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February 20, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

The Christian Cannot Live Without the Eucharist

Babies need to be touched. They need human touch not just for their general emotional well-being, but in some very specific, measurable ways. There is good evidence that sufficient physical contact with another human being is necessary for proper brain development [see here and here, for instance].

Touching other human beings is essential for human flourishing.

Less publicity has been given to the fact that contact, including physical contact, with other human beings continues to be important as we grow older. One study shows that Professional basketball teams “whose players touch each other more often win more games.” Another demonstrates that “those who had more hugs had a better immune response to the cold virus”. I could go on, but you get the idea: touching other human beings is essential for human flourishing.

It’s often the way that modern science breathlessly discovers what people have known all along. The Church has always known that we’re both spiritual and physical, and need each other not just to “be there”, but literally to be there: that’s why the Church is an ecclesia, from the Greek ἐκκλησία, an assembly of the people. We need to believe and worship in the company of other people. We need physical means like the sacraments to fully experience God’s grace. We need the Second Person of the Holy Trinity to become man so that we can look on the Face of our Creator (St. Paul calls him “the image of the invisible God”, Colossians 1:15). We need the Eucharist.

We need the Eucharist. The Second Person of the Trinity did not simply become man: He suffered as man, died, and was resurrected as man, so that He could share his Divine Life with us. The primary, tangible means with which he does that in this world is through the Holy Eucharist. Every Mass is not just a recollection, but a re-presentation, as in a making present again, of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Fr. William Sanders puts it:

However, this memorial is not simply a recollection of past history in chronological time, but rather a liturgical proclamation of living history, of an event that continues to live and touch our lives now . . .

Likewise, in the Eucharistic Host we come into direct contact with the Verum Corpus, the true body and blood of the crucified and risen Lord. That’s why the early martyrs told their Roman persecutors, “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist”, that’s why St. Tarcisius gave his life protecting the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ.

With that in mind, I’d like to turn to the delicate topic of the curious events of this past year. We learned a whole lot about the information media, the political establishment, and, yes, the Church hierarchy. I don’t have much to say about the first two except to point out, as I have previously, that they are not our friends; they are not concerned for the flourishing of any of us as individuals, and surely not for our corporate well-being as the Church.

“The Martyrdom of St. Tarcisius”,
Anthony Troncet, 1908

The Church hierarchy, well . . . that’s a touchier topic. I hardly need to say how many of us were dismayed a year ago by the response of the institutional Church to the Covid situation. I recall that at that time someone posted a map on a social media platform (which I will not name because I reject it and all its works and empty promises) showing all the dioceses of the United States. As each diocese shut down public masses, it’s area on the map went black. In less than a week the entire United States went dark. There was not a single diocese offering believers within its boundaries access to the mass. “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist”.

Now, I don’t intend to launch a rant against the bishops. I understand that their position was difficult. While the science showed fairly early on that Covid 19 is not really a serious threat for most of us (not that you’d know it from government policies then or now), that was not yet clear at the time of the shut-downs. Also, the Corona Virus really is a deadly threat for the oldest segment of the population, and a disproportionate number of priests fall into that category. The desire to protect priests and people was and remains the best argument for limiting access to gatherings in our churches; whether or not shutting down whole dioceses was the best or most appropriate way to offer that protection is another matter, which I’ll touch on below.

Much less defensible was the near total surrender of ecclesiastical autonomy to the dictates of secular governments. Please let me know if it happened anywhere, but I don’t know of a single instance of a bishop saying to his state governor: “We’ll be happy to cooperate with your Covid mitigation efforts, but we will determine for ourselves how to do that in our own institutions.” More to the point, I don’t know of a single bishop (and again, I’d love to hear about it if it happened) who said “You have no authority to determine whether or not the Church of Jesus Christ is an essential service.” The Government rarely gives something back once it has taken it.

What exactly compelled them to bow to the dictates of Caesar and deny millions of Christians access to the Body of Christ, the Verum Corpus for which St. Tarcisius died, on Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year? Remember, “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist”. Was it for the tax exemption? “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” But for a tax exemption? In any case, the signs of the times indicate that the tax exemption will soon be gone no matter what we do. Are they afraid the government will lock us out of our churches? We’ve been in the catacombs before.

