As America was preparing to give thanks around the family table, 10 young men with a chip on their shoulder turned Mumbai, India, upside down — destabilizing relations between two nuclear neighbors and making the free world recalibrate its limitless hope in the Obama Revolution.

In these days, under these conditions, I’ve heard subtle misgivings about our Thanksgiving duty. Grumbling, anxiety, and fear seem somewhat more fitting for the times in which we live.

“Thanks for nothing”. Or “Thanks, Almighty God, for what used to be, for what you did for the Pilgrims and for my immigrant grandparents too. But let’s talk straight; this New World of ours is going to pot. Plus, I’ve got no money.”

Not. So. Fast.

It was for the increase of that kind of existential misgivings — doubts about the real value of our life and the things we love most — that these 10 young men shed innocent blood and desecrated their own. Are we willing to say their mission was accomplished? Did you see the headline of Thursday’s Mumbai Daily? One four-letter word stood out: “FEAR,” printed in the biggest type you’ve ever seen. For 60 hours, fear gripped the city, all of India, and the world-wide-web.

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Editor’s Note: Father Jonathan Morris will host Foxnews.com’s “The Strategy Room” on November 25 from 1 - 2:00 p.m. ET. Click here to watch “The Strategy Room”

If I were a betting man, I’d wager my wallet that many of you—or, dare I say, all of us—are worried about America’s future. And, for many of us, this worry is starting to feel more like fear.

How quickly the world has changed in just a few months! By and large it’s an attitude shift, from confidence in our continual and gradual development as people and as a nation, to uncertainty on both accounts.

Attitude isn’t everything. But in this case, it teaches.

Our greatness as a nation has relied on our unrelenting hope. If we’ve been good at facing foes, if we’ve been unafraid of work, if we’ve had big ideas and the will to make them work, it’s because our hearts have been accustomed to believing in things unseen.

AP

Some have said this hopeful USA is a product of American “exceptionalism”—a belief that our country is destined for global leadership and exceptional success. Hogwash! Our real success has less to do with national pre-destination and more to do with courageous Americans who dared to believe in every man and woman’s, God-given capacity for greatness, and with wise Americans who rejected its many counterfeits.

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Martin Luther King’s prophetic dream brought unity because its demands were constructed upon truth, unchanging truth, of the kind we must seek today.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident…’”

His was a voice of reason crying out in the wilderness of ignorance. It was a call of conscience in favour of objective righteousness.

“One day right there in Alabama, little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Dr. King knew all children could and should join hands, not because it would be pretty or nice or convenient if they did, but rather because we are sisters and brothers, by nature, in the same image and likeness of God.

Now, forty-five years later, President-elect Barack Obama—himself a symbol of historic change—has promised to change America.

He would do well to remember, as all of us would, that the power of Dr. King’s rhetoric resided in the origin of his ideas—a shared human nature endowed with universal rights and obligations—and in the unwavering conviction that the human intellect was and is capable of grasping the details of this endowment, when it is free from blinders of pride and selfishness.

Blinders there will always be, we know. But today, I fear, our biggest blinder is much unlike and even more destructive than those of 1963: we think there is no such thing as perfect vision; we doubt clear lines exist between right and wrong. Or worse still, we don’t imagine such clarity matters as long as we are in control.

President-elect Obama and a Democratic Congress are now in control. The machinery is on. Engines are humming. Will theirs be change we can believe in?

The first word is out. A senior aide for the incoming president — transition coordinator John Podesta — has confirmed Mr. Obama is planning to use executive orders to reverse his predecessor’s policies restricting embryonic stem cell research and federal funding of abortion in third world countries. Podesta’s explanation was simple:

“There’s a lot the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that. I think he feels like he has a real mandate for change.”

There is good reason to believe Mr. Obama will effect such change through legal and democratic channels. Unfortunately, in our times, that is of little consolation.

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Today 52% of Americans taste sweet victory and 46% bitter loss. And together we all celebrate democracy and thank God for our freedoms.

My sincerest congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama. He ran an intelligent and gritty campaign. By staying on his message of “change,” he boxed Senator McCain into someone else’s corner– that of an unpopular president — and convinced the American people that an unknown future is better than four more years of the same.

We will now honor the history of our nation by working with President Obama for change we can truly believe in — the kind that facilitates the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness — and by rejecting every one of its impostors. There will be many.

It is painless and safe to make public predictions months away from Election Day. But on November 3rd, there’s nothing safe about it.

