A Double Case of Stalemate

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One of the things I have noticed for some time now is how trends and events in the Roman Catholic Church are reflective of, and roughly parallel to, trends found in the secular society, regardless of any rigid attempts to maintain Church and State in their separate pigeonholes. This phenomenon should not be surprising to any astute observer because the Church herself is a body politic which, in her human element, consists of the same ordinary and fallible men and women who in aggregate constitute civil society as well. Secular attitudes therefore are just as apt to be found among Churchmen as Christian viewpoints permeating the legal and social order to one degree or another. This inevitable cross-pollination has worked at times for the better, but sometimes to the Church’s detriment. Regardless, I would suspect that few today would deny that the trends over the past several generations have steered in a decisively ‘progressive’ direction in both spheres, whether Church or State. And it is those ‘left of center’ trends which have brought us to this present moment which I would describe as a stalemate, be it religious, social, or political.

For the United States this stalemate could be summed up in the current war against Iran, a conflict carelessly entered into with no popular support, no apparent long term strategy, and no clearly enunciated objectives other than to topple a government inimicable to one small client state, Israel. That goal having failed spectacularly, we now find American military assets in the Gulf region under siege, a looming global economic catastrophe due to the closure of the Persian Gulf, and a colossal blow struck to America’s credibility and prestige in the world. Nor does there seem to be any face saving exit from the debacle, this asymmetric war in which the weaker party, Iran, seems to hold all the strategic cards.

Thirty-five years ago, as the Cold War was ending, America seemed to be holding all the aces. We were the sole global superpower. We controlled banking and trade via the de facto global currency, the dollar. We had peacefully defeated the Soviet empire and the time seemed ripe to beat our swords into plow-shares for a dawning era of peace, trade, and prosperity. But in fact we did just the opposite. We doubled down under the influence of war-mongering neo-cons and continued beating our plow-shares into swords. We followed the same dreary path that the British colonial empire had blazed: military adventurism, resource extraction, and power projection by means of stealth, force, or deception. In the end Britain’s wars of avarice bankrupted the exhausted empire, so the Americans simply took on the British mantle and continued down the same futile pathway. That trek dragged us through conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), and a Ukraine proxy war. The result has been multiple failures and embarrassments.

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The Essence of Liberty

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From my perch, America at 250 seems not to be in a particularly celebratory mood, and it’s more than just being stuck in the middle of an unpopular and embarrassing war. Perhaps one reason for such meager enthusiasm on an otherwise auspicious anniversary is because many of our people have become spiritually tired and morally feeble. In his first inaugural address President George Washington stated, “there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble bond between virtue and happiness.” Novelist Michael D. O’Brien asks, “Does the erosion begin when we decide that God is there first and foremost to serve our will, and to aid our lives on our terms? Are we evangelizing or are we being anti-evangelized? To what degree have we mistaken the assimilation by paganism for legitimate inculturation, that is, the adaptation of Christian culture to the ‘language’ of the surrounding non-Christian culture?”

The very essence of liberty is religious freedom, that is, the freedom of the children of God without which political rights mean very little. St. Peter exhorts, “Be free, yet without using freedom as a pretext for evil, but as slaves of God.” (1 Pt. 2:16) So many Americans it would now seem have adopted a quite distorted sense of religious liberty as being the supremacy of individual conscience, an attitude which when widely diffused produces subjectivism, moral relativism, and ultimately religious and social anarchy. Imagine what President Washington would have thought of ‘abortion rights,’ ‘gay marriage,’ or ‘transgenderism.’ I daresay that he would never have considered such abuses as legitimate fruits of freedom.

Freedom is somewhat like a loaded gun with no safety. One needs to aim carefully and sparingly and to select targets prudently lest disaster ensues. Similarly, what passes for freedom today more closely resembles diabolical disorientation ~ men passing as women and vice versa, marriage and family redefined, surrogacy and IVF lauded even as epic scourges of drug and pornography addiction abound, child trafficking and blatant war crimes committed with impunity using our tax dollars. Our elected authorities become silent as the grave on such matters of grave importance because they hold a false notion of freedom un-tethered from responsibility. The false assumption that humans are capable of unilaterally deciding what is good and what is evil began when the ‘rights of man’ were allowed to eclipse the ‘rights of God.’ But it is the role and sacred duty of Religion to defend first the rights of God. This is where the modern concept of religious liberty is failing.

