Viva Cristo Rey!

As Phillip Lawler points out, a war with no long-term objectives and no clear allies leaves us with the question, “who are we fighting for?” Indeed, it was this very problem that allowed the Obama Administration to weaken our relation with traditional Muslims and minority Christians in the Mideast and instead solidify our mission to promote “gay rights” and abortion across the globe. While President Bush failed to protect religious minorities and the American clergy was more concerned with opposing the wars rather than promoting religious liberty, no one could see that they were only leaving the door open to a liberal cultural imperialism which would leave the survival of Mideast Christians to Syria’s Assad and Russia’s Putin. Moreover, it is this unchecked cultural imperialism which will drive nations like Egypt and Syria into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, leaving their lands soaked anew in the blood of Christians.

In a peculiar and roundabout way, the American bishops are now finally concerned with religious liberty. Though they may have arrived ten years too late to save the thousands of Mideast Christians who have and will continue to perish, perhaps they can learn from Catholic clergy and laymen south of the border who did not “expect to die in bed” while the next generation “[died] a martyr in the public square.” I speak here of the Mexican priests and laymen of the Cristero War. Though this war may have a better stake to the title of “The Forgotten War”, the Cristero War was a revolt in the 1920s against the Mexican government’s attack on religious freedom. The war produced many martyrs and many saints. It was a testimony to the piety of Catholic priests, the bravery of Catholic soldiers, and the ingenuity of Catholic women (who secretly supplied and nursed Cristero soldiers as members of the Feminine Brigades of St. Joan of Arc).

The Cristero War is finally being told to an American audience through this weekend’s release of For Greater Glory (formerly titled Cristiada). Be sure to watch the preview below – and see the movie this weekend – but also remember that it is our Hispanic brethren in America who possess a lived experience of shedding blood to protect religious liberty. We, too, must learn their hymn and sing their battlefield song:

The Virgin Mary is protector and defender against that [which] we fear / She will vanquish demons with a cry of "Long live Christ [the] King!" / Soldiers of Christ, let us follow this flag, for its cross points to the army of God / Let us follow the flag and declare, "Long live Christ [the] King!"

The Patron Saint of Feminism?

Morality is carried by personalities. As the contraceptive mandate debate rages, we as Catholics must take this as an opportunity to examine our own understanding of femininity and look at the personalities which shape our moral conduct.

In short, the current debate is not merely a church-state debate, nor a healthcare debate; rather, it is a battle between feminism and Marian femininity – and there can be no peace between the two. It is a battle between “I am woman, hear me roar” and the Virgin Mother of God who says “Let it be done to me according to your word.” It is a battle between women’s “right to choose” on one hand and the Woman’s submission to the will of God on the other. It is a battle between those hungry for power and the Spouse of the Holy Ghost.

Many Catholic women no longer see Mary as the model for their femininity. Perhaps she’s inspiring or appealing in some way or another, but very few women would name her as the woman to whom they aspire to imitate. Today’s patron saints are Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, Hilary Clinton, Margaret Sanger – and now Sandra Fluke. Women of power, not purity. Indeed, the polar opposites of Mary and Marian femininity.

Tolkien tells us in the Lord of the Rings that evil “can only mock, it cannot make”. To mock here means to mimic in a twisted and distorted way. Today Sandra Fluke has become the newest patron saint of the feminist cause, and a standard bearer of the twisted mockery of Marian femininity. For example, unlike Mary, the woman who bears the titles Virgin and Mother, Fluke fights for those who detest their virginity and say “no” to motherhood while saying “yes” to the abortionist's scalpel. And unlike Mary, who intercedes before the King on behalf of her children at war with the Evil One, Fluke intercedes on behalf of the President in order to win his battle while preventing the creation of children.

In the Passion of the Christ, Satan appears as a woman carrying a demonic infant in mockery of Mary and her Son. The new mockery comes from those who despise virginity and motherhood. Let us raise up the person and personality of Mary, Virgin and Mother. Let us excise the feminist cataract from our eyes and see clearly. Only then can we succeed at being a lumen gentium – a light to the nations!

The Magis Center of Reason and Faith

The intellectually gifted Fr. Robert Spitzer has made it known that his book New Proofs for the Existence of God is his magnum opus which he intends to spend the rest of his life re-explaining and clarifying for those who, unlike him, do not possess twin doctorates in philosophy as well as physics. In a lecture he gave at Benedictine College a year ago, Fr. Spitzer announced that he was hard at work doing just that: making the “new proofs” more intellectually accessible to high school youth as well as adults.

Thus Fr. Spitzer founded the Magis Center of Reason and Faith.

Over at the Magis Center’s website you can be found a wealth of information regarding Fr. Spitzer’s work. By examining discoveries made by modern physics, Fr. Spitzer is able to demonstrate the need for a Creator and thus refute the atheist worldview being propagated in our culture and in many institutions for higher education. Of the many resources to be found on the website, Fr. Spitzer’s twelve-part video series was thought provoking, educational, and readily enjoyable.

