American culture needs radical social change: but we are not radical enough because we are not holy enough. The Church founded by Christ provides us with the means to grow in holiness. We must partake of them as fully and respond as deeply as we can, while with generous and gentle hearts inviting all people to benefit from these means of salvation.
We need a restored liturgical calendar observed in a way that is visible and, if possible, draws in the civic community: patron saints for every kind of place (rivers, mountains, streets, buildings) and every sort of association of people, processions not just around the church property but around the city; pilgrimages advertised on the radio and on the bulletin boards of our secular Universities and our public libraries; fasts where we really fast and feasts where we really feast--- so that we can be absorbed in Time Made Holy.
Do we want to rebuild civilization? We need to get some good songs. I was on a pilgrimage, once, to Our Lady's shrine at Walsingham, England. The different nationalities walked in groups, so as to be able to pray and sign together en route. The English language group--- mostly Irish-British, with a few Canadians, Australians, and Americans--- was pathetic: there was not one single song we all knew and could sing together. (I presume we shouldn't count "Happy Birthday to You" and "Yellow Submarine.") Songs, please, songsters! We need singing, or we're sunk.
We need training in empathy: the Ignatian Exercises to develop, strengthen and direct our emotional and affective powers, and the Rosary. (Note the role the Rosary played in people's movements in Poland and the Philippines.)
We need to make little shrines wherever we go: at our desks or works stations at work (it could be as simple as a cheap paper icon of the Archangel Michael casting out Satan, taped to your computer monitor: and God knows we may need some devils cast out from time to time); in our front yards and back yards, in our kitchens and bedrooms and cars.
We need a renewed devotion to Blessed Mary, who is filling the churches in Russia with poets, musicians and peace people. We need intimate familiarity with the lives of women saints: with Kateri Tekakwitha and Katherine Drexel, Hildegard of Bingen and Doctors of the Church Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux and Catherine of Siena. We need to know our poets, novelists and philosophers: Caryll Houselander, Sigrid Undset, Maisie Ward, Raissa Maritain, Catherine DeHueck Doherty, Edith Stein and Adrienne von Speyr; and the woman who should be the patron saint of the American Catholic laity, Dorothy Day.
Pope John Paul II has called for the East and West to enrich each other with their spiritual and worldly goods; Look! The relationship between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches is the most interesting courtship there is. Let us pursue this courtship with stubborn courtesy and obstinate affection, for the Orthodox and Catholics are ---even more, I think, than the "two lungs" of Christianity--- the two brain hemispheres of the Mind of Christ, the two halves of His suffering Heart.
We need to study very closely the anti-totalitarian saints--- like Titus Brandsma, Maximilian Kolbe and Franz Jaegerstatter, and the New Russian Martyrs ---- and in fact all the martyrs of the Century of Terror: the 20th Century, which produced more martyrs than all the previous centuries combined.
Let's avoid the "personal success" spiritualities which could turn us into self-affirming, self-validating, self-basting turkeys.
Cultures which dissipate bonding energy through sexual adventurism, and disrupt women's sexual cycles through contraception, abortion, and the artificial feeding of babies, are not sustainable over time. We need forthright teaching on sexual shalom of the laity, by the laity and for the laity, and financial support for NFP teaching couples and La Leche-type doulas in every parish.
Catholics who have jobs where the main project, or the only project, is murder--- and this includes Catholics in the abortion industry, in the nuclear chain of command, and in immoral death technologies --- need a prophetic jolt to leave their jobs, and pastoral care in finding new ones. No authentic spiritual life can survive in such circumstances.
Catholics whose jobs expose them to near occasions of sin (I considered making a list, but frankly, name a job which doesn't) need to meet regularly with co-workers to pray and reflect, especially on matters which trouble the conscience.
We are always being formed. We should be transformed into the image of the Lord Jesus, but instead we are deformed --- by the images we allow to cascade into our eyes, and which remain in our minds when our eyes are closed; by the noise we funnel into our ears, and which begins to replace the holy rhythms of heart and lungs and Lord Have Mercy. We do not serve, so we are severed. We do not remember what a human being is for, so --- this applies to us and to our young-- we are dismembered.
Scant in religious vocations, America still has plenty of missionary zeal. We beam penetrating and persuasive images of throwaway luxury --- we call it our way of "life"--- to all parts of the world, followed by our other major exports: the Mall, the Pill, the Smart Bomb and the Suction Machine.
Yet there is One who has no part in this disease which has us sick unto death: Jesus Christ our Healer, our King and God. If the Church (that means, your household) will study Jesus worshipfully and find ways to proclaim His teachings in their entirety, we can be saved.
