FAST FOOD, Fortieth Helping, AD 2022
“The only great tragedy is not to become a saint.”
-Leon Bloy
Christians violently desecrated and destroyed the Temple of God (1Cor 3:16, 6:19) Midori Nagai in Nagasaki, Japan, Franz Jagerstatter in Brandenburg Prison in Germany and Edith Stein in Auschwitz, Poland on August 9, 1945, 1943 and 1942 respectively. Although these desecraters and destroyers were Christians, there was no Christlike holiness or Christlike love in what they did, nor were they or their Christian leaders concerned with doing anything here that was holy or loving. In this respect they were no different from the hundreds of millions of other Christians who have desecrated and destroyed the Temple of God on this little pale blue dot by killing their fellow Christians or fellow human beings for the last 1700 years.
Franz Jagerstatter wrote, “Consider two things: from where, to where. Then your life will have its true meaning.” One response to Franz’s two things in Macbeth’s: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” From nothing to nothing. If this be the truth of the matter, then Christians who destroy other Christians and other human beings are no worse or better off than anyone else. But that is only one possible answer to Franz’s question ‘from where, to where?’ Another response is from the Holy One to the Holy One. If the purpose of life is to become a saint, to spend everlasting existence in the domain of the Holy One who is love and who personally loves you, then it would be a tragedy not to become a saint—a person in eternal Holy Communion with the Eternally Holy One.
“The Gospel is about holiness because the Gospel is at its heart about God and God is Holy, All Holy, ‘Holy be His name.’ The Gospel proclaims that Jesus, the Christ, is God “made flesh,” the incarnation of the Holy One. Jesus is Holy because God is Holy and Jesus is God. The Christian is called to ‘be Holy as God is Holy,’ which means the Christian is called to be Holy as Jesus is Holy, because Jesus is the Holy One ‘made flesh.’ ‘As He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am Holy’ (1Pt 1:15-16)…Only the Holy thought, word or deed is of eternal value. Everything else done on this little pale blue dot is dross.”
-Excerpted from the attached essay, Holiness and Gospel Nonviolence
“Ask and you shall receive“:
A Simple Prayer to the Holy Spirit
of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ
Asking for Help To Be Holy
Breathe in me,
O Holy Spirit,
that my thoughts may all be Holy;
Act in me,
O Holy Spirit,
that my works too, may be Holy;
Draw my heart,
O Holy Spirit,
that I love but what is Holy;
Guard me,
O Holy Spirit,
that I always may be Holy,
For I am your Temple.
Amen.
-St. Augustine
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
(Attachment)
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Ninth Helping, 2022
“The sincerity of our prayer,” says St. John Chrysostom,” is measured by our willingness to work for that for which we pray. The sincerity of our work is measured by our willingness to pray for that for which we work.”
The absence of prayer for our enemies at Mass and in our personal prayer life, and the absence of prayer for the grace to be able to love our enemies at Mass and in our personal prayer life is a sure sign that a Church, a Christian group or an individual Christian has little interest in loving his or her or its enemies—which in turn means it is a low priority or non-priority in his, her or its Christian life.
To genuinely love one’s enemies—not just a mere public charade—is probably the most difficult act required of a Christian. In the human condition as it presently exists, to love one’s enemies demands dying to oneself, perhaps several times a day, with no one aware of this continuous martyrdom across the decades, except the individual and God. Equally difficult is that immediate, or even long term, positive results from the effort may seldom, if ever, be available for the eye to see.
For all these reasons many people have said that love of enemies as a dimension of a person’s way of being in life is impossible. Ohers, mostly Christians, have ignored that “love,” i.e. “agape,” in “Love your enemies,” means love “as Jesus loves” His enemies. Then such Christians or Christian Churches do for the phenomena of enmity what they have done for the phenomena of violence. They fabricate labyrinthian moral justifications to get around committing to loving their enemies as Jesus loved His enemies, even His lethal enemies.
.
So be it and be that as it may. But, where Gospel Nonviolence is concerned, whether it is personal or collective, it is fallacious to say it is possible without a high priority commitment to love of enemies in the model of Jesus.
Considering the immensity and power of the evil of enmity within the human condition, the short shrift given to, or total absence of, prayer for the enemy in the Mass and in our personal life, and the absence of prayer in the Mass and in our personal life for the grace to be able to love our enemies, are telltale signs of a monstrous misperception of or of an intentionally engineered misperception of Jesus and His Way of Communion with the Holy One in time and in eternity.
Thomas Merton, a Catholic Trappist monk, described the Russian Orthodox monk and acetic, St. Silouan of Mount Athos (1866-1938), as “the most authentic monk of the twentieth century.” St. Silouan prayed continually for all humanity as for himself, and he put the highest value on love for enemies, and prayer for the grace to love his enemies. One wonders where the Church and humanity would be today if the Bishops of Churches had for the last 1700 years been teaching their people and struggling personally to live “Love your enemies,” as Jesus taught and lived “Love your enemies?” One wonders where the Church and humanity will be tomorrow, if the Bishops continue to downplay Jesus’ unique imperative to “Love your enemies,” while simultaneously putting the full armor of wolves on those lambs of the Lamb of God entrusted to their spiritual care instead of putting on them “the full armor of God” (see Eph 6:10-18)?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
Thoughts from St. Silouan on “Love your enemies”
to ponder when you have the time:
Whoever will not love his enemies cannot know the Lord. The Holy Spirit teaches us to love our enemies in such a way that we pity their souls as if they were our own children.
If you see a man who has sinned and you do not pity him, the grace of God will leave you. Whoever curses bad people, and does not pray for them, will never come to know the grace of God.
Christ prayed for those who crucified Him: ‘Father, count this not against them; they know not what they do.’ St. Stephen prayed for those who stoned him so that the Lord would not judge this sin against them. So we, if we wish to retain grace, must pray for our enemies. If you do not find pity for a sinner who will suffer in flames, then you do not carry the grace of the Holy Spirit, but rather an evil spirit; and while you yet live you must free yourself from its clutches through prayer and repentance.
The Lord taught me love of enemies. The Holy Spirit taught me how to love.
Lord, teach us through Your Holy Spirit to love our enemies and to pray for them with tears. Lord, as you prayed for your enemies, so teach us also, through the Holy Spirit, to love our enemies.
Pray and try to love your enemies. Seeing your good intention, the Lord will help you in everything.”
As to a total absence of love for your enemies, it shows the presence and the action of an evil spirit; sincere prayer and repentance is the only way to be freed from it.
If I fail to love an enemy, if I judge someone or look at him angrily, my tears dry up and I fall into despondency; and again, I start asking the Lord to forgive me, and the merciful Lord forgives me, a sinner.
“If you have compassion for all creatures and love your enemies, this shows that the great grace of the Lord is in you.
Lord, teach us through Your Holy Spirit to love our enemies and to pray for them with tears . . . Lord, as you prayed for your enemies, so teach us also, through the Holy Spirit, to love our enemies.
If we are incapable of loving our enemies, if we are without love, let us turn with ardent prayers to the Lord, to His Most Pure Mother, and to all the Saints, and the Lord will help us with everything, He whose love for us knows no bounds.”
This grace does not suddenly erupt in the soul, but rather shows itself in a divine pedagogy, where taking into account the weakness and the difficulties of man, the Holy Spirit progressively teaches him to love and teaches him all the attitudes and ways which will allow him to do so. The Holy Spirit teaches us to love even our enemies.
The Holy Spirit teaches the soul a profound love for man and compassion for the lost. The Lord has pity for those who are lost.
The grace of the Holy Spirit shows to him who possesses it the way to love his enemies. But it also reveals to him the foundation of this love: the love of God for all people and His will to save them.
