Courageous Defiance
Timothy A. Chichester
STAND UP FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RALLY
Delivered 23 March, 2012, Goshen, NY
CourageousDefiance
Some 3400 years ago a man stood before a king and said the most astonishing of things. He said that the king's authority was limited by God, not the mere will of the king. In Moses we see that courageous defiance to illegitimate authority that grows within the Jewish tradition.
Some1200 years later a man rode into battle under shields and banners marked with the Greek letters Chi and Rho, the monogram for Christ. And with this came the long, painful change in the way men saw each other. With the freedom of religion granted by Constantine, the idea that man derived his dignity from his Creator, an idea carried to us from the bosom of Abraham, is unleashed upon a brutal pagan world, a world mired in the unjust economics of slavery.
Through the centuries the hope of The Prince of Peace flowed over the debauched Roman empire and raised a new civilization, a civilization that saw, with increasing clarity, that it was true, that the dignity of each man was not granted by the State, but was a boon, a boon bestowed without price, a boon innate, a boon granted by an unspeakably loving God. The slow progress of Christian humanism,sometimes even glacial, often beset by the selfish nature of fallen man, ran arrow true, and resulted in the rise of what we know to be, Christianity, currently called Western Civilization, the most creative, peaceful, prosperous and free civilization ever.
That arrow passed through the blood of many courageous men who suffered and died to
shape a future that ensured that the State reflect the God-given dignity of man. That arrow passed through a room 236 years ago, through the hearts of men steeped in Christian culture and humanism. Then that arrow sped outward with it a flaming banner emblazoned with words that reflect natural law and the true, innate, dignity of man as bestowed by Almighty God:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
...Rights guaranteed by a miraculous political document that began with the words
"We the People"
and closed with the words
"...in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven"
It was a constitution that former slave Fredrick Douglass described as "a glorious liberty document." We were blessed with a Declaration of Independence that acknowledged the spiritual natur eand rights of man and a Constitution to enshroud and enable them. Not unlike the melding of a body and soul.
Following the initial signing of the US Constitution, France 's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, emerged with generalities enabling an atheistic view quite opposed to Christian culture. In what I believe to be the most calamitous moment in the history of man, a nation declared that God did not exist. The pagans got it right. Even the murderous Aztec's, demonic in their human sacrifice,understood the reality of a transcendent deity. No one had ever thought so small as these enlightened ones who were the proto-marxists. France descended into a bloodbath that preshadowed the atheistic socialist regimes to come. The war on religion itself had become overt.
Within two generations the spiritual sewerage spawned from that atheistic ideology was recognizable enough as such a profound danger to civilization that the Vatican condemned Communism by name in 1846,two years before Karl Marx and Friedric Engles were commissioned by the German Communist League to write The Communist Manifesto.
In1891, twenty-seven years before the Bolshevik revolution, the war between the Church and the socialists for the heart of the workingman resulted in the detailed analysis and condemnation of socialism in the encyclical on capital and labor titled Rerum Novarum (which means New Things). In 1917 the war again turned bloody. Lenin asked who would be the communists Saint-Just, referring to the Frenchman behind the Reign of Terror, and found him in Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the Terror began.
The history of the20th century is that of torrents of blood shed by the various stripes of Marxists, shed always with the harmonics of miasmic rage about man and his opiate, his religion.
The Present
I have sketched the history that has led us to this time. To a time when a self-avowed Marxist with a sworn animosity toward our Constitution, has become so emboldened as to dismiss the First Amendment and crush the Orthodox Jews and Christians who now are almost the only ones left who understand the peril, and have the spiritual resources to resist. The British, those sorry lab rats for a new world order, having voluntarily reached a level of pragmatic atheism exceeding that of the old Soviet Union, no longer have the power to resist the totalitarian State now descending upon them.Others have talked and will talk about the Health Care Mandate and the need to overturnit. I am now going to talk to you about the duty we have to actively resist.
Since Marxist Socialist ideology holds that "Truth is what serves the State today," and that man is simply an economic unit, any behavior was,and is justified. This is a very, very, important distinction between Judeo-Christian morality and that of the Marxist Socialist.
