"What is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little less than a god; with glory and honor you crowned him, gave him power over the works of your hand, put all things under his feet."
Consider, for example, Littleton, Colorado and the shocking carnage at Columbine High School. Everybody has an explanation for what happened: violence in the media, the Internet, insufficient gun control, detached parents and school authorities, artificial lives, insanity, the educational system, lack of religious belief, decline in values, liberalism, the public education system, social disintegration…whatever.
Not one of these reasons can explain it, nor can all together. At the deepest level we encounter a mystery to which reason may be guided, but reason cannot penetrate the mystery of man. Do we not believe that only the mystery of Christ can fully reveal the mystery of man (cf. Gaudium et Spes 22)? As Msgr. Giussani told the Holy Father at the meeting last year with the new ecclesial movements and communities, only Jesus Christ can answer the question of the psalm: What is man?
Looking at it "with the mind of Christ" (cf. 1Cor. 2:16), we discover in this tragedy a wound in the very structure of the human, the failure to be all we can be, to be fulfilled in all aspects of our humanity, to reach our destiny. Violence is the consequence of that failure.
Yet, we see something else too. We see that this wound is not the last word about man. This tragedy happened during Easter. The last word about man is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the truth about man.
This truth about man was not absent at Columbine High School. It was foreseen in that group of students who cared for a wounded teacher for three hours, risking their lives to save him. One of them had come from another part of the building under siege to help. He was on a cellular phone in contact with his father, a doctor, who instructed him how to try to prevent the teacher from bleeding to death. It was foreseen in the death of the teacher, whose last words were, "Tell my daughter that I love her.…"
The truth about man was fully revealed when the power of Christ's Resurrection broke through all that the horror. One student-whose former life was apparently as devoid of meaning as that of the killers, before she became a follower of Christ-faced the killer directly. He asked her whether she believed in God and she said, "Yes, and you should follow His way." The killer shot and killed her. A martyr was born that day, and the truth about man was fully revealed. That young woman reached the summit of human greatness when she shed her blood with Christ as witness to God and to man's destiny. United with Christ, human death becomes a participation in this redemptive sacrifice. This is the truth about man discovered through an encounter with the Risen Lord. It allows us to imagine the martyr praying in heaven for her killer, hoping to include him and his companion in the eternal embrace of their victims redeemed by Christ.
What is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?
This is also the question of Kosovo. Into that hell too the power of the Risen Christ can enter and show that the ethnic cleansing and precision (well, almost precision) bombing are not the last words about man and his destiny. They represent indeed a "defeat for humanity," as Pope John Paul II proclaimed. This war originates in that conflict in man's heart between his thirst for unity and the need to respect the distinctness of the other. Man experiences them as incompatible and sets ethnic, racial, and national unity against the diversity of other peoples and nations with the right to their own existence. Or else, the need for unity is invoked, but it is a unity imposed by power.
Jesus Christ reveals the destiny of man as a unity in diversity and diversity in unity. That is man's way of participating in the Triune life of God, the communion of saints. Communion and liberation are inseparable. This is the truth about man, and the peace of the Risen Christ, which the world cannot give, is the only victory over war.
Those who have experienced this peace through the encounter with Christ cannot cease calling man to abandon the way of violence-no matter how noble the intention-and place his hope in the truth about man revealed in Christ, anticipated even in the midst of tragedy.