Let us ask the Lord with our whole being to give us the strength to love all men together with our enemies.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Eighth Helping, 2022
It is almost universally believed and taught that Christian nonviolence, rooted in the teaching and person of Jesus in the Gospels, says, ‘Do not return violence for violence.’ Now, that may be what other forms of nonviolence say, but that is not what Jesus teaches. Jesus’ explicit teaching by word and deed in the Sermon on the Mount and on the Sermon from the Cross is to return love for enmity, to return good for evil, to return prayers for the persecutor in response to a persecutor’s violence. Jesus teaches in other words, let evil be a catalyst for doing good instead of a being catalyst for more evil and thereby bring more evil into the human situation, e.g., violence, enmity, revenge, retaliation, resentment, anger, hatred, malicious gossip, verbal abuse, etc.
A fact in our Fallen world is that evil catalyzes evil, directly and indirectly, which in turn catalyzes further evil without any reasonable human hope of stopping its spread and escalation. So human beings generation after generation have taken that fact and made it into a philosophy or a theology that justifies taking at least one eye for one eye. By nurturing these eye for an eye philosophies and theologies, under various names, they become agents for spreading and catalyzing evil in their own time and place, and assuring that the process needed for evil’s replication and preservation in the human condition will be passed on intact to future generations.
There is no exit. Reason alone, as articulated and implemented by its ‘best and brightest,’ and worst and dullest representatives, has only been able to multiply and spread the contagious, illusionary, deceptive, hopeless process of evil conquering evil. Look out the nearest window and see for yourself.
So, the Father of all communicates to humanity by His Word “made flesh,” Jesus, the solution to the rationally insoluble conundrum of evil in the human situation. His solution, that no one among the ‘best and brightest,’ or the worst and the dullest, had ever taught or even spoken until His Word Incarnate revealed it: “Love your enemies.”
In his master work on the New Testament, The Power and The Wisdom (Imprimatur,1966) the acclaimed Catholic Biblical scholar, Rev. John L. McKenzie, states with scholarly and ecclesial authority, “The power which destroys all other powers is the power of love, the love of God revealed and active in Jesus Christ. God, who is love, revealed in Jesus that He loves man and will deliver him through love and through nothing else. The saving act of Jesus is an act of love of the type which He recommends in the Gospels. He loves God by loving His fellow men. Theologians distinguish the “God-ward” and “man-ward” aspects of the saving act; but the New Testament does not use such distinctions. The saving act is all God-ward and all man-ward; it moves toward loving God by moving with love toward man, as Jesus tells His disciples they alsomust do. And He leaves no room for man to move toward God except through love of his fellow man. The Christian cannot prove his love of God except by his love of man. Jesus makes it very clear that it is not really proved unless those who are loved include the enemy.”
Where, “Love your enemies,” in the model of Jesus is a non-concern or at best only a peripheral concern of a Christian person or of a Christian group committed to Gospel nonviolence, it can be objectively said that person or group is not engaged in the Gospel struggle, in Jesus’ struggle, to overcome violence with nonviolence. Rather they are participants in what Gandhi called “the nonviolence that is the violence of the weak.” In such “nonviolence,” if an opportunity arises to hurt or harm the adversary, the enemy, in some way large or small, it will be taken. In Gospel Nonviolence success in moving human beings off the hamster wheel of evil comes from fidelity to the truth of the One who said, “I am the Truth,” and who also lived and said —and was the first to say—”Love your enemies.”
As evidenced from His cross on Golgotha, “Love your enemies,” is an irremovable high priority in the teaching of Jesus with regard to revealing and doing the will of the Father. To the extent that it is of low priority, or is not a priority at all, in the life and work of a Christian or a Christian group, he, she or it is ipso facto aneffete agent for vanquishing evil among us, even though he, she or it may be a significant player in the cacophony of the sound and the fury of clashing groups and ideologies. Without love of enemies being up front and foremost, as it was with Jesus, personal or group Christian projects must ultimately amount to nothing at all (1 Cor 13 ff), because the Christian is then acting in cahoots with the Source of Enmity, and evil cannot and will not drive out evil—a public relation program saying it will and it can notwithstanding.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Seventh Helping, 2022
August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration in practically all Christian Churches across the planet. The Transfiguration remembers that event 2000 years ago when for a brief moment in time on a mountain in Galilee the veil was lifted and the Uncreated Light that is God shined in, around and from Jesus revealing to the three Apostles who were with Him that He is the HOLY ONE. A bright cloud overshadowed the Apostles and from it came the communication, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him” (Mt 17:1-8; Mk 9: 2-10; Lk 9:28-36).
August 6 is also a day for another planetary remembrance, when in 1945 a light created by the human hands of Robert Oppenheimer and his huddle of genius colleagues at Los Alamos, by Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt and their pack of hardball politicos, and by Col. Paul Tibbets and his B-29 Enola Gay crew, enveloped Hiroshima and exposed the ruthless immensity of the satanic, the anti-Holy, in the human condition for those who have eyes and can see. A bright humanly created cloud overshadowed Hiroshima. No communication by words came down from it, only the communication implicit in the molecules and cells, the skin and bones of the sixty thousand human beings the cloud’s creators murdered a few minutes earlier in an enormous flash of destructive, Satanic, anti-Holy light of the Atomic Bomb.
August 6 is also the day of another first in the history of humanity, although this event, its perpetrators and its victim are for the most part unremembered. The event is the initial use of what is called then “the killing chair.” Electricide enters the human situation, August 6, 1891. William Kemmler, a thirty year old, illiterate alcoholic is electrocuted by Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the State of New York, the U.S Supreme Court and Edwin Davis, the warden of the State Penitentiary in Auburn, NY who pulls the lever that sets William Kemmler aflame and writhing in agony but does not kill him until a second burst of electricity is shot into his body several minutes late.
The common denominator between August 6, 1945 and August 6, 1891 is the scientist, who employs his or her exceptional cognitive abilities to create an instrument for human destruction. Without the scientists, Tibbets and Davis, Truman and Roosevelt, the Supreme Court and the Military cannot do what they did and order what they ordered.
The critical point of contact between August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1892 in Auburn, NY and August 6 two thousand years ago on Mount Tabor in Galilee is the imperative sentence , “Listen to Him.” The “Him,” that the Divine communication is designating, is Jesus. The scientists and those others responsible for August 6, 1945 and August 6, 1891 refused to “Listen to Him,” even though a large percentage of them are Christian. As they refused to “Listen to Him” then, so they persist in refusing to “Listen to Him,” now.
For all of us to “Listen to Him” and overcome evil with love, perhaps as way doing more than cursing the never-ending and impenetrable darkness that is Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and is Auburn, NY on August 6, 1891, we could on every August 6, light one little candle of Christlike love for a very particular and needed purpose—remembering that the smallest bit of light vanquishes some darkness.
AUGUST 6
A PLANETARY DAY OF PRAYER FOR SCIENTISTS OF ALL NATIONS,
WHO DESECRATE THEIR GOD BESTOWED GIFT OF HIGH INTELLIGENCE
BY USING IT TO DESTROY THE LIVES, THE LOVES AND THE FUTURES
OF THEIR FELLOW FRAGILE HUMAN BEINGS ON THIS PALE BLUE DOT
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Sixth Helping, 2022
Revenge is sweet! The sweetness of revenge is a psychological experience that is universal in humanity. When violence has been done to a person, when one has been intentionally injured by another, his or her normal mental equilibrium is negatively affected. Revenge is a universally available and proven way of restoring the injured party’s psychological equilibrium—’getting closure’ on an injury suffered, in today’s parlance. The more serious the injury is to the offended party—and this does not require it to be a physical wound—the higher the propensity is to injure the offender severely. Even an experience of an intentional minor hurt can elicit the desire for revenge and the injured party will have no peace of mind until he or she exacts what they consider a fitting punishment of the offender, which is usually much more than an eye for an eye. In fact, the Talionic Law in the Old Testament was created to try to control the sadistic excesses to which revenge is prone. So, whether on a personal scale or a social scale, e.g., ethnic groups, countries, etc. the desire for revenge after being intentionally injured runs deep and long and wide in the human condition after the Fall.
