We are in a time of conflict and tension. And Christians are seen as standing in the way of sensible and progressive solutions. Like euthanasia. Like abortion.

Hat tip Alte, but from the Catholic Herald

“Why should the Church take special care of the sick?” there is a quote from the German Nobel Prize-winning author, Heinrich Böll:

“I would prefer even the worst possible Christian world to the best pagan world, because in a Christian world there is room for those for whom no pagan world ever made room: cripples and sick people, the old and the weak. And there was more than room for them: there was love for those who seemed and seem useless to the pagan and the godless world.”

Our post-Enlightenment, neo-pagan society fails to understand that this is at the heart of Christianity. Keen to castigate Christian belief as superstitious and irrational and its practitioners as corrupt and bigoted, it chooses to ignore the Church’s magnificent record of care for the sick – “useless feeders”, as the Nazis called them. Boll had seen at first hand how the Nazis treated the vulnerable and was revolted by it.

Well, progressives lie. The end justifies the means.

And… if it’s just me, I don’t care. If it’s my family I’ll fight. But if it is the poor, the vulnerable, the crippled and the mad, I will go feral. I confess I have a temper. I have burst into managers offices and confronted them because they are giving those with psychosis a bad deal. It’s my duty.

And anyone who coopts mental health professionals into restricting and rationing basic care is evil

At times you need to confront. In today’s lectionary there is the parable of the vineyard: the tenants will not pay rent, so the landlord sends his son. And the tenants kill him. The Righteous listening were horrified: and then Jesus drives them into the metaphor.

Luke 20.

¹⁷But he looked at them and said, “What then does this text mean:
‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone’?
¹⁸Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” ¹⁹When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people.

The trouble with confrontation is that those in authority will try to shut you up. When I lost my temper (Wrath, Sloth and Lust are my besetting sins) I was disciplined and counselled: I was not “let go” because I’m fortunate to have a fairly unusual and needed skill set. The righteous Germans paid for their confrontation of the Hitlerian evil with their lives.

Times are getting dark. Pray that it will be not night (again) in our time. But regardless of what happens, it is our duty to witness. Part of witnessing is confronting evil.