Dr. Peter Kreeft - We Are at War

  From Dr. Peter Kreeft:

To win any war, the three most necessary things to know are: (1) that you are at war, (2) who your enemy is, and (3) what weapons or strategies can defeat him.

You cannot win a war (1) if you simply sew peace banners on a battlefield, (2) if you fight civil wars against your allies, or (3) if you use the wrong weapons.

Here is a three point checklist for the culture wars.

1. We Are at War

If you don’t know that our entire civilization is in crisis, I hope you had a nice vacation on the moon.

Many minds do seem moonstruck, however, blissfully unaware of the crisis—especially the “intellectuals,” who are supposed to be the most on top of current events. I was dumbfounded to read a cover article in Time devoted to the question: Why is everything getting better? Why is life so good today? Why does everybody feel so satisfied about the quality of life? Time never questioned the assumption, it just wondered why the music on the Titanic sounded so nice.

It turned out, on reading the article, that every single aspect of life that was mentioned, every single reason for life getting better, was economic. People are richer. End of discussion.

Perhaps Time Magazine is just Playboy with clothes on. For one kind of playboy, the world is one great big whorehouse. For another kind, it’s one great big piggy bank. For both, things are getting better and
better.

There is a scientific refutation of the Pig Philosophy: the statistical fact that suicide, the most in-your-face index of unhappiness, is directly proportionate to wealth. The richer you are, the richer your family is, and the richer your country is, the more likely it is that you will find life so good that you will choose to blow your brains apart.

Suicide among pre-adults has increased 5000% since the “happy days” of the ’50s. If suicide, especially among the coming generation, is not an index of crisis, nothing is.

Night is falling. What Chuck Colson has labeled “a new Dark Ages” is looming. And its Brave New World proved to be only a Cowardly Old Dream. We can see this now, at the end of “the century of genocide”
that was christened “the Christian century” at its birth.

We’ve had prophets who warned us: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age; and Spengler, 100 years ago, in The Decline of the West; and Aldous Huxley, seventy years ago, in Brave New World; and C. S. Lewis, forty years ago, in The Abolition of Man; and above all our popes: Leo XIII and Pius IX and Pius X and above all John Paul the Great, the greatest man in the world, the greatest man of the worst century. He had even more chutzpah than Ronald Reagan, who dared to call Them “the evil empire”: He called Us “the culture of death.” That’s our culture, and his, including Italy, with the lowest birth rate in the world, and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West’s abortion holocaust.

If the God of life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims then the God of the Bible,
the God of Israel, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale.

But is not God forgiving?

He is, but the unrepentant refuse forgiveness. How can forgiveness be received by a moral relativist who denies that there is anything to forgive except a lack of self-esteem, nothing to judge but
“judgmentalism?” How can a Pharisee or a pop psychologist be saved?

But is not God compassionate?

He is not compassionate to Moloch and Baal and Ashtaroth, and to Caananites who do their work, who “cause their children to walk through the fire.” Perhaps your God is—the God of your dreams, the God
of your “religious preference”—but not the God revealed in the Bible.

But is not the God of the Bible revealed most fully and finally in the New Testament rather than the Old? In sweet and gentle Jesus rather than wrathful and warlike Jehovah?

The opposition is heretical: the old Gnostic-Manichaean- Marcionite heresy, as immortal as the demons who inspired it. For “I and the Father are one.” The opposition between nice Jesus and nasty Jehovah denies the very essence of Christianity: Christ’s identity as the Son of God. Let’s remember our theology and our biology: like Father, like Son.

But is not God a lover rather than a warrior?

No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is, what the love that God is, is. Love is at war with hate, betrayal, selfishness, and all love’s enemies. Love fights. Ask any
parent. Yuppie-love, like puppy-love, may be merely “compassion” (the fashionable word today), but father-love and mother-love are war.

In fact, every page of the Bible bristles with spears, from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20. The road from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained is soaked in blood. At the very center of the story is a
cross, a symbol of conflict if there ever was one. The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in scripture, and never absent in the life and writings of a single saint. But it is never present in
the religious education of any of my “Catholic” students at Boston College. Whenever I speak of it, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world. They have. They have gone
past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology-disguised-as-religion, into a world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the Kitten.

