The American Nightmare?

Cardinal J Francis Stafford

I do not know how good Cardinal Stafford was when he was in active service, but from what I read around one can easily think he was (and is) one of the good guys. The US Cardinal, now 80 years old, has given an interview saying he weeps for his country after the devastations brought by the big societal changes of the Sixties and Seventies, devastations that have left him “deeply disillusioned” and “alienated” from his own country.

The man is actually old enough to personally remember the Fifties and give us all a reminder out of his own life of how big the difference is between a Christian and a secularised Country. He also makes a couple of rather intelligent considerations as to the cult of “freedom” as a founding value  in the United States, a concept which can degenerate in the idea that killing unborn babies is in the end a matter of “freedom”. One hears what the Cardinal says, though I would also observe for almost 200 years of the United States’ history this was not the case, so the problem might well lie elsewhere.

It must, though, be saddening and refreshing at the same time for an US Citizen to read of a Cardinal simply looking in dismay at the state his own Country has reduced itself to. It if can be of any help, I can’t say countries like Italy are so much different, though in a way they still are: the militant atheism is still rather absent and most people still have a varnish of Catholicism, but the mentality isn’t so much different and abortion is legal over there, too. The concept that freedom is freedom to do what is good and not freedom to do what one pleases is, for example, rather poorly spread, because the local priest is more likely to talk about social issues.

Kudos for the Cardinal on this occasion, though. We need more like him, and we need them assertive enough as to make it to wider circles than the readers of the “Catholic News Service”.

Mundabor