Question 4.80

4.80 Again, as always, your reflections and your concerns go back to the absence of God in our world.

Again, as always, because man understands himself only through Jesus Christ! At another level, the absence of God is the result of an absence of the Church.

Inasmuch as God has lost his primacy among man’s preoccupations, inasmuch as man himself gets in the way of God, we are experiencing an eclipse of God. Consequently, there is increasing obscurity and incomprehension as to the true nature of man, for he is defined only in relation to God.

We no longer know who man is once he detaches himself from his Creator. Man intends to recreate himself; he rejects the laws of his nature, which become contingent. Man’s rupture with God obscures his way of looking at creation. Blinded by his technological successes, his world view disfigures the world: things no longer possess ontological truth or goodness but, rather, are neutral, and man is the one who must give them meaning. This is why it is urgent to emphasize that the abandonment of God by contemporary societies, especially in the West, affects not only the teaching of the Church but also the foundations of anthropology.