Father Rutler: Purging the Truth from Language

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. 

Father Rutler: “Laetare! Rejoice!”

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

“What if?” is a simple game, also known as counterfactualism, in which one speculates as to what might have happened if events had taken a different turn. What would have happened if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon, or if Lenin had been prevented from re-entering Russia? Such conjecture resembles what a computerized generation has come to call “virtual reality.” What is almost real is definitely not real and may lapse into nothing more than daydreaming, but speculating about the “What if” can help us understand the present.

This requires a mind willing to exercise itself, and a knowledge of history, so it is not very popular in many quarters. Winston Churchill may have over-exercised his mind when he whimsically wrote an essay titled, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” And he enjoyed being able to correct President Roosevelt who thought the battle took place in 1864. We might ask: “What if there had been no Black Death? . . . if Henry VIII had stayed Catholic? . . . if Napoleon had not lost at Waterloo? . . . if the scholars at Bletchley Park had not cracked the German code?”

Of course, we cannot go “back to the future.” The past cannot be altered, and while the future can be shaped, it cannot be stopped. We are living proof of that, having once been the future. For those who play “what if,” the problem, and blessing, with the Incarnation is that eternity and time intersected. Jesus never had to speculate about how things might have ended up differently, because to the bewilderment of everyone, even his own apostles, he knew that all things had been planned and that his “hour” had come. What if Jesus had never been born? That is a question asked only because he rose from the dead. Otherwise, his birth would have been forgotten along with all the others once inscribed on the census rolls in Bethlehem. But what if there had been no Resurrection? There would be no eternal bliss, no saints, no sacraments, and daily life would be worse than before the Resurrection: the cruelty of old paganism would by now have turned the whole world into something like North Korea, there would be no benign science, and the best moral guides would be like the Cynics and Stoics, but without their remnant virtues.

John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” But that is the sadness of dreamers, not saints. Like Saint Anselm, who asked, “Cur Deus Homo?” – Why the God-Man? – the saints do not bother with “What if” but only ask: “What are we going to do about it?”

“The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). While our culture increasingly is sinking into the misery of living as if He had never been, those who prefer reality rather than its imitation, say “Laetare! Rejoice!”