Catholics who support President Trump have had two main reasons for doing so. 1) He is the most pro-life president the U.S. has had since the Supreme Court legalized the murder of pre-born babies in 1973. 2) He has not launched a new war or expanded an existing one, at least not until now. At the moment these lines are written in real time, the world is waiting to see if he has started one by ordering the assassination by drone of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander. I don’t think so and he says it wasn’t his intention. What was?
Maybe it was to prevent an imminent attack by Iranian-backed forces against American military personnel or contractors somewhere in the Middle East as he claims. Maybe, also, having already taken on two of the world’s three globalisms, he is confronting the third.
Three globalisms? Our lives are affected by all three but it is the first with which we are most familiar. It is the globalism of Big Business and Finance working in symbiosis with Big Government to reduce men, known by Christians to be made in the image and likeness of God, to nothing but consumers.
What is it we are to buy? This globalism’s goods and services, of course, but also all of the politically correct ideas and beliefs peddled by its propaganda component, mainstream media, including all of the lowest common-denominator products of the entertainment industry – books, music, movies – that stupefy the mind and stunt the soul.
This globalism is exemplified by international organizations that exercise varying degrees of regulatory power over member countries and are most often referred to by their initials: EU, UN, NATO, IMF, WTO, WHO, etc. Of increasing importance is the grab for power and control of hysteria-mongering climate-change apocalypsists. As an America First nationalist President Trump resists the economic and political intrusion of international organizations and demands that U.S. participation as a member of them be on U.S. terms. He also calls on other countries to pay what they are supposed to for their membership instead of leaving it to the U.S. to foot the bill all alone.
He has also acted to limit the second globalism’s expansion. This is to speak of Chinese globalism. It is exemplified by China’s belt and road policy. It involves Chinese economic penetration of countries all around the world inevitably followed by some degree of political control, which is greater or lesser depending on the country, and all of it under the centralized command of Beijing. Trump’s trade war with China has been his means for taking on this globalism.
As for the third globalism, it is Islam, which is really as much a form of government as religion, there being no separation between mosque and state. (Properly speaking, there is only one religion anyway, sacramental Christianity, consisting of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church headed by the Vicar of Christ on earth, the Pope, and our schismatic brethren who adhere to Eastern Orthodoxy.)
Secular liberalism, the ideology of the first globalism, sees all religion, whether true or false, as irrelevant or inimical to itself and therefore unwittingly abets the spread of Islam by requiring adherence to its politically-correct “values” of pseudo-love, pseudo-compassion and pseudo-tolerance. You can be a Christian or, as far as that goes, a Muslim, as long as you aren’t really serious about it. Within Islam, Sunnis and Shiites vie for leadership of this would-be globalism. The centers of the two main branches of Islam are Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. The Saudis have lots of money, but no one among them possesses the political skills of Soleimani that made him head of a network of Iranian proxies extending into Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and beyond. Trump crippled this network, and thus Islamist globalism, when he ordered the elimination of Soleimani. Whether that was his conscious goal is as irrelevant as whether he is pro-life by conviction or because he thinks it will fortify the Evangelical component of his political base.
From the Catholic point of view it is lamentable that there is not another player in the globalist game, the Church, her hierarchical leadership having decided at this moment of history to ignore the last commandment Our Lord’s followers heard from His own lips: to “make disciples of all the nations.” This to the degree that Catholic youth could actually and scandalously recently hear from very throne of Peter that it would be a sign of “maturity” if they did not seek to convert others to the One True Faith.
