Health Care Reform? Expect Better News!

©2010, Randall A. Beeler

3 And King Herod, hearing this, was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him … 16 Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under (Matt 1, DRE)

16 They have a mouth, but they speak not: they have eyes, but they see not. 17 They have ears, but they hear not: neither is there any breath in their mouths. 18 Let them that make them be like to them: and every one that trusts in them. (Ps 134, DRE)

So now the princes of this world would force a healthcare bill.

This legislation is not about health, nor is it about caring for people. It is not even an attempt to shore up the reputation of a troubled president and his majority party.

For parties pass on. Laws are writ, then fade into memory. Premiums are paid (or not). All of us get ill or injured and no matter how many times we are healed, we will all face death before our final opportunity to be healed.

I do not here make light of illness or of the need of many persons who seek the peace-of-mind of being able to care for the health of themselves and their loved ones (and which of us does not fall into that category?). Would, rather, that our president and his princes have such a mundane concern.

A fervency lies behind our president's push for this healthcare bill.

And I emphasize the word, "lies."

Our current prince wants not a better world for more people but fewer people for less of a world. Those who war against the Resurrection seek to remake mankind in their image, for then mankind will have to bow down to them, and not the Christ. In talking about the ancient Carthaginians, G. K. Chesterton rightly identified this state of mind as

a tendency … to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion [in the] dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In Carthage… the god who got things done bore the name Moloch [who] … was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilized people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. (G. K. Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man)

President Obama banks on "change that we can believe in"—results. Reform healthcare on the dismembered backs of the unborn, upon banks of frozen human beings he calls embryonic product, on medical research on embryos, on the skin of the prophylactic that dictates to future generations when and how they can come into existence (if at all). Are we at all surprised that the cost of this bill is placed on future generations, even as the princes of this present darkness decimate our generations, present and future?

Practical results. Change—but not at any cost; only at the cost of hope. Before he became President, Barack Obama published a book called The Audacity of Hope. He now hopes on his own audacity.

The irony of this end-game is that our current social and economic crisis is caused by the very same genocidal tactics that Obama and his princes claim are the cure—contraception and extermination.

Europe has contraceived itself into fiscal and cultural ruin as its geography is overrun by an encroaching Islam that has found welcome in the abortifacient EU's negative birthrates where it once saw the closed gates of Vienna, the Hammer of Martel, and the flaming leagues of Lepanto.

But the West rises again. We are the West. Right here. Right now. Perhaps we have faced darker days in our history. Perhaps not. But the comedy of this situation may be in the very loneliness that you and I feel, the loneliness of "Am I the only one who sees the madness of these events, the audacity of this evil? Are you and I the only ones who spy the culture of death and this malevolent plot against the meek, against the Christ?"

As Cleopas and friend walked the lonely road to Emmaus (Luke 24), only to have a stranger rise to their occasion, so you and I walk this 2010 road not alone. Tolkien supplied Frodo with Sam Gamgee, and T. S. Eliot prophesied the Christ in our midst:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you? (from The Wasteland)

The more strenuously the princes of this world rattle in their chains, the more you and I hear the tinkle of church bells. The worse that Satan plots, the more he renders himself an unwilling instrument of God's grace.

The Crucifixes we wear announce this truth.

So, today, and tomorrow and the days ahead, you and I will wear the little feet that symbolize the precious lives of those most vulnerable. For they trod with us on our Road to Emmaus.

Even though the princes of this world would deaden the heart of man, we comedic Catholics pray through the intercession of the dead—who are miraculously alive, trodding the dust with us, cheering us on, coaxing, prodding, encouraging, slipping us a refreshing drink of the Cup and feeding us a nibble of Lembas as we clamber up the ashes of Orodruin.

We will sink the One Ring of the princes' power in the cracks of doom and see our Gollum-like shadows burnt clean in the blaze. We are not alone. We have reason to cheer.

This health care bill—and any other new-world-order plan—stands at the gate; we are servants of the Secret Fire, foot soldiers in the Church. It is not our gates that are vulnerable; for, if we hear a groan, it is only the gates of hell whose fall echoes in our ears. And all of Washington is troubled at that roar.

Pray, my brothers and sisters. Pray the Divine Mercy. And expect good news.

Eternal Father, we offer You the Body and Blood,

Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ,

In atonement for our sins, and those of the whole world.

Jesus, I trust in You.

Jesus, I trust in You.

Jesus, I trust in You.

(from The Chaplet of Divine Mercy)

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

(T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding)