FAST FOOD 2026, Sixteenth Helping

                                                             

FAST FOOD 2026, Sixteenth Helping

 

Since the Constantinian alterations of the Church in the fourth century, which changed the Church from being a grouping of people who absolutely rejected violence and taught love of enemies, into an intrinsically violent institution modeled on the state that has justified the destruction of enemies by every new form and instrument of violence created over the centuries by human beings.

 

The symbolic culmination, but not the actual culmination, of this violence justifying, enemy destroying alteration of the Church that began at the time of Constantine is considered by many to be the detonation of the first atomic bomb in human history on July 16, AD1945 at Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert. All the human time, labor and genius since Cain, which had gone into making ever more powerful and efficient instruments to destroy enemies, reached its symbolic nadir in manufacturing a weapon which could actually destroy every human being on the planet.

 

No one act that was an “aha” moment for a person brought the atomic bomb into existence. The atomic bomb came into human existence by a long process of toil and struggle by human beings desiring to kill enemies and working very hard over millennia to do that more and more effectively. Sorrowfully, it must be admitted and said that a major player in the chain of causation that brought July 16, AD1945 into existence is the Church that altered Christian morality in the fourth century to support all that happened over the next sixteen hundred years that was needed to bring about Trinity Site, July 16, AD1945.

 

As noted, and historically documented earlier in these FAST FOOD helpings, the Christian community in its first three centuries of existence was the first human community in history to renounce all such violent and enmity laced efforts and work, by struggling to put on the mind of the nonviolent Jesus and absolutely rejecting violence and teaching love of enemies. This ipso facto meant rejecting using or making tools whose purpose was to be employed to do what Christians, knew through Jesus, was evil, that is, not loving the enemy but instead destroying the enemy.

 

Today, perhaps most of the instruments of human destruction, nuclear or otherwise, are largely made by Christians, as was the first atomic bomb. Dorothy Day mentions in her magnificent September 1945 Catholic Worker commentary, True God and True Man, on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, that Notre Dame was involved with making the atomic bomb. So were tens of thousands of other Christians.

 

Today, private corporations engaged in the research and development of tools to kill enemies receive annually hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Government. While I have not been able to find figures on the percentage or number of Christians or Catholics who work for such businesses, I do not think it is out of bounds to say that a very large percentage of their employees are Christians. Few I am sure have any qualms of Christians conscience with being a cog in the juggernaut making instruments to kill enemies for the US or other countries who will pay for them.

 

Few have qualms regarding their jobs in weapons industries because few have ever heard a single sermon in their Christian Churches on the teaching in the Gospels and right livelihood. Right livelihood, which is a basic tenet of Buddha’s Eightfold Noble Path, “earning a living in an honest and peaceful way that does not harm others,” is rarely, if ever, mentioned at least in the Catholic Church, except for employment where sexual activity is involved. Yet, it seems spiritually dishonest to say that while eight hours per day working at a job takes up the average adult Christians conscious daily life, it is relegated to a non-moral concern by most Christian Churches and Christians. Why?

 

In the 1980s Bishop Leroy Matthiesen of Amarillo,Texas, found out that a large company in his Diocese, Pantex, was making nuclear weapons. He announced from the pulpits of his Churches that if a person was working for Pantext and wanted to leave for conscience reasons related to making nuclear weapons, he would support him or her and if they quit Pantext and he would use Church funds if necessary to support them financially until they found a new job! Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is not exclusively pertinent to staying away from the military and its homicidal enmity operations.

 

The Church has not changed its course in sixteen hundred years. It is still part of the process of bringing death to the enemy with now evermore sophisticated high tech, horror inducing, industrial weapons. There is, however, an exit, but only one exit, from this fiendish trap in which Christianity has ensnared itself for sixteen centuries, and it is not signing high sounding, well manicured peace statements with the deceitful Constantines, Trumps and Netanyahu, etc, of this world. It is by returning to the Source. Recognizing that there never was an organized community in the history of the world that rejected absolutely violence and taught unconditionally, “Love your enemy, ” before Christianity taught and lived it for 300 years, and recognizing also that, astoundingly, Jesus taught these truths as the Way of God but was also the first person in history in the entire canon of ancient literature to ever speak the sentence “Love your enemy.”  

 

As a Baptized disciple of Jesus be what you are, namely, a link in a chain to invite every son and daughter of the Father of all, to renounce the old destructive way of violence and enmity, to love as Jesus loves, and thereby not be a part of a future comparable reality to July 16, 1945. But rather, bring those that God places in your presence to love as God loves by loving them as God loves them, so that each and all can know the love of the God of love in time and for all eternity.

 

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

 

 

 

www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org

https://www.youtube.com/@emmanuelcharlesmccarthy3292

 

“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.

Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!