In every age there has been an ample chorus of voices proclaiming the imminent arrival of the end of the world.  The volume only gets louder at the end of a century, to say nothing of a millennium. And people watch with fascination for signs and wonders and portents.

It has always been so, hence Jesus takes special pains to remind us in the gospel that we already have what we’re looking for so anxiously: “The reign of God is already in your midst,” He says. Look no further.

The Holy Spirit already dwells within every one of us, only waiting for us to open our hearts and our lives to the Spirit’s healing and guidance. Life could take on a very different shape now, if we could bring ourselves to doing that with confidence and trust. That is the challenge that confronts us repeatedly across the whole span of our lives: To trust in the Holy Spirit’s presence, to open our hearts, and to keep them open. That task will never be complete in this life, but for some it has not yet begun.

May we not find ourselves in that sorry company.

Judgment is about as popular a concept as root canals. And yet the desire for judgment never really goes away in the human soul. Every other episode of the still-popular-after-50-years Twilight Zone was a story about judgment. So are our eternally popular myths and fairy tales. Our ongoing need for such tales testifies to something in our souls that thirsts for judgment.

Of course, Judgment is often seen as the Irritable Old Gentleman on the cloud letting fly with a lot of arbitrary rage at a humanity that cringes before his power, not his justice or his love. Such picture-thinking has no small influence on New Atheist types who tell us we must grow up, stop fearing such a god and take our place as mature adults who decide for ourselves what is good and evil. Such sentiments are invariably popular with human beings just before they commit the next massacre or holocaust.

In fact, however, the astonishing thing the Catechism has to tell us is this:

Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven-through a purification or immediately, — or immediate and everlasting damnation.

At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love. (CCC 1022)

This surprisingly quiet picture of the judgment that awaits us is basically the same thing Jesus says: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35-36). All the stuff you did out of love for your neighbor—even the boring stuff and even the boring neighbor—is what makes the difference between eternal happiness and everlasting loss of the life of God.

If the news that God’s judgment is based on love and not servile terror isn’t news enough, newsier still is the news that judgment takes place in two movements.

The judgment we just considered above is what is called the “particular judgment”. It occurs in the moment of our death and can have only two possible outcomes: Heaven or Hell (of which more in my next two columns).

Popular religiosity more or less stops there and basically envisions the soul of the dearly departed floating up to Heaven in a white robe with wings and a harp or being escorted with a pitchfork at his back into a cave with flames. End of story.

Except that it’s not the end of the story. To be sure, the blessed dead will, sooner or later, enjoy the beatific vision, seeing God “face to face” in the ecstasy of heaven. To be sure the damned are damned everlastingly. But that ain’t all, and the proof of this is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Recall that the apostles were quite ready to believe in “life after death” in the conventional sense. Like us, they could buy the idea that a ghost of Jesus might be manifesting itself out of the ectoplasm. What they were no more ready for than we are was a Jesus who was raised in a glorified body that was at once both physical and yet beyond the physics of this world—a Jesus who could eat fish, break bread, and be touched and yet who could also appear and disappear, walk through walls and somehow not appear as he had in his earthly body. The New Testament strains at the limits of language to get this reality across—which is one of the marks that the apostles are telling the plain truth. And what it means for us is this: as with Jesus, so with us. We are promised not mere “life after death” but, in the words of New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, “life after life after death”.

That’s why the Particular Judgment is not the only judgment. Rather, we are promised a Last Judgment in "the hour when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Son of man's] voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (CCC 1038). The Last Judgment entails the fact that human beings are necessarily incarnate beings and not mere “souls” floating around in the ether. When That Day comes we will live, not as spooks on a cloud, but as fully alive human beings in a recreated and renewed creation of the New Heaven and the New Earth.

Sadly, however, one series of battles continues to be ignored.

On June 3, 1942, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor, located at the Aleutian Islands, west of the Alaskan peninsula. Three days later, they landed on the islands of Kiska and Attu, culminating in the only battles of the war fought in North America. Many of the men there went through hell.

Remarkably, the battle is barely known.

One person who has not forgotten is renowned World War II historian, Donald Goldstein. Goldstein, a retired University of Pittsburgh professor, authored one of the only books on the campaign, called the “Williwaw War,” named for the freezing, high-velocity winds flowing from Siberia and the Bering Sea, which made service in the Aleutians a constant misery.