Welcome back from the moon, kids.

Where is the culture of death coming from? Here. America is the center of the culture of death. America is the world’s one and only cultural superpower.

If I haven’t shocked you yet, I will now. Do you know what Muslims call us (Americans)? They call us “The Great Satan.” And do you know what I call them? I call them right.

But America has the most just, and moral, and wise, and biblical historical and constitutional foundation in all the world. America is one of the most religious countries in the world. The Church is big and rich and free in America.

Yes. Just like ancient Israel. And if God still loves his Church in America, he will soon make it small and poor and persecuted, as he did to ancient Israel, so that he can keep it alive. If he loves us, he will prune us, and we will bleed, and the blood of the martyrs will be the seed of the Church again, and a second spring will come—but not without blood. It never happens without blood, sacrifice, and suffering. The continuation of Christ’s work—if it is really Christ’s work and not a comfortable counterfeit—can never happen without the Cross.

I don’t mean merely that Western civilization will die. That’s a piece of trivia. I mean eternal souls will die. Billions of Ramons and Vladamirs and Janes and Tiffanies will go to Hell. That’s what’s at
stake in this war: not just whether America will become a banana republic, or whether we’ll forget Shakespeare, or even whether some nuclear terrorist will incinerate half of humanity, but whether our
children and our children’s children will see God forever. That’s what’s at stake in “Hollywood versus America.” That’s why we must wake up and smell the rotting souls. Knowing we are at war is the first
requirement for winning it.

The next thing we must do to win a war is to know our enemy.

2. Our Enemy

Who is our enemy?

Not Protestants. For almost half a millennium, many of us thought our enemies were Protestant heretics, and addressed that problem by consigning their bodies to battlefields and their souls to Hell.
(Echoes of this strategy can still be heard in Northern Ireland.) Gradually, the light dawned: Protestants are not our enemies, they are our “separated brethren.” They will fight with us.

Not Jews. For almost two millennia many of us thought that, and did such Christless things to our “fathers in the faith” that we made it almost impossible for the Jews to see their God—the true God—in us.

Not Muslims, who are often more loyal to their half-Christ than we are to our whole Christ, who often live more godly lives following their fallible scriptures and their fallible prophet than we do
following our infallible scriptures and our infallible prophet.

The same is true of the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Quakers.

Our enemies are not “the liberals.” For one thing, the term is almost meaninglessly flexible. For another, it’s a political term, not a religious one. Whatever is good or bad about political liberalism,
it’s neither the cause nor the cure of our present spiritual decay. Spiritual wars are not decided by whether welfare checks increase or decrease.

Our enemies are not anti-Catholic bigots who want to crucify us. They are the ones we’re trying to save. They are our patients, not our disease. Our word for them is Christ’s: “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.” We say this of the Chinese communist totalitarians who imprison and persecute Catholics, and to the Sudanese Muslim terrorists who enslave and murder Catholics. They are not our enemies, they are our patients. We are Christ’s nurses. The patients think the nurses are their enemies, but the nurses know better.

Our enemies are not even the media of the culture of death, not even Ted Turner or Larry Flynt or Howard Stern or Disney or Time-Warner. They too are victims, patients, though on a rampage against the hospital, poisoning other patients. But the poisoners are our patients too. So are homosexual activists, feminist witches, and abortionists. We go into gutters and pick up the spiritually dying and kiss those who spit at us, if we are cells in our Lord’s Body. If we do not physically go into gutters, we go into spiritual gutters, for we go where the need is.

Our enemies are not heretics within the Church, “cafeteria Catholics,” “Kennedy Catholics,” “I Did It My Way” Catholics. They are also our patients, though they are Quislings. They are the victims of our enemy, not our enemy.

Our enemies are not theologians in so-called Catholic theology departments who have sold their souls for thirty pieces of scholarship and prefer the plaudits of their peers to the praise of God. They are
also our patients.

Our enemy is not even the few really bad priests and bishops, candidates for Christ’s Millstone of the Month Award, the modern Pharisees. They too are victims, in need of healing.

Who, then, is our enemy?

There are two answers. All the saints and popes throughout the Church’s history have given the same two answers, for these answers come from the Word of God on paper in the New Testament and the Word of God in flesh in Jesus Christ.