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The Last Norman Rockwell Generation

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Many of my ‘Boomer’ generation will fondly remember the iconic magazine art produced by the gifted American Illustrator, Norman Rockwell, whose imaginative Saturday Evening Post covers captured the quintessence of American life during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. I grew up at the tail end of Norman Rockwell’s America, a world which has long since evaporated into the mists of our nation’s social history. And while it wasn’t a perfect world it was nevertheless a time of relatively stable family life and national cohesion. In that society men worked hard in the mills and factories while wives and mothers anchored their families and neighborhoods by their at-home presence. Neighborhoods were true neighborhoods, not cookie cutter subdivisions or gated compounds. Over 90 kids lived on my block alone. We all played (and fought) together, walked in batches to school, or sneaked off to the nearby drug store soda font. Small independent ‘AG’ grocers and butchers within easy walking distance dotted the landscape. At dinnertime a mass migration ensued, each to his or her own home for the family supper.

Though we didn’t realize it at the time, it was the end of an era. America reigned as the world’s industrial power. We produced goods and services on a scale never before imagined in human history. But dark forces were already at work in the higher echelons of corporate and governmental power, forces bent on subjecting ordinary Americans to mass mind control techniques intended to enrich and empower a few at the expense of the many. The purpose of this covert social engineering experiment was to re-wire our brains and emotions and root out that annoying American trait of ‘individualism’ which was grounded in the nuclear family. Therefore the family, long the primary unit of social unity and moral authority, was to be gradually edged out of its vaunted position by a gaggle of ‘expert authorities’ in government and education. The large private corporations cooperated in this transfer of power away from the family unit by undermining the economic independence of individuals, especially fathers, and reducing workers to dependent wage slaves.

Thus World War II became a kind of benchmark after which we were no longer truly free and sovereign citizens but rather unwitting captive specimens in a nation-wide social science laboratory. And so we ‘Boomers’ were raised and educated in an increasingly corporate dominated ‘collectivist’ social framework where enterprise and independent thought were being slowly but surely squeezed out by a new ethos based upon institutional conformity. ‘Company men’ and ‘team players’ became the new social and economic paradigm supplanting the former ‘independent farmer’ mindset. In fact, the self sufficient family farm itself was in free-fall by 1950 alongside countless rural communities withering on the vine.

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American Empire and Augustine’s Two Cities

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“By our own vices, not by chance, have we lost the republic, though we retain the name.” St. Augustine, City of God, (bk. XI ch. 21) Augustine might just as well been speaking of the current American empire which, 1,600 years later, has succeeded its Roman antecedent, while apparently learning very little from its fate. That is the historical trajectory of all empires, however, and in the long run we shall fare no better than the rest: Macedonia, Rome, Spain, France, Britain, Soviet Union, etc.

President John Adams once remarked that the then new American republic was fit only for a moral and religious people, arguing that this republican system of government would only endure so long as God remained at the center of her citizen’s lives. The question is whether after 250 years of that experiment in self-government by and for the people we still fit the bill outlined by Adams. To any contemporary casual observer this once viably Christian land no longer seems to function within a Christian context. Granted, there are still a substantial number of Christians around, but their voices have become that of a minority. Even among those who claim to be Christians, what we too often see is a caricature of Christianity.

One recent example is the disturbing invocation by Secretary of War(crimes?) Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon as he seriously quoted a Biblical parody taken from the Hollywood movie Pulp Fiction. The Evangelical Hegseth lifted a gangster character’s take on Ezekial 25: 15-17 out of its movie context, invoking God to exact merciless vengeance on our enemies (the Iranian people) to basically expunge them from the face of the earth. More shocking was the Easter morning message by President Donald Trump on Truth Social where he profanely demanded Iran “open the f###ing Straits,” ending his vile tirade with a sarcastic “Praise be to Allah.” Days later, while still in Easter week, Trump threateningly posted, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be restored.” Presumably he was referring to that deeply rooted Persian civilization, well over 3,500years old before our American republic ever became a pipe dream. So what ever became of that aspect of Christianity which demands, “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father.” (Mt.5: 44) Apparently we have adopted an exclusively “Old Testament” style Christianity as though the New Testament had never modified the former “eye for an eye” narrative.

