Malignancy

O God, whose praise the martyred Innocents on this day confessed, not by speaking, but by dying: destroy in us all the evils of sin, that our life also may proclaim in deeds Thy faith which our tongues profess. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost . . .

(Collect, Feast of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs)

I live but ten miles and am only nine hours removed from one of the most dreadful and murderous school shootings in American history, which, in its violent annals, is saying something.  In what almost defies belief, according to Associated Press:

NEWTOWN, Conn. — A man opened fire Friday inside two classrooms at the Connecticut elementary school where his mother worked as a teacher, killing 26 people, including 20 children, as youngsters cowered in corners and closets and trembled helplessly to the sound of gunfire reverberating through the building.  The killer, armed with two handguns, committed suicide at the school and another person was found dead at a second scene, bringing the toll to 28, authorities said.

This tragedy, like so many before it, is exceptionally horrifying:  those murdered were mostly kindergarteners -- kindergarteners.  Moreover, as I am sure will be the case for many who live in my community of Western Connecticut, it is also particularly personal to me -- I know someone very well whose little guy was among those senselessly slaughtered today.  Like him, I too am a father of a kindergartener.  I weep for him and his wife and all of the families of those little ones.  The horrifying, no, stupefying reaction is one that keeps screaming no, no, no.  Why would  -- how could -- anyone do this to tiny children hardly removed from toddlerhood.

My heart is so full of brokenness.

As I drove home from work tonight -- with a dull numbness pervading -- I knew that the intelligentsia would take this occasion to begin a campaign against guns yet again.  In the sickness I felt at processing this awful tragedy and filled with remorse for the victims and their families, I was angry at the very idea.  Keep in mind, while I own guns as much as any red-blooded American man ought to, I would not consider the Second Amendment -- and the threats to it -- as something that keeps me up at night.  While I certainly understand and support that the problem in this country is not lawful gun ownership and, further, that we should fear governments that monopolizes coercive force and power to such an extent that private gun ownership is outlawed.  In a free society, citizens should be able to possess arms if they so choose.  All of that said, the rights of gun owners is just something I haven't cared about that much.

Much to my expectation, I amazed at the callous speed at which the New York Times posted an editorial on seizing on these deaths to attack gun rights.  The Gray Lady opined:

Each slaughter of innocents seems to get more appalling. A high school. A college campus. A movie theater. People meeting their congresswoman. A shopping mall in Oregon, just this Tuesday. Today, a kindergarten classroom.... The assault weapons ban enacted under President Clinton was deficient and has expired. Mr. Obama talked about the need for “common sense” gun control after the movie theater slaughter in Aurora, Colo., and he hinted during the campaign that he might support a new assault weapons ban, presumably if someone else introduced it.... The more that we hear about gun control and nothing happens, the less we can believe it will ever come. Certainly, it will not unless Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders show the courage to make it happen.

This editorial was published online less than eight hours after the shootings:  It is almost as if this were a canned editorial -- much like obituaries written in advance for elderly celebrities and politicians.   It is as sickening and craven as the lawyer who hands out his business cards at the scene of the accident.

It is not a gun-rights absolutism that infuriates me about these all-too predictable liberal haranguings; rather I am sickened by the thought that the sanctimonious censurers are themselves to blame.  While I am loathe to write it, maybe we have too many guns, maybe.  But what happened in Newtown cannot be blamed on guns anymore than Julius Caesar's assassination can be blamed on knives.  No, greater cultural forces of violence and amorality are at play here.  For example, as most reasonably literate Catholics know, the editorial page of The New York Times is reliably on the forefront of every wrong moral turn we have taken as a society for the last fifty years.  Her almost perfectly wrong moral sagacity has created the very cultural conditions in which a widespread nihilism has gripped our nations' young people.  She is the one at war with God.  She is the one that approvingly counsels free sexual liaisons and homosexuality.  She is the one that applauds a revolting culture of birth control and abortion.  She is the one that lauds obscenity as artistic expression.  She -- is the one posits -- when one takes in whole the entire breadth of her moral philosophy -- a relativistic and nihilistic worldview.  And more than guns -- far more than guns -- what is more important here is the cultural malignancy that must be present that would allow the callousness of such a shooter to exist in the first place.

What did the great Gray Lady think -- in exercising her counter-magesterium -- will come of her embrace of this nihilism?   The generation of young people coming of age have been fed a steady diet of base and gratuitous violence and sexual imagery -- in movies, television, the internet and in video games.  They have been raised in a cultural atmosphere that rejects any standard of absolute truth -- including right and wrong.  They have been taught that life -- including their own -- has no intrinsic value such that killing babies in utero is a celebrated right and choice.  Indeed, young people have been told their entire lives that science has shown that we are merely more developed animals in the Darwinian sense -- devoid, as it were, of genuine moral culpability because, after all, what is that anyway.  Our young people have been educated systematically as if atheism were right.  Kids are not stupid:  a culture of nihilism produces nihilists -- and only nihilists have the amorality to do something like this.  Only time will tell perhaps why this twenty-year old miscreant took the lives of these angels but he lived and breathed in a society whose masters relentless put forward that his life -- and the lives of everyone around -- had no real value.  As we are all creatures of our time, so was he.

So instead of her tired and predictable screed in which she hypocritically lays the blame somewhere else, this Jezebel ought to pick up a mirror and deeply gaze therein.  She just might see what part she played in giving birth to the very monsters of which she now disowns.  Yet, she does not -- and will not -- and like Lucifer, her father, she applies all of her considerable gifts and wiles to ensnare more and more in her diabolic lies.  May shame overwhelm her.

So I find myself again with mouth agape -- I find myself rending my clothes bewailing yet another slaughter of innocents.  Lord, Lord, comfort those who suffer grievously in this most terrible and wicked slaughter.  Lord, you who beckoned the children to come to you, admit these littles ones to your  heavenly abode.  Lord, give us, the Church Militant, the courage and heroism to fearlessly proclaim that which is right and oppose that which is wrong -- all the while building up your Kingdom on Earth. 

In this Valley of Tears,

Mother Most Pure, Pray for Us.