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.