A memoir is a biographical account written by the persons themselves.  I wrote one in the style I was used to—plenty of high school compositions.  It should take, what with the Facebook – Twitter crowd doing a big part of the reading these days.

The big problem was editing it with failing skills.  Old age  has its assets and its liabilities.  But I got it out.  The question is: did the Lord do this or did I?  That’s the story behind all my good deeds lately.

 Ever since I was in elementary school, I used to drop by my parish church to say hello to Jesus, whose body was the consecrated bread inside the tabernacle.  I used to hope I’d also see the girl I had a crush on, in the same class with the same nun as a teacher.  But the words of conversion fall on different ground.

I married a different girl, under different circumstances than I’d imagined.  It’s amazing how life comes up with circumstances we never anticipated.  It’s the way we receive the “fullness of life.”  I’m not a bit sorry; it all was more exciting.

“Men who would be free politically must discipline themselves,” said John Courtney Murray.  That continues a theme I started in my last blog.  It all falls in line with the Judeo-Christian outlook that has predominated Western Civilization for the last two thousand years.  Let’s continue after the glitch of two world wars.

We don’t do well on our own, so let’s ask all the divine aid we need, and not be too proud.  I’d rather be humble and successful than too proud and a failure.

In a country as large as the U.S., acculturation (a people’s adopting a common culture) is more difficult than in Switzerland, the oldest extant republic.  In Switzerland, each eligible citizen keeps his rifle and ammunition at home, yet they don’t have mass shootings or a high murder toll.  Ours is truly a historically new experiment in democracy, and it has barely worked out so far.

How a nation adopts the Judeo-Christian moral code has something to do with it.  Those people who say moral codes are relative are displaying their ignorance of what moral codes do.  Look at the European-Western Hemisphere civilization today.  It has exceeded tribalism and other civilizations in accomplishments.  All those nations have adopted the Judeo-Christian moral code so far.

I pray to God we don’t give it up.

Now hear this!  Unless the citizens of a democracy are honest and upright, that democracy is finished.  One of the people who realized this was John Paul II, who tried to put it gently in Certesimus Annus (in Latin for the whole world):  “freedom must be tethered to truth and ordered to goodness if freedom is not to become its own undoing.”

If you want to live in a democracy, you can’t riot and loot, or it won’t be a democracy much longer.  I’m telling you that as a brother.  Don’t turn me off as a bigot.  Facts are facts.  God showed us the way in 1790.  Don’t turn him off or down.