But honestly, I don’t think it needed, or needs, to come to that. I know of individual priests who quietly provided private masses, or offered parking lot masses, or other outdoor masses. I have to say that the cathedral church in my diocese did find some imaginative ways to continue to offer in-person confession (remember the human touch?), with appropriate social distancing, throughout the shut-down. Sadly, there are some places where confession is still not being offered at all. I’m sure that most of us would have been very pleased to see that same determination and imagination applied throughout the Covid crisis to making the sacraments, and especially the True Body of Christ, available to all Catholics. After all, “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist.”

I’m not going through this simply to air year-old complaints. I’m looking to the future. It’s going to happen again. Whether because of Covid-19 or some other reasonably plausible threat, they’ll try to shut us down again. How can they not? It was just too easy for them to do it the first time. What can we do to protect our access to the Eucharist the next time the Powers and Principalities of this world try to take it away from us?

This is where we circle back to where we started, with babies and the need for the human touch. There’s one more study I wanted to mention. An article in Scientific American reminds us that “Strong emotional bonds between mothers and infants increase children’s willingness to explore the world”. Well, it turns out that the power of the mother’s touch survives infancy:

The more secure we are in our attachment to Mom, the more likely we are to try new things and take risks. Now researchers are discovering that this effect continues into adulthood. A mere reminder of Mom’s touch or the sound of her voice on the phone is enough to change people’s minds and moods, affecting their decision making in measurable ways.

Now, the Church is our spiritual mother, isn’t she? Recall that Pope John XXIII published an encyclical in 1961 referring to the Church as Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher. We Catholics know we have three mothers: our natural mother, Mother Mary, and Mother Church. We may not be babies anymore, but we still need our mother to nourish us. “The Christian cannot live without the Eucharist.”

“L’Innocence”, William-Adolphe Bougerou, 1893

Many of last year’s complaints and criticisms, however valid, put the bishops on the defensive. That’s never a good way to get what you want. Maybe we should try, instead, to appeal to the Church as a child appeals to her mother. “Or what man of you” Jesus says to his disciples, “if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?” (Matthew 7:9-10) Think of a child, not throwing a tantrum, but instead lovingly asking “please, please I love you mommy!” A smiling but insistent child. What mother won’t give in eventually, if the child is asking for something good?

Will it work? Who knows? We do know that can’t allow a repeat of the great shut-down of 2020. Scientific American tells us that simply talking to our mother can help us try new things and take risks. Well, mom likes to feel the love sometimes, too. We need to help her be ready for the next time push comes to shove. As often and as widely as possible we ought to (respectfully and helpfully) suggest achievable ways in which the Church can render unto Caesar what is really his (and no more), but at the same time preserve and provide for her spiritual children what is theirs. We need to keep reminding her, lovingly but insistently, that the Christian cannot live without the Eucharist. Finally, let’s to ask Mother Mary to pray along with us that Mater Ecclesia finds the courage to be a Mother Bear. Her children are depending on her.

February 6, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

In The World, But Not Of It

Politics is a Means, Not an End

Last week I promised (or threatened) to discuss the issue of the relationship between faith and politics more fully (see last week’s post “Religion, Culture, & Politics” ). Something that really helped lead me to think about this subject more deeply (and, I hope, more clearly) a few years back was a comment a priest once left on one of my earlier blogs. The post was one of my screeds (not unlike the one I reposted the other day) in which I was going on about building a Catholic culture, or more likely the failure of Catholics, and the Church, to build a Catholic culture. Father’s comment was: “The Church doesn’t exist to build a Catholic culture. The Church exists to save souls.”

I had to admit he was right, and that I had been writing as if a Christian, Catholic culture was an end in itself, when in fact it is a product of Christianity and its ultimate purpose is to help leads souls to Christ. Catholic culture is not an end in itself. That’s doubly true for politics. I’ve tried to avoid that trap since. And yet, I still write about culture and politics – in fact, I’m doing it right now. How can we discuss politics and culture issues from an explicitly Catholic perspective without subordinating the ends of religion to those two lesser categories?

The Pyramid is Back

I actually started this discussion last week, (even before that, really, in my inaugural post on this blog). Last week I used a pyramid-shaped diagram to illustrate Pope St. John Paul II’s idea of how human society was structured, a concept which informed his successful effort to free his native Poland from communist tyranny. The Marxists claimed that economics was the dominant factor and therefore the “base” of the societal pyramid, while culture and politics both reflected and protected the economic system (and religion, the “opiate of the people”, was just another tool in service to that system). John Paul saw religion as the real basis of society, the foundation upon which culture was built; politics and economics grew from there. Events, of course, vindicated the Pope’s view.

