Lew, Pope Benedict has the right Christmas message: the Prince of Peace did not come to make war on Caesar and “liberate the Chosen People from foreign occupation.” He came to liberate us all from sin.
Today’s dispensationalist evangelicals, personified in the Christian Bush and egged on by the cynical, secular neocons, have hijacked the Messiah’s message and turned it upside down…Now they applaud as U.S. forces make war on the world and “liberate” foreign countries by terrorizing, bombing, and permanently occupying them “for their own good.”
Pope Benedict has tried to warn the world that America’s wars are driving Christians from the lands that the U.S. “liberated” (Bush’s “surge” was so successful, don’t you know) — lands that Christians have lived in since the time of Christ. Amidst all the carnage, I don’t hear a squeak from our televangelist warmongers who long for Armageddon so they can rule with Christ over the rest of us unbelievers.
Saint Paul and Augustine both warned against such lust for glory (superbia vitae) and power (libido dominandi). Alas, today’s “Christian” cheerleaders have made these deadly sins the bedrock of US. foreign policy, peddling the Prince of Peace as a god of war. The result was predicted by Solzhenitsyn: the truth will make you free, but falsehood always brings violence in its wake.
3:58 pm on December 25, 2010
