Tuesday of the 21st Week in Course 2020
It’s providential that the Church has given us a series of hard-hitting readings during the past month–hard-hitting but full of the Trinity’s love and compassion. It is particularly fitting that in a year when violent bands of Pharisees are roaming the urban landscapes, dealing destruction on our history and Christian culture. It’s especially apt to turn our minds and hearts to the Scriptures on this celebration of St. Louis of France–incidentally one of my wife’s ancestors–because his statue, the Apotheosis of St. Louis, was one of those attacked by rioters.
So what do I mean by “violent bands of Pharisees”? Am I of all people being anti-Semitic. Not at all. A Pharisee, as Jesus tells us, is picky about little, meaningless stuff, and oblivious to major injustices. Let me remind you that the principal objective of liberalism, since the time of Voltaire, has been the destruction of the Catholic Church, and ultimately the eradication of Christianity. Christendom was the first victim, beginning with France at the time of the French Revolution. So if you can find ways in which what is left of Christian culture does something that some people find offensive, then you get out the paint spray, crowbars and chain saws and tear things down that represent that Christian culture. Today that theory has devolved into finding anything that Christian culture did at any time that people take offense against. Take St. Louis, for example. Wikipedia–not the best friend of things Christian–admits that “his fellow European rulers esteemed him highly, not only for his military pre-eminence and the wealth of his kingdom, but for his reputation of fairness and moral integrity: he was often asked to arbitrate their disputes.” But he burned copies of the Jewish Talmud, which do contain some quite anti-Christian passages, and crusaded in the Holy Land against Muslim oppression, he is politically incorrect these days.
To convict someone who died in the thirteenth century for actions that were considered heroic and kingly then, but that some people take offense to today is particularly ironic under the circumstances of the day. The very people who take delight in tearing down images of venerated Christians like Washington, Columbus, Louis of France and others ally themselves with the Planned Parenthood types who not only make millions murdering children before they are born, but want all Americans to pay them to do it. Their allies also include organizations who believe that acts of sexual abuse like sodomy are virtuous and demand the rights of holy matrimony for their practitioners. That is why I call down the epithet of “Pharisee” on their heads. They need to repent, confess and be healed and cleansed of their filthy minds and hearts. If in this coming election the voters of the United States give power to these blind guides, they will lead us all to cascade like lemmings into a deep hole.
There are folks–they call themselves prophets–who are making the same mistake that St. Paul was writing against way back in the first century. They are teaching that the Day of the Lord is here or about to come. Now I pray “Come, Lord Jesus” all the time, and I think it would be a good time for Jesus to return and call an end to this virus and all of human injustices and crimes. But I don’t see that happening. I believe that just as Jesus warned the Pharisees of His time that they were doing evil even though they thought they were good, so the Lord is giving more time to the Pharisees of today so they can repent. But that means we have to do more than pray and vote. We need to share the loving concern of the Father for all people, black, white, brown, yellow of skin. We must continue to witness also to the evil of sin and the need to do good for those who are sick, old, unborn. It is encouraging that one of the icons of the left, Fr. James Martin, at the Democrat convention prayed at last week's final day and included a call to “open our hearts” to “the unborn child in the womb.” That’s a start, and we can pray that some heart opening does occur among the politicians who, so far, have had hard hearts in that regard.
O God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, send Your Holy Spirit into this world of sin. Help us each to examine our hearts and let the Spirit root out every trace of selfishness, and soften our hearts to make them like the hearts of Jesus and Mary. Give us the compassion of a St. Louis of France in our age, so that we may witness to Your crazy, self-effacing love for human beings, and be instruments of healing and peace for this culture of death. St. Louis, pray for us.
