Carlos Caso-Rosendi

It is very sad to contemplate what is happening in the United States. From outside, the display of barbarism and wanton destruction is only accentuated by what was once the promise that the country offered to mankind.

The Founding Fathers of the American nation were not perfect, of course but they managed to create something that brought a great number of positive changes in the world. For a long while, the nation was a beacon of freedom and prosperity unparalleled in the history of mankind.

Some say there are two visions of history, one of them is the tragic view of the human condition: humans are imperfect. Since Adam, anything we manage to build will eventually reflect its wounded human maker. But we still have to live in this world deformed by sin and make the best of it.

The opposite of the tragic concept is the epic or therapeutic view of history. For those who espouse that idea, the world still can be perfected, human imperfection can be corrected; with time and effort even infirmity and death may be defeated, they say.

Traditional Catholicism (not the post-conciliar version) affirms the tragic vision of history. We cannot install paradise on earth because humanity is mortally wounded. However, we can watch our hearts where the sources of injustice reside. In this way the effect of sin on the world can be partially ameliorated by combating it at its source. Only God can completely remove sin; he will do it, eventually. By now, we have to live with it and master our passions while we try to make the world a better place, we are ennobled by our struggle. It is a noble endeavor to enter the good fight knowing we can’t win on our own.

On the other hand, the epic (or therapeutic) vision of history affirms that paradise can be built through science, technology, ideologies and the constant control of the State. The epic vision needs to be imposed on man from without by force. The ‘new man’ is a man crushed by the weight of that effort, his humanity must be abolished to conform to impossible goals. That is why the epic vision always ends in a nightmare of violence.

In sacred history, Jacob is a fighter. His name identifies him as “the one who takes the heel” or “a trickster” but God gives him a new name: Israel, which means “the struggle belongs to God”. Man must build his destiny within the cosmic battle in which he has been wounded. He who dreams of winning the battle without God has no idea of what he’s getting into.

In the beginning, God commands Adam to subdue the earth. That commandment still applies. We must consider that Adam was instructed to lord over the earth before the fall into sin. Now, wounded mankind must suffer the consequences of a destiny twisted by evil. Man must bear the cross of a thorn existence.

Man succeeds in subjugating the earth but imbues it with his error (“cursed is the earth because of you”) and therefore, outside of Eden, imperfect man cannot rebuild paradise but only a partial copy of it. Our destiny will be tragic until God completes our redemption. The temptation to create a human copy of that lost paradise is a deadly illusion. Instead of life and happiness the result is misery and death. The apprentice cannot reproduce the work of his Master. When man tries to erase the consequences of sin, he ends up crushed by the weight of the task.

There resides the genius of the American Founding Fathers. They knew very well that it’s impossible to rid mankind of corruption and sin. In a way that I have found many times close to inspired, they designed a corruption resistant system that would protect the individual from the abuses of tyrants and most particularly from the nightmare of an out of control state. They knew it was impossible to trust the budding nation to a human dynasty, and so they gave the whole project to the care of God by stating simply: “In God we trust.”

But there is no project, not even a divine one that can survive the critique of this new and potent generation of barbarians. They will take nothing but absolute perfection. Men have to be perfectly adjusted to their schizophrenic ideals that condemn a baby to death for the mere convenience of the mother while, at the same time, forbid a policeman to fire upon a murderer bent on killing someone. In a strange iconoclasm, down go the statues of slave owners along with those of abolitionists. The movement that enthroned “goddess Reason” on the altars of Notre-Dame de Paris during the French Revolution, have abandoned even the pretension of using reason. Their pseudo-intellectual discourse is filled with blatant contradictions, it is nothing but a call to destroy anything resembling civil order.

In the end, it will come to this: either the forces of order destroy the murderous Left or the murderous Left will destroy the forces of order. We have reached the end of the age of “final solutions” when killers must face the same remedy they proposed. Mother Teresa of Calcutta prophesied that much:

“The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”

The garden planted in 1776 in North America has dried. Now the barbarians gather at the gates, their hearts on fire with an evil madness, and their minds set to kill or be killed.