Merry Christmas: Law, Christmas, and Human Dignity
Merry Christmas. Perhaps you presume Christmas is over, it now being the day after. You might also wonder what a column about the law has to do with Christmas. The first issue is the easy one, for Christmas extends through the Epiphany. Hence those French hens, leapers leaping, drummers drumming and the joy of Mitch Miller singing until the celebration of the Epiphany, January 6. So keep the tree up and the carols playing.
If you are anywhere near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you can see the most beautiful proof that Christmas extends beyond December 25. Visit the Immaculate Heart of Mary church in Polish Hill or St. Stanislaus Kostka in the Strip District for any mass this week. You will see one of the most beautiful scenes of Christmas. These churches were built by Polish immigrants, and reverent beauty is found there in ways I don’t have the skill to describe.
Consider one visitor to St. Stanislaus Kosta, who later became one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. On July 20, 1969, Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla went to the church and prayed. As he knelt in prayer in Pittsburgh, Wojtyla was already a revolutionary who was shaking the communist order from behind the Iron Curtain, years before he became Pope John Paul II. Anyone who doubts the transformational power of faith might read George Weigel’s The End and the Beginning.
Wojtyla used the power of human dignity to expose the indignity of totalitarianism. His evangelization about individual dignity began decades before he became pope, and well before he visited this beautiful church in Pittsburgh.
All of which takes us to the snowy Russian wilderness on Christmas Day in 1919. Evil was on the march, seeking a new foothold in the world — a foothold it would gain, and murder millions in the process. Solzhenitsyn, the eyewitness, called the Soviet gulags a “human sewage disposal system.” The economic philosophy of socialism constructed equally bankrupt systems that devoured human lives at a pace the world had never seen.
And thus, in a cold Russian forest on Christmas Day, some who understood the madness about to engulf their nation paused to reflect on the alternative. The father of PJ Media’s own Hans von Spakovsky was there, and if you read nothing else this season, read this Wall Street Journal story, A Christmas Tale – 1919:
One woman and 16 men, including my father, decided they would try to get out another way. In the middle of a very snowy night, they skied through the Bolshevik lines toward Finland. . . .
With the dark veil of night covering them, they lit the candles and their small pine became a Christmas tree. The scene seemed almost mystical to my father — 17 human beings sitting in the glow of a makeshift Christmas tree in the thicket of a primeval forest. They forgot about the frost of the northern wintry night, their exhaustion, and their anxiety about the future.
No more hatred remained in their hearts, my father told us — only love for God and men alike, friends and enemies. They said a prayer, sang some Christmas hymns, and then sat silently, thinking about what they had lost and were leaving behind, including their families. (My father never saw his mother or his father again.) The candles burned out, and it became dark again around them.
So again, the question, what does Christmas have to do with the law?
In Luke, we find the answer, and perhaps the real meaning of Christmas:
And now a lawyer stood up and, to test him, asked, “Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
He said to him, “What is written in the Law? What is your reading of it?”
He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus said to him, “You have answered right, do this and life is yours.”
Bloody events this Christmas remind us the same evil that sent Hans’ father skiing to Finland still prowls the world. What better example could exist than Nigerian Muslims bombing Catholic churches during Christmas services? A beautiful celebration of Christ’s birth, of peace and goodwill toward men, was destroyed by murderers. President Obama called the murders “senseless,” though I suspect there was a great deal of sense behind them from the murderers’ point of view. Murder of the faithful has been a favorite tactic since Rome.
Since we have a few more weeks to celebrate Christmas, it isn’t too late for me to mention a Christmas movie that I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere. It doesn’t involve Santa, reindeer, or even Bethlehem. But if you’ve read this far, you’ll understand. It is Lilies of the Field with Sidney Poitier, who won the Oscar for Best Actor for playing Homer Smith in 1963. The movie is about treating others the way you want to be treated, in both subtle and obvious ways. It is a delight in so many other ways.
I don’t expect Lilies of the Field is terribly well known in some corners of Nigeria this Christmas.
I am old enough (barely) to remember the starving children with bloated bellies of late 1960s Biafra, when the Christian Ibos (Igbos) made a decision to secede from the rest of Nigeria. A siege starved them into submission. To this day, the religious dimension of that civil war has never been mentioned by a leftist press too eager to make excuses for Jihadists.
It is time for the Ibos to secede again. They will face death again should they try. But they face even more horrible death if they do not, as these bombings show.
Best they try to hold on a little while longer, and make their new bid for secession only after Obama is gone. For truly he will betray them as he has betrayed everyone else.
Lucky Me! Lilies of the Field has 5 days to go on Hulu.com – http://www.hulu.com/watch/199885/lilies-of-the-field – guess I’ll watch it tonight.
