As bad as it is to be physically impaired, however, it is even worse to be spiritually impaired. God has not only given us our senses to know reality; He has also given us a mind. We are supposed to use our mind to know the world around us, to understand the truth.
We find this difficult because we are wounded by original sin with the wound of ignorance. This makes it laborious for us to discover the truth and it also makes us susceptible to being influenced in the wrong way in regard to the truth. There is a lot of noise for us to sift through.
But there is another difficulty that we have independently of that wound. It is the fact that we have the wrong perspective on reality. We tend to think that we are the center of reality because we are at the center of what is perceiving reality. We tend to think that the world revolves around us because we are at the center of our perception of the world.
This leads us to having a spiritual impairment or what might be called a “spiritual disability”. It is through the practice of our Catholic faith that we seek to overcome our spiritual impairment and see reality correctly. Our faith assists us to see reality as it is, with God at its center and with us as just little, tiny creatures.
When the world turns away from God and exaggerates the rights of man, it increases spiritual disability. Ungodliness in society makes people detached from reality, unable to see reality. It makes people full of pride; it makes them think that they are god, not only that they are the center of reality, but they actually have the power to make reality.
When spiritual disability becomes extreme, we give a special name to the condition that the person is in: we call it “madness”. After a century of deifying man, we have reached a point where we can say that a certain madness afflicts modern society. I think that, when people look back on this decade of the 2020s, they might well call it the “decade of madness” one day because society is so far from reality.
There are stories of this madness that come out every week. This past week, a woman boxer had to quit a match after 45 seconds because she was being pummeled by a male boxer in the Olympics. Many were rightfully crying out how unfair it was for a man to be boxing against a woman and how it made all of that woman’s efforts useless.