I’ll begin by saying that I believe God is at work even when morally disordered men are seemingly in command. It is God who is moving the story of the Body of Christ forward. We, all Christians in the most recent few centuries, have been following our own inclinations rather than paying attention to the Creator to understand what could be the meaning of all we’re learning about Creation, including our own human natures. Yet, there is enough freedom of movement in God’s way of telling this story that we, as individuals and communities, can damn ourselves by playing our roles wrongly. That God uses our cowardice and faithlessness to His own purpose doesn’t lessen the seriousness of the crimes we commit to serve our own worldly purposes, even when those purposes are for the benefit of institutions originally founded to serve God and the Body of Christ.
As Dante’s pilgrim found out at the very beginning of the Inferno, we can travel straight while God’s path curves away from us. We should pay attention not to our own inner orientation but rather to that path or more generally to what is going on in the world God created, the world which is the story of the Body of Christ as it came to be and now develops. In particular, Christians of the modern West would be wise to distrust any good feelings which conveniently serve our individual or communal purposes, most especially the purposes of our political and economic communities, but also those of our ecclesiastical and educational and charitable communities.
I’ve been listening to occasional ads on the radio station of the Hartford Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. These ads are a bit of a blur in my mind at the moment, but they are intended to direct listeners to one of the American government’s retirement planning websites—I think that of the Department of Labor but I hardly care about that detail. These ads make a joke of anyone silly enough (or morally well-ordered enough?) to put their trust in their families or local communities rather than in the government in Washington, DC. I’ll merely note the Biblical warning about not being able to serve two masters; the modern centralized powers, including the government of the United States, didn’t become masters competing with God only when they began to more directly humiliate the bishops by using legislation and programs supported by those bishops to attack traditional Christian moral practices.
Then, there is the ongoing horror of the destruction of ancient Christian peoples by the Western powers (rapidly becoming the comic non-powers) or their lovely allies such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar or the terrorist non-organization called Al-CIAda by knowledgeable observers. The most recent atrocity and cover-up I’m aware of is discussed by the reliable and insightful Srdja Trifkovic in his recent article, Latest Massacre of Syrian Christians Covered Up in the West, where we can read:
When a false-flag atrocity occurs of which Muslims are the purported victims, the United States goes to war to save them—the January 1999 stage-managed “massacre” at Racak, in Kosovo, being a classic example. When all-too-real massacres of Christians by Muslims take place, they are unreported in the Western media and uncommented upon by Western politicians.
“Slaughter in Syria: 45 Christians Killed by Islamists in Sadad and Thrown into Mass Graves,” CatholicOnline reported on November 5. The facts of the case are obvious from the rebels’ own shockingly gruesome footage ( here with English subtitles) and from the government forces’ initial video report after liberating the town… [Reader beware. The footage is gruesome as noted; for example, the insurgents kick the bloody corpses of Christians while calling them “Bashar’s dogs.” These are the same rebels supported by the allies of the US government who buy lots of American weaponry and more from the US and at least weakly supported by the US government in more direct ways.]
We can read on to learn:
Forty-five innocent civilians were martyred for no reason, and among them several women and children, many thrown into mass graves. Other civilians were threatened and terrorized: thirty were wounded and ten are still missing. For one week, 1,500 families were held as hostages and human shields, among them children, the elderly, the young, men and women… All the houses of Sadad were robbed and property looted. The churches are damaged and desecrated, deprived of old books and precious furniture. Schools, government buildings, municipal buildings have been destroyed, along with the post office, the hospital and the clinic. What happened in Sadad is the largest massacre of Christians in Syria and the second in the Middle East, after the one in the Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Iraq, in 2010.
“We have shouted aid to the world but no one has listened to us,” [Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan of Homs and Hama] concluded. “Where is the Christian conscience? Where is human consciousness? Where are my brothers? I think of all those who are suffering today in mourning and discomfort. We ask everyone to pray for us.”
Prayers they might get. In the same intercessionary prayers in which we American Catholics pray for the American soldiers who are being used to bring “peace” by overthrowing non-subservient governments in the oil-rich regions of the world. We might better pray for the souls of those young men and women (???) fighting in the service of a government recognized as evil only when it does something to impact the self-images or checkbooks of the American Catholic bishops or other American Christian leaders. I should add that those who see some true good possibilities in the Islamic peoples should realize the American government and its allies do all they can to destroy any movements towards peace and tolerance in favor of the sorts of men who kill unarmed human beings in the name of serving Allah. All in all, those despicable figures are a bit like those Americans who knowingly kill unarmed human beings (such as the residents of Baghdad in 2003) in the name of serving the modern central powers such as the nation-state.
Western Christians aren’t trying to serve God or to become part of the Body of Christ; they are trying to make the best deal possible, and to keep peace, with the devils which are the central powers of the Western world. And some who go to Christian churches on Sundays have integrated themselves into those devils.