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Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. (Psalm 23:4) My family and I drove aside the Mall in Washington, DC, creeping along Independence Avenue in search of a parking spot. We were beyond the Washington Monument, further south near our ultimate destination: the Lincoln Memorial. It was part of an educational field trip to teach our children about the Civil War, and to embrace a teachable moment on how the nation’s Civil War president fought for the basic rights and dignity of every human being, including those that the culture and law of the day considered not fully human. Finally, we found an open meter next to the Department of the Interior. We put the baby in a stroller and crossed the street. At a fork in the path, I suggested we go left, while my wife said we should head right. We went right — good call. All of them: those troops, their parents, and passersby who happen upon that wall; they all have a Father to lead them. Before we knew it, we encountered more people heading in the same direction. Suddenly, we descended into a dip in the walkway, and then I noticed it, for the first time, completely caught off guard, truly taken aback: I was staring at the Vietnam War Memorial. I’m embarrassed to say I had never seen it before. I always wanted to see it. Now, we had happened upon it, and it isn’t the kind of thing you want to happen upon. The scene was absolutely somber, just as everyone says. It’s the spirit of the place. All those names, cast against the black — all those boys whose lives were cut short in that war in Southeast Asia decades ago. The mood is remarkably sad for anyone — even those of us with no recollection of a single person on that wall — but it’s devastating for those lonely visitors who have a connection, who have intimate knowledge of someone on that wall; they see a face, and memories, when they see the name. There they are: touching the chiseled name, caressing it, speaking to it, praying for it, crying over it, or placing a piece of paper atop it and rubbing a crayon to bring it home. It’s the only physical remainder left from their loved one, and so they want to be with it and take it back where it belongs. I glimpsed an old man, kneeling, weeping, as he rested his hand on what must have been his long-deceased son. For a younger dad, like myself, to witness that shear sense of loss, aside my own young boys, alive and well, not yet of age for military service, is alarming. This article was originally written in 2009. The star of the article, 3-year-old Abigail Joy Kengor, had just graduated from Grove City College. She is shown here at graduation with the author, her father Paul. We poked along gradually, haltingly, speechlessly, taking in scene upon scene. We were in the valley of death. Alas, as I neared the end, having lagged behind in a daze, sauntering past the dead, it suddenly dawned on me that I had been clutching the hand of my precious three-year-old, Abigail Joy, the entire time. “Good Lord,” I thought to myself, “what have I just done to this child?” This sweet, innocent girl …. What had I exposed her to?  Had I just traumatized this beautiful little girl? In that flash, I expected to look down and see a sobbing, troubled, confused child, who would need explanations and parental counseling. Instead, I was amazed when she looked up at me, beamed, cocked her head to the side, blushed, and smiled. She was filled with joy over simply being with her dad, holding his hand in a leisurely walk down a path on a pretty day. She hadn’t seen a thing on that dark, grim wall. Abigail had been shielded, protected, with her dad. All she knew, in her universe, was that she was with her father, and all was right with the world. She had walked through the shadow of the valley of death with her father, and feared no evil, because she was with him. Yes, the Psalm fits. It had also once fit for those same boys on that wall, as they crept through the rice paddies and jungles, as gunfire and grenades and landmines surrounded them, and, most poignantly, as they met their own final moments in their own valley. It fits today, too, for their parents, peering at that wall, reminiscing back to when their children were three-year-olds. All of them: those troops, their parents, and passersby who happen upon that wall; they all have a Father to lead them, to be with them, who they can hold on to and look up to, as they enter the valley. Sometimes, it takes the vantage of a child to bring the message home. READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Your Vanishing Paperboy Your Vanishing Newspaper Be Not Afraid: Fear, Pope Leo, and Donald Trump  

