At The Stream, John Zmirak is coldly accurate:

If you have been following mass media over the past few days, you will have learned from an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor that defenders of religious freedom are “Nazis.” Take a moment to ponder that assertion. Roll it around in your head for a while. You’ll be hearing a lot more fighting words as we enter the next phase of Christian life in America.

Sample the hate that has been spewed at the state of Indiana in the past week, and faithful Christians in recent years, by gay activists and their allies. We are “bigots,” “Neanderthals” and “haters,” whose views must be ritually rejected by anyone hoping to keep a job in today’s America — even in a Catholic high school. Where will this end? Is there a logical stopping point for this aggression, where Christians are left in peace?

If you are in China, it may seem to have no end.  If you are in Russia, you know it ends when it’s stopped.

History teaches that mass vilification rarely stops short of spilling blood. The French Jacobins who spent the 1780s slandering the clergy in pornographic pamphlets went on in the 1790s to slaughter Christians by the hundreds of thousands. The Turks paved the way for killing a million Armenian Christians with a wave of propaganda. The Bolsheviks followed their “anti-God” crusade of the 1920s with starvation camps and firing squads. The Communist governments of Eastern Europe obeyed the same script, as scholar Anne Applebaum documents in her sobering study The Iron Curtain. The Hutu government of Rwanda prepared for its assault on the once-powerful Tutsis by incessantly describing them as “cockroaches” on radio broadcasts, which triggered a genocide.

If the media, the law and our elite institutions succeed in lumping Christian sexual morals in with white racism, how long will it be before believing Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox (and many religious minorities) find themselves labelled as members of “extremist sects,” no more to be trusted with the care of their own children than the Branch Davidians were?

Does that sound crazy to you? Then ask yourself why the German government, and the European Court of Human Rights, felt justified in seizing a Christian home-schooled student — with the apparent approval of the Obama administration. Think about the moral views you teach your own kids. Would your local education bureaucrats approve?

Perhaps Chicago’s cardinal, Francis George, wasn’t guilty of hyperbole when he said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

Joining him would be many Christians who affirm the Gospel in its integrity — instead of the neutered version that’s now sweeping the denominations to swell the ranks of the persecutors. See the Episcopalians and Presbyterians who are now blessing same-sex marriages; see “Catholic” universities such as Marquette, which fired a professor for defending the Catholic Catechism on this subject, and bishops such as Paul Bootkowski of Metuchen, N.J., who backed up a Catholic school that suspended a Catholic teacher for her Facebook comments critical of gay activism. With shepherds like these, who really needs wolves?

Zmirak says we should not be surprised at the hate and contempt gay militants have for Christians.  The question is, “What should we do?”

If Indiana caves and guts its religious freedom law — as Gov. Mike Pence has already promised — it will prove an equal triumph for those who are so enraged at Christian teaching that they are willing to persecute Christians.

If these zealots succeed, they will tear up the civil peace in this country, forcing millions of Americans to choose between church and state. If laws or government policies beggar Christian businesses, close Christian colleges and schools and force faithful Christians into third-class citizenship — making us virtual dhimmis, like the Christian Copts in Egypt — what should we do? What should be our response now that we know what they want to do, and are overplaying their hand, but before they complete their coup d’etat?

We need to ask ourselves some brutal questions: How should the faithful in the U.S. military respond? What about those in the state and local police? City, state and federal employees? What about religious shareholders in corporations led by anti-Christians, such as Apple?

He closes with the hopeful thought that the situation isn’t new or unusual for the Church, and it has been overcome before.

We should not let the possibility or even the likelihood of “failure” make us timid. Witness is utterly different from propaganda, more fragile but far more enduring.

For centuries, the early Christians endured far worse than we might face, dying in the Colosseum to the taunts of jeering crowds — whose grandchildren would flee the moral chaos of collapsing Rome and flock to the underground churches. All the persecution that a government like China can deal its native Christians has not stopped the church from exploding there, and striking fear at the highest levels of a totalitarian government. The battered church in Poland led the movement that brought down the Iron Curtain, through sober, persistent resistance.

