November Perspective on Politics

The month of November is extraordinarily rich, liturgically, for us Catholics and a good time for us to suffer the recent presidential election. The month starts with the feasts of the saints and souls so our attention is drawn to the last things of death, judgement, and the eternity of heaven and hell. The month ends our liturgical year and our mass readings, especially from Revelation, are preoccupied with the final times, the tribulations and final confrontation between the beast and the Lamb. The middle of the month revolves around Thanksgiving, surely the most religous and uplifting of our civil holidays, especially if instructed by something like Lincoln's 1863 declaration. And we end the month by entering into Advent, anticpating the coming of the Christ Child and, of course, His second coming in glory. Within this overall framework, we can maintain our serenity and confidence as we ready ourselves for a continued assault, unprecedented in American history, upon our liberty, mission and identity. With this election, the malice and contempt of our elite cultures for our Catholic sexual ethos has reached a tipping point. If you had told me 20 years ago that our govenment would be forcing us to pay for sterilization and abortificents, and that we would be closing adoption services (because of requriements that we place children with homosexual couples) and programs for women victims of the sex trade because we fail to provide "reproductive services"... I would have thought you were crazy. The worst pain, however, is the betrayal: that so many Catholics, including intelligent, well-meaning people, supported this regime that despises our way of life. Nevertheless, within the broader ecclesial, liturgical perspective our situaion is not exceptional. Mexico in the 1920s, Spain in the 1930s, France in the 1780s, Poland under the Nazis and all of Eastern Europe under the Soviet empire...just to mention a few...suffered adversity that makes our own seem relatively minor. Nevertheless, we need to adapt ourselves to the reality that our nation has become, in its key institutions, bitterly anti-Catholic; and that our own Church is painfully divided between those who understand, cherish and defend our ethos and liberty, and those who are complicit with the enemy.