The Jihad Came to My City

It’s Here.

I woke this morning to the news that the Islamic Jihad has finally come to Orlando, FL, my home city where I live. Actually, when I awoke all that was known was that someone had shot up a bar downtown. Only as I was coming out of Mass and going to breakfast did I learn that the perpetrator was an Islamic terrorist and perpetrated the most deadly mass shooting in American History.

52 people were taken to local hospitals, and over 50 have been reported dead. There was briefly a hostage situation before the terrorist was dispatched. Hailing from Port St. Lucie, another Floridian city to the Southeast, Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen, was reported to be wearing a suicide vest when he attacked the night club. The danger is over. For now.

This all happened about three miles from where I live.

Reflection

I am still in shock that this has happened so close to my home, but I cannot say I am intellectually surprised. Western Civilization is under attack by two very different forces: Those of Islam on the one hand (no, not militant Islam, just Islam), and on the other hand, the Secularist “progressives” of the Left. Between these two forces, each of them a heresy of Christianity, we the men of the West face a great challenge, to our way of life and to the Christian religion.

Islam is a Christian heresy, since it involves the sons of Abraham, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus of Nazareth, as well as the One True Almighty God, but reorganizes them into a system devoid of the concepts of divine Grace, or of Man being drawn up to God through the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, revealed to us through Scripture and the Church’s sacramental graces. Islam emphasizes divine justice and God’s majesty to the detriment of God’s mercy. “Neither then do I judge thee,” said our Lord to the woman who according to later Christian tradition washed his feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair in thanks for the sins he forgave. Islam, historically,  knows no such mercy. The lawbreakers, those who bring chaos to the world, must be put into submission to the unfathomable Will of God, by conquest and Jihad.

Likewise, Secularism is a Christian heresy, indeed it is the flip side of Islam. For while Islam does away with divine Grace, and the forgiveness of sins (which is impossible without the Incarnation of Our Lord), Secularism declares that there are no sins to forgive, and denies the existence of any transcendent Justice. Secularism denies human responsibility for sin, instead blaming the evils of society upon man’s environment and education. While the Secularists have imbibed the Christian virtue of Mercy from their religious fathers against whom they rebelled, they possess no good reason to uphold this virtue, for they too reject the incarnation of God into our world as Jesus of Nazareth. Love is nothing more than misdirected sexual instinct, any personal sacrifice is an illusion. While Islam is the enemy from without, slaying our citizens with obvious malice, Secularism is the enemy within, slaying the unborn and now the elderly and sick through euthanasia, denying the intrinsic dignity of the human person.

There are nice Muslims, and there are nice Secularists, but Islam and Secularism are both poisonous ideologies dangerous to and incompatible with Western Civilization. The tendency of each is to stamp out freedom of thought, Christian worship, and the unity of the human with the divine. 

We must pray for the renewal of our land, that God will have mercy upon us and upon the sins of the whole world.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” -1 Chron 7:14