“It was strategically very important who controlled those islands,” says Goldstein. The Americans stationed there “kept the Japanese from the West Coast and from invading the U.S. mainland…. From a strategic point of view, you can’t underestimate the situation there. Look at a map! The Aleutians aren’t very far from Seattle.”

In the Aleutians, American troops battled not only the Japanese, but debilitating weather and boredom. To combat the fierce and unpredictable williwaws, soldiers leaned forward as they walked, before falling on their faces as the winds abruptly ended. They battled blinding, waste-deep snow, dense fog, sleet that felt like a sandblaster.

To escape the climate, troops spent hours inside. The boredom was so bad that some drank anything they could find. There were stories of casualties from “torpedo juice.” Morale was awful.

“War is boredom mixed with moments of stark terror,” says Goldstein. “You sit and wait. And then all at once it comes.”

And when it came to the Aleutians, it came with ferocity. Shortly after bombing Dutch Harbor, the Japanese took Attu and Kiska. Thirteen months later, in August 1943, American forces sought to drive them out. Kiska was easy, since Japanese forces had bailed out two weeks earlier. Attu, however, was another story.

Attu was taken back only after a horrible fight. Japan fought to the last man. Facing defeat, 500 Japanese soldiers committed suicide with their own grenades. Whereas Dutch Harbor witnessed fewer than 100 casualties, U.S. burial patrols at Attu counted 2,351 Japanese bodies. Total U.S. casualties were 3,829—549 killed. Some believe it was the bloodiest battle of World War II.

And yet, few Americans have heard of the battle. Notes Goldstein: “Even [at the time] there was hardly any press coverage. If you ask most people today where Attu is they have no idea…. It’s forgotten.”

Do the veterans of this campaign feel neglected?

“Oh, yes,” says Goldstein. “They’re bitter. These guys never got the credit they deserve.”

Many of the unrecognized survivors suffered premature deaths once they got home. One was Andrew Boggs Covert, a tall, lanky fellow who had worked at Pullman Standard in Butler, Pennsylvania prior to the war. Boggs found himself drafted into the Marines Corps as a 30-year-old with seven children. His surviving son, Jim, recalls riding to Pittsburgh to say goodbye to his father in 1942.

It was not a permanent goodbye, as Andrew survived the brutal combat. “He told me about some of the hand-to-hand stuff,” says his son today. “It was traumatic. But he was matter of fact: ‘Do it, take care of it, serve your country, get over it.’”

Still, getting over it was not that easy. Andrew died in October 1966 at age 54.

A survivor who outlived Andrew was Leonard Levandoski of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a member of the 11th Fighter Squadron, who spent two grueling years at Attu.

A few years back, while writing for a newspaper, I tried to track down Leonard on a tip from the Department of Veterans Affairs: “This guy is perfect for you to interview,” said the press person. “Every year he writes letters-to-the-editor trying to get people to remember what happened. He’ll be thrilled to get your call.”

When I called, Leonard’s wife, Geraldine, answered. “Who is this?” she said slowly. When I gave my name and purpose, Geraldine began to cry. “Leonard just passed away,” she told me. “He waited years for someone to call.”

Many of those veterans have now passed away. The years have slowly faded, with no one calling about the Aleutians. It is about time we remember.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.

Many people wonder what “infallibility” means and how the Catholic Church can have the gall to claim it.  What they don’t recognize is that infallibility is nicely summarized in today’s verse.  It is the claim that God’s unconditional love is applied to the area of guidance as well as to all the other aspects of the life of the Church and that, because of this, God will see to it that the Church (that collection of chuckleheaded earthen vessels) will not lose track of the gospel.  It is his transcendent power, not the cleverness or piety of Catholics, that preserves the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Miriam Grossman was lecturing at a Philadelphia college about sexual health. The students had invited her to talk about something they’d never encountered in all their years of sex education—the dangers of non-marital sex.

Grossman will never forget the girl who told her that everything she’d said about sexually transmitted diseases was correct. “I always used condoms, but I got HPV anyway, and it’s one of the high-risk types,” the girl said. If the infection did not go away, she had a 40 percent chance of developing cervical cancer.

In her new book, You’re Teaching My Child What?, Grossman says she felt “a wave of sorrow” at the girl’s words—but she was hardly surprised. The girl was yet another victim of a destructive philosophy that has been forced on America’s youth under the guise of “sex education.”

