The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (34 page)

Priest and congregation chant.
“Laus tibi, Christie.”

“Glory be to Christ.”

“Per evangelica dicta deleantur nostra delicta,”
Father Green adds.
“By the words of the Gospel may our sins be taken away.”

The priest lifts the bible from its stand. He kisses it and then returns it to its place on the altar. The words,
The Sermon
flash on the screen and the old priest makes his way to the pulpit.

“About time,” says Paul senior. “I don’t know how much more of that Roman hocus-pocus I could stand.”

17:16:15

Monsignor Francis Green makes his way from the altar to the pulpit. He sweeps his gaze across the park. In the midst of a quarter of a million people, he thinks, and strangely, I have never felt so alone. He caught glimpses of the images on the Jumbotron during the Mass and found the attention unsettling. His absorption in the minutia of the ritual pushed the uneasiness to the back of his consciousness, but now, with the break in the rubrics, it sprung, front and center.

Immediately before him, his fellow Catholics sit patiently on rows of benches, awaiting his sermon. Throughout the rest of the park, Christians of other denominations, their attentions drawn away from their own services, look to him expectantly. Beyond them, outside the park, the counter-demonstrators have also fallen silent. Across the National Mall, his own larger-than-life image regards him from a giant television screen.

Father Green mounts the pulpit and looks heavenward. A dark, thin line of clouds highlights the northwest horizon. The rest of the sky is clear and strewn with bright, blinking stars. The priest can’t help but feel that they are also eyes, looking down, fixed upon him. He pulls the small handful of index cards from his cassock pocket. His notes for the homily are arranged on them. The holographic missal card comes up with the 3X5 cards. He places them on
the podium, missal card on top. He stares down at it, looking from devil to angel. You might as well watch too, he says to them. The Monsignor feels his uneasiness rise to a slight tremor of panic in his chest. He never thought that he would get to deliver the homily. He is suddenly afraid it will not be worthy of the moment. The situation has made the old priest feels like he’s fresh out of the seminary, delivering his first sermon.

Father Green takes a deep breath and silently begs heaven for help. Exhaling, he softly prays the
Memorare
under his breath. It is his favorite prayer; it has never failed him.

“Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly to you O Virgin of virgins, my mother. To you I come; before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy, hear and answer me. Amen.”

The old priest clears his throat and adjusts the microphone.

“Merry Christmas, my friends,” he says warmly.

His fellow Catholics and many others in the crowd return the blessing. Some of the counter-demonstrators offer up curses in exchange. He can’t make out the words but the tone is unmistakable.

“Thirty-three years of delivering homilies has, as you might imagine, made me pretty much immune to stage fright,” Father Green continues. “All those years of speaking before crowds has not however adequately prepared me for this moment, wherein I find myself made, quite unwittingly, the center of the whole world’s attention.

“I assure you, my friends, I am as bewildered by events tonight as any of you. I am not sure how to proceed. I only know that I must.

“Quite frankly none of us thought we would get this far in the Mass. We had every reason to believe that we would be arrested the moment we placed foot on the courthouse steps. However, thanks to the intervention of all these soldiers, things have turned out differently. And while we are grateful to be allowed the opportunity to celebrate the Mass, that gratitude, I must tell you, is tempered by a great deal of anxiety. How can it not be? We are anxious to have our President and his party released. We are anxious to see the demonstrators who have been hauled away tonight released as well. We are anxious that there
be no further violence. And we are anxious to know who is in charge and what exactly, whoever you are, hope to accomplish.

“You soldiers have gone to extraordinary lengths to insure that this Mass is not only celebrated without incident, but you have also assured that it is broadcast around the globe. I can therefore safely assume that you are fellow Catholics. As such I can also guess at your motivation for doing what you have done. All of us can sympathize with the feelings of resentment that our government’s heavy-handed secularization has raised in certain quarters. I know what you are feeling. I feel it too, believe me. And yet I feel obliged to warn you that this path you have embarked on may lead to extremes of violence no Christian should want to be a part of.”

The Monsignor pauses to let his admonishment sink in.

“When I was a young man at the seminary, Liberation Theology was still quite in vogue,” Francis Green continues. “Good Catholics, and even priests, understandably upset by the disparity of wealth between the rich and poor throughout the third world melded Christianity with Marxism and joined in with militant revolutionaries. A great many souls were led into the evil of war through this heretical mix. Hundreds of thousands died because of it. The great enemy, you see, is quite adept at using even our noblest instincts against us, whether it is our sympathy for the poor or even our love for Mother Church.

“I pray you understand what I’m saying to you. I trust that you will do all you can to avoid bloodshed.

“You have control of the satellites. The world’s communications are obviously in your hands. You have the means to speak to us. Speak. Please. We are listening.”

Monsignor Green pauses. He looks to the giant television screens in hope of receiving an answer. No response comes through the televisions. He sees only his own face staring back expectantly at himself. A long minute passes. The priest looks out across the park to the soldiers lined around the perimeter. They do not move. Not a one of the thousands comes forward or says a word.

After yet another minute, the Monsignor decides that he has waited long enough for a response. Father Green takes a deep breath, holds it for a three-count and exhales.

“Very well then,” he says at last. “Since you insist on keeping the world in the dark, I guess I must continue.”

Father Francis Green clears his throat again, glances at the first of the index cards and launches into his homily.

“Earlier tonight, President O’Neill said, ‘when all the religious trappings are peeled back, the idea of peace on earth is what is at the core of this special night.’ Well, with all due respect to the president, I beg to differ. The core, the heart and soul of what we celebrate tonight is the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. We call Jesus Christ our Lord because we believe him to be no less than God Himself. Christmas, or as our Catholic liturgy refers to it, the Feast of the Incarnation, is therefore a celebration of the greatest of all miracles, God becoming man. Dismiss the miracle of God’s incarnation as a mere religious trapping and the hope of peace on earth will disappear with it.