The Soul of the World

Today I intend to focus on politics, the top of the pyramid, but we need to be clear about what we mean by “politics”. There’s partisan politics, which is one of the lower species of politics; I’m not talking about that today. I’m more interested in politics as defined by the late, great, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus: “How we order our life here together”. How are we to do that? One of the classic descriptions of the role of the Christian citizen comes from the second century, in the work known as The Letter to Diognetus. The anonymous author of the letter tells Christians they are to “dwell in the world, yet are not of the world”. That separation from the world, however, gives us a certain responsibility to it. He tells us:

. . . as the soul is in the body, so are Christians in the world . . . The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world.

The Powers of the World bow down to the Christ Child: “The Adoration of the Magi”,
Jan Boeckhorst, 1652

Being “preservers of the world” can mean a number of things. For instance, there are many questions that don’t carry much moral import but are important for maintaining an orderly and prosperous society. Should we allocate tax money for a new playground, or a new parking lot for the town hall? These decisions are important in a limited, temporary sort of way. We need to take them seriously because we have a responsibility to be good citizens and good stewards, but we can, in good conscience, make these decisions based largely on our interests and preferences.

We also have a responsibility, a deeper responsibility, to questions of justice. Our Lord tells us:

. . . for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ . . . ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:35-36; 40)

On the One Hand, On the Other

“Ruth in the Field of Boaz”, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1828

This statement comes up in the Gospel of Matthew in the context of what we need to do in this world in order to be happy with God in the next. Some questions, then, while they may have a political aspect to them, are really moral questions of justice that don’t simply involve the ephemera of pure politics but go right down through the pyramid, with implications that stretch into eternity.

Some issues are not very straightforward because there are serious moral arguments on both sides. Take illegal immigration, for instance. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, on the one hand:

The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him. CCC 2241

The other hand immediately follows:

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens. CCC 2241.

Notice the Church doesn’t tell us how to implement these moral directives: that’s the job of political authorities and, in a republic, the citizens. A responsible, Christian approach to the issue of immigration would involve serious and prayerful discussion of how to craft policies that both recognize the human needs of would-be immigrants and respect the common good of the citizens of our own country. This issue, unfortunately, has become a weapon in the power struggle of partisan politics, and so for the time being seems beyond the reach of reasoned resolution.

The Non-Negotiables

The moral dimensions of other issues are much less nuanced, especially issues relating to marriage, the definition of the family, and, preeminently, abortion. It’s hard to find a clearer case than abortion for illustrating how an issue that may look like a political issue at first glance is really much deeper: the crack that we see at the top, in the political step of the pyramid, is just the surface evidence of a flaw that goes all the way down through the cultural level and into the religious level.

That is not to say that a political response isn’t necessary. Remember we’re called on to do justice, especially for “The least of these my brethren.” There is a real need for political action, to protect innocent human beings targeted for destruction in their mother’s womb, and to rescue the adults implicated in obtaining, performing, or promoting abortion, who are in danger of something far worse than the death of the body.

Which brings us to the second reason for political action. You may recall the image from my previous post of the crumbling step pyramid, where the falling debris from the eroding upper levels damages the lower levels on the way down. Legal abortion corrupts the character of the people involved, who become accustomed to the casual slaughter of unborn human babies. It also corrupts political institutions: one of our major political parties has been completely ensnared by it, with large parts of the other party compromised as well. Legalized abortion was imposed undemocratically by a corrupt ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision one of the dissenting justices called “an exercise in raw judicial power”. Such exercises have become more common since, imposing novelties such as same-sex marriage. Also, because the continued exercise of raw judicial power is needed to keep abortion legal, the process of confirming Supreme Court justices has been corrupted. Formerly sedate and almost pro-forma proceedings, confirmation hearings have become ferocious campaigns to destroy any nominee who might possibly rule against Roe vs. Wade.

The Spreading Corruption

The corruption spreads from the political sphere to the other layers. Corrupt political players enlist cultural forces in the media and the arts to support the abortion regime. Language is corrupted, where ordinary words like “choice” are used to disguise ugly realities. Even people who are not directly involved in abortion (although huge numbers are involved) become accustomed to the taking of inconvenient life; eventually it becomes thinkable to hasten the end of those near the end of life, or even, as is the case in some European countries, to facilitate the suicide of young, healthy people who have given up hope. We see that people and institutions compromised by the evil of abortion are willing to countenance all sorts of further evils.

