The Social Dimension of Man

Good morning everyone. Yesterday we began our investigation of the big issue that we have to face in the church and in society, which is: what does it mean to be human?

St. John Paul II always said that it was crucial for us to have an adequate anthropology—something that was adequate to the questions but also to the reality of who we are. He spent most of his life trying to give that, not just at a philosophical level in Poland, but when he became the 264th Peter with the universal church, with the categories that would flow from sacred scripture and Revelation.

Exploring Our Nature

Yesterday we focused on several aspects of this adequate anthropology. Monsignor James Shay spoke about what it means to be a creature, fallen and redeemed. Dr. Truman examined our natural hunger for the truth. Dr. Rebella described how the virtues empower our second nature—that we’re able to become someone thanks to our participation in Christ’s own virtues.

Sister Esther Mary Nickel pondered how the worship of God helps to make us fully human and more and more divinized like the God we adore. Mary Hasson scrutinized the destructive roots of gender ideology and how we’re called to live with integrity and courage, our having been made in the beginning male or female. She also summoned us with kindness, patience, and prudence and all the virtues and tools that God places at our disposal to share that life-saving and affirming truth with others.

The Social Nature of the Human Person

During the second day, we seek to build on those foundations as we focus more on the social nature of the human person, on the family, on our work, on our need for communion. Today will be the foundation for tomorrow as we begin to look at our involvement in culture, in politics, in the arts, in education.

We’re made in the image and likeness of God. This is a very powerful thing that flows from the tongue so easily that we can forget its real significance. This does not mean merely that, like God, we can think and we can choose, that we have reason and will. Because God is Trinitarian, because God is a loving communion of persons, it means—as St. John Paul II used to emphasize—that we’re made to live and to dwell in a communion of persons and love.

He said this is the deepest thing we can say about who we are, made in God’s image and likeness. This is clearly true about the family. In that first chapter of sacred scripture we read: God created man in his own image and likeness. In the Divine image he created him male and female he created them. Pointing to our becoming most fully God’s image and likeness when we are living in a communion of persons in love. Hence God thundered it is not good for man to be alone. We all need fitting helpers to discover who we really are, and we are called to be those fitting helpers for others.

The Role of Relationship

Why in the Revelation account did God wait to create Eve? He wanted, as St John Paul II would say in his Theology of the Body, for man to discover himself; that it wasn’t good for him to be alone. Even though he was in relationship with God, he was different from God. Even though he was in relation with the creation he named, he was different than creation. He needed someone like him in order to be able to approach better those other relations. And that happened when he was finally able to exclaim, “This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”

Our Social Nature: Relations of Origin and Purpose

As children we are born into relations of origin with a mom and a dad, perhaps for some of us an adoptive mom and dad, with brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, neighbors, eventually friends and others with whom we live in relation. The ultimate purpose of our social nature, of all those relations of origin, is to love. We’re made in the image of God whom St. John tells us is love.

We have a nuptial nature, as John Paul II emphasized, meant to say that we are gifts meant to be given to others. Cardinal Tolay was talking about that at the final Mass of the Eucharistic Congress on Sunday. From that mutual self-giving flows a true communion of persons. Our nature is meant to take us out of original solitude—where we were able to recognize that we’re different from God and from creatures—to longing for communion, and finally to the fulfillment of that longing through this nuptial exchange of personal self-giving.

But we have to use our freedom well in order for it to do that end. That’s not just something that happens to us; it has to be a choice. We know the legacy of the abuse of our freedom in which we choose not to love but to sin. Sin, as we heard a little bit from Senior Shay yesterday, leads us ultimately to social behavior: withdrawing from communion, instrumentalizing others for our own aims, even to harming and seeking to destroy others.

The evil one, who never stops trying to attack the Divine image in which we’ve been made, prowls like a roaring lion seeking to divide us from God and from others and to lead us to choose the path of personal and social disintegration. We see how that happened in original sin. We likewise see it in every sin. The evil one wants to isolate us even when we’re physically in others’ presence so that he might lead us to choose definitive self-alienation forever.

The Epidemic of Loneliness: A Crisis of Our Social Nature

Because of our social nature, the epidemic of loneliness that our culture is facing today has to be of particular concern. There have been many studies of increasing loneliness going back to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone almost a quarter of a century ago. So many today are living contrary to their nature—not just with regard to their biological sex, as Mary Hasson was describing yesterday, but also with regard to their social nature—and it’s both leaving them lost and at risk of enormous harmful consequences.

Last year the Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory report entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. The Surgeon General recognized that one of the biggest health crises in the country and its cause was loneliness and isolation—are living contrary to our true nature.

He wrote: Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling. It harms both individual and societal health. It’s associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, strokes, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected, being isolated, being alone is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.

And the harmful consequence of a society that lacks social connection could be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished. The lack of social connection poses a significant risk for individual health and lifespan.

