Jesus Christ was, alas for him, not politically correct. He had the ability to make his listeners feel uncomfortable and uneasy of heart because, somehow, what he said seemed to touch something deep in a corner of their hearts that they thought had been carefully concealed, perhaps even to themselves. Moreover, he often spoke of sin and the need for repentance and had the temerity to declare that the dietary laws, so beloved by his own people, were of no consequence because he said: “Whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him.” He then proceeded to make a list of sins: “evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride and foolishness” (Mark 7, 18-23) which, he said, come from within and defile a man.

A recurrent thought that often crops up whenever steps are taken to distance society from its Christian heritage is that this is a sign of maturity and progress. Those who state this do not realise that in pre-Christian times the laws being enacted today and presented as a sign of civilisation and modernity were commonplace. But in these ancient societies people also entertained themselves in amphitheatres where men fought each other to death, babies were exposed after birth and left to die if it so pleased the father, slaves were killed if their owner so decreed and women were repudiated at their husbands’ whim. These are the kind of societies that we are striving so hard to imitate in order to become “modern and “progressive”.

In the light of Christian revelation and natural law, it is correct to say that perhaps the worst that can befall a person is to lose the “sense of sin”, that is, the ability to discern the difference between good and evil. When Christ gave his list of sins he made it clear that these are not subject to the approval or disapproval of passing generations. Adultery, for example, is as sinful today as it was in the Lord’s times. This loss of the “sense of sin” has led, amongst other things, to the great tragedies of the last century, where Nazism and Communism both tried, unsuccessfully, to replace the Christian tradition with their own ideologies, upheld as a religion, even carrying its own rituals and killing millions in the process.

Anyone who has visited a former Nazi concentration camp will necessarily ask how it is possible for human beings to be so inhumane and cruel to fellow human beings to the extent of not only killing them but nullifying their dignity and dehumanising them. The answer can only lie in the loss of this “sense of sin” where what is considered good for oneself or, as in Nazism, for one’s country, becomes objectively good. In a similar vein, the Gulag archipelago in the former Soviet Union was filled with those that the state felt had to be put away and who were often worked to death for the sake of the national “good”.

Today, the millions of unborn children killed every year in the world for a presumed “good” are a witness that once Christ’s teachings are set aside, reverting back to the ethos of ancient, pagan societies becomes inevitable. Indeed, as the saying goes, “Lontani da Cristo, ci s’inbarbarisce” (“Away from Christ we become barbarians”.

Jacqueline Calleja