The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE

by Carlos Carrasco

  “Earlier tonight, President O’Neill said, ‘when all the religious trappings are peeled back, the idea of peace on earth is what is at the core of this special night.’ Well, with all due respect to the president, I beg to differ. The core, the heart and soul of what we celebrate tonight is the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. We call Jesus Christ our Lord because we believe him to be no less than God Himself. Christmas, or as our Catholic liturgy refers to it, the Feast of the Incarnation, is therefore a celebration of the greatest of all miracles, God becoming man. Dismiss the miracle of God’s incarnation as a mere religious trapping and the hope of peace on earth will disappear with it.

  “Why? It’s because Jesus Christ is the very source of that hope.

  “You see my friends, through His life, death and resurrection, our Lord showed us the way to the heaven; and in so doing, He also gave us the means to live out our lives on earth in peace. Love is that means our Lord has given us. We’re talking of real love here, not the self-serving sentimentalism or the hyper-sexualized appetite that masquerades for love in our culture. Real love is a selfless, willing of the good of the other. This love is measured in giving and sacrifice.

  “God first demonstrated this love when He created us, creatures he did not need, beings who could give Him nothing in return for having been brought into existence to share in His own blessed life. God demonstrated this selfless love of other again at Christmas, when in the second person of the Holy Trinity, He was born of a virgin and made flesh. He had nothing to gain from His incarnation any more than He had from our creation. It too was an act of selfless giving, a gift of pure love, freely given for our sakes, not His. Our Lord came to us, for us. God willed our good, our salvation, for our own sake, demonstrating through His life and death the sort of love that would make men, not only saints in heaven, but brothers here on earth.

  “Through Jesus Christ men first learned to see beyond self, clan, tribe, race and nation. It is through our Lord’s words and example that men learned to love each other as brothers. This idea of a brotherhood of man, which is essential to peace on earth, was threaded throughout the life of Jesus. It was there at the beginning of our Lord’s life when rich wise men and poor shepherds came together to worship the new born King. It ran through His ministry with our Lord’s preaching to both the powerful and the weak, to priests and publicans, harlots and heathens. And it was there in our Lord’s last command to His apostles ‘to preach the Gospel to all the nations of the world.’

  “We have, in our jaded age, lost sight of just how revolutionary Christianity was and continues to be. Christ’s admonishment to love one’s neighbor as oneself was a radical proposition to the ancient world and, I dare say, it is really no less so today. Our Lord’s admonishment to love our enemies was, and is, more radical yet. It was a new way of seeing, this Christian revelation. Political philosophy, prior to the emergence of Christianity contains nothing like it. There is nowhere in history any affirmation, or even recognition, of the inherent dignity in every soul until Christians preach the Gospel. Try as you might, you will not find the concept of universal human rights in the world before the rise of Christianity. As eminently quotable as the President’s Aristotle is, the idea of universal human rights would’ve been inconceivable to him. Love is not on Aristotle’s list of virtues. What rights there were in the ancient world were inherited, bought or won through conquest. No one thought of them as God-given and intrinsic to every individual.

  “No one, that is, until Christendom lifted man out of pagan darkness and challenged the barbaric ‘might makes right’ way of the ancient world with the Christian revelation of God’s love. It was in the light of Christian revelation that men, for the first time, saw each other as equals and began to envision better, more humane ways to live together. Up until then the notion of creating a society based on the inherent equality of all men would’ve been laughed off as a prescription for anarchy by Aristotle and his fellows. There is not a classical philosopher who wouldn’t have thought it the most absurd of schemes.

  “And who could blame them? Brilliant as they were, these pagan philosophers did not have the benefit of Christian revelation. All they had was the evidence of their senses which plainly demonstrated that inequalities of beauty, strength, intelligence, vice and virtue abounded throughout mankind. It was only in a later, Christianized age that a man like Thomas Jefferson could see through all the objective, plain as day, inequalities among men and pen the words, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…’

  “Jefferson didn’t wake up one morning with that idea freshly sprung up in his head. Neither did Locke nor any of the other philosophers of the Enlightenment. No, the idea grew, through fits and starts, over the seventeen hundred plus years of Christianity putting our Lord Christ’s command to love one another into practice. It began with the early Christians’ first efforts to abolish infanticide, slavery and gladiator games in ancient Rome. This love for our fellow man progressed to the founding of the first hospitals for the poor, the establishing of the first universities, the patronage of the arts and sciences, the promotion of philosophy and law.

  “Our founding fathers held the truths of equality and human rights to be self-evident because, unlike the world of Aristotle and Plato, their world was lit by more than just the limited light of human reason. Their world and their minds were also illuminated by the brilliance of the True Light born two thousand and a score of years ago in the little town of Bethlehem…”

  17:16:14

  “… And from Bethlehem the light shined in the darkness,” Cardinal Redding says, suggesting a burst with a dramatic spread of his arms and splaying of his fingers. “But the darkness, as Saint John records, did not comprehend the light. In fact, the darkness has been trying to snuff out the light from the beginning.”

