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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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SUMMER doldrums. Maybe they drew the Republicans here for the convention. Whatever else you say, San Diego has the rest of the country (and probably the world-I'm not quite sure, not having been to the South Seas) beat when it comes to weather.
I have been to Chicago, to give a seminar, when it was 35 below and to New York when the mercury pushed against the top of the thermometer. It doesn't take many Midwest winters or East Coast summers to convince folks of the reality of the Fall. Certainly Adam and Eve, in their earlier years, didn't have to worry about meteorological extremes. You don't have to worry about hail or sunstroke if you can get by even without a fig leaf.
During the convention one of our visitors was my friend Al Kresta. A convert, he is the Catholic host of the drive-time talk show on WMUZ, a (mainly Protestant) station in Detroit. Al was sent to San Diego for a week, with another staffer, to report on Christian-related goings on, if any, by the Republicans. Before he settled in to his duties, he stopped by the office. As soon as he greeted me, he asked, "What's the weather usually like at this time of year?"
"Just like this," I said, motioning toward the window, "though seldom as humid." (The hygrometer was high for us: If you were to run a few blocks, you might build up a sweat.)
"You mean, like paradise?"
"Yeah, but before the Fall," I said. "Kind of boring weather, though. It's always perfect."
Al laughed. Weather in Detroit is never perfect, except for a few hours in the spring and autumn.
The convention was not perfect either, on several scores. Although it took place just twenty minutes from the Catholic Answers office, for me it may as well have been across the country. What little I saw was via television, and what I saw was what I expected, but not what I might have hoped for.
I have at least a quadrennial interest in politics. I enjoy watching the returns, seeing how many people I voted against lost. (I seldom vote for anyone nowadays, but there are plenty to vote against.) Maybe there's a bit of the gambler's attitude at work: Winning is fine, but the real fun is in the game itself.
As I say, television showed me pretty much what I expected, which is to say that our temporal salvation will not come from the Republican Party -even less so, in my mind, from the Democratic Party. A righting of the temporal order depends on a righting of souls first, and, when you reduce the issue to the basics, that means conversion to Catholicism.
I never have been of the opinion that America at one time was a truly Christian nation, though Christian principles did form part of the air breathed by this nation's Founders. Christian oxygen was mixed with Enlightenment methane, which meant breathing always has been something of a problem, but we seemed to get by, at least until recently.
We lived, culturally, on what Ernest Renan termed "the perfume of an empty vase." To the extent we had a Christian culture, it was a culture based on leftovers of Christianity. The leftovers came, of course, from the banquet of Catholicism.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "America is great and good. America will cease to be great when America ceases to be good." If his aphorism is true, can we say America is great any longer, other than in a raw economic sense?
Which country ideologically and financially underwrote the population conferences held in Cairo and Beijing?
Which country can't muster up enough governmental courage to ban even those abortions that are visually indistinguishable from infanticide?
Which country-well, I could go on, but I don't want this to turn into a rant. It's easy to rant when you see your own country leading the charge in the wrong direction, and it's easy to see that Tocqueville would have a sad afterword to write if he were alive today.
I don't discount political efforts- they're absolutely necessary if we're to stave off even worse things. But that's the position we're in: just staving off. We're biding time, hoping to rescue a few sticks from the fire until-what?
Until things right themselves? It won't happen that way. It never has. Clocks do not unwind, but they can be reset. To me that means there is only one solution for our woes: conversion -personal conversion first, of course, but corporate or national conversion too.
Let me rephrase that: It's too late in the day to think we can get by with anything other than Christianity in its fullness. The Reformation has petered out. The Enlightenment has fizzled. This century's isms, including varieties of totalitarianism and feminism, all have proved failures.
There is only one thing left, one thing that has youthful vigor and age-old wisdom, one thing that has a prayer of resuscitating our moribund society, and that thing is the Catholic faith.
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