Still no Inoculation against Tyranny

NO HIGHER POWER: 

OBAMA’S WAR ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Schlafly, Phyllis; Neumayr, George 

(2012-07-23).  Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

This book constituted a genuine challenge to any optimism or hopefulness I might have had concerning the nation's and the Church's possibilities for coming through this second term of office for President Obama unscathed. The famous Cardinal George prophecy about his being able to die in his bed, his successor in jail and the following Archbishop of Chicago as having to expect a martyr's death in what was once lauded as "the land of the free and the home of the brave" looms even larger after my reading of this valuable book by Phyllis Schlafly and George Neumayr. Europe was hard pressed in the 20th Century (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and company); perhaps the 21st Century will be North America's turn.

Oddly enough what kept coming to me was the first "grown-up" question ever to plague me in life. "Grown-up" questions is what I call the experience for lack of a better term, because nothing says they have to be moral or metaphysical or existential. They are "grown-up" because you know instinctively that you cannot take them to your parents or to another adult; you have to face them on your own.

My first "grown-up" question came out of reading or study about how the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austria-Hungarian Empire sparked World War I. We were taught that he was assassinated by an anarchist... and that's where it started for me, my question: How can you be an anarchist? The great protagonists of World War II and following were all wicked, power hungry, nut cases; Napoleon was a megalomaniac, but how can you be an anarchist? As I say, somehow I doubted whether adults could help me with that one, as it somehow went beyond wrong, the very idea of destroying any social order, of denying any kind of consort or community for the sake of the common good. I really don't think I have ever answered my own question and have been spared the encounter so far in life with a bona fide anarchist. The very thought I find chilling, once you get beyond the case of a genuinely stupid and superficial person claiming anarchic credentials.

That is where we were up until this book, when all of a sudden I'm faced really with the possibility of a President of the United States turning out to be a 21st Century Mao or Stalin, capable of moving with violence and force to impose his ideology on the rest of us. It all seems very close on this eve of Sunday with his minions threatening with incarceration any military chaplain who dares celebrate Mass for the troops this Sunday. I hope it's all a bad dream which passes.

So you are asking why this dread that Obama is that anarchist I have never wanted to meet in my life? His antipathy toward Christianity and toward the Catholic Church need not be more than dumb secularism or militant atheism. The book, however, is all too clear on his support for Islamism, for radical, destructive Muslim terrorists. There are too many instances over these last 4+ years of U.S. support for Al Qaeda. Only great prayer seems to have stopped the President from striking Syria and throwing that part of the world into total chaos as well. He seems to want to destroy. I may have grown up over the course of these many years since world history class, but I cannot accept anarchism as other than something from the depths of Hell.

We pray.