By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Kneeling, seated and standing before the Blessed Sacrament in the parish hall on Holy Thursday evening, April 18, we began to sing the traditional Latin hymn Tantum Ergo without a song leader or printed sheets as the journey through Lent came to an end.
Like prayers and incense, the song rose up among us.
Memory resurrected old tunes of worship at our English-liturgy parish, before the Resurrection would be observed shortly thereafter.
People always have been on a journey, whether their own personal one that could end at any time, or larger journeys of societies and cultures.
Although we may think we have the luxury of decades ahead in our own lives, who can say that all those at Easter Sunday Mass will survive until next year’s Easter morning? Especially every single one of those human lives in a church building that can seat more than 1,100 people? This thought isn’t to be morbid, but to acknowledge God’s reminder that we know not the hour.
The Holy Thursday evening service in our large Spanish Colonial-style church here having concluded, we processed in what has become tradition past the red-tile-roofed elementary school classroom wings to the hall, which had been the original church building before a larger space was required as the 1960s began. It now serves as the school cafeteria and meeting area.
Walking past the classrooms, as the pastor transferred the Blessed Sacrament to the hall, we sang Pange Lingua.
I thought of Catholic congregations that had been under threat and persecution before. Just one example: Poland in the 1960s. They eventually were to emerge from that dark era. But the question now is whether we’re headed to our own new age of shadow, even while Christians today from Communist China to the Mideast to Sri Lanka already suffer the lashes at the pillar.
Not for the first time at Mass, as I looked around at our Easter-morning congregation on April 21, united in familiarity in kneeling, standing, and crossing themselves, I thought of the possibility of tragedy. Not in a hopeless, tremulous way, but with the self-awareness of, say, an airline pilot who knows what’s capable of going wrong.
When this parish has its weekly elementary-school Mass on Wednesday mornings, there’s a Phoenix police officer in the vestibule.
A pedestrian doesn’t step into a crosswalk expecting to get hit, but he needs to be prepared. Having just attended a daily morning Mass at this same church a few months ago, I saved my life by looking to the left even though I had the green light at the crosswalk — because my pausing a moment to look around saved me from stepping into the path of a red-light runner blowing through the intersection.
Shortly before Christmas 2016, a Phoenix man with an Arabic-sounding name had been arrested by the FBI’s terrorism task force after he reportedly did online searches for topics including Midnight Mass, suicide, martyrdom, and weapons.
My parish had one of the three Catholic churches closest to the apartment of Abu Talib Al-Amriki, who eventually was sentenced in 2018 to one year in prison and four years of probation after being accused of planning a lone-wolf, ISIS-inspired terror attack.
Phoenix-based KTAR radio news (92.3 FM) said he pled guilty to two felony charges, assisting a criminal syndicate and solicitation to commit misconduct involving weapons.
Our modern era of bold terrorism in the U.S. began, of course, on September 11, 2001, with Islamist plotters taking nearly 3,000 lives. These murderers, like other terrorists including the recent Sri Lanka killers, were sophisticated in their planning. They’re savages but not Neanderthals except perhaps in the pejorative sense.
On 9/11 I had a morning appointment scheduled on the outskirts of northeast metropolitan Phoenix. We were three hours behind the East Coast, so by early breakfast hours here it was clear some widespread, undefined assault on the nation was under way. Should I drive off to keep my appointment? Why not? If the nation was about to end, it’d end regardless of where I was.
Many people’s life journeys ended that day, but not the nation’s. When I got back to my neighborhood from the meeting, I was just in time for daily evening Mass at the same church I attend now.
One usually might expect to have found about 100 people attending, but that day the large church was nearly packed. We still didn’t know how extensive this plot might be, but we knew whom to place trust in.
Needless to say, daily Mass no longer draws 1,000 people. Routine returned to daily lives. But with some exceptions. The political sphere still could produce surprises.
The unexpected election of Donald Trump as president turned out to buy some breathing time for the U.S., but the major sources of public information are even more openly wildly biased now than in 2016. And Trump has disappointed voters on his signature illegal-immigration issue.
These propaganda-thick media probably can take some credit for giving control of some political offices including the U.S. House to the Democrats in 2018, and are rabid to mislead more voters in the next cycle.
A hostile dominant media would welcome our subjugation to their deadly ideology, and these media’s twin is a radical, deeply immoral and aggressive Democrat Party whose abortion-pushing, handsy bad Catholic Joe Biden, who himself has officiated at a “same-sex wedding,” is regarded as the old-fashioned “working man’s moderate” candidate.
A dominant media that has trouble acknowledging a dangerous massive invasion of the U.S. by unvetted alien pawns will not be in a hurry to report civil-rights violations against the U.S.’s “retrograde religious people” losing their property and livelihoods to Democrat neighborhood vigilantes empowered by a potential 2020 presidential victory.
And terrorists haven’t ceased to bide their time while seeking opportunities, as Sri Lanka’s mass murders showed once again. The routine assaults against French Catholic places of worship are another example.
Children As Victims
With tens of thousands of unvetted illegal aliens now sweeping across the U.S. southern border as a monthly event, only the blind would deny that terrorists are among them, seizing the chance to enter the undefended gates of the “great Satan.”
Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest routinely have thousands of border jumpers without resources simply turned loose on our streets by the U.S. government itself while it pleads that it has no way to hold them all.
On April 24 Breitbart News headlined, “DHS Releases 7K Illegal Aliens Into U.S. In Five Days; 1.4K Released Every Day.”
The story said: “Since December 21, 2018, about 153,000 border crossers and illegal aliens have been released into the interior of the U.S. This dictates that DHS is releasing about 38,250 border crossers and illegal aliens into the country every month, with close to 10,000 released every week and about 1,400 released every day.”
In the five days, Breitbart said, San Antonio had about 2,200 entrants dropped on it, Phoenix had about 1,200, and San Diego 800.
Readers’ feedback to the story indicated growing distrust of Trump, who talks a good game about wall-building but seems quite passive when federal judges roll out unending welcome mats to lawbreakers. Is he so serious after all, they wondered, about stopping the invasion?
“At this current trajectory,” the Breitbart story said, “by the end of the year, DHS will have released nearly 460,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities — in addition to the projected half a million illegal aliens who will successfully cross the U.S.-Mexico border this year, undetected by federal officials.”
Children are being victimized in about every way imaginable, not only as sex-trafficking slaves but even as “recyclables,” where they’re being sent back south so they can keep being passed off as still more northbound families’ offspring, enabling more adults to claim they’re crossing as asylum-seeking family units.
This likely can’t be stopped until the massive illegal immigration stops. And that won’t stop until the message is: Border jumping won’t work.
One wishes for the happy lives of everyone throughout the Earth, but some must bloom where they were planted. Although England, Norway, Switzerland, and the U.S., for example, aren’t perfect societies, they’re not nations that everyone seems to be fleeing in desperation against poverty, violence, and hunger.
We don’t have a magic formula, but we seem to have one that needs to be better applied south of the U.S. by those willing to use their talents at home. You’re not the helpless victims that the pawn-masters prefer. So stop acting that way by slinking north.
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