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Zionism ~ the Collective Messiah

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For they have not recognized the Hour of their Visitation.

The disastrously entangled situation in today’s Middle East can be said to revolve around a certain question: “Is the Old Testament a property deed in perpetuity, or is it something much greater, i.e., a binding spiritual covenant?” Modern day Zionists and the secular State of Israel generally accept only the first interpretation and are thereby willing to set the entire region ablaze in defense of that position. And yet we are told that upward of 70% of Jewish Israeli citizens are either secular, agnostic, or atheistic – more than confirmed by the highly secularized culture of Tel Aviv and other major Israeli urban centers. And while we in the West have long fretted about the threat of Communism to a Christian based social order, very few seem to recognize that Communism’s younger brother, political Zionism, may actually be the fatal ‘ism’ which draws mankind into a Third World War. Such a scenario appears to be more plausible today than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The question then arises as to how Zionism is to be understood in the larger context of Judaism, a crucial distinction that many so-called Christian Zionists and Jewish pundits such as Ben Shapiro seem unwilling to address, despite the fact that there are thousands of orthodox and even many secular Jews who reject Zionism outright. Despite this inconvenient body of Jewish opposition, the Zionist program has expanded greatly over the past 75 years from its original stated goal of a shared Jewish homeland in Palestine into a far more ambitious agenda to transform the Israeli State into the dominant regional hegemon, the seizure of every square meter of Palestinian land, and now the rebuilding a 3rd Temple in Jerusalem, after 2,000 years, for the resumption of animal sacrifice.

Such a project would necessitate the destruction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, one of the three most important pilgrimage sites in Islam, an act which would undoubtedly incite the world’s 2 billion Muslims to unprecedented fury. So why would any rational person or government risk such a volatile provocation? And yet it is no secret that countless Zionists of both Evangelical Christian and Jewish persuasions are working hard to achieve this very end which they understand full well would incite a geo-political upheaval of unimaginable scale: a worldwide religious war. It that indeed is their aim, then the American and Zionist State’s two recent perfidious sneak attacks on Iran in the midst of supposed ‘peace negotiations’ may merely represent the prelude to a much deadlier conflict.

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INCONCEIVABLE!

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With the current massive deployment of U.S. Naval forces into the Middle East we are precariously straddling what well could be the brink of World War III. And the distinction here between liberal and conservative, Democrat or Republican has little bearing on this issue since warmongering has become a profitable policy for both sides of the aisle in D.C. these days. Our entire political class, left and right, seem to be diabolically enamored by the prospect of more slaughter at the expense of the peoples in other nations. We have watched helplessly as Washington’s bi-partisan lies and distortions have inflicted countless casualties in Ukraine and Gaza over the past four years alone, but apparently the empire’s lust for blood has still not been fully satiated. Never forget that it was American supplied munitions that have murdered over 70,000 civilians in Gaza alone, maiming countless others, the majority being defenseless women and children, and I fear what these widely publicized horrors are doing to jade the souls of the American people.

History has long demonstrated that leaders can be grossly dishonest and bereft of common human decency. But what has been severely eroded within my lifetime is the public’s expectation that our leaders should at least exhibit a nominal degree of honesty and decency. Sad but true, after decades of corrupt behavior we no longer expect the least modicum of integrity from our elected and non-elected officials, primarily because we have seen time and again that high moral character is no longer a prerequisite for high office. The Clintons and Epstein class elites have successfully bred a widespread cynicism among the populace who no longer see real statesmen but only back door vacuum cleaner salesmen guiding the ship of state.

I am often reminded of actor Wallace Shawn’s most enduring line from that classic movie The Princess Bride. It was but a single word hilariously uttered in supposed astonishment, “INCONCEIVABLE!” Shawn marvelously stitched together a few syllables into a colorful absurdity bent on denying or looking past something that was patently obvious – like whistling past a graveyard. Within the context of that highly entertaining film it became a brilliant device which exposed the comic vanity of Shawn’s character who flattered himself to be the smartest man on earth. (A premonition of Donald Trump perhaps?)