In the Russian Orthodox spiritual classic, The Way of the Pilgrim, the holy man who is the central character of the book and who has been practicing unceasing prayer and asceticism, living in poverty and trusting absolutely in God for thirty years, when he reads in an old newspaper that something awful has happened to someone who hurt him over thirty years ago, he feels good about it. After a couple of minutes, the Holy Man is hit with an awareness of the evil he has just participated in and enjoyed. He repents, or perhaps better, he begins the process of repenting by prayerfully cleansing whatever is in him that allowed him to fall into this failure to love a son of the Father and a brother of Jesus as Jesus wants him to love.
Is it any wonder that no one before Jesus ever dares to say, “Love your enemies,” let alone imperatively teach it as the Will and Way of God? Is it any wonder why few in Christianity or in the Christian peace and justice movement can even acknowledge the problem of by-passing the Nonviolent Jesus’ teaching, “Love your enemies?” And, is it any wonder that all but a few Christian Churches by their silence on the issue and by other means, have made ‘getting even,’ ‘getting back at,’ ‘an eye for an eye’ almost an article of their Christian faith despite Jesus’ teaching to the contrary?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Fifth Helping, 2022
The Christian obligation of loving one’s enemies—and by implication the sinner—does not require that we cease to recognize that what he has done or is doing is wicked and therefore hateful. No higher model of Christian love can be found than Jesus Christ, whose love was not the affirmation of the goodness of men, but a desire to confer on them a goodness that they lacked.There is a world of difference between Christian love toward the sinner and a sentimental sympathy for him. Christian love will spare nothing in order that the one doing evil, an agent of iniquity, be redeemed from his condition. Sickly sympathy with the wicked, however, is not true compassion, even for the wicked.
-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical scholar**
“Love the sinner but hate the sin” has become a trite cliché in Christianity. Yet it is Gospel truth, utterly consistent with Jesus’ teaching, “Love your enemies.” It has become a throwaway line because it trips off the tongue easily but is seldom implemented. In textbook logic it is easy enough to see the distinction between the person and his or her sin. Jane stole $10 from Dick. The sin is the act of stealing, the sinner is the infinitely complex and infinitely loved by the Father person named Jane. However, hate the evil but love the evil doer is sometimes, many times, most times, very difficult to near impossible for the Christian to do. This is probably why most Christians sluff it off as a mere platitude instead of accepting it as an imperative dictate communicated to humanity, or at least to Christians, by God Himself: “Love your enemies.”
There is no commitment to Gospel nonviolence, to Christian nonviolence, to a nonviolent Christian peace and justice agenda or movement where there is not an extremely serious commitment to hating the sin but loving the sinner, as Jesus loves him or her, as the Father of all loves him or her. As far as I can see, in the observable world, there is no problem with Christians and Christian peace movements hating the sin. However, from all observable data, there seems to be an almost insurmountable problem with Christians and Christian peace movements, including nonviolent Christian peace groups, loving as Jesus loves the sinner.
The problem is almost insurmountable in the first instance because it is largely unacknowledged as a problem by Christians and by Christian peace and justice organizations. The sole issue seems to be vanquishing the sin by vanquishing the sinner, and the latter can be done by whatever means it takes. Lying about the person, denigrating the person, outing the person, demeaning the person, blackmailing the person, mocking the person, degrading, disgracing, debasing the person, dragging the person’s name through the mud, shaming the person or killing the person are used, supported and turned a blind eye to by Christians and by those designating themselves as nonviolent Christians. It should be said, however, that nonviolent Christians and nonviolent Christians groups would not overtly support the last option, killing the sinner to stop the sin. But I have heard all of those means mentioned above, short of homicide, referred to by Christians, of both the just war and the nonviolent ilk, as nonviolent means of effecting change.
Be that as it may, people name reality as they choose. However, the above mentioned means are not means compatible with Gospel nonviolence and with the teaching of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels, because every one of them requires trying to harm a person to achieve one’s end. None of them can be characterized as loving the enemy as Jesus loved His enemies. None of them can be said to be speaking the truth with Christlike love or living the truth with Christlike love.
The burden of love of enemies—not just political enemies but anyone who threatens some self- interest of ours— is probably the heaviest yoke a Christian committed to Gospel Nonviolent Love in the model of Jesus has to carry, and if truth be told all Christians are required to carry. Perhaps from a human perspective it appears so heavy that Christians of both the justified violence and the nonviolence persuasions feel they cannot look it in the eye and acknowledge it. Yet, God says, “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Mt 11: 29-30).
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
**if you would like a free copy of the Pensées on Christian Violence and Gospel Nonviolence by Rev. John L. Mckenzie, email Bob Aroian at raroian@charter.net or call 978-257-6415
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Fourth Helping, 2022
It is seldom noted, let alone emphasized, by Christian preachers in any denomination, that when Jesus teaches in the Great Commandment (Mt 22:35-40; Mk 12:28-31; LK 10: 25-28), “Love your neighbor,” the neighbor for Jesus includes the enemy. He teaches this because the first half of the Great Commandment is to “love God,” who is the “Father of all,” and infinitely loves whoever might be one’s particular enemy of the moment. “He or she whom the Father loves must be loved by the Christian if the Christian is to love as Jesus love, to love as God love, and to love who God loves. If a person says, ‘I love God’, and hates his neighbor he is lying; for the person who does not love his neighbor who is visible, how is it possible for him to love God who is invisible” (1 Jn 4:20)? If you hate or harm someone who is loved by another, you are instantly and simultaneously hating or hurting the person who loves the other. When someone that a person loves suffers, the person who loves him or her suffers—such is the Divinely created structure of human existence.
St. Silouan of Mount Athos writes, “A certain monk told me that when he was very sick, his mother said to his father, ‘How our little boy is suffering. I would gladly give myself to be cut up into pieces if that would ease his suffering.’ Such is the love of God for people. He loved and pitied all His suffering people so much that He wanted to suffer for them, like their own mother”—even if I have made them into enemies that I hate or harm.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Thirty-Third Helping, 2022
Enmity is a source and sustainer of violence. The enemy is the one who threatens, real or imagined, the survival of some self-interest. The self-interest one may want to survive may be anything from his or her good name, to their job, to their self-esteem, to their comfort, to their wealth, to their community or even their physical life on this earth. Yet, loving one’s enemies as Jesus loved His enemies is a clear and unequivocal imperative teaching of Jesus in the Gospels.
In the decree Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II, under the heading, REVERENCE AND LOVE OF ENEMIES, the following is stated:
“It is important to distinguish between error, which always merits repudiation, and the person in error who never loses the dignity of being a person, even when he is flawed by false or inadequate religious notions. God alone is the judge and searcher of hearts; for that reason, he forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone.
The teaching of Christ even requires that we forgive injuries and extends the law of love to include every enemy, according to the command of the New Law: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you and calumniate you'” (Mt 5:43-44).
Gaudium et Spes, sec.28, Vatican II
How many Catholics have ever been told or know that this is in the Documents of Vatican II, and that it is there as an imperative communication presented in all due solemnity? How many Christians have ever been told or know that “Love your enemies,” is one of the few sentences in the Gospels that Scripture scholars agree is ippisima verbi, the very words of Jesus of Nazareth, the infallible Word of God “made flash.” How many Christians and Catholics have been told or know that the sentence “Love your enemies,” appears nowhere in the literature of the world before Jesus?
Why in approximately 20,000 Mass over eighty years, Roman Rite and Byzantine Rite, have I only twice heard in the petitionary prayers voiced by the priest a prayer for “our enemies” or a prayer “to love our enemies?”
Talk about needed liturgical reform! Or, would a prayer at Masses every day to love our enemies be vetoed by governments?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD,Thirty-Second Helping, 2022
Dr. Norman Bethune (1890 -1939):
“Is it possible that a few rich men — a small class of men — have persuaded a million poor men to attack and attempt to destroy another million men as poor as they, so that the rich may be richer still? They tell them that this brutal war is for the destiny of the race. It is for the glory of the emperor; it is for the honour of the state; it is for their king and country. False – false as hell!
They make war in order to capture markets by murder, raw materials by rape. They find it cheaper to steal than to exchange, easier to butcher than to buy. This is the secret of war. It is the secret of all wars: profit. Business. Profit. Blood money. This is what all wars are all about.Threaten a reduction on the profit of their money, and the beast in them awakens with a snarl. They become as ruthless as savages, as brutal as madmen, remorseless as executioners.”
