The source of our problems: You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts.

The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the ’30s and ’40s, etc. with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today.

Winters’ problem would be the primacy he gives reason — in poetry but one suspects in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket in 1932.

Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? asked Winters about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason.

This idea was “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.” One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as Winters identified Hart Crane.

The crime of sentimentalism: This association of ideas idea seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.

Romantic poets — one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase “blithe spirit” — looked in their hearts and wrote (as the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney was advised by his muse when worried what he would tell his girl friend). Winters favored “a logical, plain-spoken poetic,” as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century poets, which is like preferring the plain-spoken Harry Truman to the oratorical FDR in political terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.

In his poem “Of Money,” Googe says he’d rather have money than friends because with the first he’d always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration:

Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, fare well they must away.

The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric “to the minimum required by the subject,” as opposed to “rhetoric for its own sake” as practiced by other Elizabethans.

Another of Winters’ favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own “creeping genius” was “more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit” and thus wrote for “those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.” An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.

In Winters, discontent: Winters’ own poetry was on the money in Greville terms. In his “A Grave,” he has this: “Life it seems is this:/ To learn to shorten what has moved amiss;/ To temper motion till a mean is hit . . . ”

And translating from the 17th-century French of Mme. des Houlieres: “Pathetic plaything of a witless chance,/ Victim of evils and of laws,/ Man . . . must suffer life’s impertinence.” Facing death, he is to “regard it with unhurried breath,/ And know this outrage for the last.”

Or the stunning motto on the back of a bicycling youngster the other day in River Forest: “It’s not the pace of life that bothers me, but the sudden stop at the end.” Only in River Forest.

Winters held feeling in suspicion and wanted it served up with restraint. This is art, to tell the tale, describe the experience, emotion and all, trying to understand it and then presenting it with the feeling it deserves and not a gulp more.

It’s the poet’s duty to take a fix on the feeling and put it in its place. He is to control emotion, “releasing it through constraint,” in Yezzi’s words.

An excess of emotion “obscured the experience” to be communicated, which is why we call sentimentalism sloppy. Bad poems are “slipshod” in their rendering of experience. They are inaccurate.

Ralph Waldo who? Winters clearly thought there was something to be said about the world. Unlike those theorists engaged in “the killing of history” as Keith Windschuttle tells it in his book of that name, he thinks we can get at the truth, or at least get close.

He defended an “absolutist” theory of literature, by which literature “approximates a real apprehension and communication of . . . objective truth.” This alone would get him laughed out of many a classroom today, if we are to believe higher education’s critics.

Interestingly, one of his absolute bad guys in the literary realm was Ralph W. Emerson, who said things like “No man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations.” Oh? This is somewhat like what current educationists say, “Every child can learn,” without saying what it is he or she can learn. But theirs is a slogan.

Emerson saw art, Winters said, as resting “on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment,” regardless (apparently) of what he is at that moment. Spit it out, and it’s good, because it’s you. Makes one wonder what did happen to the handsome Narcissus when he fell in love with his reflection in the pond. He pined away and died, that’s what.

. . . reviewed at the time by the late Paul Likoudis:

The unprecedented manner in which Pope Paul VI imposed the Novus Ordo of the Mass created tragic consequences for the Roman Catholic Church, says Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in his new autobiography.

Speaking boldly, like a private citizen, before holding elective office.

Not only did the banning of the old Mass represent a severe departure from tradition, but the revolutionary manner in which the new Mass was imposed has created the impression that liturgy is something each community creates on its own, not something which “is given.”

Not Paul’s finest hour.

Rather than being a force for unity in the Church, the new Mass has been the source of liturgical anarchy, dividing Catholics “into opposing party positions” and creating a situation in which the Church is “lacerating herself.”

Tough language.

Formally imposed after a six-month period of “liturgical experimentation” in which anything -and everything-did go, the Roman Catholic Mass has never attained a universality, stability-or even an element of predictability — for most Catholics around the world; but instead has been a stimulus for never-ending innovations-from altar girls to dancing girls to women priests.

See or have seen the first and second, not the third.

While the Missal of Paul VI “brought with it some authentic improvements and a real enrichment,” the banning of the old Mass caused some “extremely serious damages for us,” he wrote in La Mia Vita, released in mid-April in its Italian translation.

Here’s the nub, the banning.

“I was dismayed by the banning of the old Missal,” he wrote, “seeing that a similar thing had never happened in the entire history of the liturgy….

A blot on the historical landscape?

