Did you know you can bet on 2027 being the year of the second coming of Jesus Christ? Many people reportedly have - Americans probably.

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I suppose this is barely more absurd than viewing universal healthcare as (a) communism, and (b) less of a human right than gun ownership.

Of course, the smart money knows God never left.

Like many, I had received the Catechism involuntarily as a child, mainly through the Marist Brothers.

Their leaden tutelage drew heavily on the Gospel but rarely animated the earthly truths at its core.

It wasn't the parables one should take figuratively (while taking God's existence literally), but something closer to the reverse.

In hindsight, the God drummed into us with a rigid paternal certainty, was more likely, the key metaphor.

Or, to be more precise, God is that unique constituent of the human experience that sits untallied, beyond the scope of mere words.

Here, lay the object of our enlightenment and its essential project - to recognise the Divine within and in so doing, to at last embrace responsibility for human worth and human failings: love, kindness, creativity, yes, but also, violence, hatred, racism and greed.

This is the pristine possibility of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's stunning first encyclical timed to meet the anniversary of the radically progressive Rerum Novarum by the previous "Leo", Pope Leo XIII, fully 135 years earlier.

In Magnifica Humanitas, the first American pope displays global leadership and moral clarity in marking out the beauty of humanity against what he calls the "messianic dreams of Silicon Valley".

"With the heart of a shepherd and a father," he writes, "I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in........

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