It should be made clear, however, that Fr. Spitzer’s focus on physics and cosmology. He does not tend to examine chemistry or biology in any great detail, nor does he attempt to tell the story of the sciences as an elemental aspect of the broader account of salvation history. His emphasis is on the complementarity of faith and reason, not on how God is acting to accomplish something bigger and more eschatological by creating matter to begin with. There is no discussion of angels, the Devil, or why God created a universe capable of sustaining life. It is, however, a wonderful resource if one simply wants to poke massive holes in the atheist account of universal origins.

Here’s a great sample from Fr. Spitzer’s video series:

Traditional versus Secular Culture

Until the sexual revolution of the 1960s, America was a traditional culture and its character expressed the natural outgrowth of Greek thought, Roman law, Christian faith, and the German warrior. The secularization which has engulfed our nation since the sexual revolution has replaced Greek thought with sophistry, Roman law with the enthronement of self, the Christian faith with atheism, and the German warrior with the pacifist.

Cultural assimilation of immigrants may have been a difficult process in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the American culture which immigrants discovered was light years closer to theirs than American culture today – and this is because immigrants of a hundred years ago left one traditional culture and came to another. Here, marriage was protected, divorce shunned, men worked, fought, and sacrificed, and children obeyed their parents. Secular culture, with its focus on radical individualism, fails to be a culture – for a culture is something that unites a people. If a civilization is a “culture writ large,” how can a secular pseudo-culture ever be a civilization?

This is the problem of “the West” – a title which is as geographically disoriented as the spiritually disoriented people it claims to represent. We have an identity crisis, a loss of soul. Perhaps America needs immigrants now more than ever; not to work in our factories but rather to remind us of what culture really is. As the European nations peer over the edge of debt ruin and depopulation, they stand to become the new bastions of immigrants who say “yes” to children and “no” to credit cards: the Muslims. If America allows secularists on the Right and the Left to continue to steer our path and tell our story, we shall awake to find that our diseased civilization has become a corpse.

Cultural Imperialism

In the book The Enemy at Home, author and debater Dinesh D’Souza speaks of what he calls the “cultural imperialism” of the secular left. In other words, America does not seek to conquer Middle Eastern countries with military might but rather with its cultural depravity. The true imperialists are thus the secular leftists, not the traditional conservatives. Or as D’Souza would say, when “bin Laden calls America a Crusader state, he means that America is on a vicious international campaign to impose its atheist system of government and its pagan values on Muslims.”

President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, both extreme advocates of the secular left, have offered us a case-in-point today. The U.S. has decided to use foreign aid to promote “gay rights” in nations with traditional cultures and taboos. D’Souza would not be surprised at this newest act of cultural imperialism. It is an act which will embolden the enemy, winning over more traditional Muslims into the radical camp. What’s worse is that this act is bad foreign policy done to win cheap political points back home while trampling over the cultures of others. It is ethnocentrism at its worst.

But this also highlights a failed portion of the Bush administration.

During Bush’s eight years in office, he had the chance to build up an alliance between traditional Americans and traditional Muslims. Had he worked to create a deeper alliance between the values voters and the foreign policy hawks, Bush could have set in motion events leading to the free and traditional Islamic nations. As it stands now, the Arab Spring may turn into an Arab Winter. The secular leftists running our nation will do whatever it takes to secularize the Middle East – but this will only help radicalize the nations and forge an even deeper animosity between us. Sadly, Bush’s legacy may have been to leave Obama holding a military apparatus with which to promote the advance of the secular left.

Coming Soon: A Review of The Enemy at Home

America and the West

In the year 476 AD, the Roman world collapsed under the weight of internal decay and external barbarian invasion and replaced with the world called Christendom, a world in which the secular and sacred were overlapped in more ways than one. Declared the “Dark Ages” by modern day anti-Catholic scholars, the years 800-1500 were anything but. Nevertheless, ever since the Protestant Revolt and Enlightenment, the term Christendom has been dropped and replaced by “the West” – and this is why we study “Western Civ” in college instead of Christendom. We do owe Protestant and Enlightenment thinkers, however, some thanks for underscoring the need for the division of church and state and for the development of nations.

We should also thank them for the United States.

But though the American nation was founded on Protestant and Enlightenment thinking, it was not built upon the thoroughly secular notions that began to dominate the European nations. In the 17th century, even as the nations of Europe still respected Christianity with the status of the state’s religion, the absolutist ideas of Hobbes and Machiavelli had already replaced God with the king as the sovereign of the nation. Unlike post-Enlightenment Europe, the United States remained fixed in the notion that we are a nation whose sovereign is God. While Europe eventually replaced their king-God with “vox populi, vox dei” (“The voice of the people is voice of God”), the American nation will always be “under God… and… of the people, by the people, for the people” (Gettysburg Address). This is what makes us different from the secular "West" and it should motivate us to help raise up the nations under God.