“The promulgation of the banning of the Missal that had been developed in the course of centuries. starting from the time of the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, has brought with it a break in the history of the liturgy whose consequences could be tragic…. The old structure was broken to pieces and another was constructed admittedly with material of which the old structure had been made and using also the preceding models….

But . . .

“. . . the fact that [the liturgy] was presented as a new structure, set up against what had been formed in the course of history and was now prohibited, and that the liturgy was made to appear in some ways no longer as a living process but as a product of specialized knowledge and juridical competence, has brought with it some extremely serious damages for us.

A manufactured product.

“In this way, in fact, the impression has arisen that the liturgy is ‘made,’ that it is not something that exists before us, something ‘given,’ but that it depends on our decisions.

It follows as a consequence that this decision-making capacity is recognized not only in specialists or in a central authority, but that, in the final analysis, each ‘community’ wants to give itself its own liturgy.

Gallicanism?

But when the liturgy is something each one makes by himself, then it no longer gives us what is its true quality: encounter with the mystery which is not our product but our origin and the wellspring of our life….

The sort of thing you cherish.

He carries the idea further.

“I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis [!] in which we find ourselves depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy, which at times is actually being conceived of etsi Deus non daretur: as though in the liturgy it did not matter any more whether God exists and whether He speaks to us and listens to us.

A sort of navel-gazing?

“But if in the liturgy the communion of faith no longer appears . . . where [does] the Church appear in her spiritual substance?,” he asked.

The spiritual gets downplayed or left out.

Too often, Ratzinger lamented, “the community is only celebrating itself without its being worthwhile to do so.”

Waste of time, he’s saying. You can do that at a birthday party.

He’d already said things like this.

On at least two other occasions, Cardinal Ratzinger has criticized specific liturgical abuses [at] other highly publicized events, [where] he has praised the beauty of the old Mass.

But this newly released autobiography is “the first prolonged lament over the wholesale replacement of one liturgy with another.”

In 1969, in his General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Paul VI revised the the Mass and related prayers and banned, with few exceptions, the Mass rite, effective after a transition period of several months.”

The die was cast.

The Mass had undergone “evolutionary changes” throughout history, but always with a sense of “continuity,” Ratzinger wrote, including when Pius V, after reworking the Missal in 1570 following the Council of Trent, allowed for continued use of some liturgies “with centuries-long traditions.”

Not this time, and aiming at recoverying that sense of continuity, he called for “a new liturgical movement to call back to life the true heritage of Vatican Council II.”

“It is dramatically urgent,” he wrote, “to have a renewal of liturgical awareness” and “understands Vatican II not as a break, but as a developing moment.“

Few talk that way in our day. Quite the contrary.

Dear Diary(!) – Man stops to let small white dog come up to Jim on bench, man is staked out, 7 a.m. of a Sunday, book at ready. Dog says nothing. Neither does Jim. Owner man says good morning, takes dog away. Good.

Moments later, “Good morning” from woman with another little white dog, also silent, she from a few yards away, not yet abreast of Jim. He looks up and nods with a half wave, looks back down again, she takes her dog away.

Two up, two down in the early-morning Grumpy Jim game. Third person moments later with little black dog. Jim looks up as they approach, sees smiling off-white face of short-haired friendly woman, smiles good morning. Her little black dog, a poodle with no personality, stops before Jim and stares.

“Phoebe, he doesn’t want to play,” woman says but does not pull Phoebe away. Instead, she tells Phoebe again that Jim does not want to play. Phoebe, unconvinced, stays there. A third time Phoebe has it explained to her and finally she gets it and goes her way. Inning over.

But no. Comes fourth batter, mahogany-skinned younger woman with pop eyes brings her little brown dog, who also finds Jim interesting. This woman says nothing, seems rather more anxious than the others, who seemed not anxious at all. Her little brown dog she too is reluctant to force away but dog is allowed, anxiously, to stand before Jim, curious and possibly seeking a touch on his little brown head accompanied by mild tickling of chin. But he or she too is taken away.

Down the path, there is a flurry and Jim looks up and sees little brown dog approached by little black one with much yip-yapping and then little white dog on leash and then other little white one off leash and now four little dogs in mish-mash of growls and yip-yaps.

Off-white woman, older, with short hair, is clearly gratified by this turn. Owner man of off-leash little white dog calls from other side of park and in due time the congress is dispersed and crickets are heard again, also aeroplane overhead. Also, homeless pair across the park are heard yip-yapping with occasional growl.

It was morning in America, Austin Gardens-Oak Park IL, 2013 A.D.

