Jeremiah and the Gift of Discernment in an Election Year

Today I heard Sister Ann Shields of the Servants of God's Love give her daily Scripture commentary on Michigan's Ave Maria Radio (you can listen on the internet daily at this link to her show "Food for the Journey," which runs from 10 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.) commenting on today's reading from Jeremiah 28:1-17. I highly recommend listening to her short, incisive commentaries as often as you can. The theme of the Jeremiah reading is the conflict between two prophets: the prophet Jeremiah who gives the true message from the Lord that warns the people to repent and the false prophet Hananiah who gives the people the soothing message that they want to hear. As is to be expected, Sister said that she would not go into details about the application of this passage to America today; but, speaking in appropriate and prudent general terms, she did say that America needs leadership that will tell the nation the hard truth about what's wrong with the way we live. She noted that God will not allow the high level of sin in today's America to persist without repercussions.

She can't give the detailed application because of her religious vocation. I can because of my lay vocation. In Obama, you see the false messianism, the false prophecy that all is well with a nation that has made killing of babies a legal right with the false aura of compassion, that all is well with a nation that celebrates gay "marriages" that further insult an institution already reeling from decades of heterosexual shacking up and fornication as an accepted way of life, that all we need is more of the same moral and logical fog so that we can all be part of One Happy World cheering a false messiah. Jeremiah's message applies to us today during this election year. Catholics and other Christians should open their Bibles and listen to the Word and ask the Holy Spirit to pour out the gift of discernment (see 1 Cor. 12:10) so we can be able to distinguish the true from the false in this election year.