By Mr. Joseph Walkowski
08 December 2022
In a precursor to the now-common warfare between personal political opinion and the persistent voice of natural law, Pontius Pilate sought to disrupt neither of these warring parties and instead commanded for Christ to be scourged. As all men know, the brutalization of God was not enough for the world and so His Life was demanded as well. Upon His Resurrection, though, justice was demanded even more clamorously. Men, women, and children began to follow Him, so their lives too were taken. Holy days were demarcated for the celebration of Our Lord and His mother, but these were seized by men who vainly assumed such celebrations were theirs to seize! The triumphant feasts of Saints Patrick, Valentine, and Nicholas were wiped away by a deluge of alcohol, agnostic love, or (in the case of the last of these) forgotten entirely. The world wanted Easter without the Lord, so the victory of the Lamb was preposterously replaced by a rabbit! Nations bellowed for a Christmas without a Christ, so entitled greed and secular nihility were made to overshadow benevolence and Christian traditions. The faithful themselves were too impatient for the hushed stillness of Advent that heralds the celebration of the Incarnation, so lights and entire Nativity scenes were displayed without any care for the nine months that the Blessed Virgin had to endure before she could kiss the Forehead of God; if the Lord declared that the sinless Woman must wait for all that time, why would it be any different for those who have sinned? The hopeful remembrance of All Souls was mangled and represented as a day to celebrate disorder and those things that cut our earthly lives short. Yet none of these things were sufficient for the voracity of worldlings!
Morality, too, is daily demanded of God and immediately spurned. In the earliest days of barbarism and bloodthirst, the cry went up to the heavens for morality to be bestowed upon the world. Moses thus descended from his encounter on Horeb with the Divine response to such a call. Perhaps feeling like cornered beasts, some met these holy decrees with a right hand extended in welcome but a readied dagger gripped in the left. Despite the aversion of a few, morality came to rule the hearts and lands of nations. Theologians and peacemakers, who wished only to give all people the morality they so desperately desired, were slaughtered without mercy. Ancient servitude had been commonbut no one spoke for the slaves, so Blessed Augustine spoke against such practices (i.e., the ownership of man as of a creature). The Christian Church grew as the sole bastion of morality in the West, but Her enemies attacked Her for what they saw as limits on immoral freedoms, as a child might feel oppressed when denied a second dessert. The common people continued in their clamor for “Greater morality!”, so holy men such as Dominic emphasized pious reverence for the virtues of humility, charity, and unbridled joy in all trials. Those who had little care for practicing such moral perfectors deemed themselves philosophers and used honeyed words to turn entire countries against such a holistic moral system.
With the Enlightenment came hollow orators who declared that the Church, Who had given such clear guidance for achieving the morality so often yearned for (whether or not Her offices had been filled by men who themselves lived by such Christian precepts), had never been fit to gift the world with the didactic revelations of heaven. “We shall choose our morality as we deem best fits our situation”, they stated, yet the Church did not retreat. She continued to steadfastly guide all nations to the utter goodness found only in God, though the ears of many had now been caught up in the novel ideas of modern Gnostics. Those remaining people continued to beg for moral systems, which they were thoroughly provided, until the dawning of recent centuries which brought serpentine philosophers arising from French, German, and English streets and amplified the previously irritating call to do away with the Christian messenger entirely! Those who sought Christian morality were convinced that they did not know what they sought and that morality had always been relative. No longer do people turn to the heavens for Divine Wisdom, but instead to their own fancies of any particular day. It is no longer humanity’s morality. It is not even a country’s morality. Depending on how the obstacles and inconveniences of each day might affect the average person, that one believes they can only say “My morality”.