First of all, there are such married priests, as we many if not most know already. Not Roman Catholics but Eastern Rite, long-ago created in all-systems-go efforts at unification with once-schismatic Orthodox worshipers.

I stood chatting with one some time back a few blocks from where our two sons were living, upstairs from the art gallery they were running on California Ave., where the Ukrainian Catholic church was for which the priest was pastor.

As a one-time religion reporter and before that a Jesuit, I thought we might take a look inside. We did, but no more than a look. It was Easter Day, the pastor had been there since six o’clock, and he was closing shop. Had to join the wife and kids at home.

Yes. The man was a couple decades or so older than my sons. He had found his way in life that included two sacraments, Matrimony and Holy Orders. And I bless him to this day.

He and I and my son Pete had a pleasant half-hour chat and returned to the flat, joining his mother and others.

Another married-priest syndrome were the Anglicans who in the last several decades pulled a John Henry Newman on the Church of England and joined up with Roman Catholicism and now function as pastors throughout the U.S. and U.K.

These took Romanism on at the behest of our last pontiff but two, Benedict XIV, who in the year of Our Lord 2009 said come one, come all to Anglicans in search of old-time religion which they used to have in Merry England but had no more.

Alas, something went wrong with that invitation. It’s been withdrawn. By a pope named Francis, now gone for his reward, and not reinstated by his successor named Leo. No sir, no sirree.

One one single news day in the world of what this writer could find on his google, there a dozen links to the story about widespread former Anglicans become full-fletched Romans, lots of them, and one, 7-31-25, about Francis withdrawing same.

The Vatican has made a decisive move by ending a special provision that allowed Anglican priests to convert to Catholicism while retaining some of their traditions. This pathway, established under Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, was designed to welcome disillusioned Anglican clergy, particularly those opposed to the ordination of women and LGBTQ+ rights. [emphasis added]

Lot there, to be sure. The top man of Anglicans not happy with this doctrinal exposing as cause of hundreds of his people packing up for greener pastures in Rome. Come on, he says, you open your doors and we watch our people hustling through.

In hundreds, wives and families and all, as reported 11-21-25 as regards the United Kingdom, home of the worldwide English-speaking priests and bishops (!):

A new report reveals that significant numbers of Anglican clergy have converted to Catholicism in the United Kingdom since 1992.

The report, “Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain,” released 11-20-25, shows that approximately 700 clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales, and Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992. The number includes 16 former Anglican bishops.

This equates to approximately a third of all Catholic priests ordained in England and Wales during this period.

And then there is the US and Canada situation.

1-1-12,

Benedict XVI announced creation of an ordinariate – similar to a diocese, but national in scope – for Anglican groups and clergy across the United States who wish to become Catholic. The ordinariate will be based in Houston.

Yes indeed, the Spirit moved Benedict to make it international. Anglicans shocked and disturbed by their religion and wanting out were given it.

The pope also named Father Jeffrey Steenson, a Catholic priest serving in Houston since 2009, to lead the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

Married and the father of three children, Father Steenson was an Episcopal bishop before becoming Catholic in 2007.

He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 2009, the same year he came to Houston to teach patristics (the study of the Church fathers) at St. Mary’s Seminary.

Two years later, Benedict opened the gates.

Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, permitting erection of personal ordinariates equivalent to dioceses, on November 4, 2009.

By 2017, there were 43 ordinariate parishes and missions in the in U.S. and Canada, headed by priests named by the equivalent of monsignor but not bishops, who had to be unmarried.

So 43 married priests and parishes, what do you know about that? Adding to the Eastern Catholic pastors like him who took time for a half-hour chat in mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday but had to get back to his wife and kids.

It can be done. Holy Mother Church is pastored almost but not entirely by celibates including the same-sex-attractive who currently number as high as eight out of every ten, some of whom live up to their state of life but others who don’t.

For these same-sex attracted one might (I did) go to what’s said prolifically by a priest of long experience who makes this proposal: Mix up your (presumed) 80% of them with ministerial colleagues who have wife and kids and you have, shall we say, a calming effect on the church of today.

— more to come on this unusual proposal —

From Peter A. Kwasniewski’s How the Liturgical Reform and the Contemporary Ars Celebrandi Are Remote Contributors to the Crisis on Marriage and Family© 2015:

It might be assumed that once the compilers of the new lectionary of readings decided on a three-year Sunday cycle and a two-year weekday cycle, they would not fail to include in their new lectionary all of the readings from the traditional Roman liturgy, and that, in their march through various books of the Bible, they would not omit any key passages.

You would think so.

