What Would Saint John Paul II Do?

Not trade with China, for a start.

Exude a quiet strength and dignity for another:

St. John Paul II, when he was just Father Karol Wojtyla in Poland, faced harder times than ours, and he did more than worry about them at conferences. He answered them by building an “extraordinary network of friendship” that helped transform not just Poland but the worldwide Church. ...

John Paul faced betrayals by friends to the authorities and saw allies “disappear” by the Communist Party — and he faced it all with nothing but the graves of his beloved father, brother, sister and mother to turn to.

And what did he do? He built a community of friends that changed the world.

Biographer George Weigel tells the tale. In his Witness to Hope sequel The Beginning and the End he described how the young priest, laboring under an oppressive Marxist regime, created “zones of freedom.”

These were cells of community, faith and scholarship. He got groups together to put on plays in town or go on outdoor expeditions. He gave them retreats, marriage preparation, and days of recollection to teach them to pray. He organized seminars on St. Thomas Aquinas and other works. Significantly, they sang together.

Most of all, he made friends with them. “While he was among us, we felt that everything was all right,” one member of the group that came to be called Środowisko (Milieu), told Weigel. “We felt we could discuss any problem with him; we could talk about absolutely anything.”

As Weigel describes it, this was the ultimate end-run around the obstacles set up by the communist authorities. This wasn’t a political counter-conspiracy designed to subvert the government’s total control of schools, media and institutions. It wasn’t a “resistance” movement preparing to take up arms if necessary. This was something far more dangerous, says Weigel: a group of friends rediscovering love of neighbor, love of God and love of truth.

 

It is a faith in a loving God that horrified the communists above all else. 

Imagine moving the world without fear?

Why live in a world of suspicion, tyranny, want and apathy - the fruits of communist dictatorships?

Also:

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many hundreds of atheists and, among them, I’ve yet to meet one who didn’t believe in God.

Instead, these people express hatred for God.

When I show atheists the numbers involved in, let’s say, the Fine-Tuning Argument, the HaShem Equation or the Ontological Argument or any other excellent arguments for God’s existence, the atheist in my sights will inevitably — like night follows the day — respond pettily, “Then why is God killing small children with leukemia?” ...

(Sidebar: I don't know. Why did Fauci experiment on children? Why do Canadian politicians express fake concern over children they will vote to kill?)

 My belief in God doesn’t affect the reality of his existence and neither does the most fervent and fevered opinion of some random atheist. There’s more narcissism than reason to his self-profession.

And, lest we forget, Lucifer’s rejection of God was the result of his hatred for him and not merely a desire for “autonomy.” He was intimately familiar with the “Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars” and rejected it. Lucifer hated Love. There is nothing different in what Nagel asserts. He’s not arguing from a logical nor scientific perspective — he’s merely voicing his “feelings.” If wishes were fishes, we’d all have a nice lunch. ...

Atheists often repeat the hackneyed screed: “Even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards.” This is a bad faith argument. Why would anyone trust an atheist who labels God, the Church or Christians in general as evil, while simultaneously insisting that evil “doesn’t exist?” Logicians call this “jibber-jabber.” Why would anyone trust an atheist who says he and other atheists are the most compassionate and non-judgmental people in the world while simultaneously refusing to help anyone while judging anyone who disagrees with them? I pray for atheists, as do many Catholics. If someone slips on an icy street, I don’t ask them if they are Catholic before assisting them. However, atheists routinely and actively attack Catholics — though they are circumspect when it comes to Muslims.

I don’t doubt there are tactless, self-satisfied Christians who start fights with atheists hoping to compel them into believing in God, but I’ve only met a tiny handful of atheists who weren’t aching for a fight. It’s as if they were highly insecure about their own opinions and felt compelled to force others to agree with them.

The history of atheism is littered with the tiresome detritus of uninformed atheists whose last resort when arguing against Catholics — but oddly never Muslims — is screaming, “God is evil!” But this is yet another of their insincere and confused opinions. If God is “bad” by any measure, an atheist would never be able to recognize the idea because atheists don’t believe in an objective moral reality or even the concepts of “good” and “evil,” how would they know God was “evil?” If they can’t define or accept the concept of good and evil, what’s make them think they know anything about God’s supposed evil? They can’t have it both ways, and I’m delighted to point it out to them.

How does one hate what one claims is not there?