Civil Discourse

A social media message from an old college friend:

Seems reasonable

Back in the 1980s, the individual who posted this suggestion was a nice young woman from a small town about 40 miles from my hometown. As I remember her, she was a little awkward socially, but smart and attractive. She was on the periphery of my social circle and I didn't chat her up a lot, but I was always happy to see her around. Thirty-five years on, she'd prefer I were obliterated, but she is polite about it.

This sort of toxicity doesn't make me angry. It makes me sad.

Approaching it

Peggy Noonan isn't a reliable narrator, but sometimes she gets close:

It is just such an air of extremeness on the field now, and it reflects a larger sense of societal alienation. We have the fierce teamism of the lonely, who find fellowship in their online fighting group and will say anything for its approval. There are the angry who find relief in politics because they can funnel their rage there, into that external thing, instead of examining closer and more uncomfortable causes. There are the people who cannot consider God and religion and have to put that energy somewhere.

America isn’t making fewer of the lonely, angry and unaffiliated, it’s making more every day.

Emphasis mine. She almost found it there. Substitute "will not" for "cannot" and try it again. You see it every time someone speaks not of God, but of some vague spirituality, which in nearly every instance is so protean to be without any structure at all, and is easily discarded, too. C.S. Lewis was on this one a long time ago:

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

It's tough business to make these arguments, especially as a Catholic, given the scandals of the Church that we have endured. But to reject a religious infrastructure and substitute politics instead always brings destruction. We will always struggle to know God; it's intrinsic to faith. Being God is infinitely more difficult.

Exactly

The smartest thing I've read about the massacre in Christchurch, from Andrew Klavan:

When tragedy or atrocity strikes — as it just did with the mosque shootings in New Zealand — thoughts and prayers are not just an expression of compassion. They are, more importantly and more wisely, an expression of humility and helplessness. They are a way of saying: “There is nothing we can do in the face of this wickedness but we stand in solidarity with the victims and ask God to comfort their families in their sorrow.”

Almost every other reaction is absurd. To suggest you have the solution to the eternal problem of evil in the form of addressing your pet peeve or of blaming and attacking your political opponents is disgraceful. It is to use the bodies of the slain for a soap box. It degrades you and insults the victims.

When I pray, I am asking for God's help. I'm not necessarily asking for His help for me, but in the main what I'm really asking for is help in understanding the greater meaning of what I've experienced. In my own experience, I don't always get the answer I want, but I invariably get an answer, even though it can take a while to sink in. That's the nature of discernment.

From what I have read about the massacre and the incoherent series of beliefs put forth in the killer's manifesto. Klavan gets to that, too:

It is likewise absurd to extrapolate from the murderer’s philosophy in order to condemn philosophies that may have something in common with it. There are psychopaths on the right and left. I assume that, right and left, we all stand against them. I am a small-government, classical liberal American conservative. I think the Democratic party has lost its collective mind. But I am more than willing to stipulate that Ted Cruz and Chuck Schumer, Jim Jordan and Nancy Pelosi can all agree that murdering innocents at their prayers is bad. This is not where our disagreements lie.

We'll have plenty of time to discuss our disagreements in the next few years. But thoughts and prayers are still in order.

Yes and no

As is typically the case, Andrew Sullivan is on to something:

Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning.

Damn right. But there's more:

For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.

Ask Kevin Hart, just the latest comedian to come a cropper. There's more:

And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.

But for a guy who can be as spot-on in his observations as these are, he still misreads other things in the very same essay. He starts out well, to wit:

So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.

Then he gets to Trump and steers into the ditch:

Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. 

How is that, Andrew?

Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.

This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do.

It's important to define who "they" are. The Trump supporters I know don't view him as a demigod at all; his popularity is contingent on his message, which is less about a search for meaning than about calling out the steady, ever-ratcheting imposition of the desires of those in power and trying to reverse the ratcheting. There is no Trump in Europe, but the yellow vests are on the scene for many of the same reasons the MAGA hats are on display in the United States. The Robert Muellers and James Comeys and Amy Klobuchars of the world may not arrive in Washington from the same locales, but they have the same mindset and the same self-appointed sense of being a surety, along with the overweening self-regard of the Pharisees, if you want to take a historical-religious tack on the matter. Macron and Trudeau are of the same caste.