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The Sins Against Posterity

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“For indeed the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.’ At that time they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!'” (Lk 23:29-30)

My generation, colloquially known as the ‘Boomers,’ is arguably the first generation in history to largely embrace the notion of reproductive sterility as a positive good. This fulfills a prophesy made by our Lord, Jesus Christ, to the women of Jerusalem even as He was bearing the cross to his place of execution on Golgotha. Only a nihilistic culture which has no vision or hope for the future would celebrate barrenness as a desirable outcome. Only a generation steeped in this negative neo-Malthusian mindset would view its own offspring as a threat to its greater enjoyment and happiness. Only diseased minds and frozen hearts could ever conceive of human life not as a promising asset but as a dangerous liability which threatens their world, yet such is the mystifying conclusion which a great many of the Boomer generation came to accept as gospel.

Children, who had historically been considered hallmarks of family success and assets to society were, after 1965, increasingly dismissed as disposable liabilities. We lost any sense of shame about killing our unborn children, and in fact ostracized and shamed those few who were still willing to defend pre-natal life. Such attitudes inevitably create a jaded and cynical disposition regarding all human life, thus the terrible slaughters we now see in Ukraine and Gaza are either defended or casually dismissed by the very same crowd which was so greatly incensed by killings during the Vietnam War. I watched incredulously throughout the 1960s and 70s as my generation, virtually all raised with a Christian outlook, glibly swallowed the ‘Chicken Little’ overpopulation hoax of alarmists like Paul Ehrlich (author of “The Population Bomb” 1968) and sugar coated with a massive dose of Margaret Sanger’s contraception propaganda. And in fact, within a decade, that pervasive sexual revolution had blinded a whole generation to the true meaning of love and responsibility, and dispelled any concern for the good of future generations.

Ideas such as these have real world consequences. For if one generation is allowed to simply kill off its progeny for convenience sake, then what logically follows is a right to institute generational malpractice and pilferage. For if it’s okay to kill off your descendants for any reason, then what is to prevent one from robbing them blind? Whether consciously intended or not, this attitude insures that succeeding generations will be poorer, smaller, and saddled with the debts and problems bequeathed to them by their self-indulgent predecessors, the Boomers. Today’s demographics clearly bear out this phenomenon.

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To Follow Christ or Nietzsche?

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Advent 2025 marks the beginning of a new liturgical year and the celebration of the birth of Christ ~ the true King of the Universe yet who entered into human history not in pomp or splendor but in absolute meekness, a vulnerable swaddling infant born in a humble stable. This same Christ our King would later pronounce as an adult, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. (Mt 5:5) Yet if there is anything that the powers of this world truly despise in this present age of technological sophistication, it would be the very idea of meekness or the meek. We occupy an age of bravado, self-importance, and self congratulation where there seems to be very little appetite for meekness, humility, or quiet contemplation in the mad scramble to make one’s “mark on the world.”

This coming year also represents the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation which, by God’s grace, has grown and developed into an American empire. But in those 250 years many Americans seem to have forgotten a key foundational principle, that this was to be a Christian nation under God. We would needed no earthly sovereign because God was proclaimed to be our sovereign. That notion began to evaporate with the end of the Cold War which left the United States as the sole reigning world power, however. The ensuing 21st century hubris which came to exemplify American ‘elites’ (along with their European globalist allies) has led the entire Western world disastrously away from its former sense of dependence on God. At the same time it has created a very unstable if not outright delusional model of society.

In fact the state of Western society has become so degraded, noticeably accelerating since the Covid debacle, that it becomes a challenge to even comment intelligently on the depraved state of affairs. Where does one even begin when children are being mutilated in the cause of “gender fluidity” or being trafficked under the guise of “immigration rights?” Civility and courtesy in public debate forums has all but collapsed into bare knuckle partisanship signifying a level or polarization unprecedented in this land since the pre-Civil War confrontations over slavery. Our larger cities have degenerated into crime infested, barren wastelands of social-political polarization, wokeism, substance abuse, and massive homelessness. As a case in point America’s urban crown jewel, New York City, just elected an openly and unapologetic Marxist mayor. Climate activists and Green energy advocates distort data and twist the very laws of physics to justify forcing their ideological agendas on a reluctant public which pays the price in lost jobs and skyrocketing energy costs. Social dislocation has become endemic, visible on our very streets.