Yet they are not well known. In fact, the first answer is almost never mentioned today. Not once in my life have I ever heard a homily on it, or a lecture by a Catholic theologian.

Our enemies are demons. Fallen angels. Evil spirits.

So says Jesus Christ: “Do not fear those who can kill the body and then has no more power over you. I will tell you whom to fear. Fear him who has power to destroy both body and soul in Hell.”

So says St. Peter, the first pope: “The Devil, like a roaring lion, is going through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Resist him, steadfast in the faith.”

So says St. Paul: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers of wickedness in high places.”

So said Pope Leo the XIII, who received a vision of the 20th century that history has proved terrifyingly true. He saw Satan, at the beginning of time, allowed one century in which to do his worst work,
and he chose the 20th. This pope with the name and heart of a lion was so overcome by the terror of this vision that he fell into a trance. When he awoke, he composed a prayer for the whole Church to use to get it through the 20th century. The prayer was widely known and prayed after every Mass—until the ’60s: exactly when the Church was struck with that incomparably swift disaster that we have not yet named (but which future historians will), the disaster that has destroyed a third of our priests, two-thirds of our nuns, and nine-tenths of our children’s theological knowledge; the disaster that has turned the faith of our fathers into the doubts of our dissenters, the wine of the Gospel into the water of psychobabble.

The restoration of the Church, and thus the world, might well begin with the restoration of the Lion’s prayer and the Lion’s vision, because this is the vision of all the popes and all the saints and our
Lord himself: the vision of a real Hell, a real Satan, and real spiritual warfare.

I said there were two enemies. The second is even more terrifying than the first. There is one nightmare even more terrible than being chased and caught and tortured by the Devil. That is the nightmare of becoming a devil. The horror outside your soul is terrible enough; how can you bear to face the horror inside your soul?

What is the horror inside your soul? Sin. All sin is the Devil’s work, though he usually uses the flesh and the world as his instruments. Sin means inviting the Devil in. And we do it. That’s the
only reason why he can do his awful work; God won’t let him do it without our free consent. And that’s why the Church is weak and the world is dying: because we are not saints.

3. The Weapon

And thus we have our third Necessary Thing: the weapon that will win the war and defeat our enemy.

All it takes is saints.

Can you imagine what twelve more Mother Teresas would do for the world? Can you imagine what would happen if just twelve readers of this article offered Christ 100% of their hearts and held back
nothing, absolutely nothing?

No, you can’t imagine it, any more than anyone could imagine how twelve nice Jewish boys could conquer the Roman Empire. You can’t imagine it, but you can do it. You can become a saint. Absolutely no one and nothing can stop you. It is your free choice. Here is one of the truest and most terrifying sentences I have ever read (from William Law’s Serious Call): “If you will look into your own heart in complete honesty, you must admit that there is one and only one reason why you are not a saint: you do not wholly want to be.”

That insight is terrifying because it is an indictment. But it is also thrillingly hopeful because it is an offer, an open door. Each of us can become a saint. We really can.

What holds us back? Fear of paying the price.

What is the price? The answer is simple. T.S. Eliot defines the Christian life as: “A condition of complete simplicity/Costing not less than/Everything.” The price is everything: 100%. A worse martyrdom than the quick noose or stake: the martyrdom of dying daily, dying to all your desires and plans, including your plans about how to become a saint. A blank check to God. Complete submission, “islam,”
“fiat”—Mary’s thing. Look what that simple Mary-thing did 2000 years ago: It brought God down and saved the world.

It was meant to continue.

If we do that Mary-thing—and only if we do that—then all our apostolates will “work”: our missioning and catechizing and fathering and mothering and teaching and studying and nursing and businessing
and priesting and bishoping—everything .

A bishop asked one of the priests of his diocese for recommendations on ways to increase vocations. The priest replied: The best way to attract men in this diocese to the priesthood, Your Excellency, would be your canonization.

Why not yours?

One of the Things John is Doing in Iraq

The soldier in this picture is named John Gebhardt. He is a superintendent of an Air Force medical group. In addition to his regular duties, he volunteered extra time at the combat hospital where he met this little Iraqi girl.

The little girl in this photo was shot in the head by insurgents. Her entire family was executed and the insurgents intended to execute her, also.  

