Materialism is Man's "Eternal Temptation

So said the Pope at his Wednesday Audience this week. Zenit News testifies here.

Among the Pope's counsel:

Materialism is the "eternal temptation" of the human being, who places his hope "in wealth, in power, in success," says Benedict XVI.

The Pope made that observation today in his address at the general audience. He dedicated his meditation to comment on the second part of Psalm 134(135):13-21, in which two religious visions are contrasted: that of the God who loves and that of the idol created by man himself.

The "living and personal" God "is at the center of authentic faith," Benedict XVI told the 50,000 people who crowded into St. Peter's Square on a sunny morning.

"His presence is effective and salvific," the Pope said, "the Lord is not an immobile and absent reality, but a living person who guides his faithful, having compassion for them, and sustaining them with his power and love."

At the opposite end is "idolatry, … expression of a deviant and deceitful religiosity," he said. "In fact, the idol is nothing other than a work of men's hands, a product of human desires and, therefore, impotent to exceed creaturely limits. It does have a human form with a mouth, eyes, ears, throat, but it is inert, lifeless, as is the case, precisely, of an inanimate statue."

"The destiny of one who worships these dead realities is to become like them, impotent, fragile, inert," warned the Bishop of Rome.

Many of us have perfected idolatry. We no longer carve statues with eyes, ears and human form because we no longer have to. We create ideals that have no bearing on reality save in our own Reasonable consideration. We foster a culture that hoists absolute individualism and the pursuit of pleasure as self-referencial goods. We celebrate our defiance of Tradition in a worldwide media that visually seduces every audience that participates in it. We acquire far more than we can use, or even prudently care about, while those in legitimate need we look upon with sorrow...but little else. We pursue power and self-aggrandizement, even while those we love suffer from our single-minded pursuit of "excellence."

Yes, many of us have perfected idolatry. It's the natural response of those of us that are afraid to die. And why would we fear that?

We doubt God. We doubt he exists. We doubt he's "relevent." We doubt he cares. Many of us yearn for a greater experience of him. We don't know how. We don't trust those that have come bearing his name. We don't trust anything that we can't experience or control for ourselves. Many of us have become so infected by the Absolute Individualism espoused by our Reasonable elites. We fail to see that in doing so, we've become the very obstruction that keeps us from fully experiencing God's Love!

God chose to become one of us. He chose to participate in our life as part of our oldest institution, the family. He exemplified the important truth of our nature our Absolute Individualist-worshipping masters forget: Relatioships form who we are. We are our mother and father's sons and daughters. We are our children's mothers and fathers. We are brothers, sisters, friends, collegues, citizens and all other forms of relationship. Most importantly of all, we are God's children through adoption in his Son, Christ Jesus our Lord. In walking this earth as a man born of Mary and raised by her and Joseph, Jesus Christ revealed how profoundly important relationships are to our lives.

Thus, when he sent us his Spirit to form us into his Mystical Body, the Church, he chose a new form of relationship through which he would continue to live among us and reveal his truth and love. If we want to experience God, we only need to find our brothers and sisters in the Faith.

If those of us ensnared in the idolatry of Absolute Individualism refuse to let go of this illusion, we won't find the relationship with God that we seek. Is that truly what many of us want?