Never Again

[Valin]

National Review:

Will history wonder why we were silent in the face of Christian persecution?

Kathryn Jean Lopez

September 1, 2014

 

How many times have we heard: “Never again”? (Or taken selfies at a concentration camp or Holocaust museum with those words?) How often have we quoted: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”? And yet: Do we do nothing? What do we actually say in the face of evil?

 

“I don’t want to have on my conscience that I was complicit in something as horrendous as this simply by being quiet,” is how Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., reflected on the persecution being conducted against Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria — which are far enough away from the U.S. that we mostly go on with our lives, perhaps without even a thought or a prayer.

 

(Snip)

 

In his Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton remembered waking up on the morning of September 1, 1939, to learn that Hitler had invaded Poland. Merton wondered what a difference he could have made had he been less self-centered in his youth, asking himself “what the effect was of all the hangovers I had at that time ‎on what was going on in the world.”

 

Reflecting on the world today — and specifically on the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities that has been happening throughout the world in numbers higher than ever before in the history of Christianity — a friend recently remarked: “I’ve already had too many hangovers, literally and figuratively speaking, and would like for my life to offer something more for the history of the world than them.”

 

(Snip)