February 2019

Dear Friends,

I’ve included in this newsletter copies of two articles of interest. One is an editorial from The Wall Street Journal written by Cardinal Dolan on the subject of abortion and infanticide. The other is from Barnabas Aid, an organization that helps persecuted Christians. I hope you will read both of these articles and reflect upon them.

In the first case, one is tempted to say, “It’s unbelievable that a Catholic governor of one of our largest states could sign a bill legitimizing infanticide and celebrate this “triumph” by shining a pink light on the new One World Trade Center.” As if granting women the “right” to kill their new born infants “mercifully” in a doctor’s office could be anything but the epitome of decadence. It would be naïve and stupid to lament that this development is “unbelievable!” because we’ve all known for a long time that this day was coming. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” is not a Biblical proverb but everyone knows what it means. In the case of abortion it means that if you decide that a woman’s need for sexual equality with men is more important than the life of a child, children are going to lose. Children by the millions have been losing in this country for a long time now. The root of the problem is that in the last fifty years our churches—Protestant and Catholic alike—have so compromised the gospel and acceded to the values of our liberal society that the church has failed in its mission to evangelize the American people. Our task is to educate people in their duty to serve God, “the Lord and giver of life.” This has never been an easy task. But it is especially difficult when the modern people we’re trying to reach are utterly indifferent to God’s claim upon us. As I have said to you from the pulpit so many times, God is not a fiction, God exists; God really is the creator of humankind. No matter what the evolutionists say, God endows each of us in the womb with a soul; we really do belong to Him. But the more committed to an agnostic philosophy we become, the further removed from God we become. And the American people today are nothing if not devoutly agnostic. It is so sad to see Americans abandoning Our Lord and deserting his churches, choosing instead to worship “the Universe” or anything other than the true and living God. But that is where we are today. It is sad to see how defiant of God the people in this country have become. We have become defiant and we are paying a price for that as every day we see our society become more fractured, more lewd, more violent, and increasingly irreverent.

Many people argue against God on the grounds that a good and loving God would never have permitted the slaughter of so many “innocent” people as the God of the Old Testament did when he allowed the Hebrews to slaughter the Canaanites and then steal their land. But the reason that God permitted the Hebrews to commit genocide against the pagan tribes of that time and place is because those tribes practiced infanticide, they were offering up their children in ritual murders as sacrifices to their demented gods. It was the extreme sacrilege. God used the Hebrews who, for all their sins, at least knew not to kill children and then offer them to God to end the slaughter. One of the messages of the Old Testament is that God despises nations that commit infanticide and He will, if they don’t repent, wipe them out, every last one. America is on its way to becoming a faithless pagan nation. At this point, we are little better than the Philistines. We’d better turn back from the sick excesses of liberalism and do so fast or God is going to do to us what he did to the infant-murdering tribes of old. They no longer exist.

As for China criminalizing the Ten Commandments, especially the first one that demands our exclusive loyalty to the Lord, is our own liberal society so different from communism? It’s becoming less different every day. It’s essentially a “hate” crime now to say the truth: that Islam, the worship of Allah is a false religion devoted to a false god and that the Koran is a thoroughly un-holy book. Is anyone going to be surprised if, say, ten years from now, ministers who refuse to perform same–sex weddings get hauled off to prison? Don’t say “It will never happen here.” It is happening here. And unless this nation repents and returns to the Lord, it’s going to get worse and worse and worse.

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On a happier note, I recommend to you the movie Green Book. It’s a true and heart-warming story about a white man and a black man who became friends during the 1960s Civil Rights era. I’m betting that it will get the Best Picture award and Best Actor award, as well.

Please pray for our good friend Wes Green (who though he lives in Nashville, still edits our newsletter and web page). Wes is having heart surgery on Thursday Feb. 21. He will have an internal defibrillator installed.

Conni and I will be in Colorado the end of this month visiting our two daughters and our grandchildren who live there and to check up on our son–in-law, Matt Burris, who recently had back surgery. Please continue to pray for Matt that he will have a complete recovery.

Fr. Dunning will preach and celebrate on Sundays February 24 and March 3. I will return for our traditional Ash Wednesday service March 6 at 7pm.

We will be making our world-famous Easter Eggs from Thursday March 28 (at 5pm) through Wednesday April 3. Please plan to join in and help with this project some or all of the time. Every helping hand counts!

Faithfully,

Fr. Jansen String