We are in that time of “Christmas Reds,” when priests’ chasubles strikingly match the red poinsettias, holly berries, and scarlet ribbons in our sanctuaries. Why is red the color of Christmas? Because “this child will be a sign of contradiction, and you yourself a sword shall pierce” as Simeon told the child’s mother when he was brought to the temple (Sunday’s gospel reading). The first feast after Christmas, on December 26, is that of the first martyr, St. Stephen. Yesterday we remembered the hundreds of children slaughtered by Herod in the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and today, St. Thomas Becket, cut down in his cathedral by King Henry II on this day in 1170. Yesterday President Trump declared this a national day of religious liberty, commemorating the sacrifice of Thomas Becket 850 years ago. Someone forwarded the Proclamation to me, and google, apparently, pasted this censorious warning on top of the email, all decked in red:
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This message indeed "seems dangerous:” to tyrants. The message is that, though God permits his witnesses to lose battles, He will win the war through their sacrifices. Herod could not exterminate God by killing all children under age two in Bethlehem; Henry II could not eliminate the people's faith by murdering their archbishop; the Soviet government built roads with stones from the churches they destroyed, and the people knelt by those roads to pray in the snow. In our own day, no government can definitively eliminate worship, because God and the people will find a way. This message is certainly dangerous to tyrants, but in the end, it is good news for tyrants, and for all of us: the love of God will prevail.
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​A blessed and happy Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Today, in 1531, a tender and beautiful woman arranged winter roses in the cloak of a poor Indian man. She described herself as “the mother of the true God, through whom all things live,” and she addressed the poor man as “my smallest son, Juanito, Juan Dieguito!” She wore a black maternity belt with the four-petal sunflower, sacred to the Aztec peoples, over her womb. In other words, “x” marked the spot, the life-giving center of heaven and earth, within her womb. In 1999, John Paul II named her “patroness of the unborn.”
 
Every January the largest “religious” gathering in San Francisco makes its way down Market Street. It is the Walk for Life West Coast, which is not officially a religious gathering, but the enemies of organized religion certainly oppose it as such. Abortion is civil rights issue only because there is a God, and every human being has inviolable rights because we are all children of the one God “through whom all things live.” The enemies of God reserve their most violent intolerance for the prolife movement, as we experience on Market Street every January. I’m convinced the frenzied shouting and pornographic vulgarities unleashed against this peaceful event are the primal screams of a generation that has been robbed of its childhood, of children who had no loving father on earth and so hate their Father in heaven. It makes one’s heart bleed to hear that kind of hopeless desperation.
 
And yet it’s hard not to react against anger. How can we maintain steady peace and courage when it seems our next President, and our next Health and Human Services Director, will be implacable enemies of unborn children, prolife Americans, and the Christian religion? We can trust in God, besides whom there is no other hope. We can trust in the Mother of God, whom He sent to the Americas at a very difficult time. "Listen,” she said to Juan Diego: “Keep in your heart, the smallest of my sons, that there is nothing for you to fear, nothing to afflict you. Let not your face nor your heart be worried. Do not fear this nor any other illness, nor anything worrying or afflicting…. Am I not here, who am your mother? Are you not in my shadow, under my protection? Am I not the fountain of your joy? Are you not in the fold of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?”
 
A blessed and happy Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe!

A few years ago, a Republican senator complained about the entertainment industry’s leftism. “We will watch your movies and listen to your music, but no, we will not accept your worldview.” Well, my dear senator, that doesn’t work. You can’t eat brownies infected with a virus and not become sick, no matter how good they taste. We have to sacrifice the pleasure of eating those brownies, which is admittedly difficult.
 
Is it time to admit that most popular “music,” most TV shows, and most movies are laced with toxicity? Twenty years ago I was a news junkie, but I had to give it up because the “news” had become shamelessly bad entertainment: hysterical, irrational, fabricated propaganda. A few months ago I gave into temptation; I followed a link on a friend's text, a five-minute newscast about “spiking coronavirus infections.” It provided me the thrill of a good horror movie, but within five minutes it had destabilized my mind. Fun, but toxic. Emotionally thrilling, but unhinged. Certainly not based on empirical science. I asked a nurse friend who works in the Covid unit a SF General for more factual report. "We have two covid patients in ICU and a whole lot of empty beds," she said. 
 
I can only think that we slurp up thrilling newscasts because we like to be afraid. It’s what sells horror movies, but “fact” in the news media today is indistinguishable from fiction. Post-modernism holds that there is no such thing as objective truth. “What we call ‘truth’ is merely a construct of the powerful,” claim the post-modern university professors. The products of these universities now control virtually all our information. “We are the powerful,” they tell us. “We will tell you what is ‘true,’ and you will watch our product because you like to be afraid.”
 
During a recent conversation about the pandemic I noticed the telltale fear cross a friend’s face. “Aha,” I exclaimed, “you’ve been watching the news again!” Her face relaxed into a sheepish grin and she admitted “I just watch ten minutes a day....” Ten minutes is enough, because they are very good at what they do.
 
Another friend told me that she realized that she doesn't want to live in fear, so she doesn't. She stopped watching CNN. She stopped reading the New York Times. She reads rational news sources now. Big Media shamelessly censors information, so why would I give them any of my brain? Why would I watch what I know is calculated to control me through fear? Because I think I can handle it? Because I can’t think that reputable American companies have become so malevolent? There are reliable news sources, but they are not “sexy.” They are hard to find. The cool kids don’t watch them, and they are no use at cool kids’ cocktail parties.
 
If I’ve forsworn sexy media and cool kids’ cocktail parties, where do I go for community? I think Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” has it exactly right. I we don’t build small supportive communities in post-Christian America, we will lose our freedom and dignity. I thank God for my parish, a city block in San Francisco in which goodness, truth, and beauty flourish. The church, the chapel, the school, the rectory, and the gardens afford beautiful places to pray, to study, to work, to rejoice with those we love, and to help each other carry the burdens of the day. The pandemic’s forced isolation has, oddly, strengthened this community. It has become a sacred refuge, a safe place to be with God and with each other, a true gift of God.