Last week, a madman opened fire on Catholic schoolchildren attending Mass at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, killing two and wounding close to twenty more before taking his own life. It’s a sad reminder of how American Christians need to prepare for martyrdom.
Of course, the usual suspects in the Democratic Party and the legacy media couldn’t wait until the smoke had cleared to try to score political points on the back of this tragedy. On cue, they denounced comforting offers of “thoughts and prayers” as useless and called for real action to prevent further loss of innocent life (by which, of course, they mean further curtailing the rights of law-abiding Americans under the Second Amendment).
Action does need to be taken, but not the kind of action Democrats want. For decades, our nation has been mired in what Pope St. John Paul II called the “culture of death.” Breaking free from its cold grasp requires a spiritual re-awakening, something our cultural masters on the left seek to prevent at all costs.
A Grave Diagnosis
In his 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae,” John Paul II used the phrase “culture of death” to describe policies “actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency.” In such a society, any individual that is perceived as burdensome is first dehumanized and then targeted for destruction:
Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated.
The roots of this culture lie in the systematic removal of God from public life, which is a hallmark of the secular left. When this happens, humanity suffers “the eclipse of the sense of God,” which in turn leads to the “tendency to lose the sense of man, of his dignity and his life.”
In a society without God at its center, men become like demons and create a hell on Earth in which, as the ancient historian Thucydides wrote in his Melian Dialogue, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The Horror of Human Sacrifice
The chief policies driving our culture of death are legalized abortion and euthanasia, two evils that the church has condemned from its very founding. Though the left cloaks its support for these sins in the beautiful trappings of the word “freedom,” John Paul II revealed the ugly truth in his encyclical:
To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom: “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34).
The first principle of the left’s anti-life ideology is that human life has no value unless it is “wanted,” whether by the parents of an unborn child or by the elderly or infirm adult himself. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the words of Jesus Christ: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
There is a critical connection between the tragic deaths in Minneapolis and the policies pushed by the left, though they refuse to acknowledge it. You cannot promote killing inconvenient children in the womb as “empowering” and killing inconvenient adults in a hospital as “merciful” and then plead innocent when deranged people take that dark philosophy just one small step further. In both cases, adults decide to “play God” by killing people without offering them a choice or the chance to mount a defense.
Opening and Closing Pandora’s Box
As the left has removed the living God from society, it has sought to replace Him with a dead idol that I have called the “Church of Id.” The Minneapolis shooter was a devoted follower of the corrupt creed of this faith, which claims that human beings can perfect themselves. Rejecting the divine truths he reportedly learned at Annunciation Catholic School, he sought refuge in transgenderism, which is itself a denial of man’s God-given dignity because it defies the biological order established by the Creator and replaces it with the individual’s will to power.
Inevitably, though, such self-worship leads to self-loathing and eventually despair. The shooter’s manifesto reveals how his hatred of life poisoned him and his relationships. When he finally realized that he could never be a woman, his pride would not let him repent and come back to God as countless other sinners have done. Instead, in his rage, he made the awful decision to take as many innocent young lives as possible down with him. When he wrote “Where is your God?” on one of his ammunition magazines, he was blasphemously claiming God’s power for himself one last time.
To date, the Democrats and their corporate media lapdogs have stopped short of calling the shooter a “victim” like they did with the Nashville Covenant School shooter a few years back. Yet they are both victims of the societal damage the leftists have wrought in their desire to free themselves of God and His truth.
When John Paul II returned to communist-controlled Poland in 1979 to preach the gospel, he attracted millions of spiritually starved Poles back to Christ’s banner. When they chanted “We want God” in Kraków’s Victory Square, it was the beginning of the end for the false idol of Marxism in Eastern Europe and Russia. Similarly, if our country is to truly be made great again, Americans of all faith traditions must rise up and defy the secularist left’s culture of death that made last week’s tragedy and untold thousands more like it both possible and acceptable.