Time to Wake Up

For those among us who happen to be Catholic Christians, the name of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe brings great pride. He is a modern martyr, dying of starvation and a final injection of carbolic acid to finish the job in 1941 at Auschwitz. When 10 prisoners were selected to die, as a result of a camp escape, he took the place of one man who had a family.

I did not know, before this Sunday when our priest spoke of Fr. Kolbe during a homily, how he ended up in Auschwitz in the first place. He had, done, for some time prior to the time he was arrested radio shows critical of the Nazi regime.

We think, in these United States, to the extent we know of these horrors of only the last century, blinded as we are by our own narcissism and conspicuous consumption, that such a thing could never happen here. In fact, it is well on the way. Moments that get little play in the broader media which presage a totalitarianism of the leftist Left this country has ever seen. Little intrusions on the reality posited as fact, when they are lies. Say it, go ahead try to say it, and you
get a lecture, with ad hominem flourishes. But the worst is happening.

Two groups visit Washington, D.C. Not to protest. To see the seat of their government, once the beacon of liberty. One goes to the steps of the Capitol. Another to the Lincoln Memorial. The group at the Capitol, in this country founded, let me say it, founded under God, but allowing all to express their beliefs whatever they may be, or not be, dared to. . .pray. A group. Yes. But the prayer was private. Individuals gathered together in praise of the God who guided the great republic into being. And they were told that they could not do so. They were not free to pray as visitors to the steps of the Capitol.

The other group, at the Lincoln Memorial, recited of all things, The Pledge of Allegiance. They were intercepted and chastised by a functionary of officialdom.

A not so parenthetical fact: Almost half of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, concerned in large part with slavery, invoked God. You may remember the last paragraph: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

In the play and movie, "1776" John Adams, in the throes of the most disorganized disagreements of the Continental Congress, on the precipice of the great founding or a great foundering, asks, "Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?." He saw the greatness and he helped to give it birth . We, the inheritors, will we see what we must do to preserve it? Or will we be forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, even death, from speaking the truth of this nation? Martyrdom is not without possibility if we do not stem the tide.