What is wrong with the world?

About 15 years ago, I was having breakfast with a well-known conservative media personality, and he was lamenting all the terrible things that were going on in our country. He shared that it seemed that everything of importance in the country was going wrong — terrorism, drug abuse, abortion, gender confusion, illegal immigration, issues with China and Russia, liberal media, Church scandals, rampant atheism, crisis in education at all levels, and many other things. He had been a Catholic but left the Church due to trouble he had with some of the Church’s teachings (although he still belongs to a Christian church).
 
I told him that I was convinced that the only hope for our country is the Catholic Church. Nothing else will be able to withstand the onslaught of the evil one because, in the end, the Church will prevail. We have a divine promise of that! He disagreed with me, however, and said he did not think the Church could do anything to alter the course of our country.
 
Yet, no matter how bad it gets, we must not give up. We need to put our faith in Christ and the Church that he established. G.K. Chesterton wrote in his famous book What’s Wrong with the World: “…in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old.”
 
Our country and society need to be exhorted to turn to (or return to) the truth – the Church, which few have ever really tried. Yet who is going to encourage them? Throughout history, when the Church faced what appeared to be insurmountable challenges, saints arose. During the Protestant revolt, when things seemed especially dark, we had St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila, to name a few, and that was just one example in history.
 
As Legatus members, we are charged with being ambassadors to the world. And as fewer people step foot within our churches, we the Church (Legatus) need to go into the world and witness to the truth.
  
TOM MONAGHAN is Legatus’ founder, chairman, and CEO.