The U.S. has unequivocally, unabashedly and electorally embraced a subjective reality where truth is changeable, depending upon how it can serve our pocketbooks and our uninformed consciences.Posted on 01/20/2009 8:53:08 AM PST by NYer
I am a middle aged, middle income, traditional Catholic female and I don’t belong here anymore.
The nation I have loved all my life has rebelled, like some arrogant teenager who smugly tells his mother and father that he knows more than they do. It’s been coming on for some time, but I’ve always comforted myself with the thought that I stood with a silent majority that was just too busy working and striving and living and dying to voice their concerns about where the culture of our nation was headed.
Forty years or so after the cultural and sexual revolution began, the “teenagers” have won, the silent majority is a minority, and this nation — on an executive level — has become alien ground to me and many others.
This is not just inaugural griping, this is the realization that our nation has finally, officially embraced the post-modern world; that, in addition to media elitists and collegiate intellectuals spreading nihilism, we finally have a U.S. president who embodies such a culture. Propelled into office by voter greed, Barack Obama will now lead the nation that leads the world, using his successful blend of atheistic humanism and political manipulation that make for easy-to-digest sound bytes. The immoralists are no longer only in the ivory towers, they are in the White House, not to mention the courts, the educational systems and the financial industries. And most Americans don’t mind at all or are too busy or distracted to notice.
The U.S. has unequivocally, unabashedly and electorally embraced a subjective reality where truth is changeable, depending upon how it can serve our pocketbooks and our uninformed consciences.
“Every generation feels the same way, and yet the nation survives,” you may say. But I say our nation is dying and it’s closer to its death throes now than ever before in its history. The United States is 233 years old and it is creaking under the weight of its own arrogance.
“In the end Christ will triumph and the His truth will be vindicated,” you may also say, and I concur with a grateful heart. I thank God for His promises, which I know He will keep. But between now and His triumph could be the end of the great American experiment. Christ never promised the U.S.A. would be around to welcome His victory, and it’s not alarmist to say that our beloved nation may well fall before that glorious day arrives.
Stop. Before you click the “comment” link, stay with me a while longer because here’s where this article takes a surprising turn towards optimism. After two months of pondering what this new presidency and administration will wreak upon unborn babies, legitimate marriage, public education, health care and a bevy of other life-altering issues, I maintain there is opportunity alongside this heartache. In God’s universe, thanks to His mercy and providence, there always is.
The universal struggle between good and evil, between Christ and His enemies has now taken center stage in this nation. For decades most American Catholics have lived relatively comfortably by accepting shades of gray. Little by little the grays became darker as more of the Church’s moral teachings were questioned, ignored and rejected. Now, the gray areas have turned to blackness. It is no longer possible for lukewarm Catholics to remain faithful. The gray areas are gone. American Catholics will either embrace the white light of Truth or accept the darkness.
So where does this leave aliens like me? Totally reliant upon God, and for many of us it will be the first time in our lives. I used to define myself as an American Catholic, but now I realize I am a Catholic in America. The nation I used to depend upon to accept my spiritual composition is gone. No longer does our citizenship agree that our laws are, and should be, based on Judeo-Christian concepts. No longer can a Christian assume his moral beliefs will be given fair representation or even toleration in the public forum.
As aliens, we have an important role to play as keepers of the faith on hostile soil. Here’s our opportunity to get off the fence on every controversial issue that offends God and start pulling our weight as Catholics in America. Many Catholics already are very publicly defending Christ and His Gospel truths. Most aren’t. Are you defending Christ in America? Am I?
This era, just beginning, represents our time in the long history of the Catholic Church to accept suffering, offer prayers and penance, and do battle in the public forum so that the voice of Christ can be heard. It is our turn to live as Catholics who look only to the magisterium of the Church for instruction on true human dignity and authentic social justice.
We will join Catholics from around the world who “lost” their countries long ago — Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Chinese, Russians and others who have already inured themselves to the agonies of living in an atheistic nation, one that they used to love with patriotic fervor but now are estranged from. We will lean on the rich Catholic tradition of the Church Militant and go on living in an alien nation while fortifying ourselves with the Word Made Flesh, He who makes His dwelling among aliens the world over.
Are you up to this challenge? As Americans, we’ve grown undisciplined, flabby and unused to suffering. We can’t bear the pain of unpopularity; how will we bear persecution? And it is coming. With this new administration we have the makings of unprecedented Christian persecutions in our nation that will make martyrs and saints of many who stand up for Truth. You won’t have to be a political activist to have it thrust upon you: parents, clergy, health care providers, teachers, workers of all kinds will find themselves facing moral issues that assault the foundations of the Catholic faith. Which issue will be the one that forces Catholics like you and me to confront how shallow our relationship with Christ has been? Which issue will finally inspire us to make the commitment to “put out into the deep,” whatever the cost?
Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta, after visiting our great nation years ago, said she pitied us our “poverty.” She understood the seriousness of the spiritual poverty that the U.S. suffered. We may be on the brink of changing that poverty, one Catholic, one Christian at a time.
The history of the Church is one of suffering and triumph. From that perspective, the Obama presidency could be the beginning of a great renewal of Christianity in America, if each of us lives the faith the way Christ calls us to. So in an important way, this article is not about losing a nation, so much as gaining a deeper relationship with Jesus, the King of all nations. We, who have always assumed that our nation would validate our faith, now find it must be validated only by God.
“[T]he new age has begun; and…much must now pass away,” Gandalf says in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Let it pass. With prayerful renewal and faithful responses, we can find that God alone will suffice. Then maybe, in small ways that have great power, we can work to bring our beloved nation back to God.
Very powerful and consoling to know that we are not alone in our thoughts.
Apparently benign alien emissaries show mankind how to end the misery of war, plague and famine. The Kanamits, nine-foot tall aliens, arrive on Earth with one lofty goal: To Serve Man. They end war, they end famine. They make the military wonder: what's the catch?
CAST: Richard Kiel, Hardie Albright, Robert Tafur, Lloyd Bochner, Lomax Study, Theodore Marcuse, Susan Cummings, Nelson Olmstead.
Watch it, or any other TZ episode, online for free at:
(see season 3, page 1. there are 3 seasons in all, each seasons page has 2 pages of listings)
http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/
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Excellent article. May God have mercy on us.
Read this article in it's entirety.
I did several times.
It's posted as a thread but excerpted.
Read this article in it's entirety.
I did several times.
It's posted as a thread but excerpted.
Yes ... it is most painful. Thank you for the quote from Tolkien. It’s time to re-read his works :-)
Yes ... it is most painful. Thank you for the quote from Tolkien. It’s time to re-read his works :-)
There is indeed a great deal of ruin in a nation, especially in a great nation like this one.
But the ruin we see today is deep and widespread, and has been a long time coming. We have only just begun to feel its effects.
Perhaps this great nation can right itself, but I fear that liberalism, and its insidious cultural twin, postmodernism, have embedded themselves too deeply into our institutions to render them anything but hopelessly corrupt and inept.
9/11 should have been a wake-up call. Instead, the minimal sacrifices called for were met with an irrational resentment and hostility, not for our enemies, but for the lingering vestiges of responsibility and sanity in government.
These forces now have the President of their adolescent wishes: a man of monumental ego but little and dubious experience, part racial celebrity and part false messiah. Such a recipe, in a world where even the so-called “friends” of the United States look upon us with a barely concealed rancor and envy, does not bode well for the future.
As I sit in my office building just south of San Francisco, everyone around the office, from the manager on down, has their web browsers set to the inauguration on CNN, and is watching with "complete intentness" (big surprise there!!). Hence, I wound up reading this article while watching Obama sworn in via someone's web browser in the cube next to me (whether I wanted to or not - I decided to "endure").
It seems this nation has turned their backs on God, and we are slowly but surely reaping the results of that turning away. May God have mercy upon us, and may we all turn back to Him before it is too late.
We're a Nihilistic Nation.
Don’t be surprised when the funding for the southern border wall disappears in a few days... once current budget runs out work will STOP... got to let in those folks that will perpetually vote democrat (until the end of days).
The immoralists are no longer only in the ivory towers, they are in the White House, not to mention the courts, the educational systems and the financial industries.
They have been running the educational system for a long. time. That went a long way toward making the rest possible.
People see these as separate actions and even do not fathom the current Democrat leadership.
The Socialists overtook the Democrat Party. Those running the show now are the agitators who rioted in Chicago (inside the convention for Eugene McCarthy and outside against the police). Same with the talk heads in the media.
Obama's presidency is a culmination of many decades of socialist revolution in America. Even CPUSA likes the guy.
I'm reminded of Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes:
All the time, it was... We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!
Man killed Jesus too. People act and do not know what the impact is.
Global socialists have railed against our Constitutional form of government for the better part of a century. Imagine needs to be rewritten "Imagine if there'd never been an America". So many despots would have thrived.
I’m a monarchist.
I have the Swamp and my family and the Church Christ gave us.
Heck, I’ve never really felt at home here anyway.
*And I never, ever fitted in the Hamptons!
'Nuff said.
The Socialists overtook the Democrat Party.
Know about The Frankfurt School of the mid-1900's? If not, you should; it laid the plans.
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