This has been a rough week for the Wayward Catholic, so many things going on in my life, crisis after crisis, and then we here in Massachusetts we have a couple of terrorists running around. But at least I learned some things this week and in the process have become closer to answers in my life.

I want to start with the terrorists situation first. Everyone wants to know why this happened. Hopefully we will get some insight now that one of the two bombers was captured alive, but that will only give us a small glimpse. When you listen to the news commentary, you hear the acquaintances of these  two, no one can seem to understand why they would do this. “They looked normal to me.” “They never showed any signs of this.” Etc. etc. Yet they killed four people,, injured hundreds of others and shut down a major metropolitan city for a day.  And no one knew. Unfortunately I believe this is going to happen more and more.

What is terrorism? It isn’t about killing people, it is about spreading fear. Those who wish to do this will do it no matter what it takes. The people who do this are from all appearances normal, after all they are going to do their best to not get caught. After all the information on these two comes out, maybe we will find something which would have tipped us off, but I think terrorists in general will do as much as they can to not tip off others.

Is there a bigger problem here? Is it bigger than just people of one group or another hating each other so much that they have no problem killing innocent people? Is there something missing?

What has happened in our world in the last fifty or so years? Where has morality gone? Could the fact that we have pushed God from our lives have something to do with it? I believe so. We push God from our world and then when something like this happens we ask “Where was God?”

Some will use this incident (and others) as an argument to prove there isn’t a God. They will argue that if there was, He wouldn’t have let any of this happen if He does in fact exist. I counter that argument with one of my own, God is showing us what happens when we ignore Him, when we ignore the teachings of Jesus.

We are given free will by God. Free will means freedom. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach. – CCC 1732

When we change the definitions of what is good and evil, when we blur the lines of what is right or wrong, as we have, then evil prevails.

1740 Threats to freedom. The exercise of freedom does not imply a right to say or do everything. It is false to maintain that man, “the subject of this freedom,” is “an individual who is fully self-sufficient and whose finality is the satisfaction of his own interests in the enjoyment of earthly goods.” ³³ Moreover, the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that are needed for a just exercise of freedom are too often disregarded or violated. Such situations of blindness and injustice injure the moral life and involve the strong as well as the weak in the temptation to sin against charity. By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth. – CCC 1740

Isn’t it time we change?