But that last sentence of Sullivan is worth note: And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do. Perhaps those are the cultists Sullivan believes he sees, but that statement suggests he needs to dig a little deeper. Yes, if  you were to survey a regular churchgoer at St. Joan of Arc, or at any number of dessicated mainline Protestant churches in town, it would be difficult to find a Trump supporter. But if you expect fidelity to that ol' time religion in such precincts, you'll not find it. Jesus is just all right with them, but He's not the center of things. And while believers keep their focus on eternal salvation, they aren't necessarily ignoring the world they inhabit right now.

As always, Sullivan can be a fascinating read. He's worth a click. But he's not necessarily the go-to for taxonomy.

If what Archbishop Viganò claims is true... part two

In the face of continuing non-denial denials from the Vatican, Paul Rahe advances the story:

In the last few weeks, we have received further evidence of the power of the prelate-pederasts. A grand jury convened in Pennsylvania has revealed that Donald Wuerl, while bishop of Pittsburgh, covered up a priest-run child-porn ring and a host of other abuse cases involving something on the order of 100 priests, using the age-old trick of pay-offs and non-disclosure agreements. This did not stop him from being named archbishop of Washington DC and of being made a cardinal — which is to say, a Prince of the Church.

He was not even high on the list of possible nominees submitted by the Papal Nuncio. Someone powerful in the Vatican wanted him promoted, and Pope Francis responded to the news of his guilt not by ordering an investigation into Wuerl’s promotion, but with a dodge — by attributing collective guilt to us all.

We all are sinners, but collective guilt is something else entirely. But there's more -- back to Rahe:

In the meantime, Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume, former first counsellor at the apostolic nunciature in Washington D.C. has emerged to confirm that Viganò‘s predecessor had been instructed to confine McCarrick by Pope Benedict, that he had witnessed the confrontation with McCarrick, and that everything else that Viganò had said was true. To this, we must add that Viganò named names in the Vatican, specifying which high officials had obstructed the investigation into McCarrick’s conduct.

As all of this suggests, we are now at a turning point. The Lavender Mafia controls the papacy and the Vatican overall, and Pope Francis is packing the College of Cardinals, who will elect the next pope, with sympathizers. Pope Francis and his minions have now been exposed, named, and shamed; and there will be a civil war within the Roman Catholic Church.

Either Francis leaves and his supporters and clients are purged, or the church is conceded to those who for decades have sheltered and promoted the pederasts and those who regard their abuse of minors as an indifferent matter. It is time that those bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who are innocent of such conduct stand up and force a house-cleaning. In the meantime, the laity should speak up loud and clear.

I need to know more, but I'm definitely clearing my throat. There's a lot more at the link. It's worth your time.

If what Archbishop Viganò claims is true. . .

. . . the implications are enormous. Writing for The American Conservative, Rod Dreher sums it up:

If it’s true, though, then we have to see conservative Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s statement over the weekend as a nuclear bomb going off in the enemy’s capital.

Vigano said openly the kinds of things that Catholic conservatives have said privately for years. He has told tales out of school. Some defenders of Pope Francis are questioning Vigano’s motivations for doing so, but no questions about his reasons are remotely as important as this one: “Is Vigano telling the truth?”

A source reported to me recently that a prominent journalist in Francis’s circles had been saying that the McCarrick scandal had the potential to make the Church “implode.” I didn’t understand how that could happen, but now that Vigano has published, it makes sense. McCarrick is a condensed symbol of the entire web of sexual, ecclesial, and financial corruption spread throughout significant portions of the Catholic hierarchy.

The corruption began many years ago. We've been watching a modified limited hangout for the last twenty years. It never seems to end because too many people are still trying to avoid telling the truth. The linked piece is quite long and includes long passages from other sources, but it's worth your time.

