Our nation is in turmoil. Everything distopian novelists and “crazy conspiracy theorists” have written about seems to be coming true. Early in the Obama administration, for example, people said he’d create a national crisis to declare Martial Law and establish a dictatorship. Well, the tensions are arising, and Obama established aprogram under everyone’s noses to begin nationalizing local police forces. Major cities keep erupting in race riots. The Supreme Court is likely to overturn every state law on marriage and establish yet another fictious constitutional “Right.” Some people are being driven out of business for expressing thir Christian beliefs while other businesses are denying Christians their services. Hillary Clinton says if (and when) she’s “elected” President, she wants to force all religions to accept abortion.
All of it just shows society’ need for Christ.
Attempts to “fix” broken schools with more money and more legislative interference for 50-60 years have only made things worse. All we have is a “race to nowhere” with high stakes standardized tests that demonstrate nothing about real learning, line the pockets of educational conglomerates, and cause students to burn out, or worse, from the stress. When I was in elementary school, the teachers would say, discussing the differences between the US and Communist countries, taht Communists made students take tests that determined their entire lives. When I was a young adult, a teacher friend went through a few years where a faculty member had a heart attack or stroke during standardized testing, because it was so stressful.
We can’t fix something unless we know why it’s broken, and what’s broken is a lack of transcendent values.
If the reason people riot is lack of advantage, or discrimination by police, what is served by looting or burning small businesses and charities? One of the reasons the July 1832 revolt that Hugo immortalized failed was that most of “the people” were mad at the students for stealing their stuff. But, at least they knew whom they were revolting against (a just, Catholic king who was popular for giving he people more rights than the “Republic” or Napoleon) and why (they believed that secular government could and should end poverty). I saw a meme pointing out how people riot over sports games, and implying that race riots at least have a point. The way I see it, it’s equally meaningless: unbridled anger, expressed in random violence. If revolution is ever effective or just–and the Church has always been wary of revolution, even in the case of the Cristeros–it needs to be focused on the right enemy.
I often refer to Catechism 676, the passage that tells us to beware of any movement that claims to try and solve all the world’s problems through secular means because that is the “spirit of Antichrist.” This was the reason the Church condemned Freemasonry. It’s what Pope Benedict XVI expounded on in _Caritas in Veritate_, saying taht charity must be from love and truth, both of which are personfied in Christ, and that since the Church is the arbiter of Christ’s teachings and the Natural Law, economic justice cannot be divorced from the Church.
Prayer, fasting and forgiveness are the only solutions to these crises. The more we abandon Christ as a society, the worse thigns will get. If as 1 Samuel warns us, we choose a “King” over God, the warnings Samuel gave to the Israelites will continue to be proven.
The Lewis Crusade 