Most political discourse today is missing the point. Should we veer toward socialism – or hold fast to free enterprise and deregulation, to less restricted capitalism? More government regulation and control, or more individual rights and freedoms? So much faith today is put in political and economic ideology! The argument sometimes centers on the Constitution: should the Court judge by strict interpretation, or should it “breathe” and adapt to modern issues and problems?
This country is far different from when first grounded on the Constitution, and based on free enterprise and individual rights. Then, America mostly agreed on what was right and what was wrong – most individuals agreed that there was good and evil, and that we do not determine it: we must discover it. It was and is our challenge to find the true and eternal good, and to come into it; to discern the lurking evil and avoid it when possible, and fight it when necessary.
That was then; this is now. Does it matter whether we have free capitalism or regulated socialism, if we have forgotten the difference between good and evil? Is a greedy free capitalist who manipulates your health insurance any better for you than a “regulated” corrupt Washington bureaucrat? Which one will be looking out for your best interests? Who can be trusted to police either one, when God Himself is banned from the system?
The problem is deeper than the system that organizes us. The problem is within us. Before reform, America needs revival.
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Dear Thomas,
Thank you for “getting right to the point”: when God is missing, we have no compass.
Pope Benedict XVI made the same point to the Italian Bishops, and through them, to all of us:
“If our fundamental relationship with God is not living, if it is not lived, then none of our other relationships can take their correct form. […] If we do without God, if God is absent, we lack the compass […] to show us the path, the direction we must follow.
“God! We must bring the truth of God back into the world, make him known, make him present,” the Holy Father declared.
And he urged the Italian bishops to “place the formation of new generations at the center of the attention and efforts of each one, according to each person’s respective responsibilities.”
“Education is a constitutive and permanent need in the life of the Church,” the Pope affirmed.”
Hearing these words of the Pope and your words too, Thomas, it seems to me that Catholics, especially, must ask themselves, “What is my relationship with God? If I am in love with Truth Himself, am I proclaiming Him? Am I living His Truth in such a way that His light is shining in and through me?
Am I part of the “dumbing down of America” or am I continuing to learn the fullness of Truth the Church teaches in order to love God and others more?
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful and kindle in us the Fire of Your Love!
By: Deborah on November 11, 2009
at 9:30 am
Thanks, Dr. Richard, for “getting right to the point” with the operative word being “right.” As long as 3,500+ babies are being killed dailly by abortion, God will not bless our nation.Let us pray the Rosary night and day for a return to righteousness. He is waiting for us.
Ann
By: Ann Griffin on November 11, 2009
at 2:46 pm
Dear Thomas,
You are absolutely correct. If we are not right with God, nothing else matters.
Let us heed the warning God spoke through Moses:
15 “See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. 16 If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you this day, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. 17 But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you this day, that you shall perish; Deut 30:15-17
By: Barbara Byars on November 11, 2009
at 4:13 pm
I have actually been thinking something to this effect more recently. I was thinking back to before I was into my faith when they had debates about censoring and when I first took notice to what began to offend people. I remember saying that censoring was ignorant, was a violation of our rights. And that people were too easily offended. As I have grown to be an adult and have a child of my own, I come to realize that the problem is not censoring of what we are exposed to but the lack there of.
I think part of this began when we decided to take political correctness to the extreme. It is one thing to say it is wrong to call someone a certain name, but it is entirely different to say it is wrong to tell a woman what to do with “her body” or to tell someone what they can and can not expose children to. I cringe when I think of how we have taken prayer from school and when I witness violations of school dress codes that go unchallenged. How these little things effect who our children grow to be and what they do with our country’s future. We fail to realize how the little things are what start the big problems. And we suppress the good and let evil flourish in our hearts. We pay no attention to the seduction of evil while we reprimand those who pray for that to change.
We want freedom but our sense of freedom is blurred. How is murdering children and twisting their understanding of right and wrong freedom?
There is so much more that we see as freedoms that are truly subjecting us to sin. So in the end whether we are socialist or communist or capitalist, name your poison, its all the same when the sense of true right and wrong is missing. When God is not allowed to be your conscience.
By: Brittany on November 11, 2009
at 7:36 pm