The Faithful

We've been away a few days and there are countless things to discuss. Where to begin? We'll start here.

The primary order of business was bringing Fearless Maria to college. She is a student at Saint Louis University. She hasn't decided on a major yet, which seems wise inasmuch as she's only beginning her education tomorrow morning. SLU is a lot of things -- it's a mid-sized university with about 8,000 undergraduates. It's a Jesuit institution in a city with a large Catholic presence, but in a state that is part of the Bible Belt. It's a school that spends much of its time teaching its students practical things, with a heavy emphasis on STEM professions, especially in the medical field. It's an ambitious institution with a large endowment, north of a billion dollars, placing it in the top echelon of universities in the United States, although its renown does not match that of similar Catholic colleges such as Georgetown, Notre Dame, or Boston College. It lives in the considerable shadow of its neighbor five miles to the west, Washington University. It's a school that has benefited greatly from the pitched battles for students who seek to go to a top-echelon school, but fall just short for reasons that seem completely arbitrary. SLU lacks the glamor of Georgetown, but the substance of the education will be quite similar. It's also a long way from Minneapolis, every bit of nine hours by car. The city of St. Louis has its issues, but there are ample opportunities there. We are eager to see what happens in the next four years.

***

We returned to the Twin Cities on Friday and attended Mass at our home parish, St. Rose of Lima in Roseville. The presider at Mass was Archbishop Bernard Hebda, who was there to formally install our new pastor, Fr. Marc Paveglio. It was a lively Mass and it was a rare event to have the Archbishop in your house of worship. Hebda did not avoid the painful subject of clerical abuse, which continues to unfold. Many Catholics have turned away from the Church, but today's Gospel reading, from John 6, spoke directly to the question.

Many of Jesus' disciples who were listening said,

"This saying is hard; who can accept it?"

Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this,

he said to them, "Does this shock you?

What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending

to where he was before? 

It is the spirit that gives life,

while the flesh is of no avail.

The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.

But there are some of you who do not believe."

Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe

and the one who would betray him. 

And he said,

"For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me

unless it is granted him by my Father."

As a result of this,

many of his disciples returned to their former way of life

and no longer accompanied him.

Jesus then said to the Twelve, "Do you also want to leave?" 

Simon Peter answered him, "Master, to whom shall we go? 

You have the words of eternal life. 

We have come to believe

and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God."

Emphasis mine. Archbishop Hebda reminded us that we face the same question that Peter had to answer. The Church has made it easy, too easy, for people to leave, to go elsewhere. My sense is many Catholics are not becoming mainline Protestants, either, but rather turning away from organized religion entirely and, too often, turning away from God. I do not mean to diminish the horror of what too many priests and their superiors did to their victims, but the greater sin these men bear is that of turning away the faithful through their actions. Hebda's challenge, which Fr. Paveglio also shares, is to help us face the continuing reckoning, while also ensuring we do not lose faith, that we do not turn away from the promise of eternal life.

And the challenge continues, as today's headlines suggest:

In an extraordinary 11-page written testament, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States has accused several senior prelates of complicity in covering up Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s allegations of sexual abuse, and has claimed that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI but chose to repeal them.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2016, said that in the late 2000s, Benedict had “imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis” and that Viganò personally told Pope Francis about those sanctions in 2013.

Archbishop Viganò said in his written statement, simultaneously released to the Register and other media, (see full text below) that Pope Francis “continued to cover” for McCarrick and not only did he “not take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him” but also made McCarrick “his trusted counselor.”  Viganò said that the former archbishop of Washington advised the Pope to appoint a number of bishops in the United States, including Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark.

Archbishop Viganò, who said his “conscience dictates” that the truth be known as “the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy,” ended his testimony by calling on Pope Francis and all of those implicated in the cover up of Archbishop McCarrick’s abuse to resign.   

By the way, Cardinal Tobin, who has his own issues, replaced Archbishop Hebda, who had been in Newark before Pope Francis sent him to St. Paul-Minneapolis. But let's set that aside for the moment. The real question is this: what do we make of this sensational allegation? Francis, above all else, is supposed to be a reformer, but if Archbishop Viganò is correct, Francis is an active participant in the continuing scandal. And it also raises another question -- what other forces were at play when Benedict XVI stepped aside? 

