By DEXTER DUGGAN
Start with the logical explanation.
If your car’s not in the garage, your first thought is that your teenaged son took it, not an interstellar spacecraft’s explorers. That’s the way the mind tends to work.
If an unlikely interruption occurs at an entertainment venue, the first thought probably is: just part of the show.
That’s what audience members thought at Paris’ Bataclan theater last November when Islamist terrorists burst in. But they brought bullets, not ballads.
That’s also what at least some revelers thought early on June 12 when an Islamist gunman began firing in Orlando’s Pulse club, popular with an LGBT audience.
When people were wondering what’s the next moment’s music, the reality was the sudden and lasting end of their lives in this world. About 50 dead and slightly more wounded.
Although news reports addressed various aspects of the Florida tragedy, largely missing was the first reaction of traditional religious people concerned about the everlasting welfare of these people’s souls.
Who wishes for anyone’s unanticipated violent death? But that happens somewhere, somehow every day — sometimes in more newsworthy ways. When one’s departure isn’t forestalled, at least let’s hope he’s entering a better land.
A secular-dominated age that thinks either there’s no afterlife, or that everyone goes to Heaven anyway, sees no reason to worry about the spiritual welfare of victims suddenly thrown upon the mercy and justice of God.
But unbelief or teddy bear theology doesn’t make reality less real.
An airliner crash, a train derailment, a bridge collapse worry those hearing that news. And what if the victims, moreover, were in morally worrisome surroundings? Not simply listening to a car radio, but at a venue where sinfully dysfunctional sexuality is celebrated.
We live at a time when it seems that about everything changes quickly, more than ever before in history. In a century and a half, moving from millennia of foot travel, horseback, and wagon to thousands of miles per hour. From buildings ten stories high to more than 100. From food grown locally for the season, or else preserved, to arriving from the other side of the world in any season.
From books to flat screens. From local typeset newspapers to the global, electronic Internet. From medical practice that didn’t even appreciate the germ theory of disease to routine brain surgery and ultrasound showing unborn babies at play.
In living memory, European news film had to be flown across the Atlantic to be telecast from New York the next day, instead of images being bounced off satellites anywhere above the world instantly.
If everything else appears transient or unprecedented, maybe morals lose their firm foundation, too. It’s not as if we’ve discovered fresh ways to sin, but have given them wider currency and even a leftist government fist.
Or do most people still know it’s wrong when leftist governments mandate approval of serious sin? So those governments impose ruinous fines and punishment if people dare demur.
One of the Fatima prayers requested early in the last century by our Lady: “Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.”
Yes, “. . . especially those most in need of thy mercy.” She didn’t ask for a needless prayer.
It remains as true as ever that only God can read souls so as properly to issue His just judgments. Many people steeped in the toxins of the lying, permissive media of the 20th and 21st centuries and other handiwork of Satan may have consciences so impaired as to lack some culpability.
And some psychological insights may have become better divined by humans now than, say, 4,000 years ago.
However, amid all the technological transitions, people remain the same tempted, fallible beings they’ve always been. They may have heart transplants and knee replacements unknown at the time of Abraham Lincoln, but they’re the same model of human as at the time of biblical Abraham.
Serious sexual disorientation has not become a new model of freedom or human rights, even though the gravity of the sin may appear minimized when it’s hawked like a prized possession.
The Orlando massacre appropriately drew attention around the world.
In Britain’s Catholic Herald, Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith, a doctor of moral theology, wrote on June 13 about those killings:
“First of all, murder is something that God’s law clearly condemns. I mean the law given to us in the Ten Commandments, one of which clearly states ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’ Against murder God has set His face. Anyone arguing that murder can be somehow or another justified has to get around this very clear manifestation of the Divine Will. Given the long history of human duplicity, we all constantly need reminding of the Law given on Sinai.”
The foundation of what’s wrong as given on Sinai, and what’s right as given on Sinai, has not and will not change.
So we pray for the repose of those souls, for the healing of the injured, and for a better future of awakened morality.
A Globalist World
Meanwhile, what has been called the Democratic Party’s hierarchy of identity politics has been put under fresh strain by the Orlando massacre. A member of the Islamic segment under the Democrats’ umbrella murderously attacked the LGBT segment.
One understands why Barack Obama is so reluctant to denounce radical Islam as he seeks to import as many unassimilated Muslims, and other aggrieved groups, as possible into the United States, arguably to increase tensions here and render the nation ungovernable except under a strong fist. But sometimes opposite and competing interests dangerously collide.
Perhaps the classic example of divergent interests is the Democratic Party’s Planned Parenthood eugenicists and abortionists versus its black voters. One of these interest groups is directly involved in slaying the next generation of the other group, but the breaking point between these coalition members hasn’t arrived yet.
Another example would be traditional religious believers versus elite progressives. That battle already is over, and the religious believers are expected to worship liberal politics while keeping quiet about historic morality. As for the working class, it, too, has been written off as it’s being submerged by massive illegal immigration lured here by big government and big business.
The working class and the religious believers (who sometimes are synonymous) are told that if they don’t remain faithful Democrats, some rascally Republicans will hurt them.
Even if the GOP intended to do so, these gullible Democrat families will long ago have been destroyed by their own party first.
A party that wants to destroy its own? Sounds impossible, until you recall the abortion clinics chugging away every day to dispose of future little Democrat voters. No wonder the Democrat elitists insist on massive new immigration to fill their place.
If this kill-’em, import-’em sounds too loony to be true, welcome to the globalist world being birthed by the elite’s theorizing.
If only the opposing factions can be kept from each other’s throats — until voting by everyone, qualified and illegal, can be replaced by voting by no one. Because the eyebrow-arching elitists know better than to allow mere people to muck up the pathway to paradise.
Ruinous Obamacare was passed by threats, bribes, and lies, not popular assent. That’s the planned way to the future, if the theorizers get more of their way.
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