The sex-ed lobby has always claimed it was all about health—teaching kids how to stay safe. But in reality, their goal was not preventing disease, pregnancy, and emotional distress. It’s about indoctrinating them into a radical ideology—sexual freedom. Kids are urged to consult websites that urge them to begin “exploring” their sexuality at a young age, insist that sex at any age is a right, and encourage them to engage in bizarre and dangerous activities.

The findings of science are not allowed to interfere with these radical teachings. If new research proves the dangers of the behaviors they advocate, the so-called “sexperts” simply ignore it.

For instance, sex educators urge kids to avoid pregnancy by engaging in oral sex. But two years ago, cancer specialists found that oral cancers were on the rise among young adults, who used to be at very low risk if they did not smoke or drink.

If kids interact with five or more partners, they increase their risk “a whopping 250 percent.” And yet sex educators, Grossman writes, portray this activity as safe and normal. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

What’s the result of this teaching? One in four American girls now has a sexually transmitted disease.

What do the sex educators say about this? They shrug it off, telling kids that “most” people contract an STD in their lifetime—as if such a thing were normal and unavoidable.

This ought to make us really angry. The “comprehensive” sex educators have done enormous harm to our kids. They keep right on teaching kids that life is a sexual-free-for-all with no consequences as long as they use so-called “protection.”

Read Dr. Miriam Grossman’s book, You’re Teaching My Child What? You can get a copy at BreakPoint.org. And then, share it with the teens in your life. They need to know the truth—that while STDs, cervical cancer, and heartbreak may be increasingly common, they are no more “normal” than swine flu.

Once again, science is backing up the truth of the Judeo-Christian worldview. That is, sex ought to occur exclusively within the context of marriage. And anybody who tells us otherwise is sacrificing truth, science, and the health of our children.

“I am confident that when it [H.R. 3962] comes back from the conference committee that that language [the Stupak amendment] won’t be there,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the House’s chief deputy Democratic whip, in an appearance on MSNBC.

“And I think we’re all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that’s the case.”

Pro-abortion House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surprised many in the abortion lobby on Saturday evening by allowing a vote on the easily-passed Stupak amendment, which would maintain federal policy by blocking government funding of most abortions.

However, it is widely acknowledged that the move was critical just to keep the struggling health care overhaul alive to see another day.

The LA Times reports today that, in her pragmatic quest for the bill’s survival, Pelosi courted the pro-life constituency like never before: “She summoned antiabortion Democrats to her ornate Capitol office. She conferred with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to be sure the new restrictions were acceptable. She even consulted by telephone with a cardinal in Rome. ”

However, as Democrats and pro-life leaders alike note, while the amendment was a strong testimony to America’s pro-life values, the bill’s backers are not about to abandon the pro-abortion forces that have supported the initiative all along.

“There’s no way at the end of the day we’re going to support these kinds of further restrictions on abortion,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, in a Saturday morning appearance on C-Span. “We’re going to strategize further about how we’re going to respond to this amendment. Get as many votes as we can against it. But at the end of the day we want to move the process along.”

Pro-abortion California Democrat Lynn Woolsey told The Hill Sunday, concerning the pro-life amendment: “I will insist that it come out.”

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner says he was on to the Democrat strategy early in the game, when he failed to receive assurance from senior Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman that the pro-life language would stay put when the bill later merged with its Senate counterpart.

“The only reason this amendment is allowed to be offered is in order to secure enough votes to try to move this bill through the floor today,” said Boehner. “And I have my doubts about whether this language if it passes has any chance of ever being in the final version of this bill.”

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

Pro-Life Amendment Seen as Historic Victory Overshadowed by Dangers of Health Bill Passage

NY Times: Dems Banking on Later Squeezing Pro-Life Language Out of Bill in Committee

Welcome to this week’s edition of, What Random Yet Oddly Related Thoughts Are Cluttering Karen’s Mind. Well except for the vet thing. So yeah, my daughter has boycotted me from proofing her essays. I guess I should be glad she’s not dependent on me for help, right? I mean, we want our kids to handle things like this on their own, right? So I shouldn’t sulk, right? Fine, I didn’t sulk. For too long. Because I stumbled upon one of my son’s old essays… and if you promise not to tell him I’ll share part of it with you:

“‘With malice towards none.’” That was my grandfather’s slogan when he was elected University of Miami Student Body President in 1942. For 16 years of my life, "Hurricane Harry" Rinehart instilled in me the principles of academic integrity and drive for success. Every time we spoke he’d ask about my grades and how I was doing in school. I can still remember how his eyes lit up when I reported (truthfully!) I was making A’s or high B’s in my classes.

