Among Wolves and Sheep, Where are the Sheperds?

No, I'm not talking about the Episcopal kind. I'm talking about the kind all Laymen are called to be. Mary Cochran wonders that in her reflection, "The Soft Underbelly." Who do you think she saw the most among the survivors trapped at the NO convention center? Women and Children, that's who? Where were the men in their lives--the fathers of their children, or husbands, if we can dare to hope? Not with them.

No, only the men that had become wolves remained.

Ms. Kochran has seen what has happened to communities swallowed by Caesar. Everyone has. When subsidiarity is forgotten, only the leviathan Nanny State remains to provide a semblence of order. When families are torn apart by welfare regulations, only the State remains to hold pieces of civilization together. One would be better off using a tourniquette to control blood flow to an injured arm than have the State replace the family. For what happens when the state is overwhelmed by natural disaster?

The wolves come to pray on the sheep. No sheperds stand against them.

An NPR reporter describing the animalistic behavior of flood victims stuck in the convention center noted that a ten-year-old girl had been raped both of the last two nights. She was hardly alone. It wasn’t as though there were no men who wanted to help, but the criminals had superior numbers and force of arms. (One young man, driven to reckless desperation from enduring the nighttime screams of the women, threw himself on the windshield of a police vehicle to insist upon aid — and was promptly shot by the officers.) The head of the Army Corps of Engineers for the area asked incredulously why supply boats were being fired upon and said that he had instructed his workers in “rules of engagement” for dealing with the populace, as though they were dealing, not with fellow citizens, but with an enemy.

Yes, I know that there are heroes. There are always heroes. There are always those who serve and protect. And I do believe that there will be an outpouring of generosity that demonstrates once again the goodness and strength of those American people who are good and strong. But there is another breed among us. Below that goodness and strength we have seen exposed a weakness, a moral rot, which we ignore to our peril.

Predators now stalk among us. In ordinary times their inclinations are stifled, their lawlessness is bounded by law, their opportunities limited by circumstances. But let the guard down and they are ready to pounce. We have bred them in our midst and their numbers are growing. We bred them without fathers, mostly.

Did you notice how many of the stranded helpless were women with children? Women with children and a not a man in sight. This is the soft underbelly of our country. I’m going to hazard a guess that if you could catch the looters — I don’t mean the sensible people who took water and food off grocery shelves, but the guys toting the electric toys — that you’d find almost none of them had a real dad.

Why does this happen? What allows some of us to become predators? Our own human condition does, that's what.

Contrary to the delusional and utopian perceptions of many Reasonable elites, we are a social race. The ties of family and community allow us to live our lives to the fullest. They are not impediments to our freedom. They are the channels that allow us to express our freedom as it was meant to be expressed: as conduits of self-giving. Anything the disrupts our social ties leaves us vulnerable to our wounded nature. "In darkness and in light alike are we born; we are fearfully and wonderfully made", as scripture says. Though our nature is good, it is marred by the physio-spiritual deformity we inherited from our ancestors. The Catholic Church calls this condition Original sin, and though no one born is personally guilty of any wrongdoing, all of us are born into this. We're born addicted to evil. Even when united with Christ and his Church through Baptism, we remain scarred with the disordered inclination towards wrong. Concupescience, as the Church calls it, urges us toward those temptations that lead us into sin, shouls we surrender to them. We remain in God's grace when we choose to live in union with him. Since he is where two or three (or more) are gathered in his name, we remain with him when we're in relationship with others. Take that away, and in our isolation, we succumb to our enemy's seductive siren song. Some of us that followed his sweet lies have become the wolves that preyed on the more vulnerable in NO.

The government that sidelines subsidiarity is the government that shatters community. When Caesar can't inhibit those the wolves, there remains no associations of persons to either repel them or draw them back to their forsaken membership in community. The preying upon the sheep by the wolves reminds all of us that God walks among us when we unite together in his name. While he stands with us all individually at all times, we don't stand with him unless we stand with one another. We must not allow Caesar or any other force condemn the family and community to marginalization. Otherwise, we create a doomed social order that awaits only the next Katrina to unleash its horror once again.