Faithless and False Intelligence
September 22, 2026
Hello!
How is each and every one? First
things have to come first, right? I had
to go and see for myself the final work on the book that I have been asking
prayers for and to tell you the truth, prayers always need offerings of all
kinds, contradictions, resistances, aches and pains as well. They all contributed to bringing the book to
light. Soon it will be delivered.
Thank you for your prayers. I tell you the immense effort and time expended merely secured what basic human excellence requires: competence, decency, and a job well done. Every instrument used demanding or easy going demonstrated its instrumentality for the job.
Now let us continue with ‘A Word to the Intelligentsia’ from the fourth word of Christ on the Cross (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
6. 6. A Word to the Intelligentsia
Every age has its intelligentsia, and by the intelligentsia is here meant not the educated, but those who have been educated beyond their intelligence. A sponge can hold so much water; a person can hold so much education. When the point of saturation is reached in either, the sponge becomes a drip, and the person a bore.
All
intelligentsia are proud because of the alleged superiority that their learning
gives them. Their judgment of others is based on what they know rather than by
conscience.
They judge religion by their own standards, and, whenever they write on the subject, their articles are entitled: “My Idea of Religion.” Never do they seek to know God’s idea of religion. Their own preconceived prejudices constitute the norm of judgment.
In the seventeenth century, the intelligentsia believed that any religion that satisfied individual ideas of interpretation was acceptable; in the eighteenth century, the intelligentsia believed that any religion was acceptable on condition it agreed with rational principles of their own making; in the nineteenth century, they believed any religion was good if it corresponded with their views on politics.
They claim that no educated person can believe in religion, for religion belongs in the same category as folklore, superstition, primitive taboos, and phobias. In the face of real learning, they talk comparative religion; in the face of simple faith, they mock and sneer. Voltaire always believed mockery was the best tool to destroy the infamy of Christianity.
What do I
owe God?
We may ask ourselves: What do I owe God? And the answer is quite
simple: we owe Him everything. In fact, justice with God, if we can call it
that, is different from justice with other men and women. “The relations
between man and God are not relations of justice in the proper sense” (Catechism of
the Catholic Church, no. 1730). The reason lies in the fact that it
is on a totally different level: the relationship is between Creator and
creature and not creature and creature. So if we want to know how our relationship
with God can be just, we need to ask: who is God for us? What does it mean that
he is Creator?
St. John tells us in one of his letters that “God is Love” (1 Jn 4:8). Therefore the
right relationship of human beings with God is a path inscribed in our very
nature, God, who is love, has created us in his image and likeness out of love,
and given us the capacity to respond lovingly through our freedom. God wants us
to experience our freedom precisely through the most essential act of the
divine nature, which is to love.
It is true that our
dignity is due to God the Creator, which creates a bond of strong dependence,
because we have not created ourselves. But this total dependence does not mean
subjection or slavery, since at the moment God created us he made us free.
Human freedom is a manifestation of divine freedom and the capacity to respond
freely to God – who is Love – by loving.
Sacred Scripture shows us that the just man is the good and holy
man, that is, the man who, through his life, in the continuous exercise of his
freedom, chooses what is good. Israel is seen as a people that proves its love
for God when, throughout its history, they decided to follow Him as the Highest
Good.
Christ was the only truly just man because, being the Son of God,
he became man so that we might become children of God. Christ took on human
nature in the mystery of the Incarnation, thus bringing all created realities
to God in the mystery of the Redemption. He was the only man who was just in
the full sense of the word and taught us the path of the just man: a human and
divine path of self-giving and correspondence to God the Father’s love.
“If God is love, and the experience of love is a human experience, then through love we gain access to a truer image of God and of mankind.” Hence the relationship between God (who is Love) and men and women (who are creatures created out of love in the image and likeness of God) will be just to the extent that we become aware of our condition as children of God and act accordingly out of love. (opusdei.org, Christian Life on Justice).
The hallmark of culture is, to the intelligentsia, to be irreligious or antireligious. They once doubted the existence of God, but nothing else; now they doubt not only themselves but the worthwhileness of humanity.
What impact does the Cross of Christ make upon them? One needs only to go to their intellectual progenitors to study their reaction.
The fourth word addressed to the Cross came from the intelligentsia of the time — the chief priests, the scribes, and the Pharisees: ‘‘He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the king of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusted in God; let him now deliver him if he will have him; for he said: I am the Son of God” (Matt. 27:42–43).
The
intelligentsia always know enough about religion to distort it; hence, they
took each of the three titles that Christ had claimed for Himself, “Savior,”
“King of Israel,” and “Son of God,” and turned them into ridicule.
Savior: So he was called by the Samaritans. Now, they would admit He had saved others — probably the daughter of Jairus, and the son of the widow of Naim, and Lazarus. They could afford to admit it now, for the Savior Himself stood in need of salvation. “Others he saved; himself he cannot save.” The conclusive miracle to them was still lacking.
