John joined the military to fight the communists. Communists are against God, and everything Christianity stands for.

So he enlisted in the military at the beginning of the Vietnam War. He was quickly introduced to the horrors of war. But he was so zealous for Christianity and the American Way that in his bitter zeal, he began to take pleasure in every Communist he killed. As he shot the enemy soldiers and blew them to bits with hand grenades, or watched them roast in the napalm flames, he began to feel a certain satisfaction. After all, these were the Viet Cong, the bad guys, on the Communists' side. He reasoned within himself that they deserved to die, since they were part of the Communist machine.

Eventually he lost what remained of his humanity. With the passing of the months and even years, he became increasingly cruel and bloodthirsty, not showing mercy even to civilians, women and children of the Viet Cong. His heart was completely hard as stone, with no fleshly dimension left. He thought of the Viet Cong as so many fire ants, and in his diabolical insanity he even imagined that God would give him a special reward for each one of them he kills.

And as he dished out cruelty upon cruelty, "for the cause of Justice" of course, a thought stubbornly played around in the back of his mind, struggling to come to the foreground:

I have become worse than the enemy I set out to fight.



This parable was inspired by reading another article by Traditio.com, which someone e-mailed me. The bitterness, the anger, the hatred -- the author has clearly forgotten what it means to be Catholic. All he does all day is bitterly complain, calling names constantly. And he often stoops so low as to lie and distort the truth -- the original criticism the Modernists who hijacked the Church were guilty of.

But this parable would apply to anyone who, in their zeal for battle, ends up becoming as bad as the enemy they set out to fight.