And for this, you are going to hand over your sons and daughters to kill and be killed to maim and be maimed? And for this, you are going to walk away from Jesus, who has “the words of eternal life,” and from His teaching and follow some marionette politician who is exhorting and manipulating you or your children or grandchildren to hate and to kill?
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, THIRTY-FIRST HELPING, 2022
Today, more people are killed by the process that makes the sword, than by the sword. Yet hardly a continuous passionate word, let alone an impassioned word, is heard from the local Christian pulpits of the largest arms producing country in the world and in history. A lament or a call to repent, proportional to the suffering being caused and the evil being engaged in, very rarely vibrantly echos in the Churches of U.S. Christianity. This, even though it is Christians by the millions, who are daily using their life’s time to make these instruments of human destruction. An occasional, unemotional, effete reference is made by the Churches’ leadership to the arms race in general, but nothing that would even hint that their people and their nation are a major source and sustainer of a plague that is daily destroying human life physically, spiritually, morally and psychologically. The arms race is a weapon of mass destruction. In point of fact, it is the weapon of mass destruction being let loose on people today killing ten of thousands of our fellow human beings daily. That’s not opinion. That’s fact! You can take that to the bank!
“While extravagant sums are being spent for the furnishing of ever new weapons, adequate remedies cannot be provided for the multiple miseries afflicting the whole modern world. Therefore it must be said again: the arms race is a virulent plague (gravissimam plagam) for humanity, and one which injures the poor to an intolerable degree. If this race persists, it will eventually spawn all the lethal ruin whose path it is now making ready”
(Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, #81, 1965).
“The arms race is to be condemned unreservedly . . . It is in itself an act of aggression which amounts to a crime, for even when they are never used, by their cost alone, armaments kill the poor.” (Pope Paul VI to the UN 1975)
Do only vultures have eyes that can see?
One person dies every nine second in this world of starvation.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Thirtieth Helping, 2022
“Thomas Dewey, who was running against Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, after being briefed on the inquiry that F.D.R. had known in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and failed to stop it, privately fuming that Roosevelt was a ”traitor” who ”ought to be impeached,” was prepared to denounce the president publicly when General George Marshall sent an aide to plead with him not to raise this divisive issue. Nevertheless, Dewey’s running mate, John Bricker, told voters that the president was hiding his complicity in the ”disgraceful” episode.”
—Dr. Michael Bechloss, Presidential Historian, New York Times. (5/26/02).
“One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war easier to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from its previous struggle, i.e. World War I.”
—Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, (1948), page iv
Pharaoh Tuthmose III in 1479 B.C. marched his Egyptian army north to the city of Megiddo, also known as Armageddon and left us the first detailed account of a battle. There must have been several thousand battles like Megiddo over the millennia before 1479 B.C., and there certainly have been many thousands like it since. For those who were there each battle was a matter of life and death, with the whole future seeming to hang in the balance. And they were not entirely wrong in their perception, if the future is defined as simply the rest of their lives. From the point of view of history, however, empires rise and fall, whole people appear and disappear, and borders fluctuate like droplets of rain running down the windowpane as the centuries flicker past.
Yet, all the effort and sacrifice entailed in fighting wars—each of which seems so important at the time—doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is virtually cancelled out. The one thing that makes the battle of Megiddo important to us is the fact we know about it. But it is hard to feel any sense of regret about the men who lost the rest of their lives on that day, because they would have been dead over 3400 years now anyway. It is impossible to care much who won the battle, because both sides lived long ago and far away, and most of what they care for has vanished utterly. This is not at all the way we feel about the Normandy invasion of 1944, but if history goes on long enough, the day will come when Megiddo and Normandy will seem on a par: equally futile and equally meaningless.
Naturally, we resist and resent that conclusion with all our strength. That war of over 4300 years ago was obviously a mere power struggle with no moral justification, whereas any war our own nation becomes involved in today will be necessary and just. The soldiers who were killed on the battlefield/ of Megiddo died in vain. But if today’s generation of young men have to die on some central front it will decide the moral fate of mankind. The man in the ranks of Tuthmose III’s army at Armageddon was deluded about the importance of his death, but the man in a Chieftain tank or T-62 today is not. And I am the Queen of Sheba!
-Gwynne Dyer, War (1985)
“The glory of war is moonshine.”
General Sherman (1865)
The glory of war drowns
The shrieks of the maimed
In lethal moonshine.
Are the leaders of the institutional Christian Churches—popes, patriarchs, bishops, priests, deacons, ministers pastors, elders— so completely possessed by the idol of institutional survival, that they have neither the time nor the desire to fully apprise their congregation of what war is and how incompatible it is with the teaching of Jesus, before morally finessing them into the government’s, any government’s, new war?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Ninth Helping, 2022
Individual men start wars, not nations.
-Patrick Buchanan, The Unnecessary War: World War II
“When the war ends, it will be found that there was an equal amount of thuggery practiced on both sides, that terrible things were done to force final victory. Multitudes of innocent persons will have suffered. The little children of the two countries will be the main victims. Lands will be made desolate. Social progress will be arrested. A large part of the “facts” used to arouse patriotism and to stir the fervor and the fierceness of the fighting spirit will be discovered to have been propaganda. The poor will be swamped with taxes for an entire generation. The mutilated men will drag out broken lives to the end of their days.”
-Rufus Jones, 1863-1948, Quakers, received a Nobel Prize (1947) as co-founder of the American Friends Service Committee (1917)
War casualty gets a medal from the man who started the war.
The individuals who start a war, with its immeasurable visible and invisible human carnage, will, after the war, continue without interruption to live the plush and cushy lives they lived before and during the war. Look around you! You have eyes. See! Educate, your sons and daughters, your grandsons and granddaughters, your nieces and nephews, and anyone you care for, even those who have been designated as the enemy, to the truth about war and to the truth of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels, who knew well the truth about war. If you don’t, who will?
“And also son, because, by bribery, blackmail and fear,
they have the leaders of practically every religious institution
in their pocket and under their control.“
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Eighth Helping, 2022
A word open to indefinite meanings has no meaning! Nouns such as holy, love and nonviolence are such open ended words. In today’s pluralistic society, they have become Humpty Dumpty words. “’When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,’ said Humpty.” But, a word has to have at least one thing it does not mean to be a word. Words such as holy, love or nonviolence in our society mean just what the speaker or writer choose it to mean—neither more nor less. Just about every activity known to human beings from abortion to atomic slaughter, from child abuse to benign neglect of the impoverished, has fallen under the canopy of love.
To say, “Love is the ethical absolute of Jesus in the Gospels,” is a truthful statement. But it is also a meaningless one until some content that unambiguously communicates, ‘at least one thing it does not mean’ is given to the word love. If no such content is given to the word love in the sentence, “Love is the ethical absolute of Jesus,” then it is a contentless word, whose meaning is “what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Ditto for the words holy and nonviolence. Without a specific phenomenon or phenomena that love, holiness or nonviolence do not include, they are merely subjective propaganda tools open to any manipulative use for which the writer desires to try to employ them. Without at least an understanding of what the word love, which is the ethical absolute of Jesus in the Gospels, can never include, namely violence and enmity, then the situation in the Church will be as summed up by the Jewish man who said to the Christian, “Enough! Please! Don’t give us anymore of your love! We had enough of it.”
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Seventh Helping, 2022
The Christian moral loophole or moral slight-of-hand named the Christian Just War Theory (CJWT) is a murderous absurdity that destroys and maims lives even if a gun is never fired, for it morally permits every Christian in the world to participate in the ongoing mega-human catastrophe of the arms race. The Second Vatican Council in 1965 called the arms race “a virulent plague” and “a totally diabolical trap.” CJWT is the ever-ready shibboleth that Christians run to in order to justify themselves before God and humanity for slaughtering and maiming human beings and for earning a living by making hundreds of billions of dollars a year of weapons meant to bring death to their fellow sons and daughters of the Father of all.
