It’s Christmas Day 2015 and Jesus Christ is the Lord!

Christmas Eve morning, December 24, 2008, will always endure as one of the most meaningful of my lifetime. And just to think it was courtesy, in part to no less than President Barack Hussein Obama. Like so many others, we at Canada Free Press had fervently hoped and prayed that Obama would not be elected president on November 4, 2008.

To a way of thinking that the passing of time has never changed, nothing could have been worse for all of Western civilization. Many recognized Obama as an ideologue, obsessed with the ‘Fundamental Transformation of America’ long before he ever set up camp in the Oval Office. Beginning on Election Night, letters to the editor from people giving up hope began pouring in. It was, to say the least, a depressing time that marked the first chapter of the coming darkest of days. At the end of November, I came upon a FoxNews story about people visiting the gravesite of ‘Rosary Priest’ Father Patrick Peyton, in North Easton, Massachusetts, and decided to try to find my way there for Christmas Eve. The story had indicated that the grave was difficult to find, which proved to be true. All the way during the 9-hour drive to North Easton, only Rush Limbaugh lifted my post-election mood. Back then, Rush was giving air time on his popular radio show to comedian Paul Shanklin’s parody of Rep. Barney Frank, ‘Banking Queen’. Every time Rush played it, the car radio was turned up high.

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Thinking back on this trip, it was admittedly a long way to go for someone whose words, “The Family that prays together, stays together”, I only remembered in the vaguest of memories, having heard my Mother repeat them when I was a child. As things turned out, the trek to the cemetery on Christmas Eve morning had to be made in the foulest of Massachusetts weather, an icy sleet falling on several feet of snow; a snow that completely obliterated all but the tiny American flags marking the graves of the priests and brothers who had served their country in war. Even though the cemetery where Fr. Peyton is buried was described as being behind a brick wall, it was still difficult to find, as people asked along the way had never heard of it. Getting to the cemetery was only half the battle, because having found it snowed in, at first finding Fr. Peyton’s gravesite, undistinguished in any way, looked all but impossible. Giving up on the search as a lost cause was beginning to look tempting. Incredibly, and though complete strangers to me, a woman named Robin and her teenage daughter, there visiting the gravesite of a relative priest, offered their help in the search. People who visit Fr. Peyton’s grave bring Rosaries which they exchange with those others have left behind. We began brushing snow off all the graves looking for Rosaries in the snow. Robin’s words when she shouted out, “There are lots of rosaries under the snow on this one!” were to come back to haunt me on all the Christmas Eves that followed. Robin and her daughter had found Fr. Peyton’s gravesite. It was the last one cleared of snow, leaving us to think that Fr. Peyton must have wanted the snow brushed off all the others in time for Christmas Day visits. It was on Christmas Day 2008 that Canada Free Press posted the story of the Fr. Peyton search. The last words of the column come back to me for Christmas, 2015: “It is Christmas Day 2008, and Jesus Christ is Lord!” Upon my return home, I began searching the Internet for every detail I could find about Fr. Peyton’s remarkable life. It was to take a couple of years before I discovered that videos of him praying the Rosary are available online to this very day. Had I not first found ‘Come Pray the Rosary With Me’, recited by Fr. Dave Heney with parishioners of St. Pascal Baylon Church in Thousand Oaks, California, when I was searching out ways to pray the Rosary online, I would never have known about Father Peyton’s Family Theatre-produced Mysteries of the Rosary videos, which were on the same Google page right beside the the one on which I was praying, and still do. Had it not been for my feeling so blue after those letters that followed Obama’s election as U.S. president, I likely never would have made my way to Massachusetts looking for the kind of hope for which people still searched in better days. It’s seven Christmases later. Western civilization survives the brand of Marxism Obama’s imposing on a world that always was, and still is, better off without him, and survives it with ‘Hope & Change’ a real possibility for 2016. No matter where I might search, there are no better words to end this column on this day than with the ones that confidently assert a truth no one can ever change: “It’s Christmas Day, 2015 and Jesus Christ is Lord!”