Fr. Rutler on The Dragon

From Fr. G. Rutler's The Seven Wonders of the World (The Tomb of Mausolus)

History is the mythic term for God's real war in the world.  .....It has become an affectation to speak of religious truths in terms of "story-telling".  What the evangelists call the Gospel of Jesus Christ, some pedants call 'stories about Jesus.'  But there are two ways to tell a story; one is to relate an event and the other is to fabricate an event.  ......The stories the Church tells are not of [the latter] kind.  When she speaks of dragons, she is telling the truth.  .......The full story of the evil dragon has not been written yet, but its plot is already laid out graphically in millions of cemetery plots where lie the carcasses cremated by his fiery breath.

With the possible exception of some of the major newspapers, no voices have surpassed the ecclesiastics of a certain naively progressive stripe in the inane ways they have denied the existence of the dragon.  Religion in modern Western culture became a dragon-denying placebo for spiritual headaches.  It lost a sense of spiritual combat and sank into two contradictory alternatives:  pacifism and terrorism.  A curious schizophrenia afflicted religious pacifists recommending guerilla struggles in territories that fit their political agenda.  And this was simply because the spiritual combat of saints and dragons was thought unreal, and political fantasy was thought real.  The dominant political fantasy, of course, was Marxism, and it has been found fraudulent like the Wizard of Oz with his smoke and mirrors.  The underlying prejudice has just been a lazy optimism about human innocence and the unreality of evil.  It was as if the human race fell only in the sense that it was not paying enough attention to where it was going; and the once it got up and dusted itself off, there would be no end to the future.  Past and future in fact were said to be infinite.  There was no creation; and man had not lost Paradise, he had just gotten out of the primeval slime.  According to this theory, man's only obstacle to happiness is man himself.  He does not have to be redeemed; he needs a little retooling here and there and soon--Utopia.  Of all reveries, this was the most delicate and dangerous; and as man tried to live it as a fact, he found many dragons hiding along the way.

He certainly has.