I attended mass with friends last night. I usually don't go to 'vigil' masses, Saturday afternoon masses, but it was important to go with them. The homily was very good (it put their 7-year-old to sleep) but after the mass had ended, the hymn chosen was "America the Beautiful". I whispered to the 7-year-old's mother "That's not a hymn" and genuflected and left while the parishioners sang.
Singing 'America the Beautiful' these days is too much like the wicked Queen saying "Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who's the fairest of them all?" The one mirror that will tell us that we are not a beautiful country is the faith given once for all to the apostles, and (in its better moments) the Church. Sadly, my diocese is all-too-caught up in right wing Americanism, with its idolatry of "freedom" -- by which is meant making a great deal of money and bombing and shooting people with darker skins on the other side of the globe -- and the struggle with a 'culture of death' -- by which they never mean the materialist militarist culture which they revel in -- to refuse to sing hymns to the communal self.
The Church is at all times beautiful, even when her officials may not be. But a country is only as beautiful as its ethical action, and America in this way is hideous to behold, uglier even when her citizens claim to hold the moral high ground than when they don't think at all about such things.
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