Pentecost, A May 24, 2026
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“They gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language.” Why is it confusing to hear someone speak your native language? Shouldn’t that make things less confusing? Apparently not for this crowd. Nor is it really any different today. You can find a sub-genre of prank videos where someone is talking to people from another country in English before switching to fluently speaking the native language of the other person. Every time, the response is shock and surprise. But why surprise? Because it’s not what we expect. It’s normal and natural to run into language barriers. But why is understanding not normal? You know your bible stories, right? It’s the tower of Babel.
To refresh your memory, the tower of Babel happened a little after Noah’s ark. Everyone spoke the same language so they were able to make a lot progress very quickly. The human race got full of itself and said, “come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4). God knows that the only “name” which will make us truly happy is His Name. By using our cunning and linguistic advantages to make a name for ourselves, we were going to fall into a trap that prevented us from ever realizing that. We’d have “succeeded” in missing out on salvation and true happiness.
So, what did God do? He changed our languages. He intentionally sabotaged our ability to rely on ourselves so we’d learn to count on him instead. If that sounds cruel, think about it the same way you think about putting a baby-gate at the bottom of the stairs when you have toddlers in the house. You are intentionally stopping your child from going higher because you know they might seriously hurt themselves if you don’t.
So, God used linguistic confusion like a divine baby-gate on human achievement until the human race could grow more mature as a whole. By “mature” I mean grow more aware of and closer to God himself. Abraham, Moses, King David… it took time for God to get people ready for what he wanted these men to tell the world. He needed us to slow down long enough to hear them out.
It’s interesting how our technological development played out historically. Current theories say the human race has been around for 200,000 years or more. In that time, some cultures got a little advanced technologically – metalworking, chemistry, even indoor plumbing – but there’s no evidence of anything close to the kind of development we’ve seen in the last thousand years, much less what we’ve seen in the last 150 years. And there’s no sign of God putting up another baby-gate. Why, though? Why have we made more progress in the last 1000 years than in 199,000 years before that combined? What changed?
Pentecost. I’m serious. Until Jesus Christ came to give us the fullness of truth, we were too broken, too divided, and too caught up in a false view of the world to really make significant progress. People like to say science and religion are opposed, but that’s ignorance talking. Sure, some religions are anti-science, but not Catholicism. Catholicism basically created the field of science as we know it today. Monks and bishops and devout lay people carefully preserved ancient texts, developed agriculture, experimented with technology, and established accessible educational systems. St. Albert the Great was a chemist. The Big Bang theory was proposed by a priest.
It took a few hundred years, but after Pentecost, Christianity did two things to make it possible for to make progress without running into the same thing we did with the tower of Babel. First, Christianity told the human race that God is rational and therefore created a rationally ordered world which could be studied, understood, and mastered. Secondly, Christianity provided the grace necessary to do great things for the sake of God’s glory, for His name instead of our own.
Once Christianity got enough of a foothold in the world, we see a real explosion of technological and social development. Did you know that, for about a thousand years, socially acceptable slavery was basically eradicated in Christian kingdoms? Islam reintroduced it shortly before the Americas were discovered. It took us a few hundred more years, but we eventually eradicated socially accepted slavery again. When the Americas were discovered, the natives didn’t even have the wheel, but within a few hundred years North America became the primary place of technological and social progress.
It’s not that only Christians can be smart or good – many great scientists and social leaders were and are not Christian – but Christianity is what creates the conditions and social situations that make true scientific and social progress possible. A Christian world is a kinder world, a more mature, more capable world and therefore able to do now what we could not do at the time of the Tower of Babel.
So, when Pentecost happens and the Holy Spirit crosses the language barrier that God himself had put in place, it was like taking down the baby-gate to let your child go upstairs. The tower of Babel never touched the sky, but once Jesus came, died, and rose from the dead, the human race finally did “touch the sky” in his Ascension. Then he poured out the Holy Spirit upon his Apostles, upon us saying, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Send us to do what? To gather the world and bring them to heaven not with a tower made by human hands, but with the divine staircase of the sacraments of the Church. Though we still stumble, the human race is headed upward.
Or are we? Remember that rationality is only one of the conditions that makes progress possible. The other is the grace to do great things for God’s name rather than our own. It is humility. So many great discoveries and accomplishments were, at least on some level, done “for the glory of God” instead of to “make a name for ourselves.”
What about now? With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, a new space race, and transhumanist ideas of uploading our minds to the cloud, you have to wonder which name we serve. AI offers to overcome language barriers, space travel aims to “touch the sky,” and transhumanism promises immortality and salvation apart from God.
I don’t expect God to miraculously stop our progress again; we still have Jesus and the fullness of truth. But if true progress requires the humility of grace and the rationality of the One True God, it makes sense that trying to make progress without those things is doomed to fail, torn apart by our own pride.
If the rumors about SpaceX are true, our own little corner of Catholic Acadiana is about to get a massive influx of money, people, and even science. It could be a moment of progress. But it also could be an echo of Babel. What will determine that outcome? We will. If we get swept up in progress for its own sake, we’ll lose what we have and make less progress than we think.
But if we receive the “great crowds” from “every nation” like the Apostles, if we use God’s power to cross barriers of language and culture, if we strive not for power but for the peace that Christ breathes upon his apostles in the upper room, if we mark success by how many people are reconciled to God through the Church’s sacramental authority, by how many people glorify God’s name…
Then who knows? Maybe we’ll not only “touch the sky” with the “towers” we build, but go even higher to heaven itself and, by His grace and for His glory, we might even bring the whole world with us.