Fr. Gerald E. Murray: The Eclipse of God?

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray, The Human Life Review, April 2024

Fr. Gerald Murray is Pastor of the Church of the Holy Family in New York City.

Today the West lives as if God did not exist . . . This estrangement from God is not caused by reasoning but by a will to be detached from him. The atheistic orientation of a life is almost always a decision by the will. Man no longer wishes to reflect on his relationship to God because he himself intends to become God.

Cardinal Robert Sarah offered this stark analysis of the present crisis of the West in his 2015 book God or Nothing, in which he zeroes in on the nature of the contemporary loss of faith. It is, he says, the result of the choice to replace the worship of God and obedience to his law with self-worship and the anarchy-producing rejection of any limits upon one’s actions. …