Our friend Father George Rutler, pastor of the Church of Our Savior nearby, notes in his March 4th column for his parish website that Catholics must recognize that “elements of our own government have declared war on the Church, and persecution both subtle and blatant has gone domestic,” and laments the number of people who don’t see this.
He gets off some nice lines in the short meditation, one in particular. He notes that few people listened when in the 1930s Churchill made his now obviously prescient warnings about England’s enemies, and then says:
The Allies were unprepared when Churchill spoke in 1938 because people wanted butter not guns, but found soon enough that butter was being rationed, and guns were pointing at them.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
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