Today the spirit and the spiritual person have been devalued thanks to humanitarian liberalism's failure to understand the essence, destiny and true dignity of the human person, and this discrediting is being preserved, not overcome. Out of weariness and disappointment with the image of the human person which, as developed by liberalism, has dominated non-Catholic Europe for centuries, many are turning to the subhuman and sub-spiritual for the fulfilment of the yearning described above.



The spirit of the age is characterized by disaffection with individualistic liberalism. There are at least three positive elements int his trend which can be summarized as follows: first, the subjectivism and relativism of he past few centuries have prompted a yearning for the realm of the objective: a longing for objective being, which rests in itself and cannot be reduced to a mere product of our imagination or thought; and for the realm of objective values, which possesses a significance and validity that is independent of our arbitrary will and subjective satisfaction.

Second, there is a yearning for the organic, and a growing aversion to the dominion of the mechanical, to the machine taken as the covert causa exeplaris ("paradigm") of all life. In concert with such tendencies, there is also a rejection of the brutal construction of all thigns "from without," of the violent and artificial, and of the delusion that everything is doable. There is a longing for what is saturated with meaning, for what has developed organically and "from within," for what has grown instead of what has been made.

Third, there is a yearning for genuine community and a renunciation of any conception of the human person which fails to recognize his essential ordination to community and degrades community to a mere "means" which is indispensable only in a technical or practical sense. People are rejecting the dissolution of the essence of value of community, which reduces it to a mere sum of individual persons juxtaposed atomistically. They year for organic communities instead of merely artificial and arbitrarily constituted social structures.

This elementary craving for the objective, the organic, and community is the positive side of the coin of our time. The elementary breakthrough is the healthy, welcome response to the sins of liberalism and the nineteenth century, and the reduction of the cosmos - so saturated with meaning and illuminated by value - and the spiritual person, created int he image of God, to a bundle of sensations and sublimated drives (be it libido or the drive for prestige).

It is a response to the reduction of the world of eternal truths, resosing in themselves, to merely subjective necessities of thinking. It is a repsonse to the technological transformation and mechanization of the whole of life, to the excess of action at the expense of contemplation, to the bustling haste of the modern way of life, to the lack of reverence and understanding for the mysterious law of growht "from within," to the overgrowth of organization, and to the so-called "Americanism" in which the category of the quantitative supresses the category of the qualitative.

Finally, it is a respose to the uprooting of the individual from the community, to the atomistic juxtaposion of persons insocial life, to the replacement of the soical ranks by social classes, to the overgrowth of cimmittees and associations, and to the dissolution of genuine commnunities into purely purpose-oriented associations, which possess a meraly juridical reality but no proper value of their own. It is