One of the great
delights of being Pastor is that I get to go into the school and visit the
classrooms, and with the gracious indulgence of the teachers, take time with
the students for my endeavors. This week
I visited sixth-grade religion, where they were talking about Melchizedek. That was actually a great deal of fun,
because it gave me a chance to talk about sacrifices of the sort that have been
made irrelevant by the single saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. This change has made the priesthood of the
new covenant a much less messy, much less smelly affair. They hadn’t thought of that.
I also visited our
eighth graders because I wanted to check on their knowledge of history. I have expounded already to you about my
fascination with anniversaries, and yes I am still keeping the centenary of
World War I, and still trying to learn what that history can reveal about our
world and how we got here.
I mentioned other current
anniversaries – the bicentennial of the burning of Washington by the British in
the War of 1812, and the subsequent Battle of Baltimore. O say
can you see? I also pointed out how
one hundred and fifty years ago the Civil War was heading into its final
stages. I also alluded to more personal
landmarks just fifty years ago.
But what was really
in my mind was a much more recent event, but seems to be more obscured by the
mists of time than any of these others.
And the pivotal anniversary for that is this very Sunday, November
ninth.
You see, twenty-five
years ago the largest threat to the well-being of the world collapsed under the
weight of its own implausibility: Soviet communism crumbled in Russia and its
European satellites. And twenty-five
years ago this Sunday, the Berlin Wall came down.
Talk of the Cold War
these days, whatever little there is, tends to dismiss any serious
consideration of threat, conflict, or enemy.
Couched in the relativism of our current conversations, any mention it
receives usually accuses our nation and our allies of using it as an excuse for
bad behavior. Completely overlooked are
the scope and the seriousness of the evil that we were fighting, and how
success against that evil was by no means a foregone conclusion.
Being not quite
fourteen years old yet, our kids have no idea that barbed wire, mine fields, guard
towers, guns and dogs were used to keep citizens from fleeing their own country. They don’t know that families were ripped
apart, not least by using children like them to inform on the prohibited
thoughts, words, and actions of their own parents. They have no idea of the material privation
that was the result of the comprehensively controlled command economy. They can’t imagine the fear of arrest or loss
of privilege that kept people repeating slogans that were obviously false.
One of the great
indicators of someone’s true nature is the identity of his enemies. And Communism chose from the beginning to
work with every effort to undermine and even destroy the Catholic Church. That
is actually quite the endorsement, because there has never been a more
effective opponent of tyranny, oppression, and abuse than the Church. And there was no more effective example of
this than the favorite son of the suffering church of Poland, Pope Saint John
Paul II.
All of this had an enormous
effect on the lives of millions of people around the globe, and still does
today. But the lesson will be lost on us
unless we keep not only the anniversary, but the hard won awareness of the necessity
of choosing of good over evil, and truth over lies.
Monsignor
Smith
