I’ve been pondering writing a history of the 20th century and calling it, “The 20th Century: A Christian Failure” or, perhaps, “A Failure of Christians”. We really flopped in the 20th century, we who claim to call Jesus Our Lord – we allowed things to slide from bad to worse and each time a moral decision was required we retreated behind a fog of disingenuous rhetoric about “rights” and “separation of Church and State”. This is not to say that our Jewish and Moslem brothers and sisters didn’t contribute to the whole problem, but as the West in general – and the United States in particular – have been the project of those who, in their large majority, claim (or, at least, claimed at one time) to be Christian, the lion’s share of the blame must be laid at our door.
Discussing the financial meltdown, Deacon Keith Fournier points out that the financial failure is, at bottom, just a symptom of our moral failure – our unwillingness to speak the truth and adhere to truth:
When a society fails to recognize that persons are more important than things, when it loses sight of the primacy of the inviolable dignity of every single human person at every age, every stage and of every size, it soon devolves into a form of practical materialism, worshipping a new golden calf. It uses the language of human rights but has lost its true moral content. When there is no recognition of a preeminent right to life, there will soon be an erosion of the entire structure of human rights. Human rights do not exist in a vacuum; they are goods of the human person. This is why I absolutely insist that to be “Pro-Life” is NOT to be a political Partisan or a “single issue” voter. Rather, it is to be truly human and to recognize that there is a hierarchy of rights. Without acknowledging the preeminent right to life, all derivative rights and the entire infrastructure of human rights is placed in jeopardy. The further legitimate questions and positions of political parties become moot. Without the freedom to be born, all of the talk about compassion for the poor and the promotion of freedom throughout the entirety of life, and how we attain it, is hollow and empty. Failing to recognize our first neighbors in the womb as having a right to be born and then to live a full life in our community is a foundational failure of our obligation in solidarity to one another and the entire ethic of being “our brothers (and sisters) keeper”. There can be no enduring lasting solidarity in a culture that kills its own children and then calls it a “right”. This is a moral crisis.
Mother Teresa, whom the Catholic Church now rightly calls “Blessed Teresa”, put it so clearly: “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.” (emphasis in original)
Some people contest my assertion that abortion – the battle over Life – is the central issue of our times, but the more time goes on and the deeper I think on this issue, the more clear it is that I’m correct in my assertion. While there are many elements and cross-currents at work in our world today, the fact that we removed the most defenseless from the protection of our laws has been corroding our culture until, now, we hardly even bat an eye at moral depravity which, once upon a time, would have outraged the whole of society. The fabric of lies which has been used to support legal abortion has found itself apt in supporting every other form of moral collapse – it really does go, “if its ok to abort a child, then its ok to – insert immoral act here“.
At the heart of our financial crisis stands one Barney Frank – no, he’s not the primary culprit, as there is no such person in existence; it was a group effort. But, still, Frank is at the center of the meltdown – and he’s a man who offered his shield to the malefactors of great wealth who plundered Fannie and Freddie; while, at times, his lover was involved with the firms…and, once upon a time, Frank wrote letters on behalf of another lover who needed character witnesses in regards to his conviction for having sex with a minor. In other words, Frank is the sort of person who, once upon a time, would not have survived in politics…but now we shrink away, fearful that any critique of Frank – or the underlying immorality of Frank which so easily led him down the path to cover for financial skullduggers – will get us called “homophobic” and other hateful names…and so, Frank goes on, and likely will continue to go on until he voluntarily retires from the scene. Frank is impervious to us – because he has slipped out of basic morality, and we have become afraid to point out the truth of the matter.
Unless and until we recover our morality, all our efforts to cure our society will ultimate fail. Only men and women who boldly state what is right and what is wrong and who take the fight to the corrupt special interests. We can’t have, as it were, an open and honest banking system run by people who think that killing children is ok, or that pornography is harmless, or that massive sex and violence in popular culture won’t lead people astray. As we view it right here, three weeks before the election, the reason Obama is ahead is because we are – or, at least, have been – thus far unwilling to really call him on his lies and his horrific personal and political associates….he might slip into the White House on a series of lies which the American majority – long fallen from a rigid adherence to morality – fall for because they sound good. Lies usually do – its why we tell so many of them. Truth is like rough sandpaper to the soft, velvety texture of Lies.
We have a choice in November – to find comfort in plausible lies, or to march open eyed into the difficult country of Truth. What will that choice be, I wonder?
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