CULTURE WAR
These “Comments” have at least once warmly recommended readers to read the frequent articles of John HORVAT on the TFP website at tfp.org. This is because for countless adults today, God is the Great Unmentionable. He is not even to be named in polite society. On the contrary, while Horvat is often commenting on American politics, he is always doing so from the Catholic perspective of Almighty God.
In the words of one of the great Catholic thinkers of the 19th century, Horvat sees, and says, that if God today is not ruling Creation by His presence, then He is ruling it by His absence.
This is because God created the world freely, out of love, and He loves in particular the creature whom He set up to rule Creation as His deputy, and that creature is man, who sub-rules by that faculty of reason and free-will which he alone possesses among all God’s material creatures. However, if man uses that free-will to turn away from God, which God can allow him to do, then God fully knows what man does not know, namely the horrible eternity he is deserving for himself by his spurning of God’s great love of him, and God cannot leave His beloved creature alone on the road to such a destruction. And here is why modern man, fleeing God, cannot help recognising that the love of God is still pursuing him, even if that recognition merely drives him to flee all the more: “Stop loving me! I do not want Your love!”
Thus Horvat reads (article of 11 November, 2021) a recent surprise election in the State of Virginia, by which the right-wing Republicans swept all three State-wide races and surprisingly took back the House of Delegates from the left-wing Democrats. Horvat says that whereas “moderate Republicans promise everything but deliver next to nothing,” it was the moral conservatives (“with their powerful pro-life voting bloc”) who won this surprise election by voting on moral issues of the so-called “Culture War”: on Critical Race Theory, radical sex education, gender ideology and procured abortion. Notice how closely these moral issues in fact involve and offend Almighty God. Horvat says that these issues win elections because if they are well presented, “they address deep problems inside the souls of countless Americans.” In other words, the “Culture War” frames the debate in terms of what is deepest and truest in us men, God’s natural law, even if He Himself is rarely mentioned. “God, bless America” – still.
But the left-wingers are intent on driving God out of His Creation. Correspondingly, they hate the “Culture War,” and want it never to be mentioned, nor its issues to be raised. The cultural warriors who do so are “deplorables” (said Hilary Clinton), with no legitimacy inside the liberals’ overwhelming liberal culture. It goes without saying that the vile media do all they can to stifle the conservatives and to stop them from framing the issues as cultural or moral, i.e. pointing towards God. They absolutely cannot handle Him, nor even His shadow. Man has taken God’s place, and nothing and nobody may be put forward as imposing on man any objective right and wrong. Therefore anyone attempting to do so will be discredited as a “racist” or “sexist,” or “fascist” or “anti-semite,” or by some other bigoted label of hatred.
And yet so little do liberals know themselves that they are fanatical believers in “anti-hate” legislation!
Horvat’s conclusion is entirely logical, and taken seriously, it could save America from ruin: “Above all, conservatives must confide in God to come to their help. Disguised behind the façade of a thousand skirmishes is an all-out war against God and His order. Those who champion His cause can expect His assistance.” Archbishop Viganò makes exactly the same point.
Mother of God, whenever I pray your most holy Rosary, please let me grasp that I am not “just praying,” but I am doing the very best I can to assist you in your tremendous battle for the salvation of men and of their nations, through your divine Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Kyrie eleison.