The phone in each of our pockets has become the magic mirror on the wall that we consult every hour of every day to ask: “Who is the fairest of them all?”
Some of the most insecure young women I know are those who have grown up trapped in a cycle of flattery reinforcement through social media, turning to cosmetic surgery in their twenties and getting everything from lip fillers to breast augmentation in order to stoke the fire of interest in their appearance until they, like narcissus, drown in their own reflection.
In the fairy tale of Old, the mirror serves a dual purpose. It flatters the Queen, and it helps her to keep an eye on others. But Flattery and Surveillance didn’t bring the Queen happiness then, and it sure isn’t bringing us happiness now.
One young man who has discovered this truth is Italy’s most handsome man, Edoardo Santini, who at 21 years old has decided to quit modelling to become a Catholic priest, declaring that he was “tired of satisfying the will of others and posting photos where I am apparently secure and happy”. (He was 17 when in 2019 he won the title of Italy’s most beautiful man in a national beauty pageant.)
Nowadays society has come to equate happiness with contentment and subjective satisfaction, and for most people happiness denotes nothing more than a feeling. Only a culture grounded in this shallow understanding of happiness could sacrifice freedom and responsibility for safety and control, as was so evident during the Covid years.
Despite having apparently moved on from lockdowns, and without erecting a visible dome like the one in which the actor Jim Carey was trapped as the star of his own Truman Show, we have become similarly ensnared in an invisible web that puts us spider-like at the centre of our own universe where we believe that we are in control, while blind to the fact that our fate depends entirely on the person nearby holding a vacuum cleaner to obliterate our spider-web-like existence at any moment.
Santini, who has faced criticism and disappointment from family and friends for his decision to become a priest, has chosen, like Truman, to battle the storms sent to prevent his escape. He has chosen freedom from the self-imprisonment of the virtual world, and only now does he declare himself truly “happy”.
That happiness he has found: Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus surprises everybody by reversing all the truisms about what constitutes happiness. We are left with a choice between listening to the promise of fulfilment from the author of life Himself, or to the empty whispers of a fallen world:
“All the real argument about religion,” G.K. Chesterton says, “turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth, his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss…he is standing on his head, which is a very weak pedestal to stand on, but when he has found his feet again, he knows it. Christ satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up”.
Only when we are the right way up do we see clearly that we were made for union with God who is Love. It was reportedly Santini’s experience at World Youth Day 2023 that flipped him 180 degrees and saw him choose to enter this holy union in the here and now.
Those who complain that Eduardo’s decision to enter the priesthood is “a waste” have an upside-down view of reality. Priesthood is not meant to be a fallback for ugly blokes who can’t find a bride. It is a call to transcend earthly marriage and live now the life each one of us will live in heaven.
“If we experienced marriage and nothing more for all eternity, we would be missing out on what we were created for,” says Fr David Howell, a member of the cathedral clergy at Southwark. “A symbol must come to an end in order to experience the reality it promises. Following a map gives way to experiencing the destination itself.”
The idea of a young handsome man choosing to be a priest – or indeed a faithful husband – is so alien to those still standing on their heads maintaining hope, against all available evidence, that the artificial world will somehow bring them happiness.
The very people who are inclined to shout “religious fundamentalist!” at anyone espousing basic Catholic views have taken on a kind of techno-fundamentalism of unshakable belief in the power of new technology to fix the problems caused by the last. Problems now such as a sharp rise in depression and suicide across the West, where young people have grown up in social networks directed by man instead of real communities directed by God.
In the same way that we can spoil our appetite for nutritious sustenance by chomping down on junk food, our addiction to the mirror in our pocket prevents us from experiencing the real hunger that is necessary for us to say Yes to the only thing capable of satisfying.
“If there is no emptiness in you,” the philosopher and Catholic convert Peter Kreeft says, “there is no room in you for anything else – like a certain inn at Bethlehem. He often knocks at the door of our inns wearing many disguises”.
Perhaps this Christmas, the story of young Edoardo Santini can serve as a reminder to us to turn our gaze from the mirror to the window, and to watch for His arrival.
Photo: Men prostate themselves during a priest ordination ceremony celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI in St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, Italy, 29 April 2012. (Photo credit: VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty Images.)
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