OMO-0243 — The Children of Uprootedness (II and Final Part)
Education, Family, and Society
The Children of Uprootedness (II and Final Part)
Education, Family, and Society · Periódico La Esperanza
The first part can be read here
VIII. Hope, Not Optimism
It is here that the word hope begins to acquire a meaning far more precise than optimism. To hope is not to repeat that things will turn out well, nor does it mean naively imagining a pleasant future. Saint Thomas, following Aristotle, observed something extraordinarily basic: we hope for a good we do not yet possess, one that is difficult but that we consider possible to attain. And he added an observation especially moving in relation to our subject: young people are naturally inclined to hope because they have ‘much future and little past.’[1]
For that very reason, hopelessness among the young is so dramatic: it reverses the movement proper to that age. Where there should be an open future, a wall appears. Where there should be possibility, impossibility appears. Where pain should occupy part of the horizon, it ends up occupying all of it. We then understand better the opening statement of these pages: to despair means, in a sense, allowing present suffering to colonize the future. Saint Thomas observes that despair is not simply the absence of hope: it is a retreat from the desired good because that good is judged impossible to attain.[2]
This philosophical statement must not be confused with a clinical diagnosis. Depression is a medical reality, not merely a lack of virtue; a suicidal crisis does not entitle an outsider to pass judgment on the moral or supernatural life of the person experiencing it. That would be cruel and, moreover, would confuse distinct orders.
But distinguishing things does not mean separating them until they can no longer communicate. Psychiatry can explain pathological processes. Psychology can explore wounds, behavior, emotions, and relationships. Sociology can show associations between family structures, inequality, isolation, and community. One question nevertheless remains that none of these disciplines is obliged to answer, because it belongs to another order: what good can offer a person a reason to persevere when the goods he expected from this life collapse?
Carlos Alberto Sacheri addressed precisely this question in Verbo more than half a century ago. Speaking of hope, he described man as homo viator: a being who has not yet arrived, a traveler whose present condition is directed toward a destination. He also warned that modernity did not leave man without hope, but substituted its object: reason, the State, progress, technology, revolution—different temporal promises successively received an expectation that had once opened toward something beyond history.[3]
Today we could add other names: well-being, consumption, experience, visibility, autonomy, self-fulfillment. Man does not stop hoping; he transfers his hope. And perhaps that is the tragedy: when a temporal good is expected to provide what only an ultimate good could give, the good itself is not merely distorted; man becomes extraordinarily vulnerable to its loss.
IX. What Mexico Has Ceased to Believe
Mexico’s religious transformation acquires a significance here that extends far beyond statistics on religious affiliation. In 2010, 82.7 percent of Mexicans identified themselves as Catholic; in 2020, 77.7 percent did. Those reporting no religion rose during that decade from 4.7 to 8.1 percent.[4]
But the deepest secularization cannot be measured simply by asking how many people still say they believe in God. A country can retain millions of baptized people while the spiritual structure of its life changes entirely. There can be religious images in homes and fundamental decisions made as though God did not exist. The celebration can survive after the meaning of what is celebrated has disappeared. A Catholic identity can persist while professional success, money, well-being, or autonomy effectively take the place of the ultimate end.
The issue, then, is not to set suicide statistics mechanically against statistics on religious practice and declare the problem solved: reality deserves greater respect. Epidemiological literature has documented, in different cultural contexts, an inverse association between religiosity and various suicidal behaviors—including death by suicide—although with significant heterogeneity across cultures, measures, and populations.[5] That does not justify writing the childish equation ‘lack of faith equals suicide.’ It does prevent us from dismissing religion as though it were an ornamental variable in human existence.
Faith can certainly provide community. It can provide rules. It can offer practices, companionship, liturgy, relationships, and consolation. But Christian faith claims something incomparably greater. It affirms that life has meaning before we manage to give it meaning ourselves. That man did not produce himself. That his dignity does not depend on his performance. That his existence is neither justified by success nor invalidated by failure. That suffering can be terrible without thereby becoming absurd. And that death—precisely that before which all temporal goods finally surrender—does not have the last word.
This is the decisive difference between optimism and hope. Optimism expects things to turn out well tomorrow. Christian hope remains even in the face of the possibility that tomorrow they may turn out badly. It does not promise the sick person that he will necessarily recover. It does not promise the abandoned person that he will regain what he has lost. It does not promise the father that his son will return. It does not promise the defeated person that history will vindicate him. It tells him something far more radical: none of those defeats has jurisdiction over his ultimate destiny.
