Fr. Brankin's bulletin column for this week.

How many times have we heard the modern “mantra” that “religion is the cause of so many of the world’s wars and so much of the world’s suffering”?
This opinion is voiced at least once a week-- either in some inane letter to the editor—often enough published in the Chicago Tribune— in a Sun-Times column or voiced during some brainless television drama.
In fact in the last three years there have been six books—two right now-- that are on the New York Times Bestseller list. These books are written as tributes to the glories of atheism and against the horrors of religion. Religion in general—Catholicism, of course, in particular. The ultimate accusation leveled against religion—that it is the cause of all our wars and holocausts and suffering becomes one of those “things that we all know.”
But I would ask you to look at any lineup of recently canonized saints. Read their biographies.
You might be amazed to learn that in addition to those canonized who were simply good and holy people doing good and holy things—are a huge, huge number of modern Twentieth Century martyrs—just normal people—who because they were Catholic-ran afoul of their liberal, atheist, modern governments, and were jailed or interned in prison camps and then summarily slaughtered—all because of the crime of belief in Jesus and in His Church.
We all know of the six million Jews who were killed by the Nazi government during WWII. But do we ever hear of the 6 million Catholics—mostly Polish— who were also killed by Hitler and for no other reason than that they were Catholic believers and resisted the atheists of the National Socialist Government?
I think of 1936—in Spain— when Ernest Hemingway was writing about the Spanish Civil War and how wonderful and heroic was their atheist government.
But Hemingway says nothing about the 7000 Spanish priests who were dragged from their churches and rectories and machine-gunned right in the streets. He never says a word about the hundreds of Spanish nuns and Bishops who were also butchered by the atheists—or the thousands of Spanish lay people who suffered mightily at the hands of their liberal atheist government and only because they believed in God— and for no other reason.
How about all the blood and tears shed by the Mexican Catholic people and their priests and nuns? During the 1920’s ,with help from the American Woodrow Wilson, the atheist Mexican government stole all the Catholic schools and hospitals and churches away from the Mexican people and those who resisted – and there were many! were arrested and executed. Simply because they were Catholic. This era—and some Mexican people are still alive who fought for the faith during that time—has been called the Mexican Martyrdom.
I cannot believe the boldness of that crowd. They cry great crocodile tears over blood supposedly shed by believers throughout history while they never once in history hesitated to execute and brutalize countless simple holy priests, nuns, and laity for the crime of believing in Catholicism.
They did it to Catholics in Italy in the 19th Century—when they destroyed the Papal States and chased the Pope all over Italy. And they were the dark spirit behind the bloodbaths of the French Revolution in the late Eighteenth Century.

Yes, this is the same crowd that invented Nazism and Communism and gave us World War I, World War II, the Korean War, The Viet Nam War, and all of the subsequent holocausts and massacres from Auschwitz to the Ukraine from the Balkans to Cambodia. Lest we forget— this is the same crowd that would bring Americans over a million dead babies a year in our constitutionally-protected abortuaries.
And these atheist devotees of the modern liberal state have the gall to say that it is religion that causes suffering in the world?
I mention this today only because our First reading about the Maccabbees reminds us that there are a lot of people who do not like us—and have never liked us—all the way back to Jewish times—and they would sooner see us dead than to allow us to continue to believe.
They wish us gone—not because we go to Mass on Sunday or pray to Mary—but because we continue to stand as a living reproach against all the evil they would perpetrate—against husbands and wives, against families and babies, against peace and working people. Who else stands in the breach and says “No” to a world that wants to drown itself in sorrow and death and sin and suffering?—who else but Catholics?
My prayer is that God give us the strength and grace so that if we are ever called upon to be martyrs— just as so many of our brothers and sisters throughout history have—that we will be ready to suffer what we must at the hands of non-believers—for the sake of the goodness of the Living God.