Warning: The following article contains references to the sexual abuse, rape, and torture of children, as detailed in the recent Rape Gang Inquiry Report from the U.K. Reader discretion is advised. Pope Leo XIV has, as I’ve noted before, done tremendous work reversing much of the damage done by his late predecessor Pope Francis, who often sowed confusion and nearly as often refused to offer subsequent clarity. There is one topic, however, upon which Pope Leo could and should afford further clarity, in accord with the age-old teachings of the Catholic Church and her greatest thinkers, and that subject is immigration. On June 16, speaking to journalists, the Holy Father said, regarding the program of “remigration” and mass deportations being executed or proposed in many Western nations at present, “Many times we don’t recognize the reasons why these people had to leave their countries. Many reasons: violence, war, conflict,” the pope said. “So simply saying, ‘We’ll send them away, so we can wash our hands of the problem,’ doesn’t seem like the most Christian response to me. We really need to look at the cases, and above all, treat people with respect as individuals.” The brutal, harrowing Rape Gang Inquiry Report is far from the only example of the abuse of Western peoples by foreigners. First of all, it is important to note that the Holy Father’s personal political opinions are not binding upon Catholics. His formal pronunciations on matters of faith and morals are, but “blanket remigration” and mass deportations are political matters; the treatment of others with dignity is a moral matter, of course, but conducting a mass deportation campaign and treating illegal aliens with dignity are not mutually exclusive. Second, it is worth noting that Pope Leo’s comments were made on the same day that British Member of Parliament (M.P.) Rupert Lowe published the 219-page Rape Gang Inquiry Report, a thorough study on the appalling phenomenon of Muslim gangs in the U.K. raping, gang-raping, torturing, and sex trafficking British girls as young as 11 years of age. This was not a report on some singular incident that happened once and authorities are now trying to get to the bottom of it. According to the report, at least 250,000 British girls have been raped by Muslim gangs “as a bare minimum,” although the actual number is likely significantly higher. This issue has been ongoing for decades; the earliest recorded instance of Muslim rape gangs Lowe and his commission found dated to the 1950s. The issue is still ongoing. The day after the report was published, in fact, a “migrant” was arrested in Glasgow for raping a teenage girl under a bridge. (My money is on the “migrant” being a Muslim and/or of African, Middle Eastern, Pakistani, or Indian origin.) One of the chief issues identified in the report is the absolute, near-total failure of authorities to do anything to protect British girls. The rape gangs were estimated to be comprised of some 95 percent Muslims, with the overwhelming majority being of Pakistani origin, although others were of African, Middle Eastern, Indian, and other southern Asian origins. Largely due to fear of being labeled racist, although sometimes due to outright corruption, police, social services, and even health care staff did almost nothing to protect the British girls who were being regularly, repeatedly raped. One girl testified that, after having been raped multiple times by Pakistani Muslims, she was raped with a whiskey bottle, which shattered inside her. She checked herself into a state-run emergency room, where she said that no doctors or nurses ever questioned how she wound up with shards of a whiskey bottle embedded in her vaginal walls. The girl was 12 years old at the time. When the mother of another victim called the police to report that her daughter was being serially raped by “Asian” men, the call dispatcher replied, “You can’t describe them as Asian men because that’s racist. You should just be glad your child is being taught a different culture.” In another instance, the same victim went to the police for help. The officer did not help and, in fact, returned the girl to the house where grown adult Muslim men had been gang-raping her. The officer is quoted as saying, “Have fun with her.” Incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while serving as the top prosecutor and chief of the Crown Prosecution Services, personally oversaw the prosecutions of thousands of Muslim rape gang members. According to the report, he let go at least 13,000 with warning letters. These were men who serially raped, sex trafficked, and tortured (Yes, many victims were tortured. As if the repeated rape, gang-rape, and sex trafficking weren’t bad enough, victims described being beaten, cut, branded with the letter “M” for Mohammed, and far, far worse) hundreds and thousands of underage girls — and they were let off with a warning! The man who let them off with a warning is now prime minister. One victim shared that the only men who raped her who were not Muslims of foreign origin were British police officers. Another testified that, when she was being sex trafficked up and down the length of Britain, her Muslim traffickers would force her to participate in “cop nights,” where she would be raped by police officers complicit in the gangs’ sickening activity. When the Holy Father says, “We really need to look at the cases, and above all, treat people with respect as individuals,” he must understand that those doing the “looking at the cases” will be the very same political leaders, prosecutors, police officers, social care workers, and health care workers who knowingly, willingly turned a blind eye to the mass, systematic rape of at least a quarter million British girls for decades. These people have evinced no prudence, no wisdom, no discernment, and above all, no charity. After letting go at least 13,000 child-rapists with warning letters, does anyone really believe that Starmer would place the safety and security of British children first when reviewing asylum claims, visa petitions, and the like? How about the police officers who handed girls over to be gang-raped, quipping, “Have fun with her”? Would anyone trust