City of Ruin; City of Hope

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"A problem shared is a problem halved."

The pandemic is testing people's resiliency. For many, present circumstances have overwhelmed their capacity to adapt. The tight and wearied faces of people, whether lined up to shop for groceries or wandering aimlessly, hint that a significant number of folk are finding it difficult to cope with adversity. Many faces tell a story of resignation and fear. Physical distancing and economic paralysis are, for many, a wall. That wall is part of a prison complex. There is no key to unlock its gate. Little light reaches into its cells. Solitary confinement is prescribed for all, or so it seems at times.

Acts 12:6-11

So Peter was kept in prison; but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. The very night when Herod was about to bring him out, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were guarding the prison; and behold, an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the cell; and he struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, “Get up quickly.” And the chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, “Dress yourself and put on your sandals.” And he did so. And he said to him, “Wrap your mantle around you and follow me.” And he went out and followed him; he did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they had passed the first and the second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city. It opened to them of its own accord, and they went out and passed on through one street; and immediately the angel left him. And Peter came to himself, and said, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.”

Jesus I trust in Thee.

For those who understand that human beings are rarely in control of their lives and that God alone is always in control and desires our eternal well being, i.e., those with faith, the temptation to place oneself at the extremes - toward a flaccid optimism or toward an angry pessimism - is a useless distraction. Contrary to the closed door offered by progressive ideology, Christian realism sustains the deeper understanding that redeemed human beings, cognizant as they are that grace is available from God to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, are able to trust God with complete confidence. God never betrays that trust. And so, unlike unmoored boats that sooner or later run aground, people of faith coalesce at the centre in a safe harbour with God.

Romans 8:28

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

The pandemic has merely clarified tendencies already present among men. Pessimists will likely remain pessimistic about life. Optimists will likely cling to pleasant fictions and sing trite ditties even while careening downhill toward a busy intersection in a car with no brakes. Dead fish go with the flow. Realists, informed by faith and reason, are are able to swim against the current.

Western societies stand at the crossroads. The pandemic is clarifying purpose and direction, or lack thereof.

Jeremiah 6:16-21

Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’ I set watchmen over you, saying, ‘Give heed to the sound of the trumpet!’ But they said, ‘We will not give heed.’ Therefore hear, O nations, and know, O congregation, what will happen to them. Hear, O earth; behold, I am bringing evil upon this people, the fruit of their devices, because they have not given heed to my words; and as for my law, they have rejected it. To what purpose does frankincense come to me from Sheba, or sweet cane from a distant land. Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices pleasing to me. Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, I will lay before this people stumbling blocks against which they shall stumble; fathers and sons together, neighbor and friend shall perish.’”

Sobering words.

Peter Darcy at Catholic Stand also speaks in sobering tones. In plain language he identifies an insidious threat to freedom.

The mayor of Los Angeles told his constituents – without the slightest hint of irony – that “snitches will be rewarded” for spying on and reporting “social-distancing violations” by their neighbors. When I heard this I immediately thought of Castro’s neighborhood spy committees. The mayor of New York City also set up a hotline for his citizens to take and send pictures of people standing too close together. This was so he can send the police to investigate those heinous crimes. Again I thought of the Cuban police state. 

There is a difference between the dog-owner’s wild reaction and my fear of America turning into Cuba: fear of tyranny is reality-based. We’ve seen this monster before.

https://www.catholicstand.com/land-of-the-free-home-of-the-frightened/

Mr. Darcy's concerns are based on an informed reading of history, a love of freedom and love of country. He continues:

Human beings have an insatiable desire to live in freedom and to know the truth. Our country was founded on these realities. But people often surrender those deeper aspirations for uneasy compromises for their safety or for some nebulous benefit held out to them like a delectable apple in the Garden of Eden.

That is what seems to be happening to American society. Only time will tell if this fear-based lock-down of our society by petty tyrants is a short-term inconvenience or an actual trend toward socialist evils penetrating more deeply into the fabric of our national life.

Mr. Darcy might agree that the more we recline into our comfortable couches and remain complacent in the face of creeping socialist engineering, the more compliant we become. Compliance morphs into complicity with a state that relies on coercion and confinement to prop itself up, and that complicity will likely become a form of paid employment. "Snitches will be rewarded."

At The Catholic Thing, Casey Chalk confirms a loss of authentic narrative which leads to a vacuum. That vacuum is a loss of identity, and into the void made possible by bigotry and hatred, willful ignorance, fear and laziness is poured a new narrative, a poisonous mix of decadence, persecution and oppression of the human spirit.

The indictments of our modern age are many. We are intellectually exhausted, the willing victims of our own success, as Ross Douthat argues in his recent book, The Decadent Society. Our world is hyper-individualized and disdains traditional sources of morality, as Patrick Deneen observes in Why Liberalism Failed. And, much to social planners’ consternation, recent developments have aggravated, rather than ameliorated economic inequality, as Christopher Caldwell explains in The Age of Entitlement. 

French novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos anticipated much of this in The Diary of a Country Priest, written a few years before the Nazis invaded France. Thankfully, Bernanos also offered solutions. 

Diary is the story of a recently ordained priest assigned to a rural parish in France. He is pious and passionate, but also clumsy, naive, and socially awkward. He is also fortunate in having as a counselor the experienced and wise Curé de Torcy. 

“Present-day society is no longer content merely to administer our common patrimony,” the curé tells him. Though spoken by a fictional character in 1937, it could have been uttered in 2020. The academy routinely labels America’s Founders ignorant, bigoted, sexist, and racist “dead white men,” unworthy of honor.

Christianity, the deepest source of our nation’s laws and cultural norms, is termed oppressive and intolerant. [...] 

Such skepticism towards one’s patrimony inevitably leads to skepticism towards one’s neighbor, promoting a paradigm of individualism. The country priest writes: “At all events, in our part of the world, distress is not shared, each creature is alone in his distress; it belongs only to him, like his face and his hands.” 

Severed from a shared cultural identity with religion as its ballast, modern life consists of banality, boredom, and a barren imagination that passively accepts secular platitudes. “The resignation in all these people puts me to shame,” notes the priest. “They express it in their own language, and that language is no longer Christian. Or rather they don’t express it, they don’t express themselves any longer. They make do with a few well-worn sayings, and phrases out of the newspapers.” 

That secular progressivism, tethered to agnostic consumerism, undermines the very humanity of individual persons by treating them as cogs in the machine. The priest observes:

Instead of making him a beast of burden or wiping him off the face of the earth, they’ve got the notion of turning him into a small rentier or even – supposing things should really go ahead – into a low-grade government official. Quite the easiest thing to manage, the most orderly and submissive! 

Contrary to what progressivist ideologues tell us, their world is not one of freedom, but slavery. “The world does not stand for revolt, but for submission, submission to lies, first and foremost.”

The solution, argues Bernanos through his characters, is a return to our patrimony, mediated through institutions, such as the Church, that orient us toward both each other and the transcendent. As the curé de Torcy bluntly puts it: “A people without the Church will always be a nation of bastards, foundlings.”

Continue reading at: https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2020/05/13/a-priestly-voice-of-wisdom/