The religious base of society is not immune from the spreading corruption. I’m sorry to say that many clerics, not only many priests and religious but even many bishops, for the sake of pet political causes of a much lower order, support parties and candidates that promote abortion. Some even promote abortion itself, such as the nun who publicly declares that “God is pro-choice”. This situation is a classic example of the scandal in the classical meaning of the word: the bad example of public Catholics, especially those who are public representatives of the Church, sends the message that the Church doesn’t really believe her own teaching, and so even more people are led into sin.

Which brings us back to the beginning of the cycle because, as we might recall, the religious institutions form the base upon which the cultural and political institutions arise. A strong religious basis would not have produced a culture which permitted the imposition of something as diabolical as legal abortion. We might also note that, since even widespread contraception can’t prevent lots of irresponsible sex from producing lots of unintended babies, abortion is a necessary adjunct of the the culture of sexual license that has grown stronger in our society as the influence of Christian teaching has grown weaker. It’s probably not necessary to point out that, sadly, the institutional Church itself has not been immune from sexual scandal.

Spes Nostra in Domino

That’s why I said previously that the role of politics is mostly defensive: it can help protect vulnerable people from direct harm, and shield more fundamental layers of society from further damage. Those are essential tasks, but politics can’t fix the damage that already exists at the cultural or the religious levels. The psalmist tells us:

“The Archangel Michael”, Poulakis Theodoros 1650-1699

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help. When his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish. Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God. (Psalm 146:3-5)

The real battle, as St. Paul reminds us, is at a much deeper level:

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

Let’s fight the political battles that come our way, but remember that we can depend upon the powers of this world to save us no more than Jesus could rely on Pilate to save him from Calvary. Our true Hope is in The Lord.

January 29, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Culture, Faith and Politics

Religion, Culture, & Politics

How important should politics be to a serious Christian? What is the importance of culture? I hit a bit of a hot button last week in my introductory post on this blog when I wrote:

I promise to try not to get too caught up in the specifics of politics. Politics is like the horse in Psalm 33: “The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).

“The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).

One commenter took me to task for downplaying the importance of politics, pointing out (correctly) that, in its beginning, Naziism presented a primarily political problem; if German Christians both Catholic and Protestant had understood that their faith obliged them to oppose Hitler and the Nazis in the political sphere, enormous evils might have been averted. She’s right – and yes, Christians should have worked to stop Naziism at the political level before it metastasized into the full-blown horror of the Third Reich.

I agree that we should be involved in politics – and as I pointed out to the commenter above, I started this blog in the first place at least in part as a political act, a rejection of the Twitters & Googles and all their works and empty promises, and in particular their giant thumbs on the scales of our political discourse. We need to understand politics in its proper place, however, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. I’d like to explore that idea in a little more detail here.

Let’s start in my wild and crazy undergraduate days, when I thought it would be interesting to take a course called “Theory of Communism”. Much of it turned out to be not-so-interesting, particularly some of the assigned reading, which contained what must have been the most tedious prose I ever had the misfortune to read (who knew world revolution could be so dull?).

I did take away a few things, though. One thing that stuck with me was a diagram the professor put on the board one day. It looked like a pyramid made of three steps (figure 1). On the bottom and largest step he wrote “economics”, on the middle step “culture”, and he labeled the smallest step, the one on the top, “politics”. The pyramid was a graphic illustration of the Marxist concept of how society is structured: the economy forms the basis for society, and the foundation (and source) of the culture, the second step, that rests on top of it; the political system is founded on top of the other two.

While it is itself a product of the economic system, the culture helps to preserve that system, and the political system serves to protect the two lower layers from which it procedes. Given this concept, we can see why the Marxists believe that simply changing the economic system will lead to a new kind of society, and even a New Man . . . a change, granted, achieved with a helpful nudge here and there from the propaganda power of a properly revolutionized culture and state power taken into the hands of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

This pyramid came back to my mind a couple decades later when I read George Weigel’s biography of Pope St. John Paul II. John Paul knew that the Marxist understanding of human society was all wrong. The economic system is a product of the culture, not the other way around, and culture’s true foundation is religion. If John Paul II had felt inclined to use a pyramid diagram as my college propfessor did, it would look something like figure 2. At any rate, he believed that, if he reconnected the Polish people with their religious heritage, they would embrace their true culture. Then, a more authentic, human politics would become possible, and the Communist police state would wither away. Events proved that he was right, and the Marxists were wrong.