 The little girl had a lot of difficulty in her recovery but seemed comforted by Chief Gebhardt. The nurses said John was the only one who seemed to be able to calm her down. For many nights he held her in a chair  while they both slept. The girl is coming along with her healing.

Chief Gebhardt is a real Hero of the war, and represents what America is trying to do. I believe this is worth sharing. You'll never see things like this in the news. What we are doing over there is making a difference. Even if it is just one little girl at a time.

You can check the authenticity of this at a  U.S. Government site  and at Snopes.

Bishop Kidnapped-Pope Requests Fervent Prayer

Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was seized as he left a church in the eastern al-Nour district.

The Vatican has issued a statement saying the Pope was saddened by "this despicable act" which "touches the whole of the church in that country. The Holy Father asks the universal Church to join in his fervent prayer so that reason and humanity prevails in the kidnappers and Monsignor Rahho is returned to his flock soon," it said.

Most of Iraq's estimated 700,000 Christians are Chaldeans - Catholics who are autonomous from Rome but recognize the Pope's authority.

Read the complete article at: BBC News

December 2, 1980

Tim’s El Salvador Blog remembers the four North American churchwomen — Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and Cleveland Lay Mission Team Member Jean Donovan — who were martyred on December 2, 1980.

Hindsight Should Be 20/20

Roger says it's a modern wonder. A Modern Wonder? I'm not sure that that is the terminology I would use, says Antony, of Antony's Attic. Perhaps a modern travesty? Antony has posted something that gets right to the point. No matter the reasons . . . No matter that many of us believed we were justly "retaliating" six years ago . . .the scene has unfolded quite differently than many of us thought possible. Here are Roger's reflections (via Antony's Attic). The bolding is my emphasis.

18 Saudis do an amazing job of pirating Airliners, crashing them into New York skyscrapers, taking them down along with some 3,000 people. The Bush government reacts by attacking not the terrorist movements behind the violence but two independent nations.

Six years later we have 30,000 killed and seriously wounded American men and women, not counting a roughly similar number of independent contractors whom we have hired to assist in the invasions. The numbers of Afghans and Iraqis killed and maimed make these numbers seem like nothing in comparison. A few people in government have bullied us into doing a terrible thing.

And, they neither see nor seem to want to find a way of leading us out of the situation.

I don’t get it.

Me neither, Roger.
Hindsight should be 20/20. We can't change the past but we have to do the right thing now. I don't understand why some Americans think we are doing the right thing.

Here is another blogger's take on our situation:

September 11th…

Now it’s a double tragedy. Thousands upon thousands of people are dead for no reason at all. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of September 11th and yet we “had” to invade that country for some bizarre reason known only to this administration and the war profiteering Halliburton. The good will received by the United States from foreign countries was squandered and Americans were stabbed in the back with a presidential, imperial power grab that was all excused in the name of security, freedom, and patriotism when it really was the suppression of dissent and debate. But reality has finally trumped ideology. The miserable state of affairs in Iraq and the wasted lives of our soldiers, have proven that the Wal-Mart-itzation of war, and incompetence do not magically bring democracy to the world. Nor do they avenge the people we lost on September 11th. The toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan was the opportunity to go after the ones who attacked us and the ones who gave the terrorists shelter but valuable resources and personnel were diverted to the neocon dream war of Iraq and the operation was unfinished. The killers including Bin Ladin got away and religious extremists are back to threaten the region.

Remember those killed on September 11th and remember how their horrific deaths were used by greedy power mongers to do terrible things at home and abroad.

Dare to ponder an even darker scenario? Maybe we should, just for the sake of honestly and earnestly searching out truth.

Robert David Steele Vivas says:
"I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war Steele was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992. Steele is a former clandestine services case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Sr Mary Chainsaw

A dear friend of mine is Iraq. He keeps in touch via email. I wax on with sentimentality and estrogen laden concern and he balances with humor. Here is a partial response to one of my emails to him. It is telling through its humorous prose!

His old blog was called Sr. Mary Chainsaw. Obviously he has not been able to keep it going at present!

I expect to re-patriate to my beloved Deep East Texas in November. I have
reached the conclusion that these Iraqi's just don't play well together. We've
tried sending them to their rooms, tried the "All is forgiven" pizza
party....nothing seems to work.

