Culture

Charity is the love of God and neighbor, the greatest of all virtues; heroic charity is that love carried to its furthest reach, the willingness to give everything, even one's life, for the good of another. Jesus named it the summit of love: 'Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends' (John 15:13), and then he did exactly that on the Cross. Its opposite vice is selfishness, the instinct that always asks first, 'What about me?', and in its extreme, the cold cruelty that uses other people as mere means. This week's history shows both poles starkly: the Nazi regime treated whole peoples as disposable, while Maximilian Kolbe walked into a death sentence so a father could live. Most of us will never be asked for our lives, but heroic charity grows from small daily seeds: choosing the harder, kinder thing when no one is watching; giving up what we want for someone who needs it more; loving the person who is hard to love. The martyrs were not born heroes; they practiced love in ordinary ways until, when the great moment came, they were ready. This week, try this: each day, do one act of self-giving that genuinely costs you something, your time, your comfort, your pride, for someone else, and offer it quietly to God without seeking notice.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing more than 2,400 Americans. President Franklin Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy,' and the next day the United States entered World War II, joining the Allies against the Axis powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The whole nation mobilized. On the home front, factories converted to war production, women took industrial jobs symbolized by 'Rosie the Riveter,' and families rationed gasoline, sugar, and rubber. In a grave injustice, the government forced about 120,000 Japanese Americans — most of them U.S. citizens — into internment camps out of unfounded fear.

The war was fought on two fronts. In Europe, the Allies pushed back Nazi Germany, with the massive D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, opening the road to victory. As Allied troops advanced, they uncovered the Holocaust — the Nazi murder of six million Jews and millions of others. We remember these victims with reverence; their suffering calls every generation to defend human dignity. Germany surrendered in May 1945 (V-E Day).

The war in the Pacific raged on. To force Japan's surrender, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Japan surrendered, ending the war (V-J Day). The cost was staggering, and the world had entered the atomic age.

Key facts: - Pearl Harbor was attacked December 7, 1941; the U.S. entered the war the next day. - The Axis powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan; the U.S. joined the Allies. - About 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps. - D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, was June 6, 1944. - The Holocaust was the Nazi murder of six million Jews and millions of others. - Germany surrendered in May 1945 (V-E Day); Japan surrendered in August 1945 after the atomic bombs (V-J Day).

When the World Wars shattered old certainties, art could no longer pretend the world was orderly and beautiful. After the senseless slaughter of WWI, the Dada movement responded with deliberate nonsense and anti-art, mocking a civilization that had marched into the trenches; if reason had produced such horror, the Dadaists asked, what was reason worth? German Expressionism, even before the wars, had distorted color and form to express inner anguish, a foretaste of the century's pain. But the single greatest artistic protest against modern war is Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica' (1937). When German planes, aiding the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, bombed the defenseless Basque town of Guernica, killing civilians, Picasso painted a vast canvas in stark black, white, and grey: a screaming horse, a mother with a dead child, a broken warrior, all twisted in agony. He refused color; the scene is too terrible for it. 'Guernica' became the modern world's universal image of the innocent crushed by war. Today we also turn, with reverence, to the memory of the Holocaust. Six million Jewish men, women, and children, and millions of others, were murdered. We do not view graphic images; instead we honor the victims through their own words and through the work of remembrance. The drawings made by children in the camps and ghettos, and the testimonies of survivors, insist on a truth no tyranny could erase: each of these was a person of infinite worth, made in the image of God.

Write one sentence completing: 'Because I have learned this, I will never...' Then write the name 'St. Maximilian Kolbe' and one word for the love he showed.