Before the French Revolution, French aristocrats impoverished their country while avoiding most taxes. They ran the army and navy, staffed the bureaus, and were fundamentally untouchable. As they appropriated more money for themselves, the rest of the nation fell so far into a poverty so deep that many preferred death and revolution.
In England of the same period, in the late 1700s, aristocrats were in similar positions. “It’s a shame they have to hang so many Englishmen.”, Abigail Adams observed while in London, where stealing food could bring a sentence of death. All over Europe, aristocrats were the “fat cats” of the day.
Today, in most of the world’s “democracies”, a new breed of aristocrats plunder their countrymen with utter heartlessness. Barricaded behind big, bloated bureaus, modern aristocrats tax and take bribes while granting themselves higher salaries, bigger bonuses, better benefits, and plush pensions.
Even those at lower levels of bureaucracies grow ever richer and more powerful. As this happens, their neighbors cannot help but be made poorer and weaker.
Catholic Fundamentalists don’t get angry about the increasingly institutionalized unfairness that infects the formerly Christian nations with aristocracies of bureaucracies. We conclude, “God has provided democracies so that more people than ever may have opportunities to choose to rob their neighbors.” The realization that they are sentencing themselves to an eternal, painful perdition makes it hard for us to get behind outbursts of violence against plutocrats who use their power in order to plunder.
We understand that violence against government only encourages and strengthens them to steal and kill. Sooner than they think, each looter will go to Judgment. Then, they will receive their just desserts for driving so many into death, torment, jail, and poverty. Bureaucrats are having all the happiness they will ever have.
Jesus’s words, “Do good to them that hurt you.” mean that we should pay the taxes they levy, obey their laws, and give them all the worldly things they think are so important. Every minute of every day, they draw closer to inevitable punishment. Our duty is clear. We are to obey God, follow our consciences, and hope to do all things well enough to get to Purgatory, if not Heaven.
P. S. Most of us know that, no matter how hard we try, we have dark, sinful thoughts. Some of those thoughts, like those that have taken control of our oppressors’ minds, involve taking advantage of our neighbors. If we haven’t been “too bad”, Purgatory will burn those sins from our souls. It’s smarter to try and erase those errors now, while we still can. Purgatory will be painful. It’s infinitely better than the permanent pains of hell, but the more of it we avoid, the sooner we’ll be joyful.
