A Light Shines in the Darkness, by Stephen P. White

By Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing, April 30, 2026

Stephen P. White is executive director of Saint John Paul II National Shrine and a fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

God made man in His own image and likeness. God Himself, then, is the primary reference point for man’s self-understanding. Accordingly, when man loses sight of God, he loses sight of his own humanity.

This is the story of our secular age writ large. It is also, in some vaguely reassuring sense, the story of man writ large. I say “reassuring” in the sense that our failings are rarely quite so novel as we think they are, which means the remedies are less inaccessible than we might otherwise suppose.

From the earliest chapters of Genesis, we see how disobedience toward God leads to a diminution of our humanity. The Fall was a moral event – an act of disobedience and a failure of the will – which brought about a darkening of the intellect. Sin, as the saying goes, makes us stupid.

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