Two months before he died, I had the privilege to travel with my dad and Papa Rinehart to Monessen, Pennsylvania—the small town where Papa grew up. His father owned an auto garage where Papa’s first job was sweeping the front sidewalk. We visited the house where he was born and lived until he was sixteen–when his father became the first person in the United States diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. With no medical solutions or hope, doctors at the Washington DC V.A. hospital suggested the family move to Miami where the climate might keep my great grandfather more comfortable.

From the time he arrived in Miami through college graduation, Papa worked several jobs to raise tuition, including a paper route, serving as the business manager for The Hurricane and distributing cigarette samples on campus (ironic for a man who never smoked!) While there, he earned the Iron Arrow Award, was Student Body President, and became a charter member of Sigma Chi.

Upon graduation, Papa attended Officer Candidate School, USN. A Lieutenant JG, he served as paymaster aboard the USS Eldorado, the flagship during the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions. After the war, Papa used the GI Bill to obtain his master’s degree at Harvard Business School. For 39 years, Papa loyally worked as a salesman and District Sales Manager for the National Gypsum Company, while nurturing his wife through a 20-year battle with cancer and sending his three children to college.

Harry Rinehart used his life’s lessons of enduring hardship, working hard, taking leadership positions and courageously entering unchartered territory to guide his children and grandchildren. His life is an example for me — a bar that has been set — and I know I’m a better person for being his grandson. I want to reach that bar and beyond—not just to satisfy myself and ultimately serve others—but to make Papa proud."

And this is where, on some rare gleaming Bus Stop Mommy days, all the random stuff comes together.

Asked whether he felt the Stupak amendment went “too far,” Obama responded: “You know, I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill. And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”

However, Obama balanced maintaining the ban on federal abortion funding against “not restricting women’s insurance choices.”

“So, you know, this is going to be a complex set of negotiations,” he said.

The pro-life amendment introduced by Rep. Bart Stupak and accepted into the the health bill Saturday night retains Hyde amendment restrictions by ensuring that no government-appropriated funds go to abortion.  This means that any public option would not cover abortion, and women who receive taxpayer subsidies to buy health insurance would have to buy abortion coverage separately, in what is known as an insurance “rider.”

Many pro-abortion leaders objected fiercely to the amendment, claiming that it would in fact threaten women’s current abortion coverage.  Tapper asked Mr. Obama whether he thought the amendment actually maintains the status quo, or leans “a little bit in one direction or the other.”

Obama deflected the question, answering, “I think that there are strong feelings on both sides.”

“What that tells me is that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo. And that’s the goal,” he continued.

National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) legislative director Douglas Johnson took issue with Obama’s claim that his plan was principally not an “abortion bill”: Johnson recalled the 2007 assurance President Obama gave Planned Parenthood that abortion would be “at the center and at the heart of the [health care] plan that I propose.”

“The only thing that will prevent the health care bill from being ‘an abortion bill’ is precisely the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, as the House of  Representatives recognized by a 46-vote margin,” stated Johnson.  “The phoniness of Obama’s claim that he has been trying to preserve the ’status quo’ on abortion policy should be evident to any observer by now.

“In reality, the White House and top Democratic congressional leaders have been working hard to create a national federal government health plan that would fund abortion on demand, just as Obama promised Planned Parenthood.”

In addition, the fact-checking Web Site PolitFact.com found that the claims of a direct reduction in abortion coverage, which Obama referred to in tempering his dedication to the Hyde amendment, were in large part unfounded.

PolitiFact concluded that pro-abortion Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) mischaracterized the Stupak amendment’s power when stating that it “puts new restrictions on women’s access to abortion coverage in the private health insurance market even when they would pay premiums with their own money.”  The group pointed to the amendment’s possible impact on insurance companies’ business strategy as the main source of any perceived threat to coverage, rather than a direct infringement on current health insurance.

