By CHRISTOPHER MANION
What a week.
Many faithful Catholics were praying that Our Lady would choose the Feast of the Epiphany to bestow upon our beloved country special graces that might deliver us from the impending doom of an all-abortion-all-the-time takeover in Washington.
Our Lady certainly responded with graces, as she always does, but perhaps not with the results that many had prayed for.
Instead, we saw the hammer come down hard. With the slimmest of margins, both of Georgia’s Senate seats were awarded to radical pro-abortion Democrats, giving the U.S. Senate a slim but solid left-wing majority. A million Trump supporters in Washington saw the last vestige of deliverance from the stolen elections dissolve with Vice President Pence’s announcement that he saw no constitutional role for himself beyond that of a vote-counting clerk, routinely affirming the electoral votes submitted from several disputed states.
Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi, barely re-elected as House Speaker, came down hard on Republicans, making it clear that Democrats intended to rule the national government with an iron hand (forget the velvet glove).
The arrival this week of a million Trump supporters for the “Stop the Steal” rally received zip, zero, nada, attention on any media outlets — until several hundred (fewer than one percent) of the crowd attempted to breach security barriers at the Capitol. Whether outside agitators or merely agitated (and disappointed) MAGA advocates, their incursion gave members a close-up-and-personal view of what dozens of cities across the country have been witnessing for the better part of a year.
That’s right — Democrats had branded the widespread, violent Antifa demonstrations as a “myth” since June, but they were suddenly faced with reality as demonstrators entered the Capitol. None of the Antifa-style weapons — debilitating lasers, ball-bearing slingshots, and Molotov cocktails — were in evidence, but the “People’s House” was soon locked down with members and staff quickly escorted to safe havens.
We note that national Democrats and bishops have routinely ignored or even celebrated the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots that wracked cities countrywide all year. They have now joined Republicans who are demanding that the Capitol malefactors be arrested and charged. Apparently that somehow makes up for their months of insouciance.
Query: The massive Washington rally — which got no attention — and the incursion into the Capitol — which was a media sensation — are over. Will January 6 mark the death knell of the Deplorables, or their first foray into a sustained movement of opposition to the left’s power grab?
Beware Biden’s Bulldozers
The incoming administration is planning to pick up where Obama left off. Its focus on abortion will dominate: The war on life lies at the black heart of its full-scale offensive against spirit and truth in every sphere of national life.
Legislatively, one prime mandate will be the resuscitation of Obamacare and its expansion into a full-blown “national health care” system. In this, “Catholic Joe” will have the full-throated support of Catholic bishops, who frequently remind us that they have supported that goal since 1919.
But wouldn’t that mean the expansion of abortion-on-demand nationwide, free and unimpeded?
Well, yes. Undoubtedly our shepherds will ruminate profoundly on that meddlesome matter. Pursuant to protocols, policies, programs, and procedures, they will likely refer that question to the Bishops’ Committee on the Perpetual Pondering of Catholic Joe’s Complex Catholicism that they created late last year. Quickly the committee’s agenda will overflow, drowning in memoranda and suffocating the vital principles of Humanae Vitae, as well as their stated “preeminent issue of abortion,” which preeminence was Dead on Arrival as soon as it was announced 14 months ago.
When Biden reverses Trump’s affirmation and expansion of Reagan’s Mexico City Policy (prohibiting the international funding of abortion), here and there a bishop will scratch his head. When Obama’s HHS Mandate is renewed with a vengeance, a USCCB staffer will write a memo for the file. When Biden advocates overturning the wave of state pro-life laws by “nationalizing Roe v. Wade,” he will placate perturbed prelates by legalizing tens of millions of illegal aliens, adding icing on the cake by opening the borders to millions more.
And don’t forget, Catholic Joe will control the China Virus! And to remove the public danger of those pesky types who might interfere with his mandates, he will of course seize their guns.
With Catholic Joe, Social Justice will finally triumph. For our bishops, what’s not to like?
The Rot And The Rubble
During the past year, the American left has become more radical, more exposed, and, alas, more successful than ever before. Their wrecking ball has shut down the Mass for months, ruined millions of businesses, jobs, and lives, and mounted a campaign of public intimidation and ruin that bodes ill for our freedom and our lives. However, in their elation of having succeeded so widely and so easily, they have carelessly let fall the curtain that has camouflaged their perversion of our core institutions.
The media will never recover their credibility. “Experts” are now a joke, and so is “science.” The rot in the federal and many state bureaucracies has proven its staying power, but we know it by its proper name: the Deep State. The same goes for the Deep Church.
As the virus has vastly empowered government, our trust in politicians and politics itself has plummeted. Normally, a civic-minded public would draw the obvious conclusion: radically reduce the scope of government, and put strict limits on those powers that legitimately remain.
But these are not normal times. And the petty tyrants whom we wish to bind with the chains of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God have defied those laws, and us, and the possibility of “normal times” itself. They have mounted a search-and-destroy mission targeting everything we hold dear.
Where can we fight back? One key terrain worth fighting for in the coming chaos is education — and there the camouflage curtain has been drawn back big time. Every family can now clearly perceive the rot.
School unions, whose ignorance and incompetence are now laid bare, have reacted by mounting a full-scale war on parents and their children. Consider the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Their leaders are simply illiterate. The protests of parents who demand that teachers do their jobs are “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny,” they claim.
These are the union’s best. Imagine — with a shudder — the palaver their members pass out in the classroom.
Speaking of class, CTU official Sarah Chambers insists that it is “unsafe” for school workers to return to work — as she vacations in the Caribbean.
Beyond the malignant hypocrisy of the country’s most Marxist union conglomerate lies an opportunity. Parents now know what drivel their children are being taught — as well as the crucial basics that government schools ignore, even defile. And while the Bidenizers bulldoze Washington, parents have unique opportunities on the local level to unite and expand the alternatives to the yellow school bus jungle that public “education” has become.
President Trump championed parental choice in education. Biden has declared war on the family. “Children belong to the state,” said California Superintendent of Education John Swett 155 years ago. California’s largest school union still names its highest award after him. Here is a battle we can fight close to home.
“Know the enemy,” said Sun Tzu. Now we do.
“The best defense is a good offense,” said Knute Rockne.
What are we waiting for?
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