I have written two books, Christian Just War Theory: The Logic of Deceit, and The War in Iraq and the Requirement of Moral Certainty** and dozens of articles that eviscerate all possibility that CJWT is an avenue for Christlike holiness or Christlike love. CJWT is for Christians a logical, theological, moral and Gospel impossibility. If Jesus is who the Gospels say He is and teaches what the Gospels say He teaches, then CJWT and all Christian theories of justified violence are self-evident morally erroneous. So when a Catholic or Christian says as a way of defending his or her participation in war or in the war industry, “I am a just war Catholic or Christian,” I know I have an educational problem before me, since most just war Catholics do not know the standards of Catholic Just War Theory and those that do have usually never tried to apply them in an open forum all to the concrete realities in a particular exercise of the mass homicide called war.
However, unawareness of the norms, jus ad bellum, jus in bello, of CJWT and/or ignorance of the facticity of combat is not an irresolvable problem. Ignorance is merely ignorance. It is an ordinary and accomplishable educational task to lead people out of thinking that 2+2 =5 to 2=2=4.
What is an almost irresolvable problem is the Christian who does not believe in CJWT but who believes in the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the will of God revealed by God Incarnate, and yet who freely joins, participates in and supports institutions dependent upon, structured on, supportive of and actively employing violence. This is far more than a problem of mere ignorance. It is a spiritual and moral problem of the highest and gravest order. This approaches defiance of the Holy Spirit of Truth.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Sixth Helping, 2022
“Christians have no legitimate measure against an overbearing state except nonresistance, civil disobedience unto death, if necessary. They die for the state by refusing to cooperate with its immortality. When they do anything else, they have parted company with Jesus.”
-Rev. John L. McKenzie
Trying to do harm to or to destroy by the gun or by the tongue the person or the persons affiliated with the state who are attempting to impose, via some manner of violence, evil upon oneself or another is not an option for a Christian—no more than hate of the person or persons is. Nor, does it become a permissible moral option for a Christian by rationalizing and justifying the intended harm or destruction with the euphemism, “That’s just politics.” It may be that such is the way governmental politics is conducted, but normalizing hating another, intentionally harming another or deliberately seeking to destroy another does not change evil into good—even if such evil gets the secular political job done.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Fifth Helping, 2022
One of the two most radical and urgent Christian tasks of our time for Church leaders and for any Christian Synod or Council is to prepare Christians for the eventual refusal to obey. The capacity of the modern high-tech state to order and impose by violence of various forms untruth and evil—measured as such by the norms of Jesus in the Gospels—now approaches omnipotent. No moral grotesquerie is beyond the power of those who control the state to justify, order and enforce. But, it is the indisputable teaching of the Catholic Church and most Christian Churches, a teaching that dates back to the earliest martyrs and to Jesus, that “No superior authority is empowered to command an immoral act, evil. There is no right, no obligation, no permission to perform an act that is intrinsically immoral even if ordered, and even if the refusal to act involves the worst possible personal consequences.”
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Fourth Helping, 2022
“What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm. Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology and morality to which we adhere is that of the state.”
―Jacques Ellul
The well documented capacity of “the state” to do evil makes it quite clear that the Christian is not free to let “the state” make his decisions for him. He knows that men hide behind a crowd and find there an outlet for desires which they usually mask or restrain. If “the state” becomes the supreme and final judge of good and evil in public affairs, it can demand unquestioning obedience in its service. It is the demonic quality of “the state” that it tends to become god, an idol.
—Rev. John L. McKenzie
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Third Helping, 2022
Would it not be better for humanity and for the eternal salvation of all souls if a Christian and/or a Church said, “I (we) do not believe that Jesus is God “made flesh,” rather than, “I (we) do believe that Jesus is God “made flesh,”, but I(we) do not believe what He says, e.g., ‘Love your enemies,’ ‘Do good to those who hate you,’ ‘Put up your sword’?” Does God lie? Does God teach falsehoods? Does God not know the Way to eternal Communion with Him? Is God stupid?
The struggle to evangelize people and bring an unbelieving world to believe in the realy, really Good News of Jesus Christ is first and foremost a struggle against the evangelizer’s own unbelief and lack of trust in the Person and truth he or she wants others to accept.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-Second Helping, 2022
Having been brought out of nothingness, what am I to do with my nanosecond of time on earth that the “Word through whom all things were made” gave me? Learn to kill and maim people? Help and support others to kill and maim people? Follow commands to kill and maim people? Vote for a surrogate to kill and maim people for me? Earn a living by killing and maiming people? Give my mind over to another so that he or she can figure out how to kill and maim people? Give my body over to another so that he or she can use it to kill and maim people? Or, within the prescribed limits of my Word-bestowed finite instant in time, learn to love as the “Word through whom all things were made” loves and as the “Wordwhobecame flesh and dwelt among us” loves?
What does Jesus say? What does the Word say? What does the Logos say? What does sanity say?
A Meditation and a Prayer
God of immeasurable mercy,
Being behind being,
You have given me existence.
You have drawn me out of nothingness for a time and for eternity.
You have made me conscious of myself and of others and of You.
And through your Son, Jesus,
You have shown me how to live today, tomorrow and forever.
Therefore I ask that
You give me the power and wisdom to live Your purpose without fear or anxiety.
I further ask that You bestow clarity of mind and spirit upon
my family, my friends, my enemies
and all those countless and invaluable others,
whom you created by your Word of Love,
who wish to find You and to live the true meaning of existence.
Amen.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twenty-First, Helping, 2022
Can a Christian become holy, can a Christian follow the “Holy One of God” (JN 6:69), can a Christian call a monstrous, homicidal idol—the god of armies, the god of war— holy, and turn his or her life’s time, mind and will, in whole or in part, over to it and to its ways and means? Suppose it pays well, or the Christian needs the money?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Twentieth Helping, 2022
“Don’t knock the war that feeds your family.”
Attached is a public letter written by Rev. Vincent Chavez, a priest and pastor in Archbishop John Wester’s diocese of Albuquerque, NM. It is a respectful critique of Archbishop Wester’s article in the Albuquerque Sunday Journal (7/19/22) titled, “Work for Peace and Well-Being, Not for Nuclear Weapons.” It is a “must” read for Christians trapped in a country operating on a permanent war economy. The U.S. will spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
Please, first read Rev. Vincent Chavez’ letter, for it reveals a grievous moral contradiction eating away piranha bite by piranha bite at the spiritual and moral life and purpose of the institutional Catholic Church in the U.S. today, and in practically all other mainline Churches in the U.S. today.
Then, do view or listen to my homily delivered (7/16/22) at Trinity Site, in NM at the close of the 32nd Annual Twenty-Four Hour Prayer Vigil for Forgiveness, Peace and the Churches return to Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of all in all circumstances. The video/audio is 34 minutes. Please, listen to the very end. It ain’t over until it’s over! I know most of you like a quality FAST FOOD Helping, which you can wolf-down and digest quickly. But, an occasional larger portion can supply some needed supplemental spiritual and moral nourishment.
Trinity Site homily, July 16, 2022:
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FAST FOOD, Nineteenth Helping, 2022
A Christian can be killed and be holy as Jesus is holy, but a Christian cannot kill and be holy as Jesus is holy. A Christian can be killed and love as Jesus loves, but a Christian cannot kill and love as Jesus loves.
-ECM
FAST FOOD, Eighteenth Helping, 2022
Rev. George Zabelka, Catholic Chaplain to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bomb crews, the 509th Composite Group, in August 1945, addressing the National Pax Christi Conferance in August 1985.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EbdH35OpgS-yEjGPt4JwlmLfYnBYshvo/view?usp=sharing
(1 minute)
-ECM
Transcript:
“For the Church today, it is not nuclear war, but the total and unequivocal rejection in theory and in practice of all war and all mass slaughter. There is nothing in the life or teaching of Jesus that would suggest that while it is illegitimate to incinerate people by nuclear warheads, it is legitimate to incinerate people by napalm or flamethrowers. Condemning nuclear war exclusively, a Christian can thereby give implied moral approval to other forms of mass slaughter.