Seriously....what they resent the most is our trying to tell them how to
treat their women. We should have left that "Hot Button" alone. My Iraqi friends ask me how many wives I have. When I answer only one they are very embarrassed for asking. Having only one wife is a sure fire indication that I am both wretchedly poor and socially outcast.
We might be able to perform a cultural transformation on these nice people but I'd rather bet my mercenary booty on high-flying pigs or a snowstorm in Jamaica.

Just War?

The most authoritative and up-to-date expression of just war doctrine is found in paragraph 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It says:

"The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous
consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous
conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time: the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good. "

When Is War Justified?
The moral theory of the "just-war" or "limited-war" doctrine begins with the presumption which binds all Christians:
We should do no harm to our neighbors. Just-war teaching has evolved as an effort to prevent war. Only if war cannot be rationally avoided does the teaching then seek to restrict and reduce its horrors. It does this by establishing a set of rigorous conditions which must be met if the decision to go to war is to be morally permissible. Such a decision, especially today, requires extraordinarily strong reasons for overriding the presumption in favor of peace and against war. The conditions for a just war are as follows:

• 1) Just Cause. War is permissible only to confront "a real and certain danger," i.e., to protect innocent life, to preserve conditions necessary for decent human existence and to secure basic human rights.

Traditionally 3 reasons constitute just cause

1. Protecting people from an unjust attack
2. Restoring rights that have been unjustly taken away
3. Defending or restoring a just political order

Wars should NEVER be undertaken to increase a county's wealth, to expand its possession, or to insure its access to natural resources. Just War teaching strongly illustrates the fact that throughout human history many wars have been fought without just cause.

• 2) Competent Authority. War must be declared by those with responsibility for public order, not by private groups or individuals.

Many philosophers and theologins argue the very notion of who exactly counts as competent authority.

• 3) Comparative Justice. In essence: Which side is sufficiently "right" in a dispute, and are the values at stake critical enough to override the presumption against war? Do the rights and values involved justify killing? Given techniques of propaganda and the ease with which nations and individuals either assume or delude themselves into believing that God or right is clearly on their side, the test of comparative justice may be extremely difficult to apply.

There may well be greater justice on one side of a dispute, but there is never absolute justice.

• 4) Right Intention. War can be legitimately intended only for the reasons set forth above as a just cause.

The old expression "the end justifies the means" is wrong here as in most any application of that cliche. Even if an act results in good consequences, if it is first born from an unworthy intention it cannot be judged good.

• 5) Last Resort. For resort to war to be justified, all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted.

This effectively puts the brakes on our human tendancy to use violence as our first response to threat or injury.

• 6) Probability of Success. This is a difficult criterion to apply, but its purpose is to prevent irrational resort to force or hopeless resistance when the outcome of either will clearly be disproportionate or futile.

Sometimes the suffering that may be inflicted on the weaker country by going to war is so great that it is better to endure an unjust situation than to atempt to overcome it violently.

• 7) Proportionality. This means that the damage to be inflicted and the costs incurred by war must be proportionate to the good expected by taking up arms.
  
• If there is just cause to go to war, the war cannot be justified if the evil caused by it(for example: the number of deaths, the extent of destruction, environmental devatation) significantly outweigh whatever good might be granted.
  
• 8) Proportionate and Discrimination, should be understood. This is meant to insure justice in the waging of war (jus in bello).

Because of the destructive capability of modern technological warfare, the principle of proportionality (and that of discrimination) takes on special significance. Today it becomes increasingly difficult to make a decision to use any kind of armed force, however limited initially in intention and in the destructive power of the weapons employed, without facing at least the possibility of escalation to broader, or even total, war and to the use of weapons of horrendous destructive potential.

SOURCES:

1) Catechism of the Catholic Church

2) Dr. Paul J.Wadell's What Does the Catholic Church Teach About Just War?

Dr. Wadell is a native of Louisville, Ky., is associate professor of Religious Studies at St. Norbert College. He received his doctorate in theology from the University of Notre Dame in 1985.

3) Catholic Update's condensation of The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, the U.S. Bishops' 1983 historic pastoral on war and peace.

4) http://www.americancatholic.org/News/JustWar/justwar.asp