Poor fools! Of course, He cannot save Himself. The rain cannot save itself if it is to bud the greenery. The sun cannot save itself if it is to light a world; the soldier cannot save himself if he is to save his country. And Christ cannot save Himself if He is to save His creatures.
King of Israel: That title the crowd gave Him after He fed the multitude and fled into the mountains alone. They repeated it again on Palm Sunday, when they strewed branches beneath His feet. Now that title was mocked as they sneer: “If he be the king of Israel, let him come down from the cross.”
Must all the kings of earth be seated on golden thrones? Suppose Israel’s King decided to rule from a cross, to be King not of their bodies through power, but of their hearts through love?
Their
own literature was full of the idea of a king who would come to glory through
humiliation.
How foolish, then, to mock a King because He refuses to come down from His throne. And if He did come down, they would be the first to say, as they did before that, He did it through the power of Beelzebub.
Son of God: “He trusted in God; let him now deliver him if he will have him; for he said: I am the Son of God.” Irreligious forces have their holiday in moments of great catastrophe. In war time, they ask: “Where is thy God now?” Why is it that in time of trouble, God is always put on trial and not man? Why, in war, should the judge and the culprit change places as man asks: “Why does God not stop the war?”
Our
Lord was robbed of the privilege of acting freely when they fettered Him with
ropes and riveted Him with steel. He was robbed of the privilege of speaking
freely when the soldier with a mailed fist in the court of Caiaphas struck Him
a blow on the cheek. He is now robbed of the privilege of thinking freely, as
the intelligentsia laugh Him to scorn.
There is something of the mockery of hell in their sinister, diabolical language. Mockery is the greeting of hell, for having turned against God, souls in hell turn against one another, as man becomes a wolf to man.
A man literally consumes every other man; one lost soul preys fiendishly on the soul of his neighbor. The one who is nearest is always the one who is farthest away. It is the law of hell that one hates his neighbor.
As criminals, when caught in the net of justice, turn against one another, so those who stumble into the realm of eternal darkness, gloat over the misery of every other soul in the region of death.
Thus did Christ hear Himself mocked! They do not know that they are already lost. They think He is. Therefore, they, the really damned, mock One whom they believe is damned. Hell was triumphing in the human! Truly this was the hour of the power of the devils of hell.
To all the good on earth who have been mocked because of their faith in God — you are not without an example. The sneer you receive in the office because, out of love for this Good Friday Passion of your Savior, you abstain from meat on Friday; the turned-up lips and the barbed laughter you suffer because you pray or because of your loyalty to the Church; the ridicule of your fellow soldiers as you kneel at your cot in the barracks and pray — all these are but echoes of the taunts your Lord received on Calvary.
But
do not come down from your cross! “Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very
great in heaven” (Matt. 5:12). “If we suffer we shall also reign with Him. If
we deny Him, He will also deny us” (2 Tim. 2:12).
Why does not He who is the morning star put out the darkness of this hour? Because this is a moment when He wills to make atonement for the sins of men. The essence of sin is twofold: it involves a turning from God, and a turning to creatures.
He
who is without sin now wills to feel the two effects of sin. Because sin
involves turning to creatures, He suffers at the hand of men: because sin
involves a turning from God, He permits Himself to feel that divine
abandonment, as in the midst of rasping mockery He cries with a loud voice: “My
God! My God! Why hast thou abandoned me?”
This is His answer to the intelligentsia. Let them take their thought off learning for the moment and concentrate on conscience and its sin. Sin is separation from God! Sin is supreme loneliness! Sin separates man from God, man from man.
This
disruptive power of sin, which is permanent in hell, He now allows to devastate
His inmost soul that He might suffer what we deserve for our sins. That is why
He left the mockery of hell unanswered, and the scorn of the intelligentsia
unchallenged.
The Scriptures say: “God will not be mocked” (see Gal. 6:7). God will be mocked in the beginning! Not in the end!
That fellowship between God and man, which was broken by sin, He now wills to feel as His own as His cry reveals that the essence of sin is not a mission, but a dismissal. This is what sin deserves: mockery from men, rejection by God. Such is the worm and fire of hell.
Think not that the cry of abandonment meant that He who takes upon Himself the sins of the world, is not the Son of God. God could not be abandoned by God.
But God in the form of man could be abandoned, for in the strong language of St. Paul: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written: Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Gal. 3:13). The very words he quoted were taken from a psalm written thousands of years before, prophesying the very mockeries now hurled against the Cross!
The Son of David was quoting the songs of David. He who is the Son of God was stirring the waters of the Son of Man with His own Spirit. The Word made flesh was having recourse to His own words. The poet was reciting His own poetry.
