I will admit—if you will permit me a moment of first-person navel-gazing—that I had intended this article to be something of a barrage against we Americans’ love of the gun and any other weapon besides that we can get our hands on. I had great and lofty ideas of gaining impressive rhetorical profit from our Lord’s quote of “he that lives by the sword shall die by the sword,” yet as I began that tour de force explaining how I had seen what all else missed, I realized I was simply incorrect. 

It was a disaster: the Popes disagreed with me—shockingly almost uniformly; the Fathers and Doctors of the Church disagreed with me; and most damningly, our Lord disagreed, for He said too that “let him sell his coat, and buy a sword.” So now I have neither an article nor a coat. I began to think, why was I looking for some reason to attack that most American institution of gun ownership? It is true that Holy Church has always had a pacifist streak—that at least is well attested and not a product of the past 70 years—yet even in that She mostly speaks to countries that are waging war. She has always admitted of self-defense, even if some of Her more illustrious saints put it to the side to gain the glory of martyrdom. But while Americans glory in their external weapons protecting against domination by the Government or anyone else, they allow far more devious attacks to be hurled at them with nary a concern. For in this our age, we are not being deprived of our rights, our freedom, or our humanity with the force of arms; jackbooted thugs need not prowl the streets to ensure ideological conformity or at least silence against the ideology of the day; no, for they attack us now with the blade of social media and the gun of isolation.

Well then, where on earth is this going? This is going to the United States; this is going to Cincinnati; this is going to be an article that at least will try to be commendatory. The American idea, whatever its problems in other realms—I am sure Mr. Kane or I will at some point lay into those—is excellent in inculturating into its citizens the truth that any unjust and sinful law is no law at all and ought to be resisted, yet here we stand in a crumbling civilization marked by abortion, homosexuality, and all the rest of the litany. How does one fight against this evil empire? To begin at the top of the system, while it may be the fastest, is impractical given our actual situation. We are at war, yes, but where does prudence tell us to fight? It seems to me that warfare of any kind—actual or the war of the soul of a nation we are now engaged in—requires having something to defend or an idea towards which we are striving. What are we defending now? What are we fighting for? It is not enough to fight; indeed, animals may fight, but we must have something for which we are fighting. 

Is it to defend this America of 2026 where we seem to be treating the sins crying to heaven for vengeance less as a prohibitive list and more as a checklist? Or where our communities have been progressively destroyed by ‘city planners’ who operated on a “trust me bro” level of credibility? Or perhaps for our ruling class that has shown time and time again the disdain with which they greet us? We are fighting for a world whose rulers despise us, as our Lord warned they would; why then fight for them? Ought we not to fight instead for our own communities, pouring our energy, talents, time, money (i have heard some people have this, I would not know) into our Parish, into our City, into our Community, putting aside the lucrative whisper of Non Serviam, the seductive whisper of individualism and isolation, and saying instead I will serve, I will volunteer in my parish, in my City, in my community. For as Aquinas writes, “The various virtues are practiced with respect to one’s neighbor.” 

We so often find ourselves fighting for these—as Pope St. John Paul II called them—systems of evil, allowing ourselves to be drawn into fighting for the very system that tears our humanity down. We wallow in social media and scrolling, allowing our parishes, our communities, our friends, our family to wallow in neglect and isolation. We allow ourselves to be distracted by the appeal and glittering emptiness of the world, neglecting those things which “neither doth the rust nor the moth consume,” allowing our community and parish to die away in pursuit of temporary satisfactions.

What then shall we do? When shall we begin to do good? No first act needs to be some earth-shaking, city-redefining, political act of the century. No, it is instead what will actually be done. Impressive, grand actions are attractive, but rarely are we called to operate in that mode. Instead, form a group, talk to the new people you see at Church or around your neighborhood: be neighborly. It is a self-defense against the constant demand for your attention from the megacorporations attempting to monopolize humanity. If this seems like an excessively navel-gazing article, it to a certain extent is; I do not know what will work or if it even can work. We may have already lost, but I for one will keep fighting.

It is so easy to slink into the normal, to slink back onto social media, to not fully engage with anything or anyone in the real world, instead saving it for the ethereal, useless engagement of online. It is a trap I fall into constantly, so then let this be a wake-up call. For as this sleeping gnome of Cincinnati Thought reawakens, let us think about how we may fight for our Parish and our Community, how we may go about “living the truth in love” and how we may go about encouraging and loving our fellow parishioners, our fellow neighbors in the pursuit of a Parish, City, and Community where we may all be happy, healthy, and holy. “Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.”