“Why? It’s because Jesus Christ is the very source of that hope.

“You see my friends, through His life, death and resurrection, our Lord showed us the way to the heaven; and in so doing, He also gave us the means to live out our lives on earth in peace. Love is that means our Lord has given us. We’re talking of real love here, not the self-serving sentimentalism or the hyper-sexualized appetite that masquerades for love in our culture. Real love is a selfless, willing of the good of the other. This love is measured in giving and sacrifice.

“God first demonstrated this love when He created us, creatures he did not need, beings who could give Him nothing in return for having been brought into existence to share in His own blessed life. God demonstrated this selfless love of other again at Christmas, when in the second person of the Holy Trinity, He was born of a virgin and made flesh. He had nothing to gain from His incarnation any more than He had from our creation. It too was an act of selfless giving, a gift of pure love, freely given for our sakes, not His. Our Lord came to us, for us. God willed our good, our salvation, for our own sake, demonstrating through His life and death the sort of love that would make men, not only saints in heaven, but brothers here on earth.

“Through Jesus Christ men first learned to see beyond self, clan, tribe, race and nation. It is through our Lord’s words and example that men learned to love each other as brothers. This idea of a brotherhood of man, which is essential to peace on earth, was threaded throughout the life of Jesus. It was there at the beginning of our Lord’s life when rich wise men and poor shepherds came together to worship the new born King. It ran through His ministry with our
Lord’s preaching to both the powerful and the weak, to priests and publicans, harlots and heathens. And it was there in our Lord’s last command to His apostles ‘to preach the Gospel to all the nations of the world.’

“We have, in our jaded age, lost sight of just how revolutionary Christianity was and continues to be. Christ’s admonishment to love one’s neighbor as oneself was a radical proposition to the ancient world and, I dare say, it is really no less so today. Our Lord’s admonishment to love our enemies was, and is, more radical yet. It was a new way of seeing, this Christian revelation. Political philosophy, prior to the emergence of Christianity contains nothing like it. There is nowhere in history any affirmation, or even recognition, of the inherent dignity in every soul until Christians preach the Gospel. Try as you might, you will not find the concept of universal human rights in the world before the rise of Christianity. As eminently quotable as the President’s Aristotle is, the idea of universal human rights would’ve been inconceivable to him. Love is not on Aristotle’s list of virtues. What rights there were in the ancient world were inherited, bought or won through conquest. No one thought of them as God-given and intrinsic to every individual.

“No one, that is, until Christendom lifted man out of pagan darkness and challenged the barbaric ‘might makes right’ way of the ancient world with the Christian revelation of God’s love. It was in the light of Christian revelation that men, for the first time, saw each other as equals and began to envision better, more humane ways to live together. Up until then the notion of creating a society based on the inherent equality of all men would’ve been laughed off as a prescription for anarchy by Aristotle and his fellows. There is not a classical philosopher who wouldn’t have thought it the most absurd of schemes.

“And who could blame them? Brilliant as they were, these pagan philosophers did not have the benefit of Christian revelation. All they had was the evidence of their senses which plainly demonstrated that inequalities of beauty, strength, intelligence, vice and virtue abounded throughout mankind. It was only in a later, Christianized age that a man like Thomas Jefferson could see through all the objective, plain as day, inequalities among men and pen the words, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…’

“Jefferson didn’t wake up one morning with that idea freshly sprung up in his head. Neither did Locke nor any of the other philosophers of the
Enlightenment. No, the idea grew, through fits and starts, over the seventeen hundred plus years of Christianity putting our Lord Christ’s command to love one another into practice. It began with the early Christians’ first efforts to abolish infanticide, slavery and gladiator games in ancient Rome. This love for our fellow man progressed to the founding of the first hospitals for the poor, the establishing of the first universities, the patronage of the arts and sciences, the promotion of philosophy and law.

“Our founding fathers held the truths of equality and human rights to be self-evident because, unlike the world of Aristotle and Plato, their world was lit by more than just the limited light of human reason. Their world and their minds were also illuminated by the brilliance of the True Light born two thousand and a score of years ago in the little town of Bethlehem…”

17:16:14

“… And from Bethlehem the light shined in the darkness,” Cardinal Redding says, suggesting a burst with a dramatic spread of his arms and splaying of his fingers. “But the darkness, as Saint John records, did not comprehend the light. In fact, the darkness has been trying to snuff out the light from the beginning.”

Burt Owens, the president’s Chief of Staff sits in the front row of the makeshift pews set up in the White House basketball court. On either side of Burt sit two of the cross-emblazoned, armored soldiers who have taken over the White House. He has been sitting there since he was dragged out of the Oval Office. The other ten White House personnel held prisoner are spread among the other pews, similarly sandwiched between soldiers. The eleven of them have sat there for a couple of hours now, watching helplessly as the altar was set up and the Mass celebrated.

To Owen’s right, past the pair of theocrat storm troopers, sits Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira. The Colonel is wearing his medal-studded, Army Rangers dress uniform. Pereira’s high cheekbones, the flat planes of his cheeks, his square jaw and salt and pepper, flat-top crew-cut gives his head a cubic look. His brown eyes are deep and wide set under a broad forehead. He came in several minutes before the Mass began. The Colonel was accompanied by a dozen soldiers, a cross-emblazoned, white-armored praetorian who spread out to take guard positions around the gymnasium.

“Good evening,” he said, addressing Owens and his fellow captives. “My name is Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira and I would like to apologize for the necessity of holding you prisoner. I assure you however that it will not be for long. You will all be released tomorrow at six p.m.”