Thought for the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Most salient; most worrisome..
Just a timely reminder how the sin of Pride is Man’s ugliest one.
Woe is us.
This, right there, is what brought me home.
I could find no “why” in the way I knew I ought to act. Why be honest, if I could get away with it?Why show mercy to those I could walk over to get what I want? Why not seduce women and discard them?
The modern world does not want to speak of the “why.” Oh, it will blather on about “how” something happens in a self satisfied way. It will even give you thin fairy tales about “why” that make no sense. “Nature” abhoring a vacuum. Karma. Human dignity.
None of it lead to “why” until I thought about more serious thinkers, from a more serious age. All of their “whys” were solid because they eventually led back to a “who.”
For the better part of thirty years I’ve held tight to that Who, knowing that outside that camp was chaos and madness, selfishness and barbarism, coldness and sophistry, darkness and death.
Belloc was right about so many things.
He ran for Parliament in 1906. During one campaign speech, he was asked by a heckler if he was a “papist”. He responded:
‘Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking his beads out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.’
He was elected and re-elected once. But neither he nor his party could stand the indignity any longer.
Dostoyevsky pointed out as much in The Brothers Karamazov.