I have struggled with Francis since he became Pope. In important ways, he's been helping us focus on first principles, especially the importance of joining faith and good works. But in other ways, he's muddied the waters. Discernment is a continuing activity for Catholics; it has to be, really, because unexamined faith withers away. 

***

I had planned to get to John McCain and the continuing Trump circus, but that's enough for this evening. We'll get back to that and more in the coming days.

Fog of War

We don't know why a guy opened fire on a country music contest in Las Vegas last night, but we do know it was awful. Various news reports indicate at least 20 people are dead and over 100 are injured, and that gunman opened fire on the crowd from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay complex on the Vegas strip. There are plenty of photos and video out there, some pretty gruesome. You can find them for yourself; I'll not point you there.

What I do know is prayer is always in order. So we'll start there and see where the story goes after that.

UPDATE (5:50 a.m.): Apparently the number killed is up to 50. More prayers.

Odd headline of the week

I have heard many writers complain about the headline a publication chooses for their article. This headline from the Star Tribune might be the worst one I've seen in a while:

So what does this mean?

If people in one place feel unsafe, no one else gets to feel safe? Is that what this means? We don't yet know who attacked a mosque in Bloomington over the weekend. I wish people wouldn't attack mosques, or synagogues, or churches of any sort. It happens, though. Being a member of a faith community means you have faith. I'm not sure the headline writers at the Star Tribune understand that.

Silent Cal says it well

Calvin Coolidge was president on July 4, 1926, the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On the occasion he gave a speech in Philadelphia. It's well worth revisiting in its entirety, but I do want to call one particular passage to your attention, because it's a reminder of the challenges ahead:

Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the Colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are not nearly as religious people in 2016 as we were in 1926. One ought not conclude that those who are not religious do not have a faith, however. They do. Such faith may not rest upon the principles Coolidge discusses, however. We'd best be checking the roots.

The Climate Kabuki

Writing for the American Interest, Jason Willick makes a key point about the scuttling of the Paris agreement:

Like many Trump-era debates, the President’s actions on Paris are best understood through the lens of what we (following Tyler Cowen) have called “placebo politics”—elevating or reducing the status of this or that group through symbolic actions that won’t have much if any material impact on policy. President Trump’s repudiation of the agreement falls into this category: It delights his nationalistic base and sends his internationalist-minded critics into paroxysms of rage and despair—all without actually doing anything, because the Paris agreement consists simply of voluntary, unenforceable emissions pledges that are already being flouted.

All religious movements bewail apostates. And on an operational level, faith in the efficacy of climate agreements, and treaties generally, requires belief in the perfectibility of human nature, and on the self-proclaimed genius of those who negotiate such things. Back to Willick:

The drama of the Paris climate accords, then, amounts to a portrait in miniature of our political moment. A smug establishment indulged in vacuous, photo-op politics that doesn’t get us any closer to solving our major problems but pleases donors and nonprofits and makes the great and good feel even better about themselves. An angry coalition of people who felt that their status was declining reacted against this half-hearted phoniness by indulging in a placebo politics of their own—raising their own status by nihilistically tearing down the other side. Trump’s decision today doesn’t make the U.S. better off, but it probably doesn’t make us much worse off, either.

That mostly seems right to me, but I do have one quibble -- are we really talking about nihilism in this context? I don't really know too many nihilists -- do you? And as Mark Steyn has said, when we are talking about climate treaty supporters, we are talking about people who believe, in the main, that we cannot control political borders, but we can control the heavens. Clearly there's faith involved.

Events are again in the saddle

Not much content on the blog lately. While there are any number of things to discuss, I don't imagine I will be writing about them for a few days. I'm hoping to return to regular blogging soon.

I would throw out one thought that I read recently. Condescension is not persuasion.

