Our lives reflect a self-centered, self-indulged, valueless lifestyle that has resulted in a culture that is toxic to adults and children as well. We live in larger, more lavish homes but have smaller families. We’ve allowed abortion to continue, essentially sweeping it under the rug, because it’s “controversial”. We’ve legally killed babies in America for the last 35 years and and we expect God to bless our nation for this? Many of our priests have never mentioned the word abortion from the pulpit and never will. Does God bless us when we fail to speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves? According to some who’ve responded to the article, their answer is Yes! God will continue to bless them no matter how much they reject Him through words, actions, and deeds.

Since the 1960′s, prayer has been removed from the public schools. Public schools now have metal detectors to hopefully keep the guns out. We’ve put Planned Parenthood in charge of sex-education in the classroom, standing by while they teach our children that it’s normal to engage in sexual acts of any variety at an early age.

In the l960′s, many Catholic’s laughed at the Pope’s encyclical, Hummane Vitae, and showed their contempt by popping birth control pills and joining the Sexual Revolution.

Sex for many has become recreational and non-committal and competely separated from its marital and procreative intent.

Drug addiction is a fact of life for a majority of Americans, many of whom are well-educated and successful.

Divorce among Catholics is common. Young Catholics today come into marriage preparation classes with no reservations whatsoever about the fact they’re shacking up together before marriage. Many Catholics will vote for a pro-abortion politician without batting an eye.

Our music and our media reflect a society that has rejected God.

In the late 1950′s, the Catholic Church was the lone voice crying out that contraception and abortion would destroy our families and our culture. Mass attendance was high and families were intact. It has come to pass that we are now poised to elect the most pro-abortion candidate in the history of our nation?

Tell me again, why God should bless America.

To that I reply, God can bless America just like he blesses every sinner that rejects Him. Read Romans 5:8: “But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

Furthermore, we don’t have to prepare ourselves for this love of God…it is totally God’s work, “so no one may boast,” says Paul (Ephesians 2:8). I fear that the first sentence of the ending paragraph of this article expresses the opposite attitude: “In order for God to bless America we must be in a relationship with Him.”

We can always trust that God will be with us, not only when we are following Him, but also when we stray like a lost sheep(Luke 15:1-7). We trust Christ’s words from Matthew 28:20, “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

It is counterproductive and, in fact, theologically wrong to worry about making ourselves good before asking for God’s blessing, as the article suggests: “Only then can we say in confidence, ‘God bless America’ and know that He will.”

However, to the points made by other posters, let us not carry a false revisionist ideal about some essential Catholicity that American culture must return to. Aside from the motives for the founding of Lord Baltimore’s Mary Land colony, the impetus to unite this nation under the Articles of Confederation and the collective vision of the Constitutional Framers was certainly colored by the ideals of Freemasonry, Deism and various flavors of Protestantism. These men wanted anything BUT a papal state. The very nature of democracy demanded this disposition.

The acquiescence of many immigrant Catholics to the Americanist heresy only furthered the problem for American Catholics to develop a coping mechanism, some rationale to be utterly American while professing the Church’s Creed. The accommodating explanation that our nation is, at least, founded upon “Judeo-Christian beliefs” certainly provides the leeway for Catholics to operate, and to a degree influence, culture and policy in America. This accommodation however is very much due to the liberal disposition of American culture and the remnant right to constitutional religious liberty – the pluralistic nod to diversity which is ever in vogue. For Catholicism pushes the American tolerance towards diverse beliefs to its absolute extreme.

Is it really a surprise to anyone that from roots of principled religious pluralism we now have such rampant moral relativism? After all, when a Protestant leader is free to disagree with his “church” on some point of doctrine (infant baptism, justification by faith, etc.), and subsequently splinter to form a new “reformed” church, it will naturally follow that this spills into the moral realm, which in today’s Protestant churches, it most certainly has (contraception, abortion, “gay rights”, etc.) The great thought centers of the early American republic – Yale, Harvard, Penn – all bastions for the Protestant pluralistic intellectual have evolved true to form to today’s pillars for secular humanistic relativism (the heir apparent). Don’t forget what the Enlightenment was and is all about!

So be patriotic – God commands it. But be a realistic, uncompromising faith-filled Catholic first and foremost. With all its imperial similarities to ancient Rome, at least we are not fed literally to lions because of our beliefs. Christ knew we would be an outcast people in most every culture imaginable, for the fundamental incongruence of flesh and spirit makes a human civilization founded completely on grace and holiness almost unimaginable. Certainly our beloved Tolkien conjures sweet images with King Aragorn, and King St. Louis IX offers a wonderful historical role model. Unfortunately even High Christendom provides too many examples of man’s fleshly failures in human leadership to support the idea that the Universal Church offers a global geo-political governance structure for all nations to be ruled by. Subsidiarity, you know; roads and public safety are best procured at a much lower level.

Yes, America, Bless God. Doreen has it right that we must humbly posture ourselves to receive His benedictions, knowing that the Good Lord allows the sun to shine on both the just and the wicked. Fight unjust laws and unjust lawmakers to the face…but give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. We will ultimately be judged by how well we served the Church Militant in whatever country we lived.

And, to hold other remnant Christian nations, a la Europe, less spiritual than America is more dreadful still.