He pondered in depth that they increase premature death by 26 and 29% respectively. Lacking social connection increases our mortality rate more than, as I mentioned, smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Insufficient social connections are connected with a 29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke. It’s associated with increased risk of anxiety, depression, dementia, with increased susceptibility to viruses and respiratory illnesses. It’s associated with lack of academic achievement and worse performance at work. Stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs employers an estimated $14 billion annually. Social isolation just among seniors accounts for an estimated $6.7 billion more in excess Medicare spending each year.

The Fundamental Human Need for Connection

Dr. Murphy said that social connection is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter. Throughout history, he wrote in that assessment, our ability to rely on one another has been crucial to survival. Human beings are biologically wired for social connection. We knew that all along.

It’s a Eureka moment for some, but at least they’re coming to it. Our brains have adapted to expect proximity to others. Our distant ancestors relied on others to help them meet their basic needs. Living in isolation outside the group means having to fulfill the many difficult demands in survival on one’s own.

In 2022, only 39% of adults in the US said that they felt very connected to others — less than two out of five. Three out of five really felt no deep intimate human connection to anybody. Recent surveys have found that approximately half of US adults report experiencing chronic loneliness. The rate of loneliness among young adults has increased every year between 1976 and 2019.

Loneliness and isolation are more widespread than most of the other major health issues of our day, including smoking which affects one out of eight US adults, diabetes one out of seven, obesity two out of five, and with comparable levels of risk to health and premature death.

In 2018, only 16% of Americans reported that they felt attached to their community. Their individualized isolation was leading to a socialized isolation. Membership in organizations that have been important pillars of community connection have declined significantly over the last quarter century.

In 2020, only 47% of Americans said that they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. It’s down from 70% twenty-five years ago and represents a dip below 50% for the first time in the history of the question.

One in three US adults 18 and over report that they’re online almost continuously. The percentage of teens 13 to 17 who say that they’re online almost constantly has doubled just in the last nine years.

The Impact of Technology on Social Connection

Technology is a big danger. It can displace in-person engagement, monopolize our attention, reduce the quality of our in-person interactions, and even diminish our self-esteem — which can lead to greater loneliness, a greater fear of missing out, more conflict, and much reduced social connection.

In one study, participants who reported using social media for more than two hours a day had double the odds of reporting increased perception of social isolation compared to those who used social media for less than a half hour a day.

Chronic loneliness and social isolation can increase the risk of developing dementia by approximately 50% in older adults, even after controlling for demographics and health status. A study that followed older adults over 12 years found that cognitive abilities declined 20% faster among those who reported loneliness.

Another study of over 500,000 middle-aged adults discovered that among men, deaths due to suicide are associated with loneliness and more strongly with indicators of objective isolation such as living alone. The probability of dying by suicide doubled among men who lived alone. The same study showed that for women, loneliness was significantly associated with hospitalization for suicide attempts.

Remedies for the Epidemic of Loneliness

So, what are the remedies to this massive problem of living contrary to our social nature? Dr. Murthy proposes some, as we can see in the bottom of the attached graphic. He urges strengthening social infrastructure to have more community centers where people can come together, enacting pro-connection public policies we can all support, building a culture of connection, and increasing awareness in general about the problem and in the health sector in particular so that it can be looked out for and treated.

Great in reforming digital environments should draw a big “Yahoo,” but the report ducks the most obvious remedies likely because they’d be unfortunately considered controversial and are presently secularized in the “wokish” cultural climate.

For us as Catholics, however, we must will the means to the ends we seek and seek to live as radiant light in the midst of this darkness.

Catholic Remedies: Marriage, Friendship, and Faith

What remedies should be on our front burners? Obviously, promoting marriage and the family, which lead us into truly committed relations with lifelong positive social bonds. The US marriage rate is at a historic low since we first started keeping records in 1867 — so only 6.5 out of 1,000 Americans are now in marriages.

Second, cultivating friendships. Jesus called us to love others as He has loved us, and He loved us by saying, “I no longer call you servants but friends because I have revealed to you everything I’ve heard from my Father.” For us, cultivating friendships is not just a good idea but a solemn moral duty out of our Christian faith — and so many need those friendships.

Strengthening one’s engagement with our faith and with the Church, which is meant to help reinforce our social nature as we ponder God and who He is, and then who we and others are in His image and likeness.

Seeking forgiveness and extending it to others. The devil’s greatest weapon to separate us from God and others is sin. When we have been the victim of sin, or when we pridefully want to defend our sins against others, that’s where isolation grows. Hence, we’re always in a chaos of mercy in which we need God’s mercy, but then we likewise, after having received those 10,000 talents, need to share the 100 denarii with those who have wronged us. So much good can come when someone is a reconciler.