Those murders may have been more “senseless” to Obama and his ilk than that statement indicates on the surface. How does political correctness make sense of utter stupidity from perhaps the two most protected groups in the world when it comes to making excuses for their failings by blaming those failings on the racism of others, black folks and Muslims.
Nigeria is my poster child country for the next great disaster in Africa, from sheer overpopulation. It’s difficult to sometimes tell when tensions stem from simple conflict because of too many people brushing up against one another but having a religion like Islam certainly doesn’t help.
http://www.politicalislam.com/tears/pages/tears-of-jihad/
Tears of Jihad.
These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.
For 25 million slaves delivered to the market, we have an estimated death of about 120 million people. Islam ran the wholesale slave trade in Africa.
120 million Africans
60 million Christians
The country of India today is only half the size of ancient India, due to jihad. The mountains near India are called the Hindu Kush, meaning the “funeral pyre of the Hindus.”
80 million Hindus
In jihad only Christians and Jews were allowed to survive as dhimmis (servants to Islam); everyone else had to convert or die. Jihad killed the Buddhists in Turkey, Afghanistan, along the Silk Route, and in India.
10 million Buddhists
This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.
http://www.politicalislam.com/tears/pages/tears-of-jihad/
Historian Will Durant:
“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
In the the last 1400 years, Islam killed 270 million people: 120 million Africans, 60 million Christians, 80 million Hindus and 10 million Buddhists.
Bible: And GOD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” Genesis 4:10
It is interesting that the only country to offer any help to Nigeria is Israel which sent in medical help for the forgotten wounded of the Christmas massacre.
Most Christians don’t really understand the nature of the destroyer. They don’t want to believe that evil has a source and that source has been working since the beginning to frustrate and derail the eternal plan. We prefer to allow Hollywood to make evil amusing, or silly or impotent. We are more comfortable making excuses for good to be called bad and bad to be labeled good.
As Edmund Burke reminded us “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Unfortunately we are in sad need of “good men” mostly because there are few good women to marry them and even fewer willing to raise them. Good people are laughed at, made fun of, and preyed on. So I guess evil will continue to work it’s misery.
Latter Day Saints have a scripture that pertains to just this concept.
” Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.”
J. Christian Adams,
The Treaty of Tripoli (American version) has been proven to be an altered version of the Italian and Arabic originals (Barlowe translation, Article 11).
Does altering a Treaty make that Treaty null and void though it was ratified by the Senate not knowing they were ratifying a radically altered document?
just curious.. thanks..
ARTICLE 11.
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
———
The muslims made no such declaration.. nor would they ever, to this day..
I am disappointed that I did not get a response from Mr. Adams..
though he went full boring on the voter id thread..
perhaps J. Christian isn’t all that interested in historical Law..
yes this is a dig..
We need a new King Clovis. Where are his “new” Franks?
Where is the next Charles Martel?
Our Lady, Help of Christians, Pray for us.
Our Lady of the Rosary, Pray for us.
Mary of Bethlehem, Pray for us.
WE have to step up to the plate.
By that, I mean literally, you personally and me personally.
That’s why we blog: the first step is to educate a lot of people in whatever ways we can.
Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, understood Christmas, and human rights, as few people in this century. It is most telling that the day immediately after Christmas is the day of remembrance of St. Stephen, the first martyr. Martyr means witness, a person who testifies to the truth of Christmas, Jesus is God, by laying down their life in support of their belief. All over the lands of Islam, Christians are currently being regularly slaughtered for this belief. Their murderers hold to a widespread judgement of Sharia law: non-Muslims must either convert, accept slavery, or be killed. A number of Islamic nations have, or shortly will acquire nuclear weapons, and they chant a popular call, “Death to the Great Satan”, the United States of America.
No American leader has clearly confronted this lethal philosophy. Our secular press ignores it, or castigates Christians for being fond of war. In spite of almost a decade of killing, very few Americans accept that foreign nations want us dead, if we are Christians. They are the same people who would be appalled if some power demanded that a black person ride in the back of a bus. In their value system, it is better to buy fuel from Islamic nations, who fund religious savages, than to extract it from our land, because doing so would be evil.
Christmas time is a clear demarcation of our beliefs on human rights, personal, and societal justice. How do we achieve peace on earth, among peoples who were killing each other centuries before our continent was discovered?
It will never be asked by the actors in Obama’s media troupe: “Which is holier, which is more righteous, which is more divine, the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, or the Koran?”
It is a good question, because it is hard to see how they can co-exist in this society and it would really put Obama on the spot. It is hard to see how anything good can co-exist with Islam.