Yes, It Can Get Worse
I know that many of you are very concerned about the coming congressional, senatorial and presidential elections. You have shared with me your troubled thoughts about a certain political party getting control of both Congress and the presidency. There are worries that the party in question will take away your legitimate firearms, will make you pay for the murder of babies before they are born, will pack the Supreme Court with people who have no respect for the original meaning of our Constitution, and will let hordes of illegal immigrants into the country to spread disease and overwhelm our public assistance programs, putting many Americans out of their jobs. Indeed, for many people, that thought sounds like the end of our nation, and when you pile on it a continuation of the terrible violence that has recently afflicted many cities at the hands of radicals, it just seems like too much to cope with.
There’s a myth building among conservative voters, who remember retiring on the evening of November 8, 2016, convinced that the candidate they had reluctantly voted for would lose to a seasoned politician, a person who had been endorsed by everybody and who was well up in the polls. They remember the elation they felt the next morning when their candidate had pulled it off, and his party had kept control of both houses of Congress. Everything they had feared would not come to pass. Now the Supreme Court would be blessed with God-fearing justices who would resist and overcome child-murder, would protect women and their rights and privacy from men who would take it away, and would restore natural marriage. Now the other party would accept defeat and work together so that our nation could be unified and move forward under the law of God and the direction of the Constitution.
Or not. The past four years have seen probably the worst division in our nation since the terrible strife of the 1860 decade. There is more hatred in the body politic than can be tolerated. There is open talk of civil war and insurrection, and armed gangs reminiscent of pre-war Nazi thugs roam the streets of large cities, terrorizing the residents. This is not what you expected, and this is not what we deserve, is it?
Or is it not? Have we moved as a nation toward a society in which the commandments to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves take priority over our national secular objectives? In the past four years what has been the focus of the victorious party? What accomplishments do they boast of? Frankly, they are all economic. Yes, at the State of the Union we heard bragging about the lowest unemployment among various socio-economic groups in the history of record-keeping, about the level of the stock market, about trade deals and restricted immigration that increased wages of citizens. And even after the plague struck and that economic activity began to sag, what was the measure of progress of recovery? Was it an improved marriage rate and family stability? Was it a reduction in sales activity on the Lord’s Day and an increase in church attendance? Was it reduction in the divorce rate and improvement in dads staying with families? You know the answer. We continue to measure progress as a nation by the number of unemployment claims and the rate of unemployment. And we take joy, not in our return to God and family, but in record levels in stock prices, totally fueled by the 24-hour printing press of the Federal Reserve, pouring cash into financial markets as the national debt takes off into the stratosphere and beyond.
So I look at today’s readings from the prophet Amos, and I see God responding to Israel’s infidelity by preparing a plague. But at the prayer of the prophet, God actually repents. Then He whips up a fire to devour the land, kind of like Southern California during a drought. But at the prayer of the prophet, God actually repents. But let me be clear, God doesn’t repent. God’s plan and desire for us is all good, always good. We are the ones who need to repent. Just as Amos was pointing out that even God appears to repent but His people refused to turn back to Him, so I must point out that even after that election of 2016, we as a people went back to our own plans, our own designs, our own vision of the good. And that was not a good vision. It was more of the same thing that got us into the mess we were in during last January–injustice, murder, blasphemy and profanation of Sunday.
So what is the answer? It frankly has nothing to do with the election. If November 3's results are one way, yes, we will murder more babies and see higher taxes and lower stock prices and stop drilling and have a huge economic depression. If it goes the other way, it appears that we will continue murdering babies and who knows about taxes and stock prices and oil drilling and a possible depression. You can’t increase the national debt by ten or twenty percent and have everything coming up roses. So the answer is not so much what happens on November 3 as what happens today and tomorrow. And that’s not a political issue. It is a personal and religious issue. We need as individuals and families to turn back to God’s Word and God’s law, and encourage our family and friends to do the same. And I have said the first thing we need to do is have national repentance, shown effectively in a massive turning away from shopping on Sunday and praying and working for an end to the worst epidemic–that of abortion. Simultaneously we need to get our evangelization ramped up to help people discover that the only real answer to the hollowness they feel in their hearts is to turn to Jesus through His Church. St. John Vianney did it in Ars in the 19th century. We must do it in ours, or, yes, things will get worse, and very, very soon.
