A few years ago there was a short patriotic address delivered on the 4th of July.
The speaker talked about our heritage of freedom, how precious it is, and how jealously we ought to guard it. The people applauded when he was through.
Suddenly as the applause died away, a voice spoke from the crowd: “Why don’t you tell them the whole truth?” Startled, everyone looked around. The words had come from a young man in a tweed jacket with angry eyes. He might have been a college student, a poet, a Peace Corps worker, almost anything.
“Why don’t you tell them that freedom is the most dangerous gift anyone can receive? Why don’t you tell them that it’s a two-edged sword that will destroy us unless we learn how to use it and soon. Why don’t you make them see that we face a greater challenge than our ancestors ever did? They only had to fight for freedom. WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT”.
When I was born in 1943 World War II was raging in Europe and in the Pacific. By the time I was three or four years old I realized that Catholics and Christians were killing other Catholics and Christians throughout Europe. Twenty million Catholic/Christians killed one another in World War II. Even as a child I wondered what faith and going to church was all about, as Catholics bombed churches and killed one another. “What kind of a religion was I born into?” I asked myself as a child.
Adolf Hitler took control of a Catholic/Christian democratic Germany in order to assert the superior Aryan race and make Germany great again for 1,000 years. After the war, as a child I saw so many vivid pictures of what he did to the Jews – piles of six million dead bodies and haunting faces of another five million Jewish prisoners in the death camps. Those pictures were an influence on me to go into the priesthood and to try and make this world a better world. These images are re-lived in me today as I see starving/malnourished children in Catholic/Christian Haiti where I am trying to do some good as well as in Gaza, Ukraine and the Sudan.
In 2017 I spent two weeks with the US-China Catholic Association touring parishes, churches, seminaries and schools in China. If I wanted to find out what was going on in the world, I had to clandestinely use a VPN app to see what CNN was reporting. As I did so, I sat in my hotel room afraid that the Chinese police would break into my room at any moment and haul me off to jail for doing what was illegal – trying to find the truth and the facts of what is happening in our world. There are 1.4 billion people in China who must live this way every day.
You and I and everyone in America have a lot to consider and pray over this 4th of July and do all we can to preserve our freedom and our democracy. The young man may well have had it right:
“Why don’t you tell them that freedom is the most dangerous gift anyone can receive? Why don’t you tell them that it’s a two-edged sword that will destroy us unless we learn how to use it and soon. Why don’t you make them see that we face a greater challenge than our ancestors ever did? They only had to fight for freedom. WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT”.
Thanks to Karolina Kaboompics for the photo.
What are YOUR thoughts about the young man’s comments?
WHEN YOU RUN ALONE, IT’S CALLED A RACE. WHEN GOD RUNS WITH YOU, IT’S CALLED GRACE!!
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