Still the Pope and the World Youth legions give me hope – our hope of our future all over the world is looking to the Church, strongly. Let us praise and thank our God for His work among our youth.

God be with you, and keep you in His love.

I have been feeling exactly the same way about our nation the past few years, really ever since I fully began to realize what abortion means. The killing of innocents is a sin that cries out to heaven, and every single one of us is culpable in one degree or another. Who can say that he’s never voted for a political candidate who supports abortion, or that he’s protested in front of enough abortion clinics, or that he’s prayed every day with his whole heart for an end to this catastrophe? I have voted pro-life, prayed, and protested — all three — but I know I haven’t done enough. I can only hope that God, when he comes to judge this nation, will say that I did all He reasonably expected.

“Many of the last shall be first, and many of the first shall be last.” This saying of Christ applies not just to individuals but to nations. We are first among nations — politically and economically, according to the criteria of this world. But I think of other nations that I’m afraid are going to be exalted ahead of us — I think of tiny Malta or Ireland, where abortion is illegal, or of the obscure island nation of Samoa, whose flag bears five stars: one for each wound of Christ.

To be a patriot, I think, begins by seeing our country for what it really is. We have very, very serious problems, and abortion is chief among them. I love this nation, and I’m not afraid to wear my heart on my sleeve: but I fear for her future. We should all beg God’s mercy. Even if abortion ended tomorrow, conversion is always followed by penance and Purgatory.

Do you know what I think should happen? The next President, whoever he is, on the day he takes office should summon the National Guard to close all the abortion clinics. This will provoke a constitutional crisis. So much the better–if even one life is saved, one inestimable, precious human child, then it will have been worth it. The president may well have the shortest term in office of any president we’ve ever had, but his sacrifice will have been worth it. That’s what I’d do if I were elected. Will it happen? I’m no cynic, just a realist, but of course I’d have to say: don’t look for it.

Does this sound like the words of a man who loves God and His Church:

I can just imagine what George Washington, a Freemason whose library at Mount Vernon was filled with works on cement-making and other such devotional topics, would really have thought if he had known that he would one day be incensed as a Catholic icon; a new Constantine; and even a Marian visionary to boot. The belly-laugh he would have enjoyed with his buddies at the Arlington Lodge! And what about Benjamin Franklin, fresh from an illuminist workshop in Paris? Did he realize that he was laboring alongside Augustine to build up a Catholic City of God? Or consider the musings of the “liberal ” (and non-Mason) Thomas Jefferson with the “conservative” John Adams, recently cited in The New York Sunday Times: “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…” (11 April, 1823, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594). How astonished would they have been to learn that Founder-intoxicated Americanists would not permit such dreams to interfere with their identification as card-carrying Catholic intellectuals: in fact, more reliable ones than men who actually had the temerity to believe in the Trinity, Original Sin, Redemption, and the Resurrection?

Or what of this comment?

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. – Thomas Jefferson in a series of letters that he wrote to Alexander von Humboldt in December of 1813:

“A priest ridden people????”

And this from one of the founders of our so called “Christian country”. No, my dear reader, this country got off to a bad start and went downhill from there. The only remedy for our country is an immediate repentance from all politicians for their persecution of the Church, followed by a declaration that this country is to now be run according to the Law of God as properly administered by His Church — the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church of our Lord which is headquartered in Rome. Only with King Jesus ruling over this country, through the adminstration of the Church, can we begin to expect blessing. And even then, it will take much in reparation for all the evil this country has done over the last two centuries

Edward A. Hara

Is America really part of the axis of evil. spreading destruction and evil throughtout the world by its secular humanism. Many would claim tha America is the most Christian country on earth, shown by Church attendances and financial contributions to any catastrophe in the world, outside the US.

America was Putitan, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew and anti-black at one time. Members of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia were mainly Masons and anti-Catholic, but their ideals of freedom and liberty have lasted. Twice in the last century the US saved Europe from destruction.

God bless,
Noelfitz.
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IN NECESSARIIS UNITAS, IN DUBIIS LIBERTAS, IN OMNIBUS CARITAS.
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Come on, Doreen, be reasonable.

I pray God will continue to bless America.

The United States is not a Catholic nation, but our country welcomed us and allowed us to practice our faith, even though the rest of the nation does not necessary share our beliefs. We are allowed to publicaly speak out against the things we disagree with, or find wrong with in our country. Can you imagine our nation without an organized, Catholic influence? We proclaim the Lord Jesus every day in our words and in our actions and without doing so, our country would be even further off course than it is now. Mother Teresa said something to this effect: “We are but a drop in the ocean, but if our drop isn’t there, the ocean would be short a drop.”

The president of the United States very much welcomed our pope this year and treated him with much kindness and with a wonderful hospitality. He has been very respectful of our religion.

Our country, flawed though it is, is still a beacon of light for countless immigrants. A large percentage of the Catholics in our country today, are recent Hispanic immigrants. They have placed their faith, hope and love – in our country. Maybe they could better explain to us, why they were drawn here. I’ve heard it is for decent food, clothing, housing, medical care, jobs and education.

The weeds and the wheat grow together here, but I believe that God has already blessed our nation.

Laura K.