“We are an Easter people, and alleluia is our song,” the great St. Augustine once wrote. Over 1,500 years later, Pope St. John Paul II echoed these words when speaking in Adelaide, Australia. “We do not pretend that life is all beauty. We are aware of darkness and sin, of poverty and pain,” the Pontiff said. “But we know Jesus has conquered sin and passed through his own pain to the glory of the Resurrection. And we live in the light of his Paschal Mystery — the mystery of his Death and Resurrection. ‘We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song!’”
For Christ’s death and resurrection make manifest one inescapable, incontrovertible fact: Hell has already lost the war.
Those words were spoken nearly four decades ago. Since then, the world has changed much. Yes, the Iron Curtain fell, the horrors of the World Wars are now distant specters, but new horrors have risen in their stead. The apathetic nihilism of the 1920s and 30s and the rampant materialism of the 80s have given way to sheer hedonism, the Christian identity of the West is openly challenged and aggressively suppressed, and godless ideology has formed an unholy union with science and technology, unbounded by any moral standard or obligation beyond the felt emotion of any given moment.
In America, the slaughter of the unborn and the mutilating of children have become religious principles — practically sacraments — for a domineering political faction. Legacy media spews lies and vitriol to a population largely stripped of critical thinking — thanks in no small part to that political faction’s gutting of the nation’s public education system. Election integrity concerns have left citizens worried that they may be disenfranchised, ruled over by an elite political class wed to an oligarchy of technocrats. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: American Catholics Back Trump Over Biden)
Crime is on the rise, violence is becoming commonplace on the streets and subway platforms. Illegal immigration has reached a fever pitch, with fighting-age males from (let’s just say it) uncivilized countries swarming across our borders, replacing the heritage population. And the few men and women who take a stand for the very principles for which our forefathers fought, bled, and died are smeared as extremists and threats to democracy.
This is deeply disheartening, and yet news of the decay of our nation is practically unavoidable. Those who could once make a claim that they just want to be left alone have found that the tyranny of the Left will not leave them alone but will invade every corner of culture, society, education, media, medicine, law, leaving nothing untouched or undefiled.
What can men do in the face of such reckless destruction? What response is there against the merciless brutalization of the West, of the nations that we call home, the nations that our forefathers called home? The Saints answer this question for us readily: hope.
It is in Easter that we find our hope, in the resurrected Christ. It is on Christ’s back — His beaten and flogged back, saddled with a cross, with the weight of the world’s sins — that civilization rests. It is in God-made-man that we must place our hope: not in imperfect ideologies and captive institutions, not in political leaders and cults of personality, not even in our homelands and sovereign nations, but in He who is Sovereign over all.
No matter the crises we face today, Christ’s crucifixion (commemorated on Good Friday) was the bleakest, grimmest hour in human history: the death of God Himself. Yet through His glorious resurrection, He restored to us life. What profound joy must set fire and blaze within our hearts to know that our hope is in One who has conquered the grave. The tomb could not contain Him, death itself trembled and fell before Him. As St. Paul the Apostle rejoices, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).
But what good is hope in the face of what seems almost certain (slow and hard-fought, to be sure, but certain nonetheless) defeat? St. Augustine tells us, “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
Even a cursory glance at the horrors our modern age has wrought is enough to inspire the most righteous and violent fury. Tales of children surviving abortions and being left to die, stories of children being drugged and carved up to produce synthetic opposite-sex sex organs, testimony from survivors of sex-trafficking condemning the ever-prevalent phenomenon of internet pornography — these and hundreds and thousands of other depravities are more than enough to rouse anger in the hearts of those who still have hearts.
Anger then sees to it that we want a change, that we do not want our culture to be thus corroded. Courage gives us the strength to follow through on our anger, to bring down our foe and rebuild the West. The great author G.K. Chesterton, himself numbered among the Easter people, once wrote, “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” He continued:
He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
And it is, of course, our hope in Christ that inspires us to be courageous. When standing up for what is right and true and moral and virtuous, we may ask ourselves, “But what if I die?” More likely we will ask ourselves, “What if I get canceled? What if I get doxed? What if I lose my job? What if I lose my friends?” With our hope founded firmly upon Christ’s resurrection, we may boldly answer, “So what? Every man must die some day, why not today? If I am not canceled for saying this, I’ll just be canceled for saying something else further down the road, so why not say it?” (READ MORE: Polish Bishops’ Fight Leftist Government Onslaught)
For Christ’s death and resurrection make manifest one inescapable, incontrovertible fact: Hell has already lost the war. There are battles still to be won, and more still to be fought, but the war itself is won, and the risen Christ is the victor. Let us then place our hope in Him and, with righteous anger and paradoxical courage in our hearts, proclaim that we are an Easter people, and alleluia is our song!
