A weekly column by Father George Rutler.
Christ will “gather the wheat into his barn, but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17). St. Luke calls
this “good news.” Unquenchable fire hardly seems like good news, until
you realize that Christ is separating good from evil, saving mankind
from the degraded delusion that these categories are impressions without
substance.
Many have supposed that sound education and good intentions can
construct an ideal society. God is out of the picture, and original sin
is denied. The holocausts and pogroms of the modern age exposed that
deadly fallacy. It was satirized well by the Edwardian writer H. H.
Munro in his short story, “The Toys of Peace.” A family with socialist
tendencies replaces their boys’ toy fortress and toy soldiers with a
Young Women's Christian Association building and figures representing
people like John Stuart, Robert Raikes—who founded the Sunday-school
system, a poetess, a sanitary inspector, and the astronomer, Sir John
Herschel. Predictably, by the end of the day, the boys have turned the
YWCA into a fortress, and the figures are soldiers again. Munro was a
realist. Poignantly, the story was published after his death in the
First World War.
Christmas celebrates that the Word was made flesh. The Logos that
made all things came to us in human flesh. The Logos requires that we be
logical about human nature, conflicted between good and evil. This
moral logic posits the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell.
Terrible events such as the recent mass shooting in Connecticut can only
be understood realistically as part of the spiritual combat that began
with the Fall of Man. Certainly, our age's blatant contempt for God has
encouraged evil, but each generation has known this moral contest. It is
not confined to one nation: last year hundreds were killed or wounded
in Norway, which boasts of advanced social laws. Nor is it peculiar to
one generation: in 1927 a man blew up a school in Bath, Michigan killing
45, including 38 children, and wounding 58. Ask Mary and Joseph
themselves about the massacre of innocents. Every outrage in recent
times excites the media to a prurience beyond ordinary publicity and
tempts politicians to exploit it for their own agendas. Worse is the
illogic that replaces the Logos. Some logically shudder at the
destruction of scores of innocent children, while illogically promoting
legislation to do it on a grand scale. In our own New York City, 41% of
all unborn innocents are destroyed year.
Locking school doors will not keep Satan out if our hearts are
open to him. Nor will banning weapons ban murder if God is banned from
the conscience. Cain slew Abel without a gun. An illogical world can be
saved from self-destruction only by loving the Logos who was in the
Beginning, who was with God and was God.
2 comments:
Could't you have a thumbs up thumbs dowm thing. I don'y like making mundane comments like I like it. I do though.
I really appreciate comments, Anon, and wish more would share their thoughts. For reasons I haven't been able to figure out, this blog received many more comments when its readership was fewer than a third of what it is today. If anyone can explain that, I would be most grateful. Nevertheless, I will look into the possibility of a thumbs up or thumbs down way to register an opinion.
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