Our over-sensitive awareness of ourselves as responsible for “making history” is a grotesque illusion, and it leads us into the morass of pseudo-events. Those who are obsessed with “making history” are responsible for the banality of the bad news which comes more and more to constitute our “history.” The Church that takes all this too literally and too seriously needs to go back and read the New Testament, not omitting the book of Revelation.
The genuine saving event, the encounter of man with Christ in his encounter of love and reconciliation with his fellowman, is generally not newsworthy. Not because there is an ingrained malice in journalists but because such events are not sufficiently visible. In trying to make them newsworthy, or visible, in trying to put them on TV, we often make them altogether incredible or else reduce them to the common level of banality at which they can no longer be distinguished from pseudo-events.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Faith and Violence, pp. 162 -163)
