What it means to be a Christian
The theme used for this letter is thus: “What it means to be a Christian!” It is within the background that prefaces the hear t of this message: “We have a crisis in our culture and that is evident as we confront the issue: ‘secularism is becoming a religion!’”
You may ask what prompted me to write this article: (1) I am a deacon and was called by God to ser ve and not to be ser ved; (2) I was called to be a voice for my Lord; (3) I was called to proclaim the word of god in the public square and to uphold the dignity of human life because God has created us all in His image and likeness out of love; (4) when we are baptized we become the adopted children of
God and our souls become the temple of the Holy Spirit!
Secondly, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn made a profound statement: “The U.S. is in the middle of a ‘battle of Good vs. Evil:’ The battle we are engaged in cannot be fought with only human weapons: it requires the inter vention of God because we are in a war against the forces of evil, only the Lord can obtain the victor y,” (Dec. 13, 2020).
My third source was from the Sterling JournalAdvocate of Dec. 15, 2020, which shared with its readers the voice of our youths — marching in peaceful protest for what Andrea Marick aptly described as: “This COVID-19 is having a huge impact on our overall mental health and well-being — we want our healthy activities back! Taking them away has negatively impacted all of us.” A most profound expression of human dignity and health and is a message to Governor Polis, whose policy of restriction are killing the minds of our youth. Is it more important to use the
COVID-19 as a vehicle to foster a secular socialist agenda and deny the development of our young peoples’ minds, who will be called upon to uphold our constitutional rights and religious freedoms? Herein lies the future of our nation and while we endeavor to protect the health of our human population by masking, the truth is we are falling victims to the destruction and death of the minds of our youth. We as Christians need to continue to make our voices heard in the public square.
My four th purpose in writing this ar ticle, again a source attributed to a letter from a 15-year-old informed youth by the name of Kaden Piel from Merino, which appeared also in the Sterling Journal Advocate. In Kaden’s letter to Governor Polis, he gave full expression as how the governor’s policy was af fecting the minds of the youth. His comment to the governor stated that:
“while the governor was doing his best to recognize many people’s best interests – you are missing a vital sector of our population, and that is our teenage and high school citizens of Colorado.” Kaden fur ther commented that “we are learning at a young age that in life you rarely know how badly you need something until it is gone,” he fur ther advised the governor that the students’ voices must be heard and immediate changes must be made. Kaden quoted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that revealed that one out of ever y five students has or is seriously considering attempting suicide. Kaden’s comments bid us to seriously note that in the past six month there have been seven suicides in his region, compared to zero deaths from the covid.
Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) before he became pope, sought to remind Europeans, who at the time were crafting a new constitution, that the civilizational project that we call the “west” is a cultural achievement with a history. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, he reminds us , were the three foundation stones upon which western civilization was built. The invaluable contribution of these three still form the basis for the western understanding of human dignity and human rights, which spread from Europe to the United
States and beyond. Joseph Ratzinger was for decades, an insightful, shrewd analyst of political modernity and its discontents. He had no particular interests in par tisan politics. However, being a good Augustinian that he was, this sur vivor of Nazi Germany understood that a state without justice is simply a band of robbers. Thus politics for Ratzinger was an exercise in moral reasoning. It was not just policy wonker y and was not just power games; and whenever it is reduced to mere technique, politics ends up producing the opposite of the justice and peace that are its purpose.
Ratzinger knew that it takes a cer tain kind of people, living cer tain habits of mind and hear t, to make democracy and free markets result in genuine human flourishing and social solidarity. Those habits and those virtues are formed by a public moral culture; they are not products of the state or the markets. If the West finds itself steeped in political and economic discontent in the early twenty-first centur y, it has best look to addressing its cultural malaise, if it is serious about fixing its politics and economics.
The current crisis stems from previous mandrins tendency to think of public life in deeply secular and typically technocratic terms: “Build the proper political and economic machiner y, they imagine and the machine will run by itself. Joseph Ratzinger knew that this notion was a snare and a delusion. This is where lies our battleground; to justify and promote this agenda, the left has succumbed to one of the most heinous crimes our nation faces and we Christians need to play a major role in combating election fraud. Father George Rutlter in his recent book, “A Crisis in Culture” advances a major and provocative statement when he addresses this issue. “We know justice because justice has been revealed to us in the perfect man. Only the Christians can cr y out fully in indignation against injustice, because the Christian has seen the full revelation of human dignity. The pagan does not object to injustice. He may speak of injustice, and he may speak of justice, but when justice fails, the pagan will shrug his shoulders and say,
‘well, life is absurd anyway.’”
Our culture is being seduced by paganism. It is begun to think that suf fering itself is absurd, that the offering of the cross is a curse. The fear generated by this pagan attitude has played into the hands of those who seek power to suppress those who believe that human dignity and religious freedom are hallmark of our constitution. If we think the cross is a curse; we are hiding from the truth — example: There are people in our society who say that a doctor who kills a baby in the womb is a health-care provider. L ying about the myster y of the human order is the worst form of barbarism. When we tr y to com
mune with God without taking up the cross; by doing so we double-cross ourselves and our culture.
In closing, I quote Joseph Ratzinger, who stated: “in our generation the Christian faith finds itself in a much deeper crisis than any other time in the past. In this situation it is no solution to shut our eyes in fear in the face of pressing problems, or to simply pass over them. If faith is to sur vive this age, then it must be lived, and above all, lived in this age. And this is possible only if a manifestation of faith is shown to have value for present day, by growing to knowledge and fulfillment.”