The most recent edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is 904 pages long and has 2,865 subsections. Today, two days after Tuesday’s mass-execution, few words of the Church seem more pertinent than subsection number 1817:

“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

As Americans continue to search through the rubble and through their dismay, discussion of the grace of the Holy Spirit may seem flamboyantly sanguine, if not too abstract, and for those who are not Christian, even more so. A few people interviewed after the collapse of the World Trade Towers wondered, angrily, about God, and where He might have been while New York was under siege. The incomprehension illuminates one of the most difficult tasks of religion-assimilating mountainous evil into plausible, redeeming messages. And it also illuminates the complexities and the perils that theology presents to the world.

For decades Americans have been viewing revolting violence, usually in countries where TV pictures feature script that is legible only to a few American professors. Quotidian death on massive scales, like that in the Middle East, does not connect easily with the American consciousness, whose worst domestic violence has come from gangs in Detroit and Los Angeles. On the nightly news, scenes from around the world show bombs exploding, people dying-and many Americans reflect, “When does Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? come on?”

To say that is not an affront, nor is it an indication of rampant American imbecility. It is what happens when the capacity to sympathize is diminished by excessive tragedy, and when that same capacity must accommodate the more immediate exigencies of family, home and work. Humans, compassionate as they are, do not seem to be designed to contemplate usefully the quantity of slaughter that is dispersed throughout the world in such graphic and manifold ways. The axiom, “One death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic,” is an axiom for a clear reason.

In America, that aspect of human nature (the part that causes us to recoil from an overload of awfulness) is compounded by human ingenuity: The government created by the Founders, as expressed in the brilliance of the Constitution, has subdued the temptation to be fanatic. Americans are not bred to land airplanes in office buildings to fulfill a perceived divine imperative.

Furthermore, when most of the world’s worst tragedies are thousands of miles away, religion recedes. Immortal and fundamental questions of religion (What role does suffering play in our lives? How do we see God in disaster?) take their place in dogmatic pronouncements, which, most of the time, satiate the public. Plunging into the very complex mysteries concerning our relationship with God seems an unnecessary diversion for those who must mobilize all their intellect and energy primarily to feed their families.

What does all this mean? It means a few questions are paramount.

First, when something like what happened Tuesday occurs, are Americans capable of placing it into its appropriate religious context? In other words, when the President and various people on TV urge us to pray, is that merely a reflexive-psychologically aimed encouragement, or do most Americans actually have the spiritual development to see in the wickedness some sign of God’s providence?

Second, how do the United States and the rest of the West proceed in a world where different interpretations of God produce such depressing results?

For this writer, the answer to the first question is: I don’t know. And the answer to the second question is: I don’t know.

What is known is that theology is, strictly speaking, vital. How people view God, or how they do not view God, shapes every action with any significance on the world. It shaped the decisions of those few who murdered thousands of Americans, and it will shape America’s response.

Every grave challenge America has faced has served to showcase the country’s resilience and its indefatigable spirit. But it is important to note that as the country has grown farther away from its founding moment, from the noble rhetoric of the Declaration and the early Republic, God has become decreasingly used as a rallying cry. Nowadays, maintaining America’s prestige, or our economy or the elastic notion of freedom have become the main sources of energy fueling discussions of foreign policy and behavior during hostilities.

In the meantime, the quest to know and understand and perform the will of God remains infinitely complex and incomprehensibly dangerous.

Matt Emerson is a sophomore studying political science.