Restoration in Christ: Restoration of the Human Person

Sr. Mary, Star of Evangelization, SSVM

“Restoration” of itself implies two things: an original order and a subsequent disorder.  Without providing too many statistics or meticulously interviewing many different people, I assert without fear that all would universally agree that we dwell in a state of disorder. That something isn’t quite right with the world. That things could be or should be better. That things are “messed up.”

Less universally, however, will the multitudes agree on the make-up of the original order that ought to be restored. The proposed solutions range from “Do whatever feels good” to a well-meaning but rather vague sense of “fraternity” and “equality.” So long as one doesn’t insist on spouting condemning truth-speech or imposing dogmatic and restricting moral criteria, humanity will find its way to harmony and happiness, to some type of restoration to the best version of mankind; or so the world seems to think.

Perennial wisdom illumined by our Catholic Faith offers a more profound view into the constitution of the human person: both what he was meant to be and what he in fact is. A being unique in all of creation, a composite of body and soul, one with the animals and one with the angels, created for perfect union with God but debased through his own free choice and thus a lonely wanderer, groping in the dark, weakened, and dominated by his disordered passions.

​Man has faculties (or powers) that pertain to the two parts of his one composite nature. The spiritual powers of man’s soul, his intellect and will, were meant to have precedence, to be the guides on his journey. Their perfection is his perfection. He likewise possesses faculties proper to his animal component, for our purposes identified in the passions, the emotions, or the appetites.

The object of the intellect is Truth, reality: things as they are. The object of the will is the Good, a rightly-ordered possession of the being of things. The appetites are given that the whole human person, body and soul, may participate in his experience of reality. They are necessary for the performance of a fully human act.

Man, in his original ordered state and in his current disordered state, possesses these faculties by nature. The disorder is found in the reversal of the hierarchy, in man’s being “flipped upside-down,” as it were. The intellect ought to lead, providing the light of truth to the will, that it may give itself to what is truly good. The emotions are meant to be subject, handmaids of man’s spiritual faculties, accompanying man’s free choices, that he may delight in Truth and Goodness.

Man's Faculties	Object	Type
Intellect	Truth, reality, ​things as they are	Spiritual
Will	Good, a rightly ordered possession of the being of things	Spiritual
Emotions (Passions, Feelings)	Sensible good / Difficult good	Sensible Appetite​

The spiritual powers of man’s soul, his intellect and will, were meant to have precedence, to be the guides on his journey. Their perfection is his perfection.

In fallen humanity, however, the hierarchy is inverted. Man leads with his emotions, with his passions, with his bodily (and therefore lower) appetites. These passions draw the will to themselves and their disordered desires; the will in turn “convinces” the intellect to assent to unreality, to accept ideas not based in truth. Man’s unrestrained and darkened appetites thus become a danger to himself and to society.

​The consequences of man’s rejection of God as Creator, the designer and architect of human nature, lead to the attempt to exalt the creature in order to fill the void. Man, the designed, in rejecting the hierarchy that depends on Absolute Truth, seeks to usurp the place of the Designer by re-defining his very nature and end.

What man’s rejection of God has brought him to is apparent: confusion about his origins, his destiny, his received reality, manifested in such atrocities as abortion, euthanasia, pornography, and the ideologies of the transgender movement. This confusion reigns in the world and even among the members of the Church: for example, the night before the March for Life, while Holy Mass was being celebrated inside begging God to end the scourge of abortion in our country, a group of “Catholics” – of baptized persons – projected on the outside of the National Basilica words and ideas explicitly contrary to Church teaching and completely opposed to the prayers being offered inside.

What man is called to be – the perfect human ideal – is also known to us, however: in Jesus Christ, God-made-man, who “went about doing good” (Acts 10:38) and in His perfect reflections, the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints.

The restoration of the world to a proper order will only happen through the restoration of the Kingdom of God, through the restoration of Christ to His throne.

The restoration of the world to a proper order will only happen through the restoration of the Kingdom of God, through the restoration of Christ to His throne.

​Let us not be confused about this: Christ already reigns and will continue to reign for all eternity.

But He does not establish his Kingdom by force.

The reign of Christ is established through man’s free subjection to Him; through the personal restoration of ordered human nature in each individual soul; a restoration that is redemption; a redemption that was begun on the Cross and only comes to fulfillment insofar as each soul is united to the Cross.

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Sr. Mary, Star of Evangelization presented on this topic at RESTORE '22 as part of the March for Life Weekend and Restore Conference.