What level of slaughter is acceptable?”
FAST FOOD, Seventeenth Helping, 2022
“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
-Robert J. Oppenheimer, ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’
Mikhail Kalashnikov, ‘Father of the AK 47’
The honors and rewards that Mikhail Kalashnikov received from the former Soviet Union and Russian government—including the most prestigious of all honors in Russia, The Hero of Russia Medal—would take several pages to list. In 1947 he invented the Avtomat Kalashnikov, the AK 47, the hand weapon of choice for the world’s militaries, violent revolutionaries, drug cartels, terrorists, child sex syndicates and pirates.
When asked if he could sleep well knowing that hundreds of millions of his guns had brought and would continue to bring unimaginable misery and untold death to humanity, he would flippantly reply, “I sleep very well, thank you. It should be politicians who start wars that suffer from sleeping problems.”
Two years before his death, however, he writes a tormented letter to the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. It reads, “The pain in my soul is unbearable, and there is one matter I cannot resolve. If my machine gun has taken the lives of people, does it mean that it is I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the son of a peasant, an Orthodox Christian, who is guilty of the deaths of people, even if they are enemies?” He is out of his mind terrified over his responsibility before God for using his God given talents and time to invent an instrument to kill his fellow human beings.
So, how does the head of the institutional Orthodox Church in Russia reply to Mikhail? No problem! “The Orthodox Church has a very definite position: when weapons serve to protect the Fatherland. The Church supports both their creators and the soldiers who use them.” Case closed! But, Mikhail Kalashnikov knows the case is not closed in his heart. He knows that the Jesus of the Gospels, who is the only begotten Son of God, who he is supposed to follow, would never use, let alone invent, the AK 47, “even against enemies.”
After the so-called Dirty War in Argentina (1975-1983), which was a time of state terrorism conducted by the mostly Catholic military and homeland security forces, a Catholic Argentine soldier from those years wrote an article about his part in Operation Condor, the official designation of the Dirty War. As the war progressed, he became ever more certain that the killing he was doing on behalf of the government was wrong. He was especially spiritually tormented over one task in particular that He was ordered to do, namely, throwing people out of planes and helicopters, who had been labeled enemies of the state. At his spiritual wits end, he went to confession to an Argentine Catholic priest, something he had not done since childhood. He explained to the priest his situation and his anguish of conscience over what he was doing. The priest told this tortured Christian soul not to let himself be troubled by the orders he had to carry out. And then came the one-liner, the universal moral bone that the Constantinian Churches throw to those whose minds, souls and spirits are ravaged by what they did in war: “The Church teaches that you are engaged in a war to defend your country and you are morally permitted to do that. These are just the things that are done in war.”
Both Patriarch and priest say, “the Church teaches.” Neither says, nor dare they say, “Jesus teaches.”
Popes, Patriarchs, Bishops and all their canonically deputized agents are explicitly commissioned by Jesus Himself to teach all Baptized Christians “to obey all that I (Jesus) have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28: 19-20 ). A Bishop in the capacity of bishop must proclaim what Jesus expressly commissioned him to proclaim. Like Paul, that is all he has to proclaim as a Bishop qua bishop. Just war theories, just capital punishment theories, just abortion theories cannot be found in the teaching of Jesus, nor in the Apostolic Tradition, nor in the Deposit of Faith. So, what have Bishops been doing, what are Bishops doing, teaching just war theories to the Baptized Christians in their spiritual and moral care? What they have been doing and what they are still doing is leading billions of ordinary Baptized Christian souls over the centuries into the unholy, cacophonous and infernal horror endured by Mikhail Kalashnikov and our Argentine soldier. That’s fact, not opinion.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
Fast Food, Sixteenth Helping, AD 2022
The Trinity Atomic Bomb
The First Atomic Bomb, no more than the AK47 machine gun, does not just appear on earth out of thin air. It takes a large village to move both from an abstract idea to a concrete usable physical entity. The Atomic Bomb is the consummating moment in a human endeavor, the Manhattan Project, to kill and maim more people more efficiently than had ever before been done.“Trinity,” a uniquely Christian word designating God who is love, is the code name, intentionally or inadvertently, mockingly assigned for the first atomic bomb detonation in the history of humanity on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45. By all measurements it is a grand scientific success. And, by all accounts the spirit of the Reign of Satan that moves upper echelon politicians, scientists and military personnel to embark on such a project during the evil euphemistically called World War II lives on to this hour with ever greater vigor in the scientific, political and military worlds.
The first thing a Christian must do regarding violence is to perceive what violence is. Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.
If a person is doing the works of the Reign of Satan, i.e. violence, deceit, enmity, mercilessness—regardless of whether he or she is a democrat, a republican, a communist, a socialist, etc., who is his or her ultimate employer, who is the father he or she is obeying? Jesus says, “ Your father is the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies”(Jn 8:44).
The first thing a Christian must do regarding violence is to perceive what violence is. Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.
For the Christian the Trinity Atomic Bomb
was and still is a Christ killer,
because that is what homicidal violence always is,
Christ killing.
“Whatever you do to the least you do to me.”
How far from Jesus and His Gospel must a Christian, an institutional Church or a Church leader be to justify or to support killing and maiming Christ? What kind of Christian or institutional Church or Church leader would justify, support and teach every newly Baptized child or adult from the day of his or her Baptism onward, that they could kill and maim other members of the Body of Christ, that they could kill and maim and persecute Christ, Jesus of Nazareth?
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
“Who are you , Lord?”
“I am Jesus of Nazareth,
whom you are persecuting.”
Think about that!
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
*********
Traditional Prayer for the Forty Day Fast for Gospel Nonviolence
Abba, in the name of Jesus, we ask you to send the Holy Spirit to gather the Churches together, so that with one voice they may proclaim that Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of all people—friends and enemies—is the Way of God, teaching humanity, thereby, that violence is of the reign of Satan and that therefore violence is not the Holy Way, violence is not the Apostolic Way, violence is not the Christian Way, violence is not the Way of Jesus, thus setting Christians free forever from bondage to the unholy, uncatholic, unapostolic, un-Christlike ways of the false gods, theologies and agents of violence and enmity. We plead this grace so that the Nonviolent Lamb may be our Lord in deed, as well as, in word and sacrament. We request this gift so that the Christian Community may be—for afflicted humanity—a faithful witness to Jesus’ Way of overcoming evil and death. We implore this healing so that the Church may be an authentic extension in time and space of the Way of the Lamb of God, of the Way of the Nonviolent Jesus, which is the Way to renew the face of the earth, and the Way of Eternal Salvation for each and all. Amen.
Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow Him
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org.
FAST FOOD, Fifteenth Helping, 2022
Jesus is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, i.e., ‘God is love made flesh.’ When He proclaims His ‘new commandment,’ the Eleventh Commandment for Christians, ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’ He is communicating to humanity that Holiness and Love, as made visible in His words and deeds, are one. “You can’t have one without the other.” And, since Jesus lives and teaches right up to His murder by crucifixion a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the Will of God and as the Way of Eternal Communion with God (Salvation), there can be no authentic holiness in violence and no violence in authentic love. A person cannot faithfully live his or her Christian vocation (call) to be holy as Jesus is holy or to love as Jesus loves by choosing or by choosing to support to any degree the evil of violence, because violence belongs to the Reign of Satan. Jesus is God’s correction of the idea of a Warrior God as depicted in the Old Testament or anywhere else.
-ECM
God of perfect peace, violence and cruelty can have no part with you.”
-The Roman Missal (1985), The Sacramentary, Opening Prayer for the Mass for Peace and Justice.
