I have been around the world, or at least halfway, in the last month or so. I have accompanied our deacons on a pilgrimage to the capitals of Europe, many of them going to these places for the first time. I have had the chance to explore with them the landmarks of culture stretching back for millennia that form the basis of civilizations, at least as we understand them in the West.

I think, in our pilgrimage, we also had the opportunity to witness that these places are not merely museums, but living crucibles of culture in which the proud old mingles, sometimes uncertainly, with the proud new. I think we had the opportunity to witness, perhaps in a different language, what we undoubtedly experience daily here in our own place and time if we are sensitive enough to realize it.

The social dynamic of Europe and the United States is vast and complicated. In the forefront of both cultures is an undying tribute, experienced almost as a secular religion, a tribute to individualism and relativism. We have heard the official message; we know intimately the cadences of its well-rehearsed verses. You can be what you want to be. You can have whatever you desire. You can make your own way in the world, establish your own values. But we realize, don’t we, that the will to power, the will to fortune, the will to importance cannot be achieved as easily as might be expected. The Nietzschean experiment has failed, perhaps failed disastrously.

When we step back from this realization, we understand another truth. There is something below the surface, something hidden beneath the façade of the received party line. There is a kind of nihilism, a lawlessness that comes from the party line but is not a part of it. I call this the Blue Velvet syndrome after David Lynch’s iconic film.

In the film, Lynch looks at a small-town community, a community filled with chipper people, having barbeques, drinking lemonade and watering their yards. There is a wonderful image in the film in which the camera, surveying at first this idyllic landscape then ventures below the surface of the ground showing the deadly colony of insects killing one another, which resides just below the surface.

In the film, he goes further showing how a good man can be drawn into the messy underground, the miasma of life, through the most innocent of circumstances. What is below the surface? Drug addiction, sexual license, poverty, kidnapping, murder, you name it. What is more significant is that the people of this underworld take its reality for granted.

I recently read a novel at the urging of Fr. Christian. The novel was called The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke. It was brilliant. It was well written. It was provocative and it made me want to wash my hands after each reading. Burke does not shy away from showing the less-than-seemly side of life in the Louisiana bayous. It is a world of drugs, of corruption and of lies, mostly lies about who we are, what we are doing here, where we are going. It shows a naked America, a vulnerable America and, I suspect, a true America. How did we get to this? How is it that “this” is so far from what we claim?

And then we realize something else. The Blue Velvet world, the Glass Rainbow world is not the underbelly of our wonderful social order; it is the natural extension of an order that aggrandizes individualism. It is the true Nietzschean nightmare.

In Europe, the “behind the scenes” story is largely the product of the residual effects of World War II. Perhaps that is also the case here. Perhaps we are still languishing in the angst of the breakdown of culture signaled by World War II, of boys and girls from Alabama finding their way through the smoking battlefields of Europe and Africa or the seaward minefields of the Pacific. Perhaps World War II wrote the epigraph for our sad modernity.

It certainly was the case for those in Europe who lived in the maelstrom of war. Two aspects of World War II distinguish it from what had gone before. The first was civilian warfare. War was waged in the cities and in the country upon men and women, as well as in the fields among soldiers. The German Luftwaffe bombed the cities of England for eight months, one week and two days relentlessly. The city of London was bombed every night for a period of 57 nights, destroying one million homes and killing 40 thousand civilians.

The story was unfortunately not unique. By the end of the war, most European cities were in ruins, as well as many other towns and villages. The devastation can still be seen in these places 70 years after the war’s end. It was a street war in which the value of human life was so compromised that we might argue today it has never been regained. Did we become too used to seeing death? Did we lose confidence in the God of life? Did secularity gain its horrible foothold in the anomie of death and destruction on my street?

The second event of World War II was the holocaust, an event that still causes confusion, an inability to spin the numbers in our minds, numbers that signaled the deaths of almost 11 million innocent people, Jews, Romani, Communists, homosexuals and other subversives. Just 70 years ago one of the most advanced nations in the world, the Germans invented a way to systematically murder 11 million innocent people. They use medicine and science. They justified it with philosophy and even high culture. They invoked the names of Hegel, Kant and Wagner to accomplish their hatred. It seems distant and remote, and yet among us today are the survivors of the death camps, those incarcerated as children who watched their whole families slaughtered before their eyes.

A number of years ago, I read a book called, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by the Irish author, John Boyne. I had read a number of his earlier books and liked them very much and I thought I would give this one, ostensibly written for children, a try. I almost could not read it. I could not bear it.

The story of the holocaust is told from the vantage point of a little boy named Bruno who happens to be the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. The little boy doesn’t understand the world around him, but he is nevertheless caught up in it when he goes exploring, only to discover in his backyard, on the other side of a fence, a boy wearing striped pajamas.

The gist of the story is that often the very innocent are caught up in world tragedies. Often those encounters prove momentous, life altering, defining. Tragedy or triumph, there is a call in the book, a strange call in our day and age. It is a call to make a difference and to make it decisively. You have heard me speak many times about one of the main challenges we face today is our inability to make decisive choices. What would our world be like if we went exploring? What would we discover in our backyards?

