Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

a) The flight into the impersonal „they“ think, „they“ mean, „they“ do. Whoever is susceptible
to slogans, lets his or her thoughts be dictated to the ultimate questions of life by television or
magazines, or becomes an echo of others and takes over standardized ways of thinking, falls
prey to the loss of individuality. Inwardly unstable people are supple instruments of dictators.
„Centesimus annus“ speaks of „manipulation by the means of mass communication, which
impose fashions and trends of opinion through carefully orchestrated repetition, without it
being possible to subject to critical scrutiny the premises on which these fashions and trends
are based“ (41,4),
b) Assigning an absolute value to the material standard of life which represses the spiritual
and thus threatens the personality of man. Advertising and the subjection to continuous stimuli
press in the same direction. It is often said, and not unjustly, that the social value of a person
is determined not so much by his or her professional position and responsibility as by his
or her standard of life, through that ‘which he or she can afford’. Faith in the ‘producebility’
of the world has siphoned off the forces of man towards the external as never before in history.
But man does not find his fulfillment in the merely external and in consumption.
c) Religious uprooting. A widespread rationalistic and naturalistic way of thinking is foreign
and indifferent to the religious and the supernatural. Here it is striking that in broad social
strata certain ‘old-fashioned’ pseudo-scientific theories which have been obsolete in science
for a long time, continue to exercise an influence. The atmosphere of modern society has been
secularized. But the silent lapse of many into religious indifference has not brought the „great
liberation“, but made numerous people unsure, disoriented, and emotionally distressed.
This disillusionment is still bound to increase. Ultimately, it is only having one’s anchorage
point in God that can preserve man from the desecration and loss of his personal dignity. 6
Today many are alarmed by the abysmal feeling of emptiness of their lives.
„The decisive experience of existence,“ writes Eugen Gottlob Winkler, was „even for the
twenty-year-old...the feeling of being exposed to a complete emptiness... The wasteland
meant an analogy to the world for him.“ 7 In the poem, „The Wasteland“, T. S. Eliot says: „I
will show you fear in a handful of dust.“ 8 „Wasteland“ means shadows, night, „ruins and sand
scattered all about,“ total hopelessness, aloneness, or as Franz Kafka writes in his diaries:
„complete indifference and bluntness...nothingness. Dreariness, boredom, no, not boredom,
only dreariness, meaninglessness, weakness,“ 9 The „spiritual wasteland“ is made by the
„corpses from the caravans of your earlier and your later days,“ 10 „Eye and mouth stand so
open and empty, Lord,“ says Paul Celan. 11
In „Centesimus annus“ John Paul II describes the threat to our personal and individual
status emanating from pressure exerted by overpowerful social institutions as a tendential
loss of „subjectivity of society“ (subiectivitas societatis). If man is „reduced to a series of
social relationships”, then „the concept of the person as an autonomous subject of a moral
decision disappears.“ The anthropological „fundamental error of socialism”, he says, consists
in understanding man „simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism...
6
Cf. Joseph Höffner, Industrielle Revolution und religiöse Krise (Cologne-Opladen, 1961); Pastoral der Kirchenfremden
(Bonn, 1979).
7
E. G. Winkler, Dichtungen: Gestalten und Probleme (Pful1ingen, 1956)
8
Cf. H. Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Harnburg, 1967), 265
9
Franz Kafka, Tagebücher (Frankfurt, 1954),475.
10
Franz Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (Frankfurt 1953), 349.
11
„Tenebrae“, in Paul Celan: Sprachgitter (Frankfurt, 1959)
27