Similarly, we need to form people to be true peacemakers. Jesus said that the children of God, the real sons and daughters of the Eternal Father, are not peace-wishers — those who would love having sung Kumbaya and everything else for people to just somehow learn how to love each other. But He calls us to be peacemakers going out there in the front lines, trying to reconcile others — those who have wronged us or those who have wronged each other. That forming real social connections requires this type of peace work.

The Prince of Peace has come into the world and given us His peace at each Mass so that we can be His peacemakers as His bride and body.

The Eucharist: The Greatest Remedy

Jesus’s greatest remedy of all, however, is what we’re now celebrating at last in the National Eucharistic Revival. Jesus entered our world to redeem what was broken in the human person, including that triple alienation brought by original sin and personal sin: the wound of communion with God, the wound of communion with others, and the various disintegrations that sin brings about within ourselves.

Jesus has come to restore our capacity to receive, remain in, reciprocate, and share His love. I think those are the most important words ever articulated in John chapter 15. Jesus says, “Just as the Father loves me” — and we know that the Father can’t love the Son any more — “just as the Father loves me, I love you.” Because we’re afraid of that love and we think we’re unworthy of it, He has to command us: “Remain in my love. Don’t run away.”

Then He tells us how you remain in His love — if you keep His commandments, which are all about love and forming that right bond between God and others, “just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in His love.” Then He simplifies everything, breaking everything down to one commandment: “This is my commandment: love one another just as I have loved you.”

No one can have any greater love than to lay down his life for others, to make that type of self-gift, that self-sacrifice for others. Jesus, of course, did that by His incarnation; He certainly did it by His passion, death, and resurrection; but He seeks to do it by means of the true summit of salvation history, which is His Eucharistic self-gift.

For the last 71 days, I have been on the road for 65 of those days, helping to lead the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage at St. Junípero Serra route from New Haven, Connecticut, all the way to Indianapolis. I was able to preach countless times along the journey about where the pilgrimage fits into the Congress and the Revival.

One of the things I kept preaching about is that it wasn’t enough for Jesus to take on our nature and enter into humanity; He loved us even more than that. It wasn’t enough for Him just to celebrate the first Mass and give His body and blood on Calvary and then rise from the dead on the third day. He loved us so much that He wanted to become our food because He didn’t consider any other nourishment worthy of your soul and mind.

The way He wanted to complete His saving work was not by saving us on the outside but by saving us on the inside — as we eat His flesh and drink His blood and become one with him in a Holy Communion. \

The Eucharist is the summit of Salvation history and it’s where the Lord, the Redeemer who came into the world, wants to perfect our social nature by bringing us anew into community with God, into the very heart of Trinitarian life, and by means of that communion, into communion with everyone else with whom he’s in communion. By means of this sacrament of sacraments, Jesus not only seeks to help us live according to the Divine image but mysteriously and wondrously to bring us into the life of the Trinity in whom we’ve been made.

Jesus’ Mission: Restoring Our Social Nature in Loving Community

Jesus’ whole mission can be looked at from within this context of seeking to restore our social nature—to live in a loving community of persons made in God’s image. During the Last Supper, he prayed three times that we might be one just as he and the Father are one, so that the world might know that the Father sent him and that the Father loves us just as much as he loves Jesus.

If we’re not living according to that social nature and according to its perfection through Christ’s work in us, we’re making it much more difficult for people to recognize the Divine Providence of Jesus’s entering our world, as well as to believe in the love that God has for us.

Jesus taught us to pray, as you remember, in the first-person plural: Our Father, give us today our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses—so that we would pray for and in loving communion. He incentivized our prayer with others by saying, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst.” Jesus will hear our prayers even made one on one, but he incentivizes our praying for and with others.

The Eucharist, as we pray in Eucharistic Prayer 3, is meant to make us one body, one Spirit in Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure—both of whose 750th anniversaries into eternity the Church celebrates this year—taught that the ultimate effect of the sacrament of the Mass, what’s called in Scholastic theology the res tantum (the thing alone), is for the Holy Spirit to unite us as Christ’s body and bride.

The Eucharistic Revival is meant not only to help us remedy the troubling ecclesiastical situation of insufficient Eucharistic knowledge, faith, amazement, gratitude, love, and life, but also to extend this pinnacle of Jesus’s redemptive work and revive people’s receptivity in response to Jesus’s frontal attack on human alienation through sin and the existential loneliness that results.

The National Eucharistic Pilgrimage was meant to manifest that we are a pilgrim Church on Earth, walking together with Christ and with the rest of his disciples—not walking alone, not wandering as a lost sheep, but walking together with the Good Shepherd in his fold all the way to the eternal sheepfold.

The National Eucharistic Congress is meant literally to bring us together as an Ecclesia, a Greek word that means called out of, in order to be together.

One of the most beautiful and unforgettable experiences of the 10th National Eucharistic Congress was this unity—as we adored the Lord together, as we processed with him together in the largest Eucharistic procession in decades in the US, and as we celebrated Mass together.

