Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
John Lennin lyrics.
I have read two posts this morning which referred to John Lennin. One mentioning that the anniversary of his death was 8th December, and the other was included in the article mentioned over at Auntie Joanna’s from the CNA. (Do visit to read an excellent piece!) There is no need to ‘imagine’ a secular world anymore, because we living in the midst of it! Heaven and hell are not going anywhere, and this is where our personal choices are going to make a difference as to how we live in the midst of it.
Aunty writes:-
‘As I look back 30 years, it is such a very different Britain: it was still possible to speak openly of male/female marriage as the foundation for any society, and it would have been impossible for anyone in public life to be taken seriously in proposing that two people of the same sex could marry. Supporters of abortion still felt obliged to preface their speeches with some statement to the effect that abortion was in general regrettable before continuing with “but…choices…cases of neccesity…”. And it was still normal to expect that anyone who wanted to be active in public life should not cohabit but should marry, or live as a single person. It’s very difficult now to convey all of this: today’s young Catholics simply cannot really know what it was like to live in a culture where some moral norms, while under steady attack, were still praised in public. And in our praying and campaigning, we had public support: in the 1970s it was still possible to muster 80,000-100,000 people in London to cheer pro-life speeches and to march to Downing Street, and the 1980s saw huge pro-life prayer-vigils, candle-lit processions, packed cathedrals…’
(Copied from Catholic New Agency)
Chicago, Ill., Oct 23, 2012 / 07:15 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has said that the “secularizing” of American culture is a “much larger issue” than political causes or the outcome of the presidential elections, warning against a rise of anti-religious sentiment and restating his fears of a future persecution in the United States.
“The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It’s on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters,” Cardinal George said in his Oct. 21 column for the Catholic New World.
He said the 2012 political campaigns have brought to the surface “anti-religious sentiment, much of it explicitly anti-Catholic, that has been growing in this country for several decades.” Secularism, he said, is just “communism’s better-scrubbed bedfellow.”
Cardinal George also touched on reports that he believes a successor of his will be martyred. Those stories came from his remarks to a group of priests several years ago.
“I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square,” the cardinal wrote.
However, he said the reports left out his last phrase about the bishop who succeeds a possible martyr: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”
The cardinal said he was trying to express “in overly dramatic fashion” what the “complete secularization” of society could bring.
“What I said is not ‘prophetic’ but a way to force people to think outside of the usual categories that limit and sometimes poison both private and public discourse.”
Cardinal George said his predecessor Cardinal George Mundelein acted similarly in his 1937 criticisms of Adolph Hitler, whose Nazi government had dissolved Catholic youth groups, silenced the German bishops in the media and tried to discredit the Church’s work through putting on trial priests, monks and sisters accused of immorality.
Cardinal Mundelein had warned that there is no guarantee “that the battlefront may not stretch some day into our own land.” American Catholics’ silence could mean that “we too will be fighting alone.”
While Cardinal Mundelein never saw persecution at home, Cardinal George warned against trends that follow the example of the John Lennon song “Imagine,” which imagines a world without religion.
“We don’t have to imagine such a world; the 20th century has given us horrific examples of such worlds,” he said. He denounced the violence of “the nation state gone bad” which claims an absolute power to decide questions and make laws “beyond its own competence.”
Cardinal George closed by reminding Catholics that God “sustains the world, in good times and in bad.” Jesus Christ has “overcome and rescued history.”
“Those who gather at his cross and by his empty tomb, no matter their nationality, are on the right side of history. Those who lie about him and persecute or harass his followers in any age might imagine they are bringing something new to history, but they inevitably end up ringing the changes on the old human story of sin and oppression,” the cardinal concluded.