Yet if there’s any value in handicapping political outcomes beyond the lure of self-promotion—and I think there is—why are so many analysts hiding now?

I include myself in this gang of suddenly-quiet pundits. In both private conversations and on-air, I’ve wiggled out of many pleas for prophecy. I’ve learned to respect polls as a snapshot in time of a given population and to look beyond them as insufficient barometers of what the sum of voters will do behind the curtain. We mostly hide, or become uncharacteristically nuanced, on November 3rd because we simply don’t know what will happen, and the chances of people remembering our ignorance is just too high.

But today I’ll throw caution (and self-defense) to the wind in the name of the greater good and towards a more honest post-election analysis of where we are as a nation and what matters to us. Once again, if I am reading this correctly, I will repeat what I said on October 16th — the 2008 election will be closer than many polls are saying it will be on the eve of the election.

Today The Huffington Post prominently and proudly displays two of the newest and last polls of the election season, drawing samples from Saturday and Sunday polling results: CBS News gives Senator Obama a thirteen point lead among likely voters and USA / Gallup puts Senator Obama up by eleven points in the same group. Three days ago The New York Times also gave Senator Obama an eleven point lead nationally.

These polls understandably tempt journalists to suggest the race has been “clinched” by Senator Obama (as John King did recently did on CNN). — I hope such predictions won’t affect anyone’s interest in voting.

Here are my reasons for believing the race will be closer than these polls indicate:
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The Catholic bishop of Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, Bishop Francis Malooly, recently published a letter to the editor in response to an interview Senator Biden gave to the same paper about his understanding of Catholic doctrine in relation to abortion.

The bishop’s decision to publicly clarify Senator Biden’s misrepresentation of his own church’s doctrine, reminded me of a happy moment last night, of a very different kind.

I was sitting outdoors on an ancient loggia looking over St. Peter’s Square, enjoying a moment of glorious tête-à-tête with a group of American tourists—friends of friends—Lutheran, Catholic, and Jewish.

“You mean those two rooms there, with the lights on, immediately across from us and at our same level, are the Pope’s private quarters?”

“Yes, that’s right, those right there,” I responded, with a smile, partaking in their awe.

“This is more like a storybook, than real life,” one of my new friends continued, “and it all seems so small and quaint, when we know the Catholic Church is so big.”

And so it is, big and small. There are 1.31 billion Catholics worldwide, and yet, in the church’s “world headquarters”, if you will, there is a total of just 3,000 employees, from the highest ranking cardinal to the humblest of janitors.

What my friends were witnessing with a bird’s eye view, Vatican City State, is by far the world’s most decentralized organization of its size.

Amazingly decentralized, except, of course, when it comes to the preservation of its core teachings. If the Catholic Church is still around today, it has less to do with the perfection of its members (I don’t think we need any reminders) than with the continuity of its fundamental teaching.

Enter Bishop Malooly.

The bishop’s firm response to Senator Biden’s flippant claim about the Church’s nuanced view of the subject was not meant as a veiled political endorsement, as some are suggesting. Bishop Malooly was doing what many voices, from various religious traditions, have done before him, as he explains here:

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Robin Hood is a legitimate hero, not because he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, but rather because he returned to the poor what lawfully belonged to them.

This distinction is what separates the just goals of Robin and his band of “Merry Men” from the dehumanizing economic theory of “redistribution of wealth”—a hallmark of socialism—as explained and supported by Senator Barack Obama in his 2001 interview with Chicago Public Radio, just recently rediscovered by the media.

While the famed green archer risked his life in defense of the natural right to retain private property (from thieves like the cruel sheriff of Nottingham and King John who stripped peasants of their land and livelihood), in this interview Senator Obama questions to what extent this right even exists.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to it. Did you hear what I heard?

There can be no longer any doubt. Senator Obama’s enduring political philosophy is socialist at the core. And his leanings, in this regard, are radical; he would like to see all three branches of the federal government play a role in restructuring our society according to “redistributive” economic principles.

As I listen to the interview, I must say it is hard to believe our leading United States presidential candidate said, just seven years ago, that it is a tragedy the civil rights movement failed to get the Supreme Court to venture into the issues of redistribution of wealth. It is hard to believe the leading United States presidential candidate said, just seven years ago, “any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing economic change through the courts.” It is hard to believe the leading United States presidential candidate suggested, just seven years ago, we should be seeking legislative and administrative avenues to effect “redistributive change,” since it is impractical now to get the courts to do it on their own. It’s even harder to believe the leading United States presidential candidate, just seven years ago, was talking about the importance of community organizers “putting together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Seven years later, and just one month before Election Day, Senator Obama said to Joe the Plumber, word for word, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everyone.”