FAST FOOD, Fourteenth Helping, 2022
If the Catholic Church took the Nonviolent Jesus’ side in a war and infallibly proclaimed about violence and enmity what Jesus infallibly proclaimed about violence and enmity in the Gospels, how many Catholics would leave the Catholic Church? How many Orthodox would leave the Orthodox Church if it infallibly proclaimed about violence and enmity what Jesus infallibly proclaimed about violence and enmity in the Gospels? Anglicans, the Anglican Church? Lutherans, the Lutheran Church? Methodist, the Methodist Church? Baptists, the Baptist Church? How many rich Christians would leave their respective Churches, if their Church vigorously and unreservedly took the side of Jesus in a war and infallibly proclaimed about violence and enmity what Jesus vigorously and unreservedly proclaimed about violence and enmity in the Gospels? How many governments would continue to give billions of dollars a year to the Catholic Church if it absolutely and infallibly withdrew participating in war as a moral option for Catholics?
-ECM
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
FAST FOOD, Thirteenth Helping, 2022
“The life which Jesus proclaimed cannot be fostered, advanced, or protected by any kind of war, holy or unholy. Surely, one may say, there must be situations in which the conflict between good and evil can be perceived in elemental terms, where a Christian can indeed take sides without compromising with evil. I wish I could find such instances; and I wish to leave no doubt that it is not mere cynicism which leads me to say this. It seems a safe general statement to say that in the wars of which we have any information there has been no side which God could have taken without dishonoring Himself.”
-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical Scholar
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
FAST FOOD, Twelfth Helping, 2022
Violence has long lasting negative effects on the person who suffers it. It humiliates, tortures and degrades a person in body, mind, soul and spirit. It cannot be said that the diabolical effects of violence end when the diabolical act of violence ends. The fabricated exaltation of violence is propaganda; foisted on the public primarily by government and media. Whether this mythology of violence initially issues from establishment politicians or revolutionary zealots, it makes people forget that violence means bloodshed, means human beings screaming in pain and fear, and savage cruelty. All this is intentionally disguised by legal fictions, political doctrines, factual deception, appeals to patriotism and by Christian just war theologies that induce Christian to unreservedly participate in these fostered illusions. Christians under the spell of this mass media produced mirage, then blindly take sides in an activity, i.e. war, which demands, regardless of which side the Christian chooses, acting in a way that is the extreme opposite of what Jesus taught.
Jacques Ellul
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
FAST FOOD, Eleventh Helping, 2022
“What is gained by immoral actions is to a Christian not a gain but a loss; this is the position a Christian must take.”
- Jacques Ellul
“Our analysis has, I hope, shown that politics needs all these dubious practices; it cannot be managed without violence, deceit, betrayal, corruption, and propaganda.”
- J. Friedrich, former Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University, writes on the final page in the final chapter of his 400-page book, The Pathology of Power
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
- John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical scholar
FAST FOOD, Tenth Helping, 2022
The iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove violence of the ruling class, who maintain the regimes of injustice, exploitation, profiteering and hatred of enemies has its exact counterpart in the bare iron fist violence of the oppressed. The humanistic politician shows his true colors—as a savage exploiter or as an oppressor, who does not hesitate to use violence when he meets resistance, domestically or internationally. He reveals that his affable, kind, humane, understanding holds only in so far as those he supposedly serves and those he exploits are servile and obedient; otherwise the humanistic politician turns ferocious, and enacts special laws to justify action which in itself is pure violence against people. These are the infamous “emergency laws, ” applicable while the “emergency” last. Every politician in the so-called civilized countries knows this game. In short, what we have here is ostensible legality as a cover for ruling class violence. And. this masked violence is found at all levels of society. Economic relations, class relations and race relations are relations of violence. Truly, we must see things as they are, and not as we are told they are, not as we imagine them to be or wish they were. The “New Five Year Prosperity Plan” that requires that a holocaust be made to the God of Economics is violence and it is no less violence for being voted into existence by a parliament or for being made into law by way of an executive order. We must see things as they are.
.– Jacques Ellul
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
FAST FOOD, Ninth Helping, 2012
The 1938 address by Mao Zedong explaining why, “All political power comes from the barrel of the gun.” is reproduced in part here.
“Where there is naivete on the question of power, nothing whatsoever can be achieved. It is very difficult for laboring people, who have been deceived and intimidated by the ruling classes for thousands of years, to awaken to the importance of having guns in their own hands. Communists must prove themselves the most politically conscious of all leaders. Every Communist must grasp the truth, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.
Experience in the class struggle teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the laboring masses can defeat the well-armed capitalist class who own most of society’s wealth and means of production, and the landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”
—Mao
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
-ECM
**************
FAST FOOD, Eighth Helping, 2022
“The first thing a Christian must do regarding violence is to perceive what violence is. Rigorous realism requires going far beyond the usual generalities; for natural man fools himself about fact, cannot bear to look at a situation as it is, and invents stories to cover up reality. Every state is founded on violence and cannot maintain itself except by and through violence. The distinction between violence and force is an invention of the lawyers. They say when the state applies violence, even brutal violence, it is exercising “force;” that only individuals and non-governmental groups use violence. This is a totally unjustified distinction. State politics is always a means of conquering others and exercising the power of violence over them.”
― Jacques Ellul
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.”
-ECM
FAST FOOD, Seventh Helping, 2022
War is of the Reign of Satan. In war billions of times a day acts are chosen that serve the Reign of Satan, e.g., violence, hate, deceit, mercilessness, etc. This is why war in its concrete reality, as opposed to abstract conceptual discussions of it, is of the Reign of Satan. No war ever has been fought that is other than Satanic in its daily execution.
It has been said, “There are things worse than war.” And, maybe there are. But, war releases all of them into human life. War is a Pandora’s Box filled with Pandora Boxes of evil, everyone who enters into it, whether by gun or by pen, releases the energy of hell into that piece of the world he or she occupies at that moment, to the detriment of all humanity, today and tomorrow. General Tecumseth Sherman, looking for a word to communicate the unspeakable hideousness and savagery of the battlefield, decides on the word hell to complete his now famous sentence, “War is hell.” But, this is only a metaphor trying to describe what life becomes once the dogs of war are let loose. But according to Jesus, every particular act of war, e.g., violence, hatred, revenge, deceit, vengeance, homicide, mercilessness is participation in the actual dynamic of hell, where Satan reigns. And, once war, through the individuals participating in it, releases its hellish power into the human situation, no person knows how far or to where or to whom it will spread. Evil is beyond human control once it is permitted to pass from hell to earth through a human being. Logically and spiritually, it is possible that a chain reaction of evil initiated by the dispatching of this dreadful energy into human life, and the consequences attendant to that, may reach into the next day or into generations yet unborn. Or, it may reach into eternity.
-ECM
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan.
FAST FOOD, Sixth Helping, 2022
“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan, and that men must expel violence if they wish to liberate themselves from the Reign of Satan,” writes the internationally renowned Catholic Biblical scholar, the late Rev. John L. McKenzie. The Reign of Satan is the source, the domain and the agent for “The only great tragedy.” It is the fount of evil. The Reign (Kingdom) of God, the Holy One, is eternally opposed to the Reign of Satan, the unholy one. Within each human person the struggle between the two reigns is constant and deadly. Needless to say, having faith in and serving an idol, e.g. a warrior god, is not expelling violence from one’s life and cannot liberate a person from the Reign of Satan. And, it is certainly not the way in which a chosen disciple of Jesus can participate in the Holy, in becoming holy, or in growing in holiness.
-ECM
FAST FOOD, Fifth Helping, 2022
“I simply do not believe in the Great Warrior God, who exterminated the Canaanites. Some who share my faith do. They also profess belief in Jesus Christ the Son of God who said that he who would save his life must lose it, and who implied that a good way to lose it quickly is to love those who hate you and pray for those who persecute you. How does one speak of a god who exhibits both these features, the Great Warrior and love of enemies? I am compelled to say one cannot. I am also compelled to say that such a God does not exist, and that those who profess this monstrous faith worship an idol.”
RELIGION AND THE HUMANIZING OF MAN
Excerpt from the Plenary Address (1972)
International Congress of Learned Societies in the Field of Religion
-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical scholar
FAST FOOD, Fourth Helping, 2022
“God of perfect peace, violence and cruelty can have no part with you.”
