I remember growing up that
many, if not most, stores and businesses were closed on Sunday. I remember that the question was never
whether a person you knew went to church or not, the question was, which church
did he or she go to? When I was young,
Bishop Fulton J Sheen had the number one rated television show in the land –
Protestants and Catholics alike tuned in to watch him, my parents
included. In other words, faith,
Christian faith, was an integral part of society and, yes, even culture. What we have today is a disaster that seems
only to get worse with each passing day.
Bishop Chaput asks a very good question when he writes,
The question is: How did we get from the
America of Tocqueville, where on Sundays “the commercial and industrial life of
the nation seems suspended [in piety, and] all noise ceases,” to the America
where—borrowing from the words of Pascal Bruckner— we’re the “galley slaves of
pleasure,” an America of obsessive consumption and confused sexuality where
“the intention was to produce freedom, but the result was advertising; [where]
what was liberated was less our libido than our appetite for unlimited shopping”? Archbishop Charles Chaput, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Withness and the
Next America, Kindle edition, Location
232
“The galley slaves of
pleasure. . .” is an apt description of what is going on today, and a very
sad one. To make matters worse, we have
an administration bent on making in impossible legally to return our society to
some sort of freedom and sanity; they consider what was once good and normal in
this country to be evil and repressive.
One can only see the work of dark forces in their motives, and one can
spend a lot of time in prayer and remembrance that these forces must lose, have
already truly lost.
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