The fine Latinity of Laetare Sunday means to be joyful, and
as the mother of civilization, the Holy Church encourages
her children to keep pressing on toward the Easter prize.
Just as Eskimos and Arabs have many words for snow and sand,
the ample resources of Latin give us more than one word for
rejoicing. There is gaude, from which we get gaudy
celebration, so in the somber days of Advent we have Gaudete
Sunday. “Gaude et laetare, Virgo
Maria.” We shall sing that at Easter, but
laetare creeps in on the Fourth Sunday of Lent.
Back to Greek: I indulge apophasis,
which means saying that I am not going to say what I am
going to say, to remark that there is no need to mention, in
this rose-colored time of Lent, that our brothers and
sisters in the Faith in Iraq and Syria are suffering
terribly. The Pope and various national leaders have used
the word that our Chief Executive will not pronounce:
genocide. If a hapless youth is shot on one of our city
streets, it is front-page news, but the beheading of
Christian infants in the Middle East hardly gets a
comment.
Our current President has told the United
Nations that the future must not belong to those who slander
the Prophet of Islam, and he makes a habit of saying that
terror attacks have “nothing to do with Islam.”
Our government has purged any reference to Islam from
military and intelligence training manuals, and immigration
policies favor Islam to the extent that so far this year 602
Muslim immigrants have been granted asylum while only two
Christians have. Meanwhile, Christianity is being eradicated
in the Middle East, and churches and monasteries
destroyed.
The Knights of Columbus have received more than
25,000 names for a petition asking the Secretary of State to
designate the systematic mass murder of Christians by the
Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) as genocide. Iraqi and Syrian
Christians fear going to refugee camps because they may be
killed by Muslim “hit squads.”
This transcends all the issues that transfix
political candidates now seeking to repair what is broken in
our nation. We are in the predicament that some of our
Founding Fathers faced as they tried to make sense of what
was to them an obscure and exotic religion that was damaging
American commerce and compromising the new nation’s
sovereignty: The Barbary pirates were enslaving thousands of
Americans.
In a recent talk to the Islamic Society of
Baltimore, which the FBI warned had radical allegiances,
President Obama said that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
had copies of the Qur’an. He neglected to say that
they were not seeking spiritual edification: they were
trying to anatomize what was to them a fount of cruelty and
engine of hysteria. Our Lady knew that kind of mentality
when she watched her son dragged through the streets.
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