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Dear Friends,
I am in Tokyo for this year's Colloquium on Violence and Religion conference. At more or less the last minute, I decided to change the theme of the paper I am giving here. I hope to post it to our website and send copies to our donors either later this month or in August.
The presentation is about the demographic decline now occurring virtually throughout the world. The first sections of the paper deal with the social science data. I will spare you that for the time being and simply share three paragraphs from the last section of the paper. I hope you find these excerpts interesting.
A word needs to be said in conclusion about sacrificing sacrifice.
To echo the theme of a paper I gave at an earlier conferences, we live in a world where, as Chesterton said, Christian virtues have gone mad. More to the point, we live at a time when the anti-sacrificial has run amok. The self-sacrificial motive force that lies at the very heart of Christian anthropology has in our time been replaced by a radically anti-sacrificial impulse. In fact, however, the true and only alternative to the blood sacrifices of old is self-sacrifice, and the question that has to be answered is: where and how can we learn to live self-sacrificial lives? But nature, too, has a school of sacrifice, one that grows in importance precisely as the old sacrificial arrangements continue to malfunction, but which is itself undergoing a very dramatic deterioration in our time, namely: the family.
While the explicitly violent and sacrificial rituals on which cultures could once rely have been misfiring, the attenuated and/or self-sacrificial substitutes for the gross sacrifices of the past remain both subtle and dependent on interior formation. Sadly but predictably, the effort to form self-sacrificial habits of being are accused - a la Nietzsche - of being either insufficiently self-assertive or illegitimate vestiges of the crude forms of sacrificiality for which they are, in fact, the only viable alternative. In any case, the subtle process of forming a robust and healthy self-sacrificial ethos in individuals and in society as a whole requires time and patience and it easily succumbs to the moral confusions and social antagonisms that beset a culture undergoing more change than it can assimilate. Christianity - and more to the point, the Church - exists to free us from the tyranny of self-regard by inculcating - sacramentally, liturgically, and by scriptural admonition - the spirit of loving self-sacrifice. But it is the traditional family that is nature's school of self-sacrifice; not the only one to be sure, but the one which has provided most of humanity with the counter-intuitive experience of joyful and meaningful self-sacrifice. That lesson and the school where it is most likely learned is indispensable to the task we face today, and no political or economic or social tinkering will replace it once it's gone.
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Thank you as always for your interest in our work and especially for your prayers and support. I'm tremendously grateful.
With gratitude and affection,
Gil Bailie
 
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