Saturday, May 17, 2014

Salvation and Super Heroes

From Crisis:
While we Americans value freedom—and rightly so—if we wish to safeguard this national treasure, we need to recognize that divine love is freedom’s true cause and only guardian. The deepest enemy of freedom is not the violent and deceptive establishment of world order. It is the absence of charity or narcissism, to call it by another name. The martyrs teach us that even in the face of violence, we can still love and thus conquer evil. And this love is our true freedom because charity turns us toward the God who saves us. What the Gospel teaches is that evil is self-annihilating in its resistance to charity; and this, precisely because evil is self-absorbed. It simply destroys itself as it seeks to destroy its enemy. It is a house divided.

But even more powerfully, once charity draws the person to God, evil vanishes altogether as light fills the darkness. Evil simply has no effective response because charity cannot be overpowered. And that’s not to say that we should forego legitimate self-defense. It’s merely to suggest that we should cling to the sobering (and admittedly less exciting) reality that self-defense cannot destroy evil, as does the love of Jesus Christ. “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). Not exactly what we call action, but it is the real power of divine love. (Read more.)

Via Mary Victrix. Share

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