Indifference

The indifference of a culture is the reflection of the indifference present in many, many human hearts.

Indifference is the failure to respond to another as a person, in person. Instead, indifference causes us to de-personal-ize each other, reducing the person in front of me to a problem, a conquest, a non-entity or a possession.

When Catholics experience Mass and parish life with indifference, they often fail to recognize the person of Christ in His living Body intimately united with the Church, and therefore, linked to each unique and unrepeatable human face they encounter in their daily lives.

The following responses to the difficulties of human life show the sorrow and poverty that indifference can foster in hearts that have not been seized by the wonder and mystery of human life, revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ. Keep checking back to see how the scourge of indifference reduces the humanity of us all.

Where we’ve seen indifference
Check out the very matter of fact way this article proposes the “earlier, safer, private and confidential” abortion of human persons with Down syndrome. Ponder how the scientific language depersonalizes a unique and unrepeatable human person. Then check out the growing consequences in this article: “About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.”

P.S. Send us the Indifference examples you’ve found, too!

“We cannot avoid wonder, but we can delete it a moment later. That is the victory of preconception.”
— Fr. Julian Carron, Communion and Liberation

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
— Albert Einstein

One can sin against God's love in various ways: indifference neglects or refuses to reflect on divine charity; it fails to consider its prevenient goodness and denies its power.
— Catechism of the Catholic Church 2094

"Indifference is the essence of inhumanity."
— George Bernard Shaw, Anglo-Irish dramatist and wit (1856-1950)

“In liberalism, the self is understood to be originally unbounded by, hence indifferent to others….Contrary to liberalism’s own best moral intentions, such indifference implies a logic of the priority of the ‘strong’ over the ‘weak’—that is, of the ‘independent’ over the ‘dependent.’ It fails to recognize the ontological dependence of all selves upon God and indeed others that alone enables the true strength and justifies the unconditional dignity of all selves, even—especially—the ‘weak’ and the ‘dependent’.”
— Dr. David L. Schindler, “The Dramatic Nature of Life,” Communio, Summer 2006