A hundred and twenty-five years, measured against the life-span of our young Republic-235 years and counting-is a respectable segment of time; more than half of our Republic's history has unfolded since St. John's Parish was founded back in 1886. In this stretch of time our nation went to war eight times. We fought in two World Wars in which our participation was decisive in gaining the victory we and our allies sought, and those two wars were preceded by the Spanish-American War, in the wake of which we became an imperial power, with control of the Philippine Islands at the western edge of the immense Pacific Ocean. In the aftermath of World War II we divested ourselves of the Philippines and assumed the role of rebuilder of western Europe and Prime Defender of the Free World, in opposition to the aggressive appetites of the newly created Soviet Empire and a recently established Red China. It was in response to this generously assumed responsibility that we restored freedom to the South Korean people, whose country had initially been overwhelmed in an invasion launched by their Communist cousins to the north, and we fought gallantly again, with heavy casualties and much expense, though this time with a shameful outcome: a politically instigated, self-inflicted defeat, to maintain the freedom of the South Vietnamese in the face of attack--once again-from a Communist North. Then came the astonishing collapse of the Soviet Union-largely the achievement of President Reagan and Pope John Paul the Great, with contributions from Britain's Margaret Thatcher-a collapse officially certified in a document signed by Mikhail Gorbachëv in 1991, on, of all days of the year, Christmas Day. With that our nation became briefly the Lone Superpower, acting as which we led a powerful coalition to expel the megalomaniac dictator Saddem Hussein, Iraq's sadistic tyrant, from Qatar, the oil-rich country he had seized. We mistakenly allowed him to continue in power in Iraq, thus snatching defeat, as some of us thought at the time, from the jaws of victory. In the immediate aftermath of this Gulf War we did, however, discover, to our great surprise, that Saddam Hussein had made much more progress towards producing an atomic bomb than we had suspected, a fact that should have prompted us to eliminate the threat right then and there while our forces were on the ground. "Realist" thinkers in the State Department persuaded our government to allow Hussein to remain. With 9/11 a new kind of warfare burst upon the scene, asymmetrical warfare, a warfare of surprise attack on civilian populations unleashed by terrorist groups, the spawn of a virulent form of Islam that calls for the destruction of the civilization of the West. And so we went to war again, first against Al Qaeda's base country of Afghanistan, ruled at the time by the vicious fanatics called "the Taliban", and then once again against Saddam Hussein, who having earlier expelled the UN's atomic weapons inspectors, was now boasting that he possessed the Bomb. After flushing him out of power we learned that his boasts were premature but that he had accumulated a huge inventory of the "yellow cake" uranium metal from Africa's Niger that is the essential raw material for atomic weapons, and that he had acquired much of the necessary "know how" from the "father" of Pakistan's Bomb, A.J. Khan, who had long been running a highly profitable black market in atomic weapons technology. North Korea was another of Dr. Khan's clients. A spin-off from this second war against Hussein was the decision of the intimidated ruler of Libya, Moammar Khadafi, to hand over to us the total inventory of his own nuclear weapons program. He too, had been a client of A.J. Kahn. Apart from this happy but quite unexpected outcome, the verdict is still out with respect to the ultimate impact of these last two expeditions into the heart of the Muslim world.

In the meantime Red China is arming itself to the teeth, and at break-neck speed, with the latest high-tech weapons, a program financed in part by the huge interest payments we are currently paying to that country as a major holder of our enormous multi-trillion dollar debt. Added to this appalling scenario is the insane demand of the current administration to increase yet further the slashing already in force for expenditure on our national defense including programs for anti-missile defense, reduction of our own atomic inventory and delivery systems, coupled with an indefensible negligency in maintaining the efficiency of what we still possess, with vast reduction in research and development, cancellation of new aircraft programs, and calamitous reduction in the over-all size of our armed forces-all of this in an increasingly dangerous world, with Iran's sadistic mullahs as an extra dollop getting closer day by day to the Bomb.

All of which means we should be down our knees begging God to preserve for us the liberties for which our nation stands, despite our proliferating sins-abortion, widespread addiction to pornography, cohabitation without the life-long commitment of marriage, widespread casual sex and the consequent appalling increase in the number of children who do not enjoy the security, the financial, emotional and moral security, that growing up in a stable family provides. As individuals we can at least by a whole- hearted "YES!" to Christ and a decisive "NO!" to the devil make our own humble contribution to "ransoming the time." These are perilous times for our Republic."