Confirmation Day

Fearless Maria gets confirmed at the Cathedral of St. Paul:

Right in front of the bishop

If you've never been to the Cathedral of St. Paul, you really should visit it if you get a chance. It is a magnificent Beaux Arts structure that was completed just over a hundred years ago, mostly the product of the persistence of Archbishop John Ireland and the wallet of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate whose mansion home is down the street.

I've lived in the Twin Cities for over 23 years and I've only been to the Cathedral three times -- once for the ordination of a family friend, another as part of teaching a Boy Scout merit badge, and yesterday. As a symbol of the majesty of the Church, the Cathedral is unsurpassed, at least in the Midwest. It's a subjective judgment, but to my eye the Cathedral of St. Paul is a significantly more impressive structure than Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. It certainly has a better location -- Holy Name Cathedral sits on Wabash Avenue and is part of the grid pattern of streets in the area, while the Cathedral in St. Paul has a commanding perch on top of Cathedral Hill.

Confirmation is a hugely important sacrament in the Catholic Church, as those who are confirmed are full members of the Church. The issue for many Catholics is that they don't take that membership as seriously as they ought to. Following Jesus means putting aside your own desires and listening to something other than the sirens of the larger world. It's never easy to do. In his homily, Bishop Cozzens spoke of his own challenges as a young person and how he struggled to hear God's voice. It's possible that someone in the group pictured above could have a religious vocation some day. It's a path not often chosen, but as we've seen throughout the past year, lay people within the Church play a large role in faith formation as well. The challenge in the bishop's message is to listen more closely and find the role God plays in our lives.

I was confirmed a long time ago, back in 1979. In those days, the practice in our diocese was that Bishop would come to your parish, instead of traveling to the cathedral. I'm glad that we go to the Cathedral now; it serves as a reminder of the glories of the past, along with the challenges ahead. We don't have to rehearse the many scandals that priests and other religious have caused and the tremendous pain involved; it is an ongoing challenge and represents a stain that is impossible to remove. We build cathedrals to celebrate glories of God. We emerge from the cathedrals to find a world where God is always present, but also a world where it is often difficult to see the hand of God or the workings of the Holy Spirit. Those who were confirmed yesterday face that challenge today. Those who love and support those who were confirmed have the same challenge.

Martyrs

It's not terribly difficult to be a Christian in the United States. In other parts of the world, it's liable to get you you killed:

A suicide blast claimed by Islamist militants ripped through crowds of families celebrating Easter at a park in the city of Lahore on Sunday, killing at least 70 people and injuring an additional 300 in an attack the jihadists said had deliberately targeted Christians.

The attack was carried out by a suicide bomber in the parking lot of Gulshan e-Iqbal Park around 6:30 p.m., transforming a joyful scene of picnicking families into a spectacle of chaos and horror. Many children were among the dead, local officials said.

No surprise on the perpetrators, either:

A spokesman for the Jamaat ul-Ahrar militant group, which is an offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban, asserted responsibility in a telephone interview on Sunday.

“It was our people who attacked the Christians in Lahore, celebrating Easter,” the spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said. “It’s our message to the government that we will carry out such attacks again until sharia Islamic law is imposed in the country.”

Meanwhile, in Yemen:

The Islamic State committed a grisly Good Friday commemoration, crucifying a Catholic priest. 

The Rev. Thomas Uzhunnalil, a Salesian priest, was kidnapped in Yemen in early March during a raid on a nursing home run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.

His execution by the Islamist sect, using the same method used by the Romans on Jesus and marked on Good Friday every year, was confirmed at the Easter Vigil Mass by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna.

Father Uzhunnalil was a native of India and had been the object of both prayers and diplomatic efforts since the March 4 raid where 16 Christian nuns and nurses were killed.

It won't do to pretend that Christians aren't capable of terror themselves. You could ask Lord Mountbatten about that one, to use just one example. We are called to be better than we are, but as sinners we regularly fall short. What we rarely face, at least in the West, is the possibility that we might die for our faith. As we enter into the Easter season, it's worth remembering that martyrdom isn't an abstraction.