Suddenly it becomes clearer why suicide, while remaining a medical, psychological, and social problem, necessarily touches on a question of civilization.
When Saint Thomas considers one’s own life, he views it in terms of three forms of belonging that our age tends to separate: man has a natural inclination to preserve himself; he is part of a community to which his life matters; and his existence is ultimately received from God. Nature, community, and gift.[6] It is difficult not to notice the extent to which these three realities have been subjected to revision. Nature becomes material available to the will. Community retreats before the individual and large organizations. And God is progressively confined to the private life of whoever wishes to retain Him.
There is no need to imagine a conspiracy to recognize a consequence: man can end up extraordinarily free to decide how to live and extraordinarily alone before the question of what to live for.
X. The Examination That Falls to Us
Here, however, it would be all too comfortable to accuse the age. It is much harder to ask what we ourselves have done.
What responsibility do parents bear when they can spend their entire lives working to give their children things they never had and, without realizing it, deprive them of the time their own parents did have for them? What responsibility does a culture bear when it speaks constantly of rights and far less eloquently of the duties that make a person know he is needed by others? What responsibility does a school bear when it can convey extremely sophisticated knowledge and becomes increasingly uncertain when asked what a good life is? What responsibility does an economy bear when it knows the consumer’s desires with admirable precision but cannot distinguish between what he desires and what he ought to love? What responsibility do platforms bear when their economic success depends on capturing for hours the attention of people whose personalities are still developing? What responsibility does a State bear when, noticing the disintegration of bonds, it tries to replace through programs what no administration can manufacture—friendship, paternal authority, a home, neighborliness, meaning?
And above all: what responsibility do we Catholics bear?
It would be all too easy to describe the crisis from a position of innocence. We can bring our children to the sacraments while teaching them in practice that what really matters is success. We can speak to them of God while organizing family life as though God were a decorative addition. We can worry obsessively about the university they will attend and very little about the vocation through which they will serve. We can form excellent professionals and men incapable of suffering. We can defend the family in speeches and surrender to the screen the hours in which the family ought to learn to know one another. We can teach commandments without having shown the beauty of the good that makes them intelligible. We can preserve a Catholic identity and lose hope as a way of existing.
Then the question ceases to be directed at ‘them.’ It turns back toward us.
What world are we handing on? What spiritual tone—to use an old but exact expression—do our children receive from us? Is life a gift or a project? Does freedom serve to accomplish the good, or merely to choose? Is the family a form of belonging or a contract? Is duty a burden or a form of love? Is suffering only a malfunction to be eliminated, or is there also a human way of passing through it when it cannot be avoided? Are we needed by others or merely independent? Is there anything that deserves sacrifice? Is there any truth for which it is worth ordering one’s life? Is there a good that remains when all the others are lost?
XI. Weaving Community: A Civilizational Response
Here another observation in the report that gave rise to these pages takes on its full meaning. After discussing therapy, budgets, and prevention, it uses a modest and exact expression: ‘weaving community.’ It points out that the response cannot be solely individual.[7]
Weaving community. Perhaps that is where we should begin. Not to replace the psychiatrist with the parish priest, or treatment with a sermon—that would be another form of reduction—but to rebuild what a true civilization ought to offer before an emergency arises: homes in which presence is not replaced by material provision; marriages capable of understanding that their stability is a good extending beyond themselves; parents willing to exercise an authority that is neither domination nor abdication; young people who discover responsibilities before adult life catches them unprepared; friendships that do not depend on putting oneself on display; neighborhoods, parishes, schools, professions, and associations where a person can once again find concrete faces between the individual and impersonal structures; an education capable of teaching that failing does not mean being a failure; a culture that can speak again of sacrifice without considering it pathological, of fidelity without considering it alienation, of limits without always confusing them with oppression. And alongside all this, accessible psychological care, competent psychiatry, timely detection, prevention, accompaniment, and the ability to recognize that some forms of pain require clinical treatment.
But even after we have done all this, a question will remain. Perhaps the question: why is life worth living?
No civilization can avoid answering it. Even one proclaiming that each individual must invent his own answer has already answered: it has decided that there is no commonly true end that can be received.
