“If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him” (1 Jn 2:15).
It is true that St. John affirms in his Gospel that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16) to save humanity. But this love is fundamentally different from the love that the Apostle speaks of in his letter. God’s love for the world is a saving love, calling man from sin to light, from confusion to truth.
On the other hand, the love of the world, into which we human beings can fall, is a blind love that becomes idolatry when it takes possession of the person. This “love” is contrary to true love and therefore incompatible with love for our Heavenly Father.
Therefore, it is an illusion for a modernistic Christianity to think that one can approach the world optimistically and openly, enjoying worldly things to the fullest and believing that there is little difference between the way of following the Lord and a worldly life.
With such a mentality, our love for our Father will become weaker and weaker: we will conform to the world, we will adopt more and more of its values (or rather, its anti-values), and we will hardly have the strength to endure persecution and rejection for the sake of our Father. The “love of the world” will have weakened us inwardly and robbed us of the strength to resist.
A deplorable state, which becomes especially serious when we do not even notice it.
Those who open their eyes will see that this “love of the world” is one of the main reasons why our Church is so weak. The antidote can only be to turn to our Father and deal with the world in the Spirit of God.