Times of the Unknown

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan talks about the fact that more people are saying “I just don’t know” these days, but God knows. The transcript follows the video.

Transcript

Hi everybody, Cardinal Timothy Dolan here. Thanks for checking in. You know what I’m finding a lot of people saying more and more? “I just don’t know.” It could be our political leaders. It might even be our doctors or healthcare professionals, professionals who are doing such a good job. It could be people that I’m calling or checking up on. When you ask about the virus, when you ask about what’s the best thing to do, when you ask when it’s going to let up, more and more people are saying, “I just don’t know.”

Now that’s a little strange, because most of the time, those people whom I just cited like to give a sense of omniscience. They want to say, “We know what’s going on. We understand this. We can explain it to you. We are in the know.”

We’re not used to people saying, “I don’t know,” and that’s a rather refreshing posture of humility to have. The people who usually are filled with knowledge, in whom we have confidence—our political leaders, our healthcare professionals—even they are saying, “We’re not omniscient. We just don’t know. We’re doing the best we can, and we’re trusting in other people who do know a lot more than we do. But we just don’t know.”

When you think about it, everybody, there’s only one person who is omniscient, and that’s Almighty God. And every once in a while, it’s not bad for us simply to say, “I don’t know, but God knows.”