Wunderkind Repercussions & Prayer

Don't you feel that you have met our new president before? In academic circles, he is the wunderkind; the "it" kid who has touched all the right bases, possesses the right charm, talent, smarts, and a certain jena se qua that baptizes him with the charisma acknowledged by all. Including him.

So it comes as no surprise that after the 8-year reign of the Know Nothing administration, the United States should elect the wunderkind. After all, we want a president who not only is intelligent, but thinks we have enough smarts to want him too. In religious categories, Protestants and Evangelicals do not give a rip about abortion and contraception issues, so that concern was only that of Catholics, and American Catholicism is a sad, torn affair in those departments, forgetting all too well the baby thrown out with the bathwater, epistemologically speaking, is a lack of certitude in all things when one diminishes the authority of the Church's Magisterium. We're all dime a dozen Prots and relativists then.

But enough about us. More about the wunderkind. He is closing Gitmo just as Yemen is releasing 170 Al-Qaida suspects. Here we see a clear example of a non-Bush move. One might say, anthropologically, it is even "negative imitation."

Regardless, it is of a piece with the mind-set of the wunderkind: set an example of how trusting we can be and the former enemy will reply in kind with a diminishing of hostilities. Right? Aye, there's the rub. Perhaps I am being naive myself, but I think the wunderkind truly excludes the realities of Original Sin in his progressive, Gnostic optimism. Sort of a Pelagian, If We Can Imagine It We Can Make It Happen sort of leader.

My prediction is that the new president will continue to try to extend an olive branch. It will produce more statements from the Scimitar that he is "weak" and eventually attacks that will motivate that great wunderkind intellect to a resolve to act in ways very similar to those of his predecessor. But this will only happen after the wunderkind, all of his admiring electorate, and all who did not vote for him have suffered the consequences of inaction, lack of vigilance, and that certain mixture of naïveté and hubris that has typified his leadership in the past three weeks.

My suggestion is keep praying, keep listening closely to the Holy Father and his bishops, keep assisting at Mass, and fall neither into presumption nor despair. Fight the good fight in Marian chivalry and offer up everything! Encourage one another, stay ever in a state of grace, and fear nothing. The evil that seems so strong is as nothing to Eternity.