As we prepare for Christmas, we still have on our minds the heinous slaughter of kindergarteners last Friday in Connecticut. This morning, at our IHM Chapel, Father Phillipson offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the victims. Some pious soul in the congregation kindly requested this intention.
Looking at this act of stupefying malice in a supernatural light, we can console ourselves with the thought that these children probably included many who were baptized, who had not yet learned evil, and who were therefore speedily welcomed into the abode of the blessed. Such little ones are now saints and nobody can hurt them anymore.
I don’t know how atheists and agnostics take consolation in moments like this.
We pray for the families of these children (and for all the grieving), who are left to mourn a terrible loss. Their Christmas will not be merry, and from now on, their Advent will be a time to renew the wound of their children’s murder. They will never “just get over it.” It doesn’t happen that way. May the Holy Infant and his Holy Innocents bring succor to their agonizing souls, and bring some greater good for them out of this shocking evil. God alone can do that.
Meantime, there is no parvity of base moralizations from the professional media — and the career politicians they enable — to stop the madness by giving us more laws, more regulations, more government interference in our lives and fewer freedoms. The agenda they promote — the marriage of widespread moral degeneracy to progressive socialist statecraft — is exactly the perverse union that sires such issue, yet they are the ones now offering as medicine more of the poison that’s killing the patient.
I don’t know who Christopher Gawley is, but I very much agree with his assessment, expressed on The Remnant’s site. (It so happens that he lives near Sandy Hook Elementary, and knows the parents of one of the child victims.) Here are two paragraphs of his righteous indignation directed at an opportunistic The New York Times editorial on the tragedy:
The editorial page of The New York Times has been reliably at the forefront of nearly every wrong moral turn our society has taken over the last fifty years. Her wrong-headed moral sagacity has helped to hone and create the very cultural conditions in which widespread lawlessness and nihilism has now gripped our nations’ young people. She is the one at war with God. She is the one that approvingly counsels free sexual liaisons and homosexuality. She is the one that applauds a revolting culture of abortion. She is the one that lauds obscenity as artistic expression. She is the one that posits a relativistic worldview that we can say with absolute certainty represents a complete inversion of right and wrong. And far more than guns, what is important here is the cultural malignancy that must necessarily be festering at the heart of our society to allow such a violent culture of death to exist in the first place.
What did The New York Times think, in exercising her counter-magisterium, would come of her embrace of secularism, atheism, nihilism? The generation of young people coming of age have been fed a steady diet of gratuitously violent and obscene imagery – in movies, music, television, the internet, video games, etc. The “arts” have become little more than a cesspool of depravity. Young people have been raised in a culture that rejects absolute truth, including objective right and wrong. They have been taught that life, including their own, lacks intrinsic value to such an extent that killing babies in utero should be celebrated as a liberating act of freewill.
If my own words here are considered opportunistic — and some will accuse me of hypocrisy on this point — may they at least be taken as an opportunity to remind the faithful to pray for the deceased and their families, and to pray also for the conversion of our nation, which still doesn’t understand that there are dire consequences to denying God His rights and Christ His Kingship.
