TO THE EDITOR:
No longer a matter of dispute is the fact that our American society is in a process of moral decline and moral deterioration.
Statistics and reports show that of all world leader nations we hold the lead in crime, violence, abortion and single-parent families. We have lost the admiration and respect of nations and peoples that once held us up in high esteem. In a recent U.S. poll, almost 74 percent found us off the beaten track.
Our national and state governments with our elected leaders, have striven to confront the affairs of the day, but in the wrong way. They are limiting their efforts to legal and social remedies that deal only with effects, ignoring the causes of the very problem, and thus aiding the decline. The moral character of our nation cannot be reduced to economic, material and political factors. Values and virtues are a huge factor in their own right. What is needed is the spiritual revival which will restore a sense of moral and civic values.
The problem we face today is a moral one. Our secular culture has so rejected our moral principles, that were always considered sacred and binding, that a moral decay has overtaken our culture. The word moral has been just about abolished from our vocabulary.
In addition to facing a moral problem, we are also facing a religious one. Morality and religion go hand in hand. Morality cannot last without a connection to religion. Mother Therese of Calcutta once said, If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong. She also went on to say, if God does not exist in our culture, everything is permissible, which is the lapse in our culture today.
At the heart of our moral problem lies a basic choice to be made. Continue with the moral permissiveness that has taken over the last four decades or return to the moral values which this nation was founded on. Only in the latter is there real hope for an end to our national and state moral and spiritual decline.
This return will not come easily. How can a culture that all but deifies money, power-sensuality and encourages a self-centered individual attitude exist with a lifelong commitment to God, who requires a total commitment of us to love and serve others?
We are in a serious dilemma today. Which way are we going to go as a nation? One side of the compromise will in the end finally win out with the rise or fall of our society/culture. We are faced today not only with a cultural and religious rise or fall but also a national one.
What does it profit a man or a nation or a people if they gain the whole world and suffer the loss of their soul?
Richard D. Walsh
East Greenwich, RI
