Memorial Day

I suppose it's a sign of age, but I still can't get used to this Monday holiday thing. For my younger readers, assuming I have any, the change came about in 1968 when Congress passed the cleverly named Uniform Monday Holiday Act. As a result, in 1971 Memorial Day began to be celebrated on the last Monday of May. 

I much preferred it when Memorial Day always fell on May 30, no matter what. It seemed far more sacred when it didn't just mean the third day of a three-day weekend. In some respects, and to a large portion of our citizenry, Memorial Day has lost its meaning. This morning, for example, I watched as a stream of young, college-age kids were interviewed on some beach. For most Memorial Day simply meant another day to party, instead of a special day to thank those who gave their lives so they could enjoy theirs. 

I really can't envision an easy way to educate the younger generations on such things since our school systems probably teach that our dead soldiers, sailors, and marines were just a collection of militaristic racists, fascists, and Islamophobes. Too many of their parents haven't a clue either, so maybe it's up to the grandparents, while we're still around. 

My opinion? Get rid of all those three-day weekends. The birthdays of George Washington (February 22) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12) got dumped in favor of the insipid Presidents Day, now celebrated on the third Monday of February. I would guess a vast majority of American under the age of 40 don't know that Presidents Day celebrates the lives of these two men: Washington and Lincoln. A few years ago, one of our soup kitchen guests told me that Presidents Day celebrated "Obama's birthday." She was more than a little disappointed when I informed her of its actual purpose.

And then there's Columbus Day...Yes, we still celebrate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas. Originally celebrated on October 12, it was moved to the second Monday of October. 

Of course, the politically correct crowd considers Columbus to be guilty of genocide and lump him together with such pleasant people as Adolph Hitler. Although it's still, thankfully, a national holiday, many states have stopped celebrating Columbus Day, replacing it with such holidays as Indigenous Peoples Day or Discoverers Day or Native American Day. I'm sorry, but I'll stick with Columbus. And do you know something else? I'm glad the Europeans came here and took over, bringing Christianity with them. Yes, they weren't always kind to the natives, but in truth the natives had a history of being far more brutal to each other. This doesn't excuse those who mistreated the indigenous folks, but like today too many didn't practice their Christian faith. Anyway, come October 12, I will raise a glass of good Italian wine in a salute to that intrepid explorer.

This year, because the nation will celebrate Memorial Day on Monday, May 25, and since May 30 falls on Saturday, I've decided to celebrate Memorial Week instead. 

I will thank God first for the many men I knew well who gave their lives for us -- men like Henry Wright and Bart Creed, just two of many of my Naval Academy classmates (1967) who lost their lives during the Vietnam conflict. I'll also remember Ron Zinn, my brother's West Point classmate (1962) and roommate who died in combat in Vietnam. This week I will pray for the souls of these men, as well as all the other valiant men I knew who sacrificed their lives for our freedom. 

USNA Class (1967) Service Deaths

I will also thank God for those in my family who served this country honorably but are no longer with us. Since none of them died in combat, I realize it's more fitting to celebrate their lives on Veterans Day. But each of these men were more than willing to give up their lives for their country. I think of my grandfather, Sgt. John McCarthy, who served in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and then took part in the rescue mission to Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. I think, too, of my Uncle Bill Dorley, who served in the Navy aboard an Atlantic destroyer during World War One; and my father, Colonel John McCarthy, who served in Europe during and after World War Two; and my brother, Major Jeff McCarthy, who, like me, served in Vietnam. 

I ask you all to call to mind those you knew who gave their lives so that we might live ours in freedom. Thank God for them this week. Pray for their souls, that our loving God take them into His eternal embrace. Jesus said it best the night before He died: 

"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" [Jn 15:13].

And remember, too, that freedom is a precious commodity. Too many of our politicians have little or no respect for freedom or for those who died defending it. Keep that in mind when you vote this November.

Pray for our nation this week.