And perhaps one of our greatest mistakes lies there. We believed that eliminating a given end would expand freedom indefinitely; we did not realize that it could also leave freedom without direction. We believed that freeing man from all his forms of belonging would make him entirely his own master; we did not realize that it could leave him without a place. We believed that well-being would make the question of suffering’s meaning unnecessary; suffering returned. We believed that communication would end loneliness; we found ourselves connected and alone. We believed that prolonging life would suffice to increase its value; and now it is precisely some of our young people who compel us to ask what we have done with the reasons for preserving it.
This is not about returning archaeologically to our grandparents’ Mexico: history does not move backward, and many of its achievements should not be lost. It is about something much harder: discerning what there was in those forms of existence that answered permanent human needs, and that we confused, perhaps too hastily, with the defects of their time. For the young person of 2026, surrounded by possibilities his great-grandfather could not have imagined, still needs exactly what every person needed before the invention of the internet: to know that he is loved; to know where he comes from; to know that he belongs; to know that someone needs him; to know that some things do not depend on his whims; to know that failure does not destroy his dignity; to know that suffering does not occupy the whole of reality; to know that there is a future; and to know that there is a good great enough to move toward.
Technology has abolished none of these needs. It has merely allowed us to forget them for longer.
Perhaps that is why the figure of 8,709 deaths should not be read solely as a health statistic. Each of those deaths belongs to an intimate life on which we have no right to pass sentence: we do not know the inner freedom of someone who was under the weight of illness, anguish, or extreme pain. Mercy begins precisely by recognizing that mystery.
But the historical accumulation of these deaths does question society. It compels us to ask what we have weakened, what we have replaced, what we have ceased to pass on. And if, at the end of that inquiry, we discover that family, community, rootedness, obligation, transcendence, and faith were not mere cultural ornaments of an old society, but some of the ways through which man learned that his life was set within something greater than himself, then we can no longer speak of their disappearance as though it were neutral.
History is not, however, condemned to a mechanical decline. That is precisely the Christian difference. Christianity never taught that history was an inevitable march toward well-being, or that every temporal defeat concealed an earthly success. It taught something more demanding: that man’s ultimate meaning does not depend on history’s success; that even its crooked lines remain under a Providence that does not abolish freedom or pain, but neither abandons them to absurdity.
From this comes a hope entirely different from naivety: a hope capable of looking at evil without denying it, of recognizing the wound without turning it into destiny, of accepting the night without asserting that there is nothing beyond it.
That is what we ought to be able to pass on again. For our children do not need only instruments with which to live. They need reasons.
We have given them more possibilities than any previous generation. Have we given them ends? We have taught them to choose. Have we taught them what deserves to be chosen? We have told them to be independent. Have we taught them to belong? We have protected them from many forms of pain. Have we taught them what to do with the pain that no human power can prevent? We have spoken to them of self-esteem. Have we shown them a dignity that remains when their own esteem collapses? We have told them they can go very far. Have we told them in which direction?
And when what seemed to justify their existence is lost—because one day something important is lost—will there remain within them a good that no defeat can take away?
That is the question behind the news of September 11, 2026. And perhaps it is also the question our civilization has been postponing for too long.
If our young people are to look at the future as a promise once more, it will not be enough to teach them to survive the wound. We must give them back the horizon: a nature they do not have to invent; bonds that are not merely provisional; a community to which they can belong; duties capable of making them needed; goods worthy of sacrifice; a meaning that does not depend on success; a hope that holds firm even when life does not turn out as they expected.
And finally, we must tell them again that human existence neither begins nor ends with them. That life is not an absurd piece of property left to our management for a few decades. That it is received. That it has an origin. That it has an end. And that, beyond all the goods that can be lost, there is a Good that no temporal misfortune, not even death, can destroy.
Christian civilization gave that certainty a name. It was not progress. It was not well-being. It was not success.
It was—and remains—God.
[1] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 40, a. 6.
[2] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 20 (De desperatione).
[3] Carlos Alberto Sacheri, ‘The Theological Virtue of Hope,’ Verbo, nos. 131–132, 1975.
[4] INEGI, Population and Housing Censuses, 2010 and 2020 (religious affiliation).
[5] Cf., among others, A. Wu, C. Wang, and X. Jia, ‘Religion and Completed Suicide: A Meta-Analysis,’ PLOS ONE, 2015.
[6] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94, a. 2, on natural inclinations; and II-II, q. 64, a. 5, on the unlawfulness of suicide.
[7] Brenda Salas, ‘Psychological Care: An Unattainable Luxury,’ Excélsior, September 11, 2026.
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