I have become very interested lately in the story of another Bruno, Fr. Bruno Reynders. I first heard about him from a Benedictine monk who was here on the Hill giving a retreat for the monastic community two years ago. It is interesting that I first heard of him only then, as Fr. Bruno, who was also a Benedictine monk, hailed from Louvain, Belgium, where I lived for four years. Let me tell you a little bit about Fr. Bruno.

Henri Reynders was born in 1903. He spent his early years studying and preparing for an early entry into the Benedictine monastery at Mont Cesar in Louvain. He became Dom Bruno and was later ordained to the priesthood. Eventually, he earned a doctorate in patristic theology from Louvain. He taught in the university and at the monastery. He also spent some time teaching in Germany, where he was exposed very early to the teachings of the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. When the war broke out, Dom Bruno was assigned to work in a home for the blind, but his assignment was a cover. With the permission of his superiors, he was working with the Belgian resistance to rescue Jewish children.

Over the years, he personally escorted hundreds of Jewish children to hiding places, giving them new names, forging identity papers, and risking his life to save children he didn’t even know. In all, he saved the lives of 400 children. For the rest of his long life (he died in the 1970s), much of his great legacy was unknown. Ultimately, at least to him, it didn’t matter. He did what needed to be done. He was a hero without fanfare.

In the end, Fr. Bruno touched the underside of human experience, but he was also able to draw out many who might have been its victims. Isn’t that our goal? We strive to be able to rescue the children of this age, perhaps realizing that we must first rescue ourselves from the jaws of the lion of this age’s savage reality, or perhaps this age’s savage indifference. There is a great deal of work to be done and it is the responsibility of all the Christian people to accomplish it, not priests, not religious, not laity, but all as Newman said; it is the work of the faithful.

We must confront the human experience in all of its complexity. This means that we must learn to respect, to listen to, indeed, to love all of those who are in need, all of those who are untouchable, all of those crying out for dignity, all of those who do not even know they are hurting or in danger of falling into the hell of the world’s devices.

We must engage one another in a fearless manner. There is so much timidity today, even among the Church’s ministers. There is so much temptation to stand back, to look for clarity, to try and understand what is happening. Move. Our daily conversion, which is the necessary component of our evangelical call, requires action.

We must be beacons of hope, not for the righteous, but for the fallen, the sinner, even the deadly sinner, those who have, for whatever reason, already been mangled by the social orbits they inhabit.

If there are two orders to culture today, is there the possibility of a third? I wonder if there is that possibility, perhaps built on the legacy of many people like Dom Bruno. Is there the possibility of adding the evangelical order as a viable reality? Is there the possibility of not merely being a reactionary Church, but instead being a truly great Church that rebuilds, re-forges the Christian message in a new age, a Church that rises up out of the ashes of indifference and the cultural wreckage of the world in which we live?

Isn’t there the possibility, perhaps with heroes as our guides, of finding a new song, a new cadence to bring to bear on a world deafened by the lyrics of a song of corruption, the marching song of an old order? Perhaps we can find a new order, a new Gospel order, an evangelical order.

What is the evangelical order?

It is an inclusive order, a truly Catholic order. It is a world in which all of the children of God find a place at the table. It is a world in which the message of the Gospel is proclaimed clearly and without compromise by its adherers and so becomes a message for others that cannot be put aside. It is a message of love and integrity.

It is an enlightened order. It is an order where truth and goodness and beauty are given credence, a world in which the poor and the outcast are cared for, truly cared for, and in which all injustice is put away in a great intellectual act. It is a world in which everyone has access to learning and the fruits of learning and in which the economic order is directed toward service rather than greed.

It is a compassionate order, an open-hearted order, where we judge with the heart, where we mete out peace with liberality, where we understand that the presence of God in our midst, the Blessed One alive on the altar, is not just for us, but for the world that He came to save. We must help Him save it. It is so in need of saving.

It is a giving order, a serving order. In the novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the main character seeks to serve the needs of his friend on the other side of the fence. He brings him food. But more importantly, he brings him the humanity of friendship and understanding in a hellish place. He doesn’t treat him with charity; he treats him with equality and love until we begin to question which boy is in prison and which one is free. Eventually, the boy behind the fence is also able to give a gift to his friend, but I cannot say what that gift is, at least not now.

It is also a willing order, willing to be crucified on the cross of public opinion, the opinion of a misshapen world. I think about Dom Bruno. I think about the danger he faced every day to help Jewish children. I think about his continually putting his life on the line, not for friends but for strangers, non-Christians, but fellow sojourners. I think about his love in the face of so much hate, his resolve in the face of so much indifference, his faith in the face of so much doubt. Where will we go? Can we learn from the past or shall we merely be victims of it?

Go out to all the world and tell the Good News. There is, after all, so much Good News to tell.