Originally published at crisis magazine
During political turmoil, listen to St. Augustine of Hippo, who lived through and wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire “…what are kingdoms (or nations) but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs, but petty kingdoms?”
That doesn’t make any government look too good. “A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention,” he wrote in his masterful work The City of God.
History tells us that many of our Founding Fathers had such a crooked-eye view of human nature. Some would say realistic. My spiritual guide and friend Fr. Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., of happy memory, would say, “slightly pessimistic. You have to believe in the Doctrine of Original Sin.” He’d add with a Jersey City accent, “If you don’t believe in Original Sin, walk through Times Square sometime and it’s all around you.”
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Through this lens, one can see more clearly that you’re not going to vote for a saint but for someone—and realistically an entire administration—that might do