  Burt Owens, the president’s Chief of Staff sits in the front row of the makeshift pews set up in the White House basketball court. On either side of Burt sit two of the cross-emblazoned, armored soldiers who have taken over the White House. He has been sitting there since he was dragged out of the Oval Office. The other ten White House personnel held prisoner are spread among the other pews, similarly sandwiched between soldiers. The eleven of them have sat there for a couple of hours now, watching helplessly as the altar was set up and the Mass celebrated.

  To Owen’s right, past the pair of theocrat storm troopers, sits Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira. The Colonel is wearing his medal-studded, Army Rangers dress uniform. Pereira’s high cheekbones, the flat planes of his cheeks, his square jaw and salt and pepper, flat-top crew-cut gives his head a cubic look. His brown eyes are deep and wide set under a broad forehead. He came in several minutes before the Mass began. The Colonel was accompanied by a dozen soldiers, a cross-emblazoned, white-armored praetorian who spread out to take guard positions around the gymnasium.

  “Good evening,” he said, addressing Owens and his fellow captives. “My name is Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira and I would like to apologize for the necessity of holding you prisoner. I assure you however that it will not be for long. You will all be released tomorrow at six p.m.”

  Without another word or glance at his prisoners, the Colonel then led the sixty or so worshippers through a recitation of the Rosary. When he was done, Cardinal Redding processed down their make-shift chapel with four altar servers. Burt Owens was surprised to see that the Cardinal was sprung from prison. The Chief of Staff watched the Mass unfold, all the while wondering and worrying about the scope and reach of the coup.

  Every glance at Pereira deepened Owens’ fears.

  Burt knows the man well. The president’s Chief of Staff was one of the lawyers who advised the Senate Committee which charged Pereira with war crimes back in 2010. Owens’ role during the proceedings was simply an advisory one. He didn’t have to interact with the man personally during the hearings, but he remembers well the first time th
e Colonel set his eyes on him. It was the first day of the trial. Like everyone who was convened by the Committee, the White House Chief of Staff sought Pereira out as he entered the hearings chamber. Video of the bloodbath he made of the Iranian Martyrs Brigades was scrolling round the clock up to and through the trials. The streets outside the Senate were full of demonstrators demanding his head on a pike. Everyone wanted to take a good look at ‘the Butcher of Baghdad.’ When Burt entered the hearings chamber, the Colonel was already at his table, silent at his counselor’s side, scanning the faces of everyone who entered the room. The look on his face was more than contemptuous. Owens got the distinct impression he was committing them all to memory, passing judgment on the spot, determining the sentences to be carried out against them at his earliest convenience.

  Burt recalls the memory of his glacial gaze with a shudder.

  Cardinal Redding continues his sermon.

  “Our long lineage of bloodied martyrs attests to that. We can trace that sacred line to the very beginning of the Christian community. A thousand years before the Church raised a single sword in crusade or held a single Inquisition, the world declared war on our Church. A whole millennium before the Church did any of the things our critics are always throwing in our faces, Christians were already hated. The Roman Empire which generously accommodated the worship of a thousand false gods would not tolerate the worship of the One True God. They could expertly assimilate peoples from every alien corner of the world and yet ruthlessly single out one group for extermination. Persecuted from the beginning, the first Christians were hunted like criminals, whipped, stoned, impaled, beheaded and fed to flames and wild animals.

  “Why?

  “It’s simple really. To use a term much bandied about in the present culture, Christians were instantly reviled by their fellow man because they introduced into the world the first and the only, truly alternative lifestyle.”

  The Cardinal pauses to look right at Owens, bushy eyebrows arched in seeming challenge. The Chief of Staff is sure that Redding is alluding to his earlier career with Freedom from Religion, the atheist advocacy group. Burt worked for them while in college, helping them take down many a cross and nativity scene across the country with his argument that such sites ‘were not only an affront, but also a veiled threat to all Americans who lived alternative lifestyles.’

  “There is no lifestyle more alternative than the Christian’s,” the Cardinal continues. “The Christian does not justify the indulgence of his appetites merely because it feels good. That is the way of the world; it has always been the way of the world, the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. When he looks out for number one, the Christian is not thinking of himself. Selfishness is the way of the world of man not The Son of Man. The Christian eschews the ways of this world; he lives in it without being a part of it. Christianity dares to proclaim that there is a will greater than man’s will. The Christian rejects the self-determination preached by the world. Like the Blessed Mother of our God and Church, the Christian lives his life saying to his God, ‘be it done unto me according to your word.’ The Christian repeats after our Blessed Lord, ‘not mine, but Thy will be done, O God.’

  “This alternative lifestyle of Christianity begins with Christmas and thus it is no surprise that so many are hostile to seeing any sign of it in the public square. This hostility is nothing new. In fact it could be argued that the war on Christmas began in Bethlehem…”

  17:16:13

  “…In Bethlehem, where our Lord and Savior was born under a death sentence, hunted by a jealous Herod, the ultimate battle between good and evil began.”

  Joe Corelli feels pretty certain that the priest’s accent is Lebanese. He picked up French-tinged hints of it in his recitation of Latin. It is much more pronounced in the delivery of his homily.