It goes to the heart of why so many Jews and Christians alike have been seduced wholesale away from the foundations that held them fast for centuries. It goes to the heart of why the Catholic bishops,charged with transmitting the Deposit of Faith from generation to generation, were 'surprised' by a White House lecture on how they needed to listen to the enlightened ones, the pragmatic Catholic apostates like Pelosi and Durbin, who are so willing to serve our pragmatic atheist and Marxist, Barak Hussein Obama.
The issue is much greater than the apparent First Amendment abuse. It is about making irrelevant those Christian institutions that constitute the main line of resistance to Marxist dominance over the US political sphere.
The strategy behind the abortion / sterilization mandate is to make those institutions indistinguishable from their secular counterparts while loosening the grip of the Constitution. But, you say, what of the threats to close down the hospitals and other vital services? After all, Catholic hospitals make up 13 percent of hospitals and 16 percent of all admissions in the U.S. - won't closure work?
The answer is a strong maybe not. It worked for Cardinal O'Connor in 1994,why not now? The answer is simple. We are dealing with a president who acts like a hard core Marxist ideologue, one for whom lying and deceit are resume enhancers. This is a man who has been recorded advocating for infanticide. A man whose advisers hold that the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions.
He and his fellow travelers lied through their teeth to the Bart Stupaks as well as to the American public. What makes him trustworthy now?
The crisis grows, the wailing begins, and, in a few weeks, Obama steps into the breach with previously prepared eminent domain filings, based upon the infamous Kelo decision, and transfers the assets representing over 200 years of Christian ministry to various private and commercial, as well as federal state and local political entities.
To Obama and all Marxists this is right and just. Let me illustrate why. In 1965 a thirty something year old woman in Odessa, in the USSR, gave help t oa WW II widow who was all but starving on her miniscule war widows pension. The young lady was reported and brought to the militia station, the local police, and warned not to help the old woman. Sheprotested. They said "We don't care . Just don't help her." A short time later she was hauled into the station house and warned again. The third time she was arrested and charged with a felony crime "slander against the state" and sentenced to 18 months of what was euphemistically called "strict regime," the hardest of the hard labor camps.
The connection I am making here is two-fold. One is that most people have never understood the reasoning behind the Obama's effort to do away with tax deductions for charitable giving. The ideological component is the same as that used against the woman.
The State is the father of us all - how dare you presume so much. The tax change is part of a web of rules and actions designed to make religious charity impossible, and thereby weaken the only real ideological opposition to Marxism.
The other connection is the recognition of the rabid anti-religious nature of these people. Simply put, you cannot negotiate with them because they simply cannot be trusted. Again, keep the name Stupak in your head.
Defiance
How can we act to make the most of this situation. A glance at the city of Nowa Huta, Poland provides insight. Nowa Huta was described by Brian Whitmore of THE BOSTON GLOBE, as the place "...where George Orwell's dark vision of a perfect industrial metropolis was executed with stunning precision. Until, that is, the workers rose up and overthrew Big Brother."
In this grimy steel town the workers wanted a church. The communists said no. The Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, persisted and defiantly held Mass on the site for years. Workers replaced every cross removed or destroyed by the State. Eventually the State caved.
What is needed now is for our bishops and other religious administrators to publicly defy the mandate and keep the institutions open without compliance. We must not give these Marxists the opportunity to seize the assets of religious and charitable institutions.
Our duty, yours and mine, is to assist them, to encourage them by letters and prayers. But our duty extends far beyond this rally in effort and time. We must make ourselves loud enough to be heard. We must be vigorous and persistent in creating prayerful and lively sit-ins in our politicians offices. We need to wheedle , encourage, beg ,plead - what-ever it takes- to get our bishops, rabbis, ministers and priests to get motivated to the point of action. We must help them understand that a single pastoral letter to the flock is worthless without the personal courage to lead from the front. We long ago passed from the diplomatic maneuverings of 1938 to the brutal fighting of Stalingrad.
What is needed is direct, forceful, definitive and ongoing actions by courageous and defiant religious and lay leaders.
We need to tell them we will be standing next to them, saying "I will go to jail with you!"
And above all we must pray daily, unceasingly, for the conversion and confounding of those whose word and deed threaten us and our nation with such malice.
We have a right and duty to pray for our deliverance from evil.