It was the poetry of redemption. The courts of justice, the mobs, the unrepentant, the intelligentsia had now done all they could to break Him down, by throwing back all His love in His face, but that great royal love remains unbroken. For in the very dark moment when He felt the isolation and abandonment that sin merited, He in His human nature calls on God.
The
way back to God for the intelligentsia is here indicated from man’s side and
from God’s.
On man’s side, that cry “My God” is the antithesis of the pride of the intelligentsia. It is a cry of humility and primordial obedience. Having arrived at the lowest depths of loneliness, man still asks for the right of being human. It is the confession of a duty-bound child; a prayer so subservient that man continues to seek God even in the darkness of abandonment.
Here Christ, taking on man’s sin, asks God to deal justly with a creature predestined to be a child, and to open the door to the prodigal again. Sinful man is knocking! Adam hid after his sin. God asked: “Where art thou?” Now the new Adam lays hold of Adam’s loneliness of soul and asks God: “Where art Thou?”
This is the foundation of religion and the way of salvation to all the intelligentsia: by becoming obedient; by making a total surrender to God; by acknowledging creaturehood; by pleading for restored fellowship.
A man can thus feel the pains of hell, mockery, and loneliness and still ask God why he is not acceptable in heaven. Nor in His word is there unbelief in misery or in the midst of the penalties of sin; never “is there a God” or even “God,” but “My God, my God.”
By laying oneself bare as the needy child, who cannot live in the loneliness of sin, man can still prove that he takes no delight except in God: “For what have I in heaven? And besides Thee what do I desire upon earth?” (Ps. 72:25). That cry was the hope of man. It was the denial of the chaotic amidst chaos! We too can take our whys to God!
Then follows the beautifully haunting realization that it really was not God who abandoned us; it was we who abandoned God. Adam hid from God after his sin — so does man. God never really abandons man! Christ in His human nature was never separated from His divine nature.
Because
man is made for God, he feels sin as abandonment. It would be like a man who
refused to eat saying: “O Food, why hast thou abandoned me?” Or parched lips of
a man walking from a spring saying to the spring: “Water, why hast thou
abandoned me?” As the stomach needs food, as parched lips need water, and the
mind needs truth, so man needs God. We refuse to drink and then wonder why we
are thirsty; we refuse to love God and wonder why we are unhappy.
If the way back to God on man’s side is by the acknowledgment of creaturehood, from God’s side, the reconciliation is effected through love. Creatures run out of love when betrayed and mocked! They touch bottom and say: “I wash my hands of him.”
But here Divine Love refuses to leave the sinner even in sin. We have no expression for the opposite of “washing our hands of a person” except “the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6).
To bear sin meant to go on loving even in the midst of a crucifixion.
I can go on sinning despite His love, for I am free. But at the same time, when I see Christ still loving me even when I crucify Him; when I see Him still praying to God for me, even when I abandon Him, and never losing faith in me though I lose faith in Him, by that very fact I am made penitent, for how can I go on sinning in the face of love like that?
I
may not be at the end of my journey, but I am at the end of my rebellion. I now
see the nature of sin and cry: “Why am I abandoned?” I see the nature of God
and cry: “My God, my God.”
A child sins seriously. A mother suffers because of that sin, and the suffering varies in direct relationship to her love and the gravity of the sin. Because the mother loves the child, she cannot let the child suffer the effects of the sin alone. She enters into it and shares it. If the child sees the mother suffering, he will be drawn to penitence. Then the mother can forgive.
Christ so loved us that He took our sins upon Himself as if He were guilty, and He draws us freely to repentance by the price He paid to save us. Hence, forgiveness is no glib thing! The Cross was the supreme expression of the righteousness of God!
If the redemption of man were done without cost, it would insult us, for no man with a sense of justice wants to be “let off.” It would insult God, for the whole moral order founded on justice would be impugned. The Cross is the eternal proof that no sin is forgiven through indifference.
God safeguards His justice even the very moment He forgives: “All we, like sheep, have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6). “Him, who knew no sin, he hath made sin for us, that we might be made the justice of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). From the side of man and God, therefore, we come into relationship with God primarily as disobedient sons returning to a holy and loving Father.
Intelligentsia! You are the most difficult class in the world to bring to God, not because you are wise, for no one is wise unless he has discovered truth.
To the self-wise who rejected truth, Our Lord said: “the publicans and the harlots shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you” (Matt. 21:31).
Could it be possible that Paul was right in telling the intelligentsia of Corinth that the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God? Is character in the intellect alone, as you believe, or in the will, which clings to God even in darkness, as this world reveals?
Are all the intelligentsia happy? Are all the uneducated unhappy? Are you right in thinking that so long as a man is intellectually honest, his private morality is of no concern?
