Bulletin Column from June 26, 2022

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! At various points over the years you might have noted my references in homilies, talks, or columns to the Black Death in late Medieval Europe. For a variety of reasons I find the topic and the historical period of the succeeding waves of the Plague to be fascinating. This partly because it is an example of Western Christian society living through a staggering demographic change, and having to make some type of spiritual sense out of the horrific suffering of the situation. The Black Death if nothing else offers a substantial “perspective check” on all that comes after it, as each generation (that knows no history) is often convinced that things have never been so bad before.

Demographers and historians dispute the details of the period of the Plague, but a number that is often tossed around is that in only a matter of a handful of years, Europe lost half of its population to the disease. This means that in many cases entire villages were wiped out, and that pretty much every family lost at least one member to it, and often it was multiple family members.

Consider the human capital that was lost so rapidly in those years and the resulting impact it had on commerce and the routines of life. The percentage of farmable land in Europe shrunk significantly as forests reclaimed large areas of fields that now sat empty. Property was suddenly cheap, and there was an advantage to the common worker in a dramatic way because there were suddenly so few laborers for the jobs that needed to be done. It took a few centuries for the population of Europe to restore itself to the pre-Plague levels, and as the population slowly regrew itself, so did the economic and industrial capacity of the continent.

The era of the Plague is an extreme illustration of an otherwise basic fact that is always true, although it often takes demographic swings to notice it: people are our most valuable natural resource. We are short right now on a lot of things it is true: gasoline, grain, wood, finished products, etc, etc. For awhile it was popular to blame this problem on Covid, and for sure that did have some small impact at least as an accelerant of the deeper demographic problem that had been building for awhile. Some also blamed our shortages on government benefits. There is also truth in this point but probably not in the most historically immediate sense of the term, aka, Covid Relief pay. The benefits problem as it relates to demographics goes back many more decades and is deeply complex.

No, fundamentally we are short on people. The reality is that the current infrastructure of our society is built for a much larger pool of labor than we have at our disposal. What powered so much of our economic might for so long was a vast expanse of natural resources at our fingertips that also aligned with a high-tide of immigration in the 19th Century, and then child birth in the past century. Big families provided all of the workers to power all of our systems, and those large numbers are just not there anymore. In shrinking our families we purchased short-term economic gains with higher household disposable incomes, creating for awhile an illusion of prosperity, however we were doing so at the expense of the future as we created a demographic cliff to go over down the road. “Down the road” has now arrived, and over the demographic cliff we are now going. We are all feeling the strain with every “help wanted” sign that we see. We do not have the people anymore for all of our infrastructure.

While this might not be as sudden or painful as the Black Death, the dynamics in a social system are the same. Mechanization is going to buy us part of the solution as we turn more and more to automation to create a new “working class” of machines/robots to power the guts of our modern life in the way that, say, American newcomers or high school students did once upon a time. But, machines are not people, and before long it is clear that they start to control us rather than the reverse. It will be a very different world indeed as our systems and infrastructure realign themselves accordingly.

In that new world that is coming upon us, it will be a mark of a true Christian believer and Christian community to truly elevate and celebrate persons over technology. To see persons, especially naturally conceived and born biological children, as precious, precious gifts. To understand that one cannot treat persons like machines, and also that making machines into persons (Siri) is just a sham. Only God can make new lives. We can only make robots, and pretty unimpressive ones at that if the iPad kiosks at Panera are any indication.

In our fallen world, it has always been a journey of grace, Revelation, and conversion of the heart to see a person NOT as a consumer of resources, but instead as a most precious resource in and of themselves. A Christian believes in humanity. A Christian celebrates and welcomes life. A Christian sees lives as valuable in lean times and in easy times. A Christian vision gives hope for tomorrow in a way that desires life and humanity to continue on in its natural state. It will be the true Christians who bring our human family through the challenges of the present moment to preserve authentic humanity, and our culture, for the next generation in a way that resists simple solutions to our demographic challenges. A Christian knows that a mechanized world is an inhumane world. A humane world is full of humans.