Today’s gospel provides Mathew’s telling of the Beatitudes. There is something profoundly counter-cultural about Jesus’ words, a jarring recognition that what he preached stands profoundly contrary to much of how the world operates. Part of this oppositional “world view” comes from an understanding of the human person nourished by the ideas of Charles Darwin and his later disciples, who saw competition and conflict as the surest form of success. In his famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, (yes, that is the work’s full and correct title) Darwin argued that in the struggle for limited resources more perfect species evolve. The theme of struggle, or kampf in the German language, was taken up by others that identified the human species not as a single community but part of an evolutionary line that could be marked by “scientific” differentiation based on skull shape and intellectual examination. Thus, the message of the Beatitudes and the entire message of Christ stands in opposition to the idea that the fullness of the human person can be understood solely by its physical qualities. I may note here that the Catholic church never condemned the ideas of Darwin in so far as they explain the transition of physical characteristics. However, as Pius XII identified in the encyclical Humani generis (1950), the full understanding of the human person can only be known by a consideration of the human person’s physical and spiritual nature. It is to this spiritual nature that Jesus appeals, and it is that nature that makes us most human. In 1965 Pope Paul VI gave some marching orders to the Jesuits. “Fight atheism” he said, and in his exhortation he saw atheism as nothing less than “frightening.” The pope who gave us the phrase, “if you want to work for peace, work for justice,” was correct in his estimation of the consequences of atheism, since it is the denial of the supernational both in God and the human person that lies at the root of the de-humanization of the human person. It is no surprise then, that for many decades Jesuit Colleges and Universities stressed a philosophical curriculum that argued for the existence of God and the dignity of the human person, a dignity that stands in opposition to a world view preached by immoderate consumerism but certainly not today’s gospel.