A Word from the Persecuted

If you're a Christian, and especially if you're a Catholic, you're being persecuted. Maybe you didn't know this, but it's true. Even here in the good ol' freedom-loving USA, we are undergoing all kinds of persecution, some subtle and some not so subtle. We're not being killed or imprisoned, at least not yet, but there are other forms of persecution, some already in place and others planned.

Ironically, those responsible for much of this persecution justify it based on a very strange interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It's really remarkable how those plain words written by our nation's founding fathers have in the minds of many of today's supposedly educated intelligentsia come to mean exactly the opposite of their original intent.

If it's been a while since you last read those first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, I suggest you take a few minutes to read them again. Here's a link: Bill of Rights, and here are those plain words of the First Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I'm certain it's no accident that the first right, the first freedom, addressed by the founders was freedom of religion. Note that the words clearly are not intended to protect us from religion, but to protect us from the government, to ensure the free practice of religion without government interference.

Yes, religion was the number one freedom in the minds of the founders. Only after guaranteeing our religious freedom did they go on to enumerate freedom of speech and the press, of the right to assemble peaceably, and the right to petition the government.

James Madison clearly believed that freedom of conscience was a right that no government could viloate:

"More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man's religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact."

It was a belief upheld as well by Abraham Lincoln who stated:

"That the guarantee of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the Catholic than to the Protestant; and that all attempts to abridge or interfere with these rights, either of Catholic or Protestant, directly or indirectly...shall ever have our most effective opposition."

And yet today, Catholic charities have been forced by state governments to cease running adoption agencies that, in many instances, have have operated for over a century because they will not place children with homosexual "parents". This, of course, is a direct abridgement of the rights of conscience and religious belief of Catholics and violates the Constitution in both letter and spirit. This, folks, is religious persecution, plain and simple. Yes, "Conscience in the most sacred of all property..."

In the same way, across the country politicians are floating legislation and/or executive orders to demand that all physicians and other medical personnel be forced to refer patients for abortions or contraceptive services even when such actions would violate the religious beliefs (i.e., the rights of conscience) of the physician involved. I can think of no more direct violation of one's conscience. Can you imagine the uproar if the state tried to force a physician to perform an execution? Well, for the believing Catholic who accepts the Church's magisterial teaching on the inherent evil of abortion, forcing a doctor to participate even peripherally in an abortion is really no different. And again, "the guarantee of the rights of conscience...is most sacred and inviolable."

As an ordained permanent deacon in the Catholic Church I have witnessed many marriages over the years, but always between a man and a woman. The Catholic Church does not accept same-sex marriages and never will, and yet homosexual activists are strongly lobbying state and local governments to demand that all those who are permitted by the state to"perform" marriages -- and that would include Catholic priests and deacons -- also perform same-sex marriages. As one deacon friend said to me recently, "I'll be damned if I'll ever do that." He expected his words to be taken literally.

Contrary to the clear intent of the Constitution, students have been prohibited from the free exercise of their religion in school for 50 years, despite the fact that prior to the Supreme Court's June 1963 decision prayer had been an active part of schooling throughout the country for almost 200 years. Suddenly it becomes illegal to pray in school because a group of robed ideologues decide the people have been wrong for two centuries.

I'm afraid that very few of today's politicians or judges still believe, if they ever believed, that in the United States the people are sovereign, that the government  "derives their just powers from the consent of the governed",  and that they are part of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people."  

Political correctness has already run amok in Western Europe and Canada, and led to far more severe persecution of Christians, including fines and prison sentences, than we have yet to encounter here. But I have little doubt we will soon see similar things in this country. Keep your eyes and eras open, folks. And when you see such acts of religious persecution, raise your voices, let those elected to represent you know that they won't represent you for very long unless they fight against these overt and subtle violations of our Constitution.

Jesus didn't tell us to sit on our hands. We are to "Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." And we should certainly not allow Caesar to lay claim to what is God's. Over the past twenty centuries, millions of Christian martyrs have given their lives to prevent that from happening.


Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:The Great State of Florida