At the funeral Mass for George Shillow Weigel, Oct. 23, 2004:

“For the seven years I served as president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, I was privileged to have Admiral Bud Zumwalt, the former Chief of Naval Operations, as my board chairman. Dad and Bud were contemporaries, one a reserve naval officer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, the other an Annapolis graduate, both of whom served America and the cause of freedom in the Pacific. On one occasion I told Bud that Dad, who like others of his generation spoke very little about his service, had once made a mildly ironic comment about the wisdom of the United States Navy, turning an economics major into a landing craft commander rather than using him in supply or management or something for which his education had prepared him. Bud laughed and said, ‘I bet your father never told you that they screened those reserve officers for qualities of leadership—and then assigned the leaders to command those landing craft.’

Of course, Dad hadn’t told me that. His leadership was of a piece with his other qualities: understated (which, given the personalities of his sons, suggests that understatement is not genetically transmitted in the male line down the generations). … His volunteer work, teaching reading to adult illiterates, or doing “Meals on Wheels,” was understated; but he kept feeding the hungry until he was unable to do so any longer. … His successful professional life was understated; yet one of his colleagues told me that Dad, in addition to being a skilled manager, was a terrific salesman. I expect he was that because people knew they could trust him.”

At the funeral Mass for Betsy Schmitz Weigel, Oct. 28, 2009:

“Five months after Mom was born, European civilization imploded in the First World War and the 20th century began in earnest. Mom lived through that entire epoch—from the guns of August 1914 through the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991—and then lived for another decade and a half in the 21st century, which as an epoch began in 1991, as the 20th century as an epoch really began in 1914. Her life spanned nine pontificates and 16 presidencies, three world wars (counting the Cold War), an ecumenical council, the civil rights revolution, the contemporary women’s movement, the Sixties, the pro-life movement, the Revolution of 1989 (and) 9/11. … At her death, America had traveled as far, in time, from her birth as the country had traveled from the first administration of President James Monroe to the day Betsy Hebner Schmitz entered the world. …

“Mom was (my brother) John’s and my first evangelist: she taught us our prayers, helped us learn the Baltimore Catechism, later helped us memorize the Latin responses that enabled us to become altar boys, (and) … drove us to serve the 6:45 a.m. Mass with jelly sandwiches in our bookbags for breakfast afterwards. Her example of prayer, and Dad’s, which was both profound and unobtrusive, left its mark; so did their patience with occasionally rambunctious sons, who later experienced the joys of raising teenagers themselves; and so did the noble Baltimore German habit of offering sauerkraut with the Thanksgiving turkey, a tradition which continues to the third and fourth generation…”

George and Betsy, Dad and Mom: requiescant in pace.

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Under new plans put in place by the government, sex education will be implemented starting at the age of 5 throughout the education system, including in religious schools. However, Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, has issued a ministerial statement saying that all children need to receive at least one year of sex education as teenagers before the age of consent at 16 - meaning that parents will lose the right to opt-out for children over 15.

Under the new sex education rules, Catholic and other religious schools will be forced to teach children about contraception and homosexuality “within the tenets of their faith,” a caveat that Daily Telegraph columnist Gerald Warner called “simply a cynical method of enforcing anti-Christian values on faith schools.”

Balls said in the announcement that religious schools would be forced to give details about sex, contraception and homosexuality. Balls said, “You can teach the promotion of marriage, you can teach that you shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage, what you can’t do is deny young people information about contraception outside of marriage.”

“The same arises in homosexuality,” he added. “Some faiths have a view about what in religious terms is right and wrong - what they can’t do though is not teach the importance of tolerance.”

Until this change, parents had the right to withdraw their children from sex education under the 1996 Education Act. This summer the Family Planning Association (FPA), a key player in creating the new directive, issued a demand to government that parents’ right to remove children from classes be revoked. FPA is the national affiliate of International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world’s largest pro-abortion organization. The government granted the demand despite the fact that their own public consultation found that nearly 80 per cent of respondents believed parents should retain the right to withdraw their children at any age.

Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), said the plan was just a means of increasing government control in its determination to “deliver its anti-life policies to children.”

The Christian Institute’s Mike Judge called the move a “terrible intrusion of the right of parents. The government isn’t responsible for educating children, parents are. Parent’s don’t lose that right on their children’s fifteenth birthday.”

“There can’t be a teenager left in Britain that doesn’t know how to roll on a condom,” Judge told the BBC. “Sex education has been a disaster. We need less of it, not more of it.”

But despite a steady chorus of protest from parents and religious organizations and the mounting evidence of the failure of such programs, the push to introduce very young children to the intricacies of human sexuality has been under way from Britain’s abortion and contraceptive lobbyists for decades, and is only intensifying.