The “modern man” has “come of age” as a deadly serious adult, conscious of his sufferings and alienations but not of joy, of sex but not of love, of science but not of “mystery.” Since he knows there is no “heaven,” he cannot understand the prayer to our Father who is in heaven, and the affirmation that heaven and earth are full of his glory.4 But the tragedy is also a sin, because secularism is a lie about the world. “To live in the world as if there were no God”!—but honesty to the gospel,5 to the whole Christian tradition, to the experience of every saint and every word of Christian liturgy
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