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Mary, Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix

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The kind of soft apostasy emanating regularly from the Vatican these days by players like the Doctrine of Faith’s prefect, Victor Cardinal Hernandez, who rather than vigorously defending doctrines seems more interested in wearing down resistance from those annoying, orthodox Catholics who stubbornly cling to the Faith of our Fathers. The latest example of this baleful phenomenon is the November 4 release of Mater Populi Fidelis, in which the oily prefect seems willing to denigrate the Mother of God by stripping away her titles as “Mediatrix of all Graces” as well as that of “Co-Redemptrix,” or at least banning their usage in ordinary theological dialogue. In a brazen exercise of faux-pietry the cardinal insists “the title of Co-Redemptrix risks eclipsing the exclusive role of Jesus Christ and would not be a true honor to his mother,” declaring it to be “inappropriate and theologically unhelpful.” This is classic Curial doublespeak, an art-form now fine tuned from previous documents such as Amoris Laetitia, Traditionis Custodis, Fratelli Tutti, Fiducia Supplicans and other dubious contributions of the “Francis papacy” designed more to muddy the waters than to contribute real clarity to difficult Church teachings.

Let me put it plainly as my long deceased spiritual mentor Fr. Thomas Kelly, S.J. often said, “Whoever honors the Mother honors the Son,” the obvious corollary being that one can never honor the Son by dishonoring his Mother. Again, Cardinal Fernandez goes on to proclaim that the title “Mediatrix of all Graces suggests a lack of solid grounding in Revelation and carries limits that do not favor a correct understanding of Mary’s unique place.'” So what then is Mary’s unique role in salvation history according to the Church’s teachings and traditions if we may be so bold as to ask the cardinal prefect? Co-Redemptrix after all is a title which goes back at least to the 15th century and has been affirmed by numerous popes and saints including Sts. John Henry Newman and Maxmilian Kolbe. Did these also share an incorrect understanding of Mary’s unique place?

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Suffering – for good or for ill?

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In my last post we investigated the nature of evil to discover that it is not “a thing in itself” but rather the privation or disordering of some particular good. Today we shall look at its close companion, suffering, with which evil is too often equated. At first glance, evil and suffering appear to be but two faces of the same coin mainly due to their sharing certain traits in common. For instance, suffering, like evil, may be described as the privation of a good: the loss of one’s health, liberty, even property or a loved one. All these thing cause one to suffer. Like evil, suffering is dependent upon the agency of persons. In fact, God himself seems to have ordained suffering in Genesis when He sentences Adam to toil “by the sweat of your brow” and for Eve to suffer pain in childbearing. And if suffering is just another manifestation of evil, that would mean that God has directly willed evil to exist, contrary to his nature which is pure goodness. How are we then to resolve such a paradox?

Genesis does give us a clue in resolving it. Notice that suffering did not enter the picture until after our first parent fell into sin. By embracing evil (disobedience to God’s direct command) Adam and Eve invited the baneful effects of suffering into their own lives and the lives of all their future progeny. Suffering, in other words, was an after effect of the sin they first committed. Suffering did not bring on the evil, rather it was their acceptance of evil which introduced suffering (and death) into their previously felicitous existence. Suffering is downstream from evil – it is one of the effects of sin, not its cause. Yet like evil, suffering is not “a thing in itself” but is attached to and inheres only in some conscious creature.

Suffering does not play favorites or take sides, for the righteous suffer alongside the wicked as the Book of Job so clearly illustrates. Suffering stalks its victims with no regard for one’s age, faith, politics, or income level. It is the great social leveler, undoubtedly by God’s design. Unlike evil, which God allows but does not will directly, suffering is not only permitted but at times actively willed by God for his own inscrutable purposes. So one may ask why a good God would will some innocent child, for instance, to suffer from an incurable disease? This is where the mystery of suffering deepens well beyond our limited ability to comprehend, and consequently where many become shaken in their faith. We cannot help but sense a link between suffering and evil and yet we struggle to draw a meaningful distinction between them.

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