—The Roman Missal (1985), The Sacramentary, Opening Prayer for the Mass for Peace and Justice, page 903.
What follows is a front page article from the April, 1975, edition of The Archdiocese of Boston’s Catholic weekly, The Pilot. The article is titled, “Cardinal Blesses Bicentennial Stamp.” It reads,
“Cardinal Medeiros will take part in a bicentennial observance in Concord on Saturday, April 19th, at 5:00 P.M., where he will bless a first date issue postage stamp at the first parish meeting house. The ten cent stamp, a semi-jumbo rectangular in yellow, red, blue, green, and two shades of black was designed by Bradbury Thomas and is based upon the painting, Lexington and Concord, 1775, by Henry Sandham. The scene depicted is Lexington Commons where the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War took place on April 19th, 1775.”
Pictured on the stamp are violent revolutionaries, the Minutemen, firing upon British troops.
Does the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston have any business blessing such a stamp? What does his being there on this day and his blessing of this stamp communicate about the reality and the truth of Jesus and His teachings? The stamp pictures men firing weapons at each other for the purpose of killing each other. Some of the men are on the ground either dead or wounded. Any person looking at the stamp knows what the men on both sides are thinking and feeling. He or she knows what spirits are operating in them at the moment. They are the unholy spirits of violence, vengefulness, hatred, fear, the desire to kill and maim. The stamp represents the antithesis of the Nonviolent Jesus, the Word of God, in the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances. But, the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston is blessing it. What is communicated to the world and to the Christians of Boston about the truth of who Jesus is and what His teaching is regarding the will of the Father of all for all? A Christian publicly blessing unholy human choices and acts is engaged in false witness. It is placing the unholy under the auspices of the Holy, thereby deceiving people about God, the will of God and the Way of God unto Eternal Communion with God as revealed by God Incarnate, Jesus. That is pretty serious stuff! Yet, this Cardinal’s anti-witness to Jesus is in complete spiritual and moral conformity with that of most cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, ministers, pastors and popes of most Christian Churches for most of Christian history.
-ECM
FAST FOOD, Third Helping, 2022
“Holiness is nothing other than love lived to the full. The measure of our holiness stems from the stature that Christ achieves in us, to the extent that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we model our whole life on his”.
-Pope Benedict XVI
Since the Word of God ‘made flesh,’ Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels, is nonviolent and proclaims by His words and deeds, unto His murder by crucifixion, a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the will of the Father, holy violence or violence as a way to do the will of the Holy One is a spiritual, theological and moral impossibility. The Word of God Incarnate communicates to humanity that love (agape) of all under all circumstances in His model is the moral will of God for all people, because God is love, the Father of all, and loves all His sons and daughters under all circumstances. The Word of God Incarnate also communicates to humanity that the moral will of God is nonviolent. Jesus, the Word of God, is nonviolent because God is nonviolent, and the Word is God (Jn1:1).
-ECM
FAST FOOD, Second Helping, 2022
“The only great tragedy is not to become a saint.”
-Leon Bloy
“As He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ”You shall be holy, for I am Holy” (1 Peter 1:15-16).
Pope Francis:
“The Lord Jesus, the divine Teacher and Model of all perfection, preached holiness of life to each of His disciples and to everyone of every condition. He Himself stands as the author and consummator of this holiness of life. He sent the Holy Spirit upon all that He might move them inwardly to love God with their whole heart and their whole soul, with all their mind and all their strength and that they might love each other as Christ loves them. I want to insist on the call to holiness that the Lord addresses to each of us, the call that he also addresses, personally, to you: ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’ The path of holiness is a source of peace and joy, given to us by the Holy Spirit. At the same time, it demands that we keep ‘our lamps lit’ and be attentive. Abstain from every form of evil. Naturally, this attitude entails obedience to the Gospel as the ultimate standard. For it is love that rules over all the means of attaining holiness and gives life to these same means. All the faithful of Christ are invited to strive for holiness and perfection in their own proper state. Indeed they have an obligation to so strive. Let all then have care that they guide aright their own deepest sentiments of soul.”
-GAUDETE ET EXSULTATE: THE CALL TO HOLINESS, March 19, 2018
FAST FOOD First Helping, 2022
Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan. The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager1 space probe from a record distance of about 3.7 billion miles.
“Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.”
-Carl Sagan, Excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came to be through Him and without Him nothing would have come to be…and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
(Jn1:1-14)
Traditional Prayer for the Forty Day Fast for Gospel Nonviolence
Abba, in the name of Jesus, we ask you to send the Holy Spirit to gather the Churches together, so that with one voice they may proclaim that Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of all people—friends and enemies—is the Way of God, teaching humanity, thereby, that violence is of the reign of Satan and that therefore violence is not the Holy Way, violence is not the Holy Way, violence is not the Apostolic Way, violence is not the Apostolic Way, violence is not the Christian Way, violence is not the Way of Jesus, thus setting Christians free forever from bondage to the unholy, uncatholic, unapostolic, un-Christlike ways of the false gods, theologies and agents of violence and enmity.
We plead this grace so that the Nonviolent Lamb may be our Lord in deed, as well as, in word and sacrament. We request this gift so that the Christian Community may be—for afflicted humanity—a faithful witness to Jesus’ Way of overcoming evil and death. We implore this healing so that the Church may be an authentic extension in time and space of the Way of the Lamb of God, of the Way of the Nonviolent Jesus, which is the Way to renew the face of the earth, and the Way of Eternal Salvation for each and all. Amen.
Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow Him
—
Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow Him.
Friends,
This year is the 40th anniversary of the July1-August 9 time of prayer and/or fasting that the truth of Jesus’ Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies be once again the teaching of all the Churches of Christianity as it was the explicit teaching of Jesus when He dwelt among us and still is the infallible teaching of the Word of God.
Over the decades, the number of folks who participate in the fasting dimension of this spiritual event has dwindled markedly, now probably approaching absolute zero. So be it. Life continuously alters possibilities available to people. However, without having commissioned a formal Gallup Poll, I think the number of people who participate in this effort to call the Churches and their leaders back to the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances by prayer alone has increased. Which is wonderful!
For 40 years the passage from the Gospels that have been employed as a raison d’etre for this time of prayer and fasting is, “This is the kind (of evil spirit) that can be driven out only by prayer and fasting” (Mk 9:29; Mt 17:21). I note this for two reasons. First, Jesus is saying that there is a hierarchy of evils and some require a greater effort at opening up ourselves and others to the grace of God that is necessary to conquer “this kind.” Second, The Gospel of Mark is prior to the Gospel of Matthew and is the source of many passages in Matthew. Mark says, “This is the kind (of evil spirit) that can be driven out only by prayer.” Matthew adds the “and fasting.” So, if the limitations of your situation in life do not allow for fasting, know for certain that prayer alone is not a lower level of participation. Both prayer and fasting in this situation are asking for help from God. The sincerity of our petition and our willingness to do what God reveals to us as our part in overcoming this humanly intractable evil, is what is central to our prayer and/or our fasting. Remember the woman in the Gospel who has only one shekel to give as an offering to God and what Jesus says about her.
Certainly, the grip of death and destruction which that the most ancient of evils, violence, has on human beings and on just about every institution human beings’ have erected is more than enough motivation to seriously ask God for help through Jesus and His Holy Spirit. When an evil is so embedded in the human psyche and in practically every human institution, which nurtures and controls people, that it is normalized and seen as good, when it has so blinded human beings that they cannot even see they are murdering God (Jesus did not die in a camel accident!), then prayer and/or fasting are necessary. for we are confronting the mystery of iniquity close to the top of the hierarchy of evil.
Attached is a prayer that many have said from July1-August 9 over the decades, and that many who firmly desire peace among and within all people and the Eternal Salvation of all, have prayed daily over the years.
I will continue to forward to you each day a FAST FOOD Helping (reflection) to ponder for guidance from the Holy Spirit during these forty days, and maybe thereafter.
In Christ-God,
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org
2 comments. Leave new
Thank you for posting! Looking forward to more.
Thank you Patrick and please spread the message by sending this website https://www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org or the FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.