Challenges and Questions of Communion in Our Eucharistic Life

One of the biggest challenges of the Revival is to make this truth about the Eucharistic Jesus and what he seeks to do for us by means of the res tantum practical. Do you and I cooperate with what Jesus is trying to do by means of the Holy Eucharist and enter into Holy Communion with him and others to live a truly Eucharistic life, which is a life of communion?

Five or six Catholics in the US don’t come to Mass on any given Lord’s Day. The Revival is seeking to address that in the missionary phase just begun, trying to get each of us to go and invite people back one by one.

But even of those who do come, do we genuinely seek the reestablishment of communion with others according to our social nature that Jesus desires and the Holy Spirit has been sent to bring about?

When we come to Mass, do we worship as individuals or cliques rather than as the one family of God? Do we desire communion with the others with whom we worship at a given Mass, or more broadly with all our spiritual brothers and sisters?

I like to say we are far more related to each other by the blood of Christ flowing in us through baptism than I am related to my identical twin Scott—the handsomest man in the world—by genes. Or do we prefer to worship more or less as strangers who happen to find the same Mass convenient?

This is more than a lack of opposition to communion. If it happens, this means a positive desire for what Jesus himself desires.

I’m showing you a little Church where I was Pastor for seven years in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I was the youngest Pastor by nine years when I was appointed there. I was a Frenchman who spoke French, but there were a lot of Portuguese, and my job was to bring them together. They didn’t really want to come together.

So after two years, at that Corpus Christi in 2007, I preached the most harrowing homily I ever have, and I reminded them that the ultimate purpose of the Mass is not the Real Presence of Christ in the altar—that happens—but it’s what Christ, whom we receive, wants to do: make us one body and one Spirit in Christ.

So if you’re coming forward and you’re French and you don’t want communion with the Portuguese, or you’re Portuguese and you don’t want communion with the French, or you’re French and you don’t want communion with the other French and vice versa, don’t you dare receive Holy Communion. Because if St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 thundered about eating and drinking condemnation for ourselves when we weren’t united in reception after Mass, how much more would he say it if we don’t want real communion in Mass—and that’s something we intently desire.

We don’t live this well enough yet. Many of us don’t know the names of the other people who come to Mass, not to mention their problems and their joys. Christ wants to change that in this revival.

The Universal Call to Be Signs and Agents of Communion

Jesus desires us as his disciples and apostles to be signs and agents of communion—those who, with him the Good Shepherd, gather rather than scatter the lost and isolated sheep. He came from Heaven to Earth to restore the true family of God and wants us to live the true familial dimension of our identity, reflecting the Trinitarian image in which each of us has been made in all its complementarity.

A salt to the Earth, light of the world, and leaven—we’re called to live and work in the world as these signs and agents, helping the Church live out her true vocation as one body, one Spirit in Christ, and helping the whole world discover in an age of radical individualism, rampant materialism, and unsatisfying hedonism the path to happiness, love, and life.

As Father Spiter said in the introduction, I worked for seven years at the United Nations for the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission. When St. Paul VI came for the first papal visit in 1965, he challenged the entire world through the leaders of nations there to live this reality based on how the Church lives it.

He said: You exist and work to unite nations, to associate states, to bring them together with each other. You’re an association, a bridge between peoples, a network of relations among states. Using the papal “we,” we are tempted to say that in a way this characteristic of yours reflects in the temporal order what our Catholic Church intends to be in the spiritual order—one and universal.

Nothing loftier can be imagined on the natural level. Your vocation is to bring not just some peoples, but all peoples together as brothers—a difficult undertaking without a doubt, but this is the nature of your very noble undertaking.

The Church’s Social Doctrine on the Human Person’s Social Nature

Let’s finish with the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which summarizes the Church’s understanding—it’s good news of great joy about the social nature of the human person.

It says: The human person is essentially, not by accident, essentially a social being because God, who created humanity, willed it so.

This is based on a relational subjectivity that is in the manner of a free and responsible being who recognizes the necessity of integrating himself in cooperation with his fellow human beings and is capable of communion with them on the level of knowledge and love.

This relational characteristic takes on, in the light of Faith, a more profound and enduring meaning. Made in the image and likeness of God, made visible in the universe in order to live in society and exercise dominion over the Earth.

The human person is for this very reason called from the beginning to life in society. God didn’t create man as a solitary being but wished him to be a social being.

Social life, therefore, is not exterior to man. He can only grow and realize his vocation in relation with others.

And the Lord never calls us to any vocation without willing all the means we need to live up to it.

And so let us embrace the social nature with which he has made us in His image, and let us be salt, light, and leaven to help them rediscover and live robustly that same social nature made to help us to love and to come into communion with God and others here and forever.

God bless you.