Now let’s take it a step further, because the second pyramid is not quite complete. Religion has one thing in common with politics: it’s not an end in itself. The word religion is believed to derive from the Latin religare, which means to bind back, i.e., to reconnect. And to whom or what does it bind us back? To God, of course. God is the ultimate foundation of everything. The Marxists aren’t wrong that the upper layers of society are a product of the lower layers, and that they serve to preserve and protect the layers that lie below. They are wrong about which layers are dependent upon which, and being atheists they deny the existence of the most important layer of all. If St. John Paul was right, and it appears that he was, our conclusion should be that the end of a healthy politics is to protect a healthy culture, which in turn provides fertile ground for sound religious institutions, which then serve to bind us back us to Our Lord. Notice that politics does not bring us salvation: it merely helps create conditions conducive to those institutions that can lead us in the direction of our true Savior.

So what does all that have to do with us here and now? Let’s go back to the second pyramid, which contains the three layers within our control. For two thousand years, our culture and politics have rested on the foundation of religion, most tangibly present in the Catholic Church (and in varying degrees in other Christian communities as well). While the upper levels are dependent on the lower, they can protect those layers beneath . . . or actually harm them. It’s undeniable that religion has been crumbling, and as it does, culture and politics and economics follow suit. But remember, the influences go both ways: weakened cultural and political institutions fail to do their job of protecting the the base, and religion is further damaged. I sometimes picture an actual step pyramid in my mind, with pieces of the upper levels falling off and smashing parts of the lower levels as they collapse on top of it.

So, yes, politics is important, but its role is mostly defensive: it can protect the cultural and religious institutions that it rests upon, or if it is neglected or abused it can damage or even destroy them. Politics itself can help order our material existence in the short term, and protect life and property, but it can’t create human happiness. Attempts to use politics to achieve utopia have always resulted in bloody failure. Marxism in practice, for example, has always tried to use political power to force the changes that it seeks in the cultural and economic spheres, with incalculable loss in human life and societal destruction.

For us, even if we win the political battles we see in front of us (and I agree that they need to be fought), the victory will only be temporary if the culture is eroding beneath us, and our religious foundation is collapsing under that. While I don’t agree with Rod Dreher that the culture war is already lost, we are losing it, and losing badly. We must fight the political battles for justice in the short term (as in, for instance, the fight to protect innocent life), but the long term battle will be won or lost at a more foundational level.

There’s more that could be said on this topic, but this post is already running too long. We’ll come back to it next week – I welcome your thoughts in the meanwhile.

(See my follow-up post: “In the World But Not Of It”)

January 22, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

Don’t Let Them Muffle The Message of Life

This year’s March for Life in Washington has been cancelled – or perhaps I should say “Cancelled” – who would have guessed?

The first March for Life was a protest against the notorious U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, which together effectively wiped out all state laws restricting abortion. It was held 48 years ago on January 22nd, 1974, on the first anniversary of the twin rulings. The first march had about 20,000 attendees. The marchers have come back every year, with steadily growing numbers: when I attended in 2019 and 2020 there were hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic, joyful pro-lifers in attendance. Several different MFL veterans of many years assured me that last year’s march was the largest they had ever seen. There has never in American history been anything like this: a massive gathering, repeated annually over nearly half a century, where the size and enthusiasm of the crowd just keeps growing.

Until now. Strictly speaking, the entire event hasn’t been cancelled, but it certainly has been “Cancelled.” Instead of hundreds of thousands of people from around the United States (and from around the world) gathering together, the 2021 March for Life will be attended by only “a small group of pro-life leaders.” The rest of us can participate “virtually,” sitting in front of little glowing screens in the isolation of our own homes. The official press release from the March for Life explains:

The protection of all of those who participate in the annual March, as well as the many law enforcement personnel and others who work tirelessly each year to ensure a safe and peaceful event, is a top priority of the March for Life. In light of the fact that we are in the midst of a pandemic which may be peaking, and in view of the heightened pressures that law enforcement officers and others are currently facing in and around the Capitol, this year’s March for Life will look different.