Instead, they made a programmatic decision to avoid what they judged to be “difficult” biblical texts [in part because] such texts would be more difficult for the faithful to understand.

Huh. Spare the people conundrums.

Be that as it may, these verses from 1 Corinthians 11 did not make it past the cutting board, never appear in the new mass readings:

“. . . whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink of the chalice of the Lord unworthily,
shall be guilty of the Body and of the Blood of the Lord.

“But let a man prove himself; and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice.

“For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord.” (verses 27-29)

Never appear? Never.

So the allowing of all and sundry to communion, a major issue in new-church politics, can’t readily be shot down by this presumably confusing passage at any new mass during the mere decades-old choice by some  apparatchiks of the 1960s?

Right.

Now what kind of organization would ignore, in this case erase, a basic statement that cuts at the heart of its existence?

Paul, with Peter one of the earthly very founders of the church as we know it, said it. The fixers paid no attention to it and made sure pew-sitters would not be reminded of it.

We are to ignore — misrepresent — something as crucial as who is worthy to take the Eucharist? Because it’s too hard a sell? So we have a liturgy cleansed of the hard-to-take?

Good luck with that, people. This be a counterfeit version meant to leave members undisturbed, relaxed, happy with themselves and they better be, or they be telling us goodbye?

It would seem so, in that for “almost half a century, St. Paul’s warning against receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord unworthily, unto one’s damnation, has not been read at any Ordinary Form Mass.

A warning that “in the traditional Latin Mass,” whose readings were called “too restricted,” these verses are heard “at least three times every year, once on Holy Thursday, and twice on Corpus Christi, in the Epistle and the Communion antiphon.”

Hmm.

 

 

We met each other in 3rd grade in St. Catherine of Siena school in Oak Park IL in 1939, stayed in touch over the years, more recently via telephone, Chicago to his house in California.

His son called the other day, suggested I might talk to him. Not that he was talking any more but he was listening, which I verified with the help of the son’s  wife, who had put her phone next to his ear and later told me he was reacting to my voice.

Hearing is the last thing to go, she said, and I can testify three other death beds over the years, when mourners-to-be addressed the soon-to-die, one of whom, another from our youth, bed-ridden on a coma, pressed my hand, showing he’d heard.

As I told our #1 daughter, I talked to Bill a lot over the last several years, hearing what he had to say about lots of thinks, toward the end doing a lot of listening, let me tell you, but from now on doing all the talking, to him in the next life.

I love that part. Already have my sister Mary Clare Penney, who much appreciated Bill by the way, from conversations at our house and told her children about him. Bill told me he appreciated seeing siblings relate to each other, having had none himself.

Bill and I in days gone by played baseball on Sam’s Lot, as we called a vacant stretch on a corner near us. He considered himself a pitcher and made an art creation of it. Very serious about it.

On another of our locations, Columbus Park, on the Chicago side of Austin from the el and metro tracks station on the south to tennis courts on the north.  We played on the southern-end open space with diamonds on either end. Commuters would stop to watch on their way home from work.

One of our games had a score in the twenties, leading a religious-order priest assigned to St. Catherine’s, who played touch ball with us on after-school hours, observed it had been a pitcher’s duel.

Let’s leave it for now. Praying that Bill rests in peace, of course . . .

Rorate: Dew, Desert, and the Return of the Judge

Fourth Sunday of Advent: when God answers the Church’s long delay with a Quiet Coming that changes everything

Chris Jackson Dec 21, 2025

“Let the Just One descend, O heavens, like dew from above.”

That line lands differently when you have lived long enough to watch men replace thunder with press releases, altars with stages, doctrine with “journeys,” and apostolic gravity with a perpetual pastoral smile.

We are not the first Catholics to feel the sky has turned to brass. Advent itself presumes the experience of delay. It trains the soul to keep begging Heaven to open, even when the earth looks sealed.

Christian impatience, you know.

Today’s Mass does something bracing: it refuses to flatter our impatience. . . . gives us dew, not fireworks.

A voice in the desert, not a committee statement. A steward who fears the Lord’s judgment, not a “synodal” manager who fears headlines. It gives us the Church’s true hope, which is never “things will probably improve,” but rather: the Lord is coming, and He will set things right.

Oh yes. We are convinced of that.

The Introit is juridical and royal. “Rorate caeli desuper… Let the Just One descend.”

Neither therapist nor facilitator. The Just One. The One who does not negotiate with reality and cannot be bribed by modernity. The One whose justice is not cruelty, because it is married to truth.

The way things are. Relax, fellow. Buy into it, OK?

