The Chiaroscuro of Dark Apocalyptic Times: 1930s and 2020s

 After 75 years of national and (for the most part) global peace and prosperity (1945-2020), we have entered a new, dark, even apocalyptic time: horrendous violence in Ukraine and Gaza, the ominous emergent Chinese Communist Empire, environmental troubles, and domestic politics of unprecedented divisiveness, decadence and discouragement. We seem to be entering a dark era, more similar to the first half of the twentieth century. Consider especially the 1930s:

Worldwide Depression with the accompanying impoverishment, despair, suicides and mental breakdowns; the bookends of two world wars; emergent anti-Christs of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini; fratricide in the Spanish civil war; suppression of Church by the masonic state in Catholic Mexico; Jim Crow and the KKK in control of our South; contempt for poor, urban, Catholic ethnics among the WASP elite of our northern cities.

My maternal grandfather lost his job, suffered a breakdown, attempted suicide, and died mysteriously in an institution, leaving his wife poor with three children. My paternal grandfather, having lost the family diary farm, was unemployed with six children until he got a job with a New Deal program. My oldest uncle, Frank, was a young, emergent labor leader with the UAW, getting beaten up by Henry Ford's union-breaking goons on strike at Edgewater, NJ, and fighting communists for control of the union. Dark days!

At the very same time, we have an alternate reality at work: quietly, humbly, hopefully, anonymously at study/work/prayer: Father Solanus, Brother Andre, Father Maximillian Kolbe, Padre Pio, Karol Wojtyla, Father Leopoldo, and thinkers like Danielou, Congar, Balthasar and DeLubac. 

An even greater radiance comes when we consider women quietly in service and prayer: Faustina, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Catherine Dougherty, Katherine Drexel, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Caryll Houselander, Adrienne von Speyr, Elizabeth Anscombe, Raisa Maritain, Josephine Bakhita, and Etty Hillesum.

Our time, like that decade ninety years ago, is one of chiaroscuro: a cosmic, apocalyptic clash of the dark and the light. In the darkness, the light shines all the more.

May we consider these quiet, radiant flames of faith and hope. May we emulate them and bring that warmth, clarity, light and encouragement now to our world!