I don’t doubt Senator Obama’s good will. In fact, he is right about many things.

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Editor’s Note: Fr. Jonathan Morris will be discussing this topic on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 9:30 a.m. ET on FOX News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom.’”

During this election season, an unprecedented number of Catholic bishops have made public statements about the moral issues Catholics should take into consideration in the voting booth.

Their declarations have evoked a mixed reaction. Many Catholics have expressed gratitude for the clarity and strength of their leaders’ teaching on complicated topics. But others are crying “foul,” saying the bishops’ emphasis on certain issues are, in effect, a not-so-veiled condemnation of Senator Obama’s platform and an endorsement of Senator McCain.

Most recently, according to the Associated Press, a group of twenty-five parishioners protested outside the administrative offices of the Diocese of Dallas, after Bishops Kevin Vann of Fort Worth and Kevin Farrell of Dallas issued this pastoral letter, in which they said, among other things:

“But let us be clear: issues of prudential judgement (such as ‘immigration reform, healthcare, the economy and its solvency, care and concern for the poor, and the War on Terror’…for which ‘there can be reasonable debate among Catholics on how to best approach and solve them’) are not morally equivalent to issues involving intrinsic evils. No matter how right a given candidate is on these issues, it does not outweigh a candidate’s unacceptable position in favor of an intrinsic evil such as abortion or the protection of ‘abortion rights.’”

In the same pastoral letter, the bishops gave practical advice about the conditions under which a Catholic could, in good conscience, vote for a candidate who supports an “intrinsic evil” like abortion, even if they aren’t voting for the candidate specifically for that reason. They say:

a) “If both candidates running for office support abortion or ‘abortion rights,’ a Catholic would be forced to then look at the other important issues and through their vote try to limit the evil done; or

b) “If another intrinsic evil outweighs the evil of abortion. While this is sound moral reasoning, there are no ‘truly grave moral’ or ‘proportionate reasons,’ singularly or combined, that could outweigh the millions of innocent human lives that are directly killed by legal abortion each year.”

Bishops Vann and Farrell make this conclusion:

“To vote for a candidate who supports the intrinsic evil of abortion or ‘abortion rights’ when there is a morally acceptable alternative would be to cooperate in the evil—and, therefore, is morally impermissible.”

I would draw your attention to the bishops’ deliberate decision not to mention any candidate or party by name. Believe it or not, this is not primarily about avoiding IRS sanctions on the church’s tax-exempt status, although it certainly keeps them within our government’s helpful guidelines in this regard. Instead, they choose not to name names because they have no interest in supporting one party over another, knowing full well no political party will ever have a monopoly on moral truth. They are explaining moral principles and allowing their flocks to apply them to the present ballot options, whatever they may be.

Who in our democratic system would deny these bishops’ right to teach in this way, as pastors of their communities?

Bishops Vann and Farrell are not the only ones making headlines. Today the Drudge Report is highlighting an Associated Press article regarding an address given by Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput at a dinner event last week. Notice here, in contrast to the Texas bishops, Archbishop Chaput makes the point he is speaking here specifically as an author and private citizen, and therefore doesn’t mind drawing personal conclusions about what he considers the characteristics of the morally justified vote in 2008, with names included.

The Archbishop begins with what he refers to as his “Litany to the IRS.”

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In recent weeks I have spent a good amount of time crisscrossing the country.

Something very unusual is taking place.

From Seattle to San Diego, from Burlington, Vermont to New York City, from New Orleans to Texas and Midwest towns like Cleveland, I am hearing hushed admissions of a terrible sin: “Father, I’m not going to vote for Obama.”

Then I look at the polls. Nationally and in battleground States, Senator Obama is thrashing Senator McCain.

So what gives?

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In a more perfect world, politics would be not only fair but even positive. Our politicians would all be stellar candidates, with spotless records and inspiring stories who would present themselves to an educated, open-minded public. Responsible citizens—all of us—would then flock to the voting booth to make a prudential judgment between the greater of two or more goods, deciding which of the candidates is most suited, right now, for the particular job at hand.

Good morning, America. It’s 2008 and, need I say, that’s not our world. Keep Reading …