*Pro-Life Marchers fill Constitution Avenue January, 2019 (author’s photo)*

Yes, it will look very different. For the first time in nearly half a century, the March for Life is being shut down because of the fear of political violence. To be sure, march organizers also cite Covid 19, but there was no talk of shutting down the rally before the Big Tech-Progressive Syndicate turned the vandalism at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th into our own Reichstag Fire. It’s clear now that the communications cartel that dismissed months of ongoing left wing violence over the past year as “mostly peaceful protests” won’t hesitate to seize upon the slightest disorder at the March for Life to vilify the pro-life movement, and to push pro-life voices into the outer darkness . . . and we can be sure that there are provocateurs ready to step in to provide that disorder, knowing that they’re protected. The politicians who weaponized the Capitol riot as a pretext to impeach (again) the outgoing President Trump can also be counted upon to use any excuse to wield the full weight of government power against those who speak up for the truth of human life.

The key word there is truth. Truth wins out, if people know it. I’ve also reposted a piece I first wrote six years ago (“The Truth is Pro-Life“) about the power of ultrasound to demonstrate the truth that unborn babies are human beings; the abortion industry and its apologists work tirelessly to keep ultrasound away from prospective customers, because when women realize that truth they overwhelmingly choose life for their child. As we saw during the recent election campaign, powerful communications entities will not only ignore information injurious to their preferred outcomes, but will seek to “deplatform” individuals and even major news organizations that try to speak the truth in public.

Ultimately, this is bigger than an election, and even bigger than the sanctity of human life. The Church is the Body of Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (see John 4:16). All the smaller truths that Church proclaims in this world flow from that larger Truth; the opposition to those truths, and to that Truth, ultimately derives from “the principalities, . . . the powers, . . . the world rulers of this present darkness, . . . the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (from Ephesians 6:12). Those principalities and powers are eager most of all to drown the message of Christ, because that is the biggest obstacle to their having their way in this world. They’re coming after us. “Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (Ephesian 6:13).

January 21, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

Forget the Tech Tyrants: Our Hope is in The Lord

Welcome to Spes in Domino (Hope in the Lord). This new blog grew out of my efforts to disengage from the giant communications companies that seem increasingly intent on squashing any voices that don’t submit to a certain secular and, increasingly, totalitarian social and political perspective (needless to say, traditional Christian belief and morality lie very much outside of that perspective). I found dropping the likes of Twitter and Facebook to be easy; untangling myself from the many tentacles of the behemoth known as Google is a more complicated task.
     In my current job there’s not much I can do about the pervasiveness of Google: Gmail, Google Meet, Google Classroom, and a whole series of (admittedly convenient) other tools are furnished by my employer. Ending my personal entanglement with Google is another matter: it’s achievable, but time-consuming and tedious. I’ve begun the process of shifting my email traffic from Gmail to Protonmail, I’m moving documents from Google Drive to Zoho, and I’m looking for ways to replace other Google products as well.
     Among my Google connections are two Blogger blogs, now mostly moribund, except at Christmas time. Blogger was swallowed up by Google some years ago. As I’ve been looking over all my old blog posts while working to rescue them from the maw of Google I’ve been inspired to resume the regular practice of bloggery.  I’ve reflected on how important it is to keep independent voices in the public square – especially Catholic Christian voices. Another thing I tried to do with my old blogs was to share the immense, beautiful, and inspiring treasury of religious art and music we have inherited, much of which remains unknown to so many of us. I’m convinced that this remains a an essential mission.
     Sharing some of those treasures more widely, then, is one of the purposes of this blog (and part of the fun for me is learning about and experiencing them myself).  I also hope to discuss (charitably, if I can) events and ideas from a Catholic perspective. I will also be taking note of saint’s days, liturgical feasts, and other elements of Catholic life and Catholic culture as they suggest themselves to my distractible mind. Oh, and I promise to try not to get too caught up in the specifics of politics.  Politics is like the horse in Psalm 33:  “The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).
     The Good News is that there’s someone who can save:

Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love,
   that he may deliver their soul from death, and keep them alive in famine.
Our soul waits for the LORD; he is our help and shield.
Yea, our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.
Let thy steadfast love, O LORD, be upon us, even as we hope in thee.
(Psalm 33: 18-22)

Our hope is not in politics, or programs, or policies, or in people: our hope is in The Lord: Spes in Domino est.

I’m writing this blog as a Catholic layman, husband, and father. I have no formal training in theology, but I do know a little Latin and Greek, and I’ve spent a large portion of my adult life (after what I like to think of as a supernatural boot to the backside) trying to learn more about the Catholic faith, and live it out in my family and in the world. -Iacobus M