people like the doctors and nurses who failed to ask a bruised and battered 12-year-old girl how glass whiskey bottle shards became embedded in her vaginal walls to ask visa applicants the right questions? Every single British institution charged with the care and safekeeping of these girls failed and folded at the prospect of being called “racist.” They are not the sort of people fit to determine whether foreigners can enter the country or not. I have no idea whether Pope Leo has read or even heard about the Rape Gang Inquiry Report, but he must understand that, at the present moment, “blanket remigration” or mass deportations are the kindest, most charitable, and most humane response to crises such as the mass rape, torture, and sex trafficking of a quarter million children at the hands of foreign insurgents. The pontiff’s suggested course of action may err on the side of charity, but charity toward whom? Certainly not toward the little girls whose lives, bodies, and psyches were forever and perhaps even irreparably shattered by gangs of foreign rapists. Certainly not toward the mothers, fathers, and foster parents who genuinely cared about their children but found themselves helpless as every single institution refused to save their daughters from being raped and tortured. Certainly not toward the generations of men who fought, died, struggled, toiled, and labored (As Catholics, we pray for the souls of the dead and honor the venerable among them) to make their nation a safe place for their posterity to live. The Holy Father urges that we “treat people with respect as individuals.” Not a single one of the more than 250,000 girls who fell victim to foreign rape gangs was respected, as an individual or in any sense. One girl was beaten around the head with a baseball bat, which her attacker then used to rape her. Another girl was raped by a dog, and her Muslim captors placed bets on whether the dog would rape her vaginally or anally. Multiple girls were kidnapped and sex trafficked to the Middle East or parts of Asia, where they were forced into Muslim marriages. None of this is treating anyone with respect. The brutal, harrowing Rape Gang Inquiry Report is far from the only example of the abuse of Western peoples by foreigners who do not understand the concept of respect, dignity, or charity. British man Stephen Ogilvie was nearly beheaded in the streets of Belfast earlier this month by an African immigrant. In Dublin, Algerian national Riad Bocuchaker attempted to stab to death three five-year-old children because he was frustrated at having been denied additional welfare benefits. One of the children, a little girl, was slashed across the chest and needed surgery to save her life; she had no pulse when paramedics arrived on the scene. Another little girl was struck in the head so viciously that police found “bone fragments” in her hair. A 25-year-old wheelchair-bound Swedish woman with severe autism was raped by her ambulance driver, an Iraqi national 20 years her senior. The U.S. also stands as a rebuke of the pontiff’s political comments. Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old Iowa girl, was raped and murdered by an illegal alien, who first used an ear of corn to rape her anally, so vigorously and violently that her intestines were ruptured. Jocelyn Nugaray was 12 years old when two illegal aliens, both adult men, raped and strangled her under a bridge and dumped her body in a puddle. Rachel Morin was a mother of five who was beaten to death against a tunnel wall by an illegal alien who proceeded to rape her corpse. The list goes on — far too long a list. Certainly, these violent offenders should never have been allowed to enter the country, I’m sure the Holy Father would agree. But what of those who entered the U.S. without ever having committed a crime, those with no black mark or blemish on their records, save the violation of American immigration laws? Colombian national and illegal alien Jose Medina had no criminal record — in fact, he was a victim himself; Medina had been shot and left permanently wounded by an armed robber in his home country. Nevertheless, just this year, he shot and killed 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman, a Catholic girl — one of Pope Leo’s own flock! — who was studying at a Catholic university in Chicago. Both the U.K., where every major institution systematically and completely failed to protect 250,000 children from being brutally raped, and the U.S., where former president Joe Biden and his twisted lackies and deputies flooded the nation with at least 12 million illegal aliens in the space of four years, are evidence that “blanket remigration” and mass deportations are necessary, if for no other reason than to allow Western nations an opportunity to recalibrate the systems by which they vet foreigners for admission into the country. Pope Leo urges that Western nations treat foreigners with respect, dignity, and charity, yet dismisses “remigration” and mass deportations as a viable option. He ought not. Mass deportations may not be the gentlest means of reclaiming Western nations for their native peoples, but they certainly allow for treating foreign insurgents with respect, dignity, and charity. The alternative means of reclaiming Western nations for their native peoples, as I hope neither the Holy Father nor anyone else ever has to find out, will show no respect, no dignity, and no charity towards those who pose a threat to the safety, security, and sovereignty of those nations, those who have so callously, so brazenly, so viciously desecrated the dignity of their Western hosts. With all due respect and deference to the Holy Father and with a deep and filial love for his sacred office, I must point out that the pontiff’s personal political opinion in this instance is wrong. In fact, “remigration” and mass deportations are “the most Christian response” to the present crises. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: The Tragedy of the SSPX One Way or Another: The Insanely Easy Choice Facing America on Immigration The Exorcist and the Cardinal

