November 5, 2006

After a lecture at a major New England university, a student asked a friend of mine who is a professor of philosophy: “When we speak of the Second World War, does that mean there was a first one?” Yes it does. And the woeful neglect of history will be a deadly freight borne by the forming generation. Certainly one cannot be a Christian without a knowledge of history, since it is the result of history and explains history. Without roots in actual events, religion becomes a Gnostic vapor: that is, a sentimental illusion divorced from fact.

Veterans Day was first known as Armistice Day, because “the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” of 1918 was engraved in the memory of Western civilization. My maternal grandmother kept a framed poem in her house, and bid me memorize it. She had two brothers in the Cheshire Regiment, formed in 1688, and both were killed within days of each other in 1915 in the Ypres Salient. A Canadian army surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, was aghast at what he saw on that battlefield and within the space of about five minutes wrote the poem which became a template of the sadness that shrouded those fierce acres after 17 days of battle:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Recently one of our parishioners returned from his second tour of duty in Iraq, grateful for the prayers of our people. We continue to pray for all those of our parish family engaged in this present war in which the very norms of civilization are at stake. Even comfortable Europe is becoming more than anxious about threats to the culture it has taken for granted. In an essay of 1916, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: “The Greeks who triumphed at Marathon and Salamis did a work without which the world would have been deprived of the social value of Plato and Aristotle, of Aeschylus, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization, because the victories stretching through the centuries from the days of Miltiades and Themistocles to those of Charles Martel in the 8th century and those of John Sobieski in the 17th century.” Now the challenge faces the 21st century.

Fr. George W. Rutler