By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
As I drove north recently on my route to a vacation destination, I passed along a portion of highway dubbed in honor of Christopher Columbus. I wondered how long that would last while authorities in the same state were removing his statues from public places under cover of darkness.
Of course some may have counseled such preventive action to avoid the despicable spectacle seen in Baltimore where a mob pulled down and smashed Columbus’ effigy to cries and howls of fiendish delight and evil satiation.
As of this writing, divers have recovered some pieces of the explorer’s statue that were thrown by rioters into the inner harbor. The governor and the mayor rightly spoke out against the lawlessness.
In Sacramento, Calif., a statue of Columbus and Queen Isabella which once stood on the state capitol grounds was officially removed on July 7. The weekend before, a statue of St. Junipero Serra was torn down and viciously destroyed there with a sledgehammer.
Jonah McKeown reported as follows for Catholic News Agency: “After rioters pulled down a statue of St. Junipero Serra in Sacramento on July 4, a local Catholic told CNA that she felt compelled to clean the spot where the statue once stood, to pray there, and to defend the eighteenth-century missionary’s legacy.
“‘I know enough about him to know that he was not a bad man, and that he doesn’t deserve the inaccurate histories that were being portrayed in our local media. I’m not going to be silent about that when given an opportunity,’ Audrey Ortega told CNA.
“Ortega, a homemaker from Sacramento and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, set up a makeshift shrine to Serra on the statue’s empty plinth July 5, and led other Catholics in cleaning graffiti from the site.”
If a statue of Columbus elsewhere in the Ohio city of the same name is also no longer acceptable, by what logic does the metropolis itself continue homonymously to serve as his memorial? Will the District of Columbia be renamed “Washington, BLM”?
It seems in the rush to affirm that some human lives matter the rights and cultural expression of many other lives must be trampled and obliterated. What’s a little collateral damage in pursuit of a good cause?
The destruction of carved marble or stone does not hurt those of us looking on with disgust except to signal a further denuding of the landscape of all signs of our faith, itself already in great decline.
So many Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ Eucharistically that it is small wonder they don’t defend against or even actively take part in attacks upon monuments to that faith and those who championed it in the course of this nation’s history.
No, the statues are stand-ins for those of us who yet profess the faith. Their destruction serves as a warning that what we thus propose is a dangerous enterprise.
Our enjoyment of a brief respite within the long war that properly describes the relationship between the faith and the world may be coming to an end. We proudly hold high the cross upon which our divine Founder was crucified by the world.
We must die to the world in order to rise and live in Him who trampled the world underfoot in His self-sacrifice to save us.
These signs of the times remind us of the truth that we must die here once to live forever. Dying to this world involves detachment of various kinds, and ultimately for all those things which serve to remind us of faith.
The victory of the cross must still be worked out among us in the effort of all engaged in rightly overcoming injustices of every kind. Toppling and pulverizing statues does not advance that cause.
It is through the victory of our faith that all injustice is corrected and wrongs repaired.
Still no word in the outrage media about some black lives of very young age felled by bullets every day in our cities or those newly conceived snuffed out in the Planned Parenthood abortuaries strategically positioned in our most impoverished urban zones.
The faithful in St. Louis who pray in vigils and recite the rosary around the monumental statue of the sainted king to whom the city is dedicated bring peace to a site of hatred in recent days.
Their acts of faith show compassion to those who threatened to target the city’s Catholic cathedral next, even as they called for the removal of St. Louis’ monument.
We join in prayer with them for the intercession of St. Louis. Sword upraised in battle, together with St. Michael the Archangel, they defend us in battle against the evil of an anti-God agenda deceptively hidden behind a social justice mask.
The victory of our faith for the salvation of souls is always advanced through prayerful compassion and forgiveness before recourse to worldly weapons purely in self-defense.
Will we finally wake up from our somnolent illusion that we will never be called to martyrdom, as is recorded of the heroes of faith in our Roman Martyrology?
Christianity is dangerous. We are either training our children for the lions’ den or we are deceiving them.
Will we stand up to defend our faith and protect its free expression?
Elements of BLM ideology are satanic, and those elements of it which are not are already provided by Christianity.
Profanity, threats of violence, and hatred are not Christian. Attacking the Catholic understanding of family based in the laws of nature and nature’s God, and the moral teachings underpinning the whole, are among the aims of BLM.
Arguing the truth based on facts and logic must be the Christian way. When the time comes to defend ourselves against violent threats we must do so, however. Self-defense is also a Christian principle.
The only thing in the world which is purely devoid of Satanic elements is the Christian Catholic faith. So increasingly are we as we seek to embrace the faith in all its aspects while rejecting those ideologies which include satanic and evil elements.
Assimilating corrupt elements into the Church furthers the corruption we already decry. Any ideology embracing elements incompatible with the faith must be rejected in order to be faithful.
In the final analysis the reason for supporting the memorialization of any saint is for the reason that he or she imitated Christ to the degree of heroic virtue. These include the martyrs.
We cannot exclude our own possible call likewise to such bloody and final witness to Christ unto death.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ now and forever.
Join me on Parler @FatherKevinMCusick
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