Kids hear this all the time from us old people: “Thank God there were no cell phone cameras when I was young!” Junior rolls his eyes — not because the sentiment isn’t true, but because it’s the 50th time he’s heard it this week. Still, he knows, deep down, that mistakes are better left to memory. More than seven million American children still play baseball. Most of them will never see an automated strike zone. The cultural critic Susan Sontag warned that the camera changes not only what we see, but also that an unquenchable “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” Professional sports are strung out on instant replay, and Major League Baseball has just upped its dosage as it moves toward its Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system. Using tracking technology, the system evaluates pitches with far greater precision than a sweaty umpire ever could. For those concerned with fairness and efficiency, the goals of ABS are difficult to oppose. The results are indisputable. Yet in eliminating bad calls, instant replay and ABS also eliminate much of baseball’s humanity. Baseball is so difficult that imperfection is unavoidable and failure is woven into the game. From Fred Merkle’s baserunning blunder in 1908, to Bill Buckner’s error in 1986, to Jim Joyce’s blown call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game in 2010, some of the game’s most memorable moments emerged from mistakes. They were painful, frustrating, and undeniably “unfair.” Yet they revealed true character, and the stories endured because the mistakes were transcended, replaced by stories of accountability, forgiveness, resilience, humility, and grace. At its core, baseball is ultimately about failure. “If you fail seven out of ten times at bat, you’re headed to Cooperstown,” remains true. In baseball, there is real utility in embracing defeat and disappointment because if you don’t, you’re going to lose your mind and quit. The murky, interpretive space of a particular umpire’s strike zone has always been a part of the rubric. Players and managers have to deal with a mercurial strike zone, and if they argued balls and strikes, it was an unwritten rule that they would be tossed from the game. The lesson here is that life isn’t fair; deal with it. Major League Baseball is, of course, a business, but if we continue to call it our National Pastime, it also bears some responsibility for its negative knock-on effects, in what it normalizes and how it shapes the expectations of the game. More than seven million American children still play baseball. Most of them will never see an automated strike zone. They play under volunteer coaches and imperfect umpires, where bad calls are not technological failures but an inevitable part of the game. One wonders what responsibility the MLB has for that, as what they normalize, the youth imitate. Most youth leagues will never have access to instant replay or automated strike zones. So if the MLB teaches kids that every mistake should be corrected by technology, what message does that send? How will a young player deal with bad calls when their parents and coaches show them those calls on their iPhone 17s? Sports are incubators for civic life. They teach children how to live in a world that is not perfectly fair. That is why they are such a prominent part of schooling. They teach kids to respect authority, even imperfect authority. They teach them perseverance, self-control, and resilience. With our increasingly grievance-over-grit culture, do we really want sports to reinforce the idea that every mistake is a system failure requiring technological correction? A free society depends on folks tolerating imperfection and continuing to participate in institutions despite frustration and disagreement, not on perfect enforcement of rules. Technology like instant replay and ABS may offer “rational solutions,” but we should recognize what we are sacrificing. Baseball has always been a teacher. It has taught generations of Americans how to handle failure, adversity, disappointment, and unfairness with grace. In trying to perfect an imperfect game, we may inadvertently diminish its unseen beauty. Modern culture is addicted to capturing every moment and litigating every slight, whether on a smartphone camera or an automated replay screen. But baseball’s greatest contribution has never been about perfection. It’s about teaching us how to move past errors and “get ’em next time.” These types of lessons can only be learned when we put down the phones, switch off the sensors, and allow ourselves to simply deal with it; whatever that “it” might be. READ MORE from Peter Connolly: Graduated, Not Educated The Radicalization of American Politics The Inevitable Result of Government’s Addiction to Spending Other People’s Money