Published May 7, 2025
H.G. Wells was a gifted writer. He was also a tiresome socialist. He was also a callous thug when it came to matters of faith. In his novel The Shape of Things to Come, a future scientific elite targets and exterminates religious believers, and especially Catholics — all in the pious name of “necessity” and human progress. But otherwise his science fiction did entertain. His novel War of the Worlds has been made into film seven different times.
An even better tale, though, and one of the very best books of my teen years, was his novel The Time Machine. The storyline is simple. A man in Victorian London invents a vehicle that carries him into the distant future. He finds a world filled with beautiful young people, the Eloi, whose main tasks seem to be eating, playing, and having lots of carefree sex. But paradise has a cost. At night, the Morlocks, the formerly human creatures who manage the machines that run the paradise, emerge from their tunnels underground. As the time traveler discovers, the Morlocks raise and tend the infantilized Eloi as cattle. The Morlocks love the Eloi — for dinner.
I mention this because there are days now when the people in our national leadership class — the various elites who run the machine we call our nation — clearly have some Morlock DNA. The top 10 percent of the U.S. population controls about 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. The bottom half controls barely 3 percent. The wealth divide in our country is obscene. It’s an insult to justice. It’s wider than in any other developed nation. And it’s increasing. It’s also bi-partisan. There are just as many, or more, Democrats in that top 10 percent as Republicans. The oligarchy that Bernie Sanders and his sidekick AOC like to rant about has a big-tent, open-borders kind of membership policy. You just need a lot of money.
The good news — the difficult, but I think finally good news —is that our economic realities, along with the country’s complicated moral issues involving sex, race, abortion, immigration, and other matters, offer great evangelical terrain for the Church if we have the will and the skill to engage it. It’s not an impossible goal.
People in pain seek answers and meaning. The Church has both answers and meaning in the person of Jesus Christ and in the people who genuinely love and serve him. And the Church in the United States, despite her problems, is still stronger, healthier, and more generous than anywhere else in the world.
That’s not hyperbole. I saw it in my decades of diocesan service. And I’ve heard it many times from foreign friends, including here in Rome in the ramp-up to the papal conclave — which makes the criticism of the U.S. Church that animated the Francis pontificate all the more unwarranted. The Church in the United States is rich in fruitful apostolates. Our seminaries are dramatically stronger than they were 30 years ago. We have a Catholic donor class that’s numerous, committed, and articulate. And they’re not shy about how and why they give to Catholic causes.
Yet, almost unconsciously, we’ve also cooperated in creating the most thoroughly materialist culture in history. It doesn’t deny God. Instead it renders him irrelevant and finally incomprehensible in a river of consumer distractions and appetites. In our efforts to assimilate, the beliefs and behaviors that make us distinctly Catholic have been scrubbed out in the process. Too many of us, too often, including me, have done exactly the opposite of St. Paul’s message in Romans 12: Do not be conformed to the world. We’ve conformed ourselves to a world that doesn’t want us hanging around if we drag along the baggage of our Catholic beliefs.
The result is predictable. Obstacles to a Christian life that were unimaginable in our nation just 50 years ago — a growing hostility to biblical morality; attacks on religious freedom — are here now and very real. And unless we sober up and start thinking and acting differently, “the shape of things to come” is not encouraging.
Now what I’ve just described are uniquely American conditions. But the appetite to “fit in;” to avoid conflict and embarrassment about our beliefs; to conform to the world, is universal. And it’s lethal for a life rooted in the Word of God.
So what do we need going forward? Well, I wish we had better preaching. I wish we had more beauty in our churches and liturgies. I wish we had less discord in the Church, though it’s often been this way in our history . . . because matters of doctrine and practice invariably circle back to what does and doesn’t lead to salvation. I wish we had more zealous and faithful leaders in the Church, starting in Rome, because nobody follows mediocre, ambiguous men. And in my darker moments, I wish theologians who talk about “paradigm shifts” in Catholic belief would make a one-way mission trip to the Morlocks.
The truth is, wherever we are as Christians, we have limited influence on the future, which anyway doesn’t yet exist. But we’re not powerless. We’re never powerless. We have a lot of influence on the choices we make and the actions we take, here and now. “Now” matters. It matters because all the “nows” in a lifetime add up to the kind of people we become, and the kind of world we help heal or degrade. Our power as individuals lies in what we do now; in our willingness to speak and live the truth today, now, whatever the cost. It lies in our resistance to evil; our refusal to cooperate with a culture of distortion and deceit.
So I suppose the real lesson in Conclave 2025 is simply this: We need to pray earnestly for the man chosen as our next pope, because the ministry of Peter matters. But the everyday task of Christian witness remains with us. You and me. And that matters more. Always.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