May it not be that the modern hatred of religion is to a great extent determined by the way men live? Do not men, in the end, delude themselves by making a creed fit the way they live, rather than making the way they live fit a creed? Is not mockery of religion but a vain attempt to ignore?
Why is it the intelligentsia are more interested in destroying faith in others than in giving others their own incertitude? You have told others that to believe in God is foolishness, but what wisdom did you give as a substitute? Why do you never think of making others better, but only “wiser” according to your own judgment?
A few years ago, I instructed a young man in one of the large colleges of the East, which college, incidentally, was founded to teach religion. His classmates ridiculed him by buying rosaries and swinging them before his eyes as they passed him on the campus. Why must the intelligentsia mock? Does learning really bring understanding?
Take
an hour off tonight and meditate on the answer of Our Lord to the
intelligentsia of His time. For all their mocking there was an answer — the
total, complete surrender to God — the smiting of pride into nothingness. “And
every height that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing
into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
As you examine your conscience, ask yourself:
Are
you your own creator? Do you owe what is deepest in you to no other? Have you
any more right than a rose to say there is no life beyond you? Is the freedom
of your soul self-originating? Have you never done anything wrong in your life,
and do you feel no need of atoning for it?
Did not Our Lord say: “Amen I say to you, unless you be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). By this He meant that you must put on a new mind: He does not ask you to be childish; He asks us to be childlike — that is, to be docile, to be teachable.
When, therefore, in the darkness, your soul feels disquieted, and your conscience haunts you, think not that this is due to psychological explosions from an unconscious mind; it is rather the call of God.
As you lie awake at night and ponder over your sins, for the darkness brings out your own darkness; as you mourn the loss of relatives or friends and for the moment ponder on the problem of death; as you feel stirred by the purity, sacrifice, and faith of others, even when you ridicule; as you try to throw off a thousand qualms of conscience a day — ask yourself what these promptings really are!
They
are actual graces: divine solicitations, beckoning calls of the Shepherd to
lost sheep.
Frustrate
them not by introducing speculative questions, as did the woman at the well,
when the root of your discontent is in your morals, not in your mind.
If you have been away from the sacraments for twenty years or more, cease justifying your rebellion against God by saying you no longer believe in the sacrament of Penance. Your quasi-intellectual opposition is a camouflage for your moral cowardice. You are afraid to face your sins; so you attack the creed.
Get down on your knees! Humble yourself before your God, for He hears you before you call on Him. He knows your loneliness; He felt it on the Cross. He knows your needs; He bought them on Calvary.
Think not that Love has passed you by; it is only the bowl of human affection you drank dry — not the chalice of salvation.
The
Eternal still pleads that He refuses to destroy your freedom: “Come to me all
ye who labor and are heavily burdened” (Matt. 11:28). A humbled and contrite
heart the Master will not despise, and from it may you pray in the language of
the ancient prayer:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light: and where there is sadness, joy.
O
Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in
giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in
dying that we are born to eternal life.
— Seven Words to the Cross
Wow! The above message calls for a peaceful and
serene disposition; interior and exterior silence; a quiet moment in a quiet
venue. By all means, bring up the topic
during your conversation with God the Father, our Creator; God the Son, our
Savior and Redeemer and God the Holy Spirit, our Sanctifier. Listen intently
and do as each one moves you to do. Be a child not an intelligentsia. Be sincere and simple like a child and like a
child be teachable and docile.
Yesterday,
was my day as a volunteer mentor to four science high-school students. I have never seen nor heard one of them. I have seen and gotten to know two of them. Then I was given a new one who I met
yesterday. I was disposed to accept only
three mentees even if they were giving me four.
But since one of the three never appeared. They decided to give me one more. Our session was very dynamic because this
girl with one question answers all you need to know. The conversation was spontaneous and flowing.
We laughed together at our own discoveries of each other.
I
introduced her to Jesus in the Tabernacle and suggested to her how to
acknowledge Jesus’ presence in the venue by greeting Him hello and
goodbye. Her classmates who were done
with their mentoring were around at a distance. Amazed at why they knew who I
was they said because of my pink cheeks, pink being one of their favourite colors. Before leaving my mentee whispered and said “Tita
Pinky, sana kayo din po ang mentor ko next week”. “Oo naman, bakit?” It seems she had a mentor in the previous
weeks but for whatever reason, she was given another one, myself. It never dawned on me to ask. I just welcomed the fact, that I have a new
mentee given to me. So I assured her, “Siempre naman ako pa din. Binigay ka sa
akin aangkinin kita. Kasi hindi ko din
gagawin na aakuin ko ang ibang mentee na hindi naman binigay sa akin”.
Isn’t that
being a child? Simple and sincere? So I
thought, you and I need to be the same in our relationship with Jesus. Parang providential naman yang example na yan
for this post. “Omnia in bonum”
everything works out for the good.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may
you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care;
‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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