  “Make no mistake, my friends, we Christians are at war and we fight behind enemy lines. We are, in fact, charged with taking the battle to the very gates of Hell. The Church, one might say, is the point of heaven’s spear driven at the heart of the enemy.”

  More striking than his accent is the appearance of the man. The priest is six and a half feet tall, slender and olive-skinned. Waves of white, feathery hair crown his head and drop like a cape to his shoulder blades. He has a cloud of a beard that hangs to his belly. The man’s sun-bronzed face is heavily creased within the nest of soft, snowy hair. And he is missing an eye. A white patch, matching the Christmas vestments, covers his left socket.

  “Our share in salvation history is to be both ‘the light of the world’ and ‘the salt of the earth,’” the priest continues. “In our Lord’s description, the Church Militant is given her twofold mission. The light of the world is easy enough to comprehend; expose the truth by scattering shadows and dispelling darkness. The salt of the earth, as an expression, has however been diluted over the centuries to mean merely a simple and guileless people. While there is some truth in that definition, the expression would have meant a lot more to Christ’s first century audience. Salt in the ancient world was both a preservative and a corrosive element. Salt could both preserve food and render a land lifeless. We are called to do both, preserve what is good in this world and destroy evil, by salting the ground on which it grows.”

  The chapel is full. Corelli estimates there are four hundred worshippers crammed cozily into two rows of dark, mahogany pews. The walls and arched ceiling are paneled in the same wood, giving Joe the impression of being in an overturned boat. The nautical feel is reinforced by the round and back-lit stained-glass depictions of the Stations of the Cross placed high on the walls in lieu of windows. A life-sized Crucifix is suspended high in the air above the communion rail. The high altar is made of intricately sculpted white marble. Quinn and he are seated on the next to last pew on the right side. The sniper has the aisle position on his left. A young, black woman with corporal stripes on her sleeve is on his right.

  “Christmas marks the beginning of the end of Satan’s rule. He knows it and his minions, here on earth, can sense it. They are frightened. This fear is the source and fuel of their hatred of us. It has led them to persecute Christians in every age. It compels them to exterminate us in this age. We need not fear them however. Our Lord, you will recall, did not come down to us unaccompanied. The shepherds in the field looked up to see a host of angels in the sky above Bethlehem. The Greek word used in scripture is stratius. We get the English words, strategy, strategic and stratagem from it. The word can be better translated as, an army. The new born King of Kings arrived on earth with an army of angels, an invasion force, at his back, beck and call. They are the same legions of angels that ministered to our Lord during His forty-day duel with Satan in the wilderness. They are the same angels that are with us in all our struggles against the world and the Powers and Principalities that presently rule it.

  “Tomorrow we shall offer the world the chance to join us in this great campaign. Let us all pray they accept our offer.”

  Or else what, Joe wonders?

  “In the name of The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost. Amen.” The priest crosses himself and returns to the center of the altar.

  Joe Corelli rises with the worshippers.

  “Credo in unum Deum,” the priest intones, beginning the Nicene Creed which ends the first half of the Mass, the Mass of the catechumen.

  “I believe in one God,” Joe recites from memory, silently in English. “The Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible…”

  Everyone around him recites along with the priest in Latin. Corelli is impressed by their command of the dead language. This is his first time experiencing the old rite and, despite the circumstances, he finds himself fascinated by it. The church his family attended years ago celebrated Mass in English. In his youth, he didn’t know that the Mass was celebrated any other way than in the vernacular. Ironically it was only long after he stopped going to church that he became aware of the liturgical differences and the politics thereof.
>
  “Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum…”

  “And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. Born of the Father before all ages. God of God; Light of Light; true God of true God. Begotten not made; consubstantial with the Father; by Whom all things were made. Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven…”

  The worshippers genuflect. Joe follows suit, a beat behind them, amused at how deeply ingrained in him the minutia of the faith remained.

  “Et incarnates est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine…”

  “And was made flesh by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary: And was made man…”

  Joe has never thought himself capable of faith, not much of it anyway. Corelli counts himself among the agnostics, believing reason can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, despite the contrary claims of both atheist and theist. He figures his death will one day lift that final veil and he will know at last. Until then, he sees little reason to concern himself with the matter, figuring the here and the now is the purpose and the point of the life he possesses.

  “Crucifixus etiam pro nobis…”

  “He was also crucified for us and suffered under Pontius Pilate and was buried. And on the third day He rose again according to the scriptures. And ascending into heaven, He sitteth at the right hand of the Father. And He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead; and of His Kingdom there shall be no end…”

  Could Annie be right, Joe wonders? Are they witnessing the first effort to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States? Can those gathered in prayer around him be the Christian equivalent of Muslims who sought to establish a worldwide caliphate? Could it be that easy? If so, what role did Earl Forrester, who ‘isn’t the church going type,’ play?

  “Et in Spritum Sanctum…”

  “And I believe in the Holy Ghost, Lord and Giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son. Who together with the Father and the Son is no less adored; and glorified: Who spoke by the Prophets.”