Christians, and particularly the Saints, have a record of flourishing under the least likely circumstances. The reader with even a passing acquaintance with Christian history will be familiar with this.

They, and we, when we persist to victory, are undefeated even through defeat. For if God is for us, who can be against us?

The faithful Christian will even know why this is so. He will be inwardly confident, that the universe is designed in such a way that he can win. And it will be a good fight, against insuperable odds, except that Christ has made them superable.

For our religion is founded on Christ, the Son of God, and rests upon Him and rises with Him. He came down from Heaven at the most auspicious moment, which to our view was the most unlikely time. And He prevailed, through Crucifixion.

Of course I've been told that this is just my opinion, but I proclaim it in the knowing company of All Saints - even though the battle for the hearts and minds of the pagans is not over yet. And when, too, you have Christ on your side, there is no reason for a peace treaty. The world, even the Synods and the Vatican, can take it or leave it.

But just that one word, "Synod," leaves a bad smell in the nose. For I have not been describing a bureaucracy. We do not have meetings to decide what we are, if we were formed already.

And the Saints have long been following Christ's evangelical instruction, to "go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. And he that believeth and be baptized shall be saved."

To contemporary American ears, this will sound like the rantings of old-time religion. Depending on their politics, they will smile, or spit. My own habit, when listening to a rant, is to examine every word, in case I agree with it. For some things, including not only thought but action, must follow if the rant is true.

Not only America, but old Europe and the world are also with us, in these "globalized" times.

Once we could pretend that the whole world was unreachable. Now we notice that not everyone is listening for a religious message.

The Saints, let us observe, are not bureaucrats. Each of them was, and is, a one-off job. Of course, even Saints can be intimidated for a moment, but being Saints they know when they are called. Always.

And we, perhaps, are not even Saints. But we are called also: to the world's salvation.

The ambition to save "the environment" instead would be a compromise. God will actually do that for us. He made this environment from the beginning, and He made it to be self-healing. Similarly with questions of migration and crime: which may or may not be acute, but are insignificant compared with the real problem in the human soul: the problem of salvation. It is a problem that no amount of activism can solve.

The solution to physical hunger and thirst are relatively simple, if we use good sense. But we may hunger and thirst after righteousness: and that is not so simple.

For righteousness is something that depends on us, as if we were Saints. Yet only the Saints have acknowledged their responsibility.

Catholicism, as every other form of religion, is personal, and social. We often find this when we are left alone, and reach for something to distract us. The "culture" has prepared us for various things, or we discover that it hasn't. It has given each of us some notion of what is right and good and beautiful, as a gift from the stars. We were, in fact, born into an intuitive, pre-religious and pre-cultural, knowledge of what is what. Only a psychopath can entirely lose this.

There are moments when we, who are not psychopathic, wonder if we have a purpose, or will ever have a purpose, in our life "down here." In which we stand, apparently, abandoned without the Devil or God. The very ability to wonder about this sketches our hard philosophical situation. For if any kind of purpose could be imagined, our purposelessness can be imagined, too.

We live in a world of amateur philosophy; among so many amate...