From the earliest moments of the Church, the Maccabean martyrs have been recognized as models and precursors of the Christian martyrs. More than a thousand years later, they inspired the Crusaders in their struggle to repossess the Holy Land.
My notion of a Christian Zionism may be obscurely tied up with my own habit of reading I Maccabees, each year when the Jewish calendar requires it: specifically, the remembrance of the liberation of Jerusalem from Seleucid rule, and the rededication of the Second (Herod’s) Temple.
It is implicit in the celebration of Chanukah, the eight days of which conclude at nightfall this evening. We Jews (for Catholicism, founded by a Jew, is in the descent from Judaism) remember righteous warriors and saints, and all the miracles of our survival – which will continue, we believe, beyond the present day.
Our faith is, in this sense, a warrior faith: we may “submit” to death, where death is inevitable, but the living and the dead are joined in service to God, the Father.
It is a kind of spiritual “string theory” that I am advancing here, in my conception of the Church. The liturgy for the sacrifice of the Mass descends from the Temple worship at Jerusalem (as opposed to later rabbinical Judaism); “mainstream” Christianity follows from “mainstream” Judaism; and the Jews, in winning freedom, won freedom for us.
Events in the Middle East have reawakened Jewry to their peril, and to their destiny; the same should be the effect on Christians.
We had, in the events of 7th October, a reminder not only of the military situation (the Books of Maccabees are good at describing these), but of the moral realities. The Hamas terrorists who raped, tortured, and murdered Jewish innocents of all ages, and their guests, were exhibiting the opposite of prescribed “Judeo-Christian” behavior.
They belong to a religion founded upon Submission. Christ taught that we should rather KNOW the truth, and that the truth shall make us free.
He declared this, we read in our Scripture, “to those Jews, who believed him,” and made disciples of them. Note, particularly: disciples, not slaves.
This continues to be an important distinction, at the present day, as the post-Christian inhabitants of the West show their preference for slavery.
The loss of religious faith is, to my mind or my knowledge, the very cause of this. The idea that human life can offer anything beyond a choice of submissions (to Islam, to Communism, to commerce, to perversity) is falling into desuetude; and by no surprise we have come to accept instructions from new masters.
They may not be human masters. Only our obedience is human. The new bureaucracies for the Batflu regime, or the climate regime, or “gender transitioning,” are inhumanly, or “trans-humanly” guided. These are signs of the times.
“Democracy” has been reversed in our political life. Where, at least in theory, it meant that men would choose the members of their government, it now means government has been imposed – for “the people” have spoken, and our conscience is obviated. Voting decides all.
The individual Christian citizen is commanded by recent laws to obey not Christ, but Satan. In Canada, where I live, for instance, he must willingly kill babies and the old and ill if he is a medical professional. His conscience is no legal defense against the demands of a devil in human flesh.
The machine principle of bureaucracy can thus be applied in matters of life and death, as it was in Nazi Germany; and has been by many other psychopathic governments in the course of recorded history. The German people, like North Americans today, simply allowed it, from fear.
Free men do not allow tyrants. This has nothing to do with laws.
They use whatever means are necessary to recover their freedom. That is the principle behind the right to bear arms, which was not invented in America, but goes back through British and Mediaeval tradition.
This is what most of the victims of Hamas were lacking on the 7th of October: they were not armed. It is among the paradoxical benefits of the day, that Israelis, and Jews in America, are now apparently arming themselves in unprecedented numbers.
For it makes no sense to grumble, as insipid Republicans tend to do, that Harvard and the various Woke universities have succumbed to antisemitism; or that the public schools are brainwashing their children; or that polite society is not generally available anymore.
Opinion polls on the views of the American young are quite appalling. Record numbers do not believe the Holocaust really happened; many do not think Israel has the right to exist; and they don’t think murder and genocide are, in ALL circumstances, wrong. They aren’t majorities yet, but already they can swing elections.
One needn’t be a member of the National Rifle Association to realize that Jews and Christians need to be armed, in the world toward which “progress” is advancing. More than this, they need to show courage when their lives are threatened.
Freedom of speech is recognized in the American Constitution, and in those of most other once-Christian countries. This is nice, and it is good to have a law to cite when someone comes to silence you.
But freedom of speech further requires that we speak freely. It requires us not to “shut up” when illegitimately told to do so. We cannot be commanded to lie, or to suppress the truth.
For the flip side of a truly meek nature must necessarily be a courageous one. These two qualities go together, in the healthy philosophical mind. For “meek” does not mean fearful. Christ says, “Fear not!”
As a certain Theodore Roosevelt put it, one should “speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Or as T. S. Eliot wrote, “the trowel in hand, and the gun slightly loose in the holster.”
He was alluding to the prophet Nehemiah.