But notice the manner. Dew. Gentle rain. A quiet descent that still breaks the hardest ground.

That is already a correction to our age, which has trained Catholics to look for the kingdom in volume: the bigger event, the bigger platform, the bigger “moment.”

God enters history like dew. He does not need the Church’s marketing department to accomplish His Incarnation.

Again. Buy this. Make it your own. It’s you and God, yes. You can count on it. He knows all about you. Believe Him. Trust Him. Respect Him. Faith, Hope, Charity.

. . .

Very often people will ask, as I myself asked for years: “Why in the world would the Church’s leaders persecute some of the most faithful Catholics—those who form the TLM [Traditional Latin Mass] communities?”

They are penalized, to be sure, their venues taken away, promoters disciplined.

Why indeed?

The answer is not an agreeable one, but sometimes we must take bitter medicine in order to get well. Truth can be the bitterest of medicines. [Uh-oh. Look out.]

. . . of all the sicknesses in the Church, denial of reality is one of the most widespread and most unacknowledged. When this sickness is not diagnosed, the sufferer cannot take the steps he needs to take in regard to spiritual diet and exercise.

That last is a grabber. He’s means to prescribe or begin to uncover what’s needed for the pew-sitters of the world for them to stay (a) interested and (b) devout.

The Church’s leaders persecute the most faithful Catholics . . . a leadership . . .  at this time dominated by a network of active homosexuals and theological modernists.

Oh.

They are not always the same people, but they rely on, and receive, one another’s support.

We all know individual good bishops or cardinals, but such exceptions [!] are a controlled opposition, with very limited mobility.

Exceptions?

The more [these bishops and cardinals] act or speak out, the more ostracized they are, and sometimes they can even be canceled, as priests are canceled lower down.

In the ranks, where non-conformers pay for their sins.

What then of “the enormity of the evil represented by each of these forces”?

Homosexuals reject the first principles of natural law.

Modernists reject the first principles of divine revelation.

Together, they reject the foundations not only of Christianity but of religion as such, and therefore of morality.

Hard words, hard to take. He warned us.

Their “religion,” if such it can be called, is one of self-actualization and self-regard—a secularized inversion of the Christian mission to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.

Condemnation, you have a target.

Theirs is the fashionable subjectivism and flexible relativism of the postmodern West, where “anything goes”—except, of course, traditional faith and morals, for this faith and these morals would eliminate them, possibly even in the old-fashioned method prescribed by pre-modern popes who did not think the death penalty “inadmissible.” [?!]

This false religion, combined with unlimited vanity and lust for power, explains why much of our senior leadership is hell-bent on erasing the TLM from the Church and uprooting the communities that grow around it.

Whom they see as their enemy.

Thus, when people exclaim—baffled by Traditionis Custodes and its ongoing implementation —“But look at how the TLM attracts young people! Look at the large families and numerous vocations!” they are . . . missing the point.

It’s precisely because of this fruitfulness, not in spite of it, that its enemies want to crush it. The more fruitful it is, the more furious they will be.

Whole thing is a mess. Modernists and same-sex-attracted join forces to shoot down opponents, run-of-mill purveyers of every-day Catholicism who know what side their butter’s on.

They see people every day dying for help and have bosses with eye out for non-conformity and ready to slap him down. Conformity, otherwise called unity, actually uniformity, is the never-ready explanation.

Wall St. Journal pays tribute to couple slain by the son they worked hard to bring around in a lifetime of addiction.

President Trump got caught up in the story, blaming the couple’s politics, as if to say they got what was coming to them.

Secondary story this, his ill-timed, misguided comment, a case I say, of giving way to a Satanic urge, by one who has dealt stoically with an amazing list of harsh commentary and attacks on his physical well-being.

Great day for Satan, Cardinal Newman would have said.

. . . to give ourselves only to this or that commandment, is to incline our minds in a wrong direction, and at length to pull them down to the earth, which is the aim of our adversary, the Devil.

Something else. Drug slavery is at the heart of this parental slaughter, and freedom from drug slavery is at the heart of President Trump’s closing down the border invasion and more recently hijacking delivery boats, indeed having them blown out of the water.

More than any other president, or public official for that matter, he has taken steps to shoot down the trade that kills thousands and/or leads addicts to kill their loved ones.

The president’s blaming the dead or seen as such for how they felt about him, bizarre as it was, oddly enough might be seen as referring in part at least to his crusade against killer drugs.

Either way, we have in this episode not only the horror of the son’s insane reaction to loving parents but also a case in point of the deadliness of the enemy that threatens the nation, what the president has recognized and seeks to thwart.