Perhaps the future we face is the one that Cardinal George envisioned. Speaking of a future bishop who would someday die a martyr, George predicted, “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” If we stand for eternity, then history is on our side.

 

 

The stark Francis style of Holy Week papal observance is all about deletion and de-emphasis in the name of corporal works of mercy.  Holy Thursday and the Catholic Rites of Our Lord’s Last Supper are mainly about the Blessed Sacrament, the priesthood, and the Mass itself.  But for Pope Francis it’s about service, service, service.

In other words it’s all about the feet.

Go to a jail, not a church, and smell like sheep!  That’s wonderful true, but it’s not Holy Thursday is it?  That’s because it leaves a lot of important Catholic things out, priceless heavenly things that Our Lord gave us.

It’s troubling to find the Catholic media falling in line too.

When I was growing up, like a lot of families, mine had one of those small, cheap Kodak Instamatic cameras. You used those flash bulbs that looked like ice cubes…and got these little square pictures back from the drug store when you had them developed. My dad must have taken hundreds, if not thousands of pictures with that camera. I never appreciated them until years later, after I was grown, and my parents had died, and we were going through their things and we found all these pictures. Boxes of them, curled and faded. But there they were – life, captured by Kodak. Memories you can put in a shoebox.

We need that. We want something of the person we love to outlast them, and stay with us.

We want to remember them.

So photos help us to remember the ones we love.

And remembrance is at the very heart of what we celebrate this evening. But Jesus didn’t leave us photographs in a shoebox. He left us something better.

He left us Himself.

Paul’s letter to the people of Corinth is the earliest account ever written of the Last Supper. It pre-dates, even, the gospels. It is so close to the original event, that its words are part of our Eucharistic prayer, spoken at every mass, at every altar, around the world. The words that created the Eucharist are the beating heart of our Catholic Christian belief.

And through it all, one word leaps out at us.

Remembrance.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Jesus is saying: This is how I want to be remembered.

So, instead of photos, Jesus left us Himself in the Eucharist and he wants us to remember him by the Blessed Sacrament?  Or Perhaps, since Our Lord’s real presence is much more than just a memory, Deacon Kandra is saying that Jesus wanted priests to remember to confect the Holy Eucharist in that way.  The memory is the Mass, not the Sacrament itself.  Either way, there is much more to the Blessed Sacrament and the Holy Mass than remembering Jesus.

Next Deacon Kandra uses the Gospel of John to sort of change the Last Supper into mainly a message of service.

In the gospel, John doesn’t even mention the meal, or the institution of the Eucharist. But he finds something else for us to remember: Christ, the servant.

This of course is no reason to see Holy Thursday primarily in this way.

Deacons feel a special affection for this passage, because it is here that the diaconate, really, is born — in Christ’s extraordinary act of service, the washing of his disciples’ feet. Often, you will see emblems for the diaconate that include the image of a basin and a towel. It refers to this specific passage. And it is a reminder that we are called to serve – to wash one another’s feet, in humility and in love, just as Jesus did.

But is the meaning in Jesus’ act the same for lay people? Isn’t there something in it about bishops, priests, and deacons–something uniquely apostolic?

But it is not just the ordained who are called to this. It is all of Christ’s disciples. All who sit at His table and share in His body and blood.

All of us.

“You ought to wash one another’s feet,” Jesus says. “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

In other words: remember what I have done. And do this, too, in remembrance of me.

So we go from family photos, to the Mass, to the Eucharist, to the Priesthood, down to lay people helping each other; then to cap it off we hear the words of consecration used in a way that could apply to any single act of Christian mercy.

Doesn’t something strike you as odd about that? It reminds me of what Pope Francis warned yesterday, when he claimed:

“If we approach Holy Communion without being sincerely willing to wash one another’s feet, we do not recognize the Body of the Lord?”

Do the Blessed Sacrament, or Mass, or the priesthood have no power or value intrinsic to themselves, or do these things only matter if we wash enough feet?

Is is just all the same this Holy Thursday?