Signs And Wonders

The following speech was modified and delivered by Michael Knowles At the Legatus National Summit Orlando, Florida on February 11, 2023.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be here. It’s an honor for me to be here at Legatus. This esteemed and influential Catholic laymen and women organization is a great honour. But it isn’t only the laity here with us today. I know that we are also joined by a number of priests, nuns, and — if news reports are to be believed — undercover federal agents. 

Many Catholics are dismayed by the FBI memo that was leaked. It outlined plans to infiltrate certain Catholic parishes and monitor those that celebrate the traditional Latin Mass. According to the memo the traditional Mass attracts radical and violent extremists. I think that this is true. Anyone who has been to one of these parishes will know that it is crowded with toddlers. As the father to a two-year old and a seven month-old, I know that little boys can be some of the most extreme, violent, and radical people on earth.

Many Catholics do not approve of surveillance. Quantico visitors are welcomed to my house. It’s a great opportunity for evangelization. As far as I’m concerned, anything that gets people through the doors of the church and into the pews is fine by me. The mysterious workings of Our Lord are amazing.

This is the conference’s topic: ‘Signs and Wonders.’ This is coincidentally a subject that I am passionate about because it’s the very idea of ‘signs and wonders’ It played a crucial role in my return to faith. It was a small book called “The Book of Faith” after I spent about 10 years in a desert of atheism & agnosticism. “Coincidentally” — coincidentally written by the former national chaplain of this organization, Fr. George Rutler — that impelled me, when I came upon it unexpectedly, to return to church. I could speak for probably an hour about the many improbable little signs and wonders that accompanied that moment — as well as the many more fantastical and improbable experiences that took place in the months that followed as I returned to the faith — but the attempt to convey the experience of these phenomena is a lot like trying to describe a dream to a friend: endlessly fascinating to the person who has had the experience and lexical chloroform to everyone else.

The book “Coincidentally” The book is filled of wisdom about this topic, beginning at top of the front page, which contains an epitaph written by Alexander Pope. “All nature is but art unknown to thee; all chance, direction which thou canst not see.” When one opens the cover, Fr. can be found on the inside flap. Rutler’s more blunt observation: “An evil generation seeks signs and wonders, and I am not the first to say it. But a stupid generation ignores signs and wonders.”

Catholics can’t ignore signs and wonders. The Catholic vision is fundamentally semiotic. There is neither neutrality nor emptiness. Everything means something, and nothing means nothing. Even the most amazing miracles can seem like a coincidence to a modern man who lacks faith. A Catholic believes that there is no such thing as coincidence. No matter how small the event, God controls all things. We know God has the final say on everything.

This is why the Catholic emphasis on history. A modern man without faith sees history as one more damned thing. History is allegory to a Catholic. Every moment in history has meaning. False religions or ideologies can distort history. For example, Hindus deny the linearity and view history as cyclical. Buddhists also deny that time exists objectively apart from the human mind. Modern progressives claim to be able to control both the movement and meaning of time. 

Only a few people watch “Morning Joe” on MSNBC will have observed this fact just the other day when Joe Scarborough’s guest Nikole Hannah-Jones declared, “The arc of the universe doesn’t bend one way or the other. We bend it.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, for those of you fortunate enough to be unaware, is the progressive fabulist behind The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which endeavors to reset America’s founding away from 1776, when the Founding Fathers declared independence from Britain; and away from 1620, when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Harbor; and away even from 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue for gold and the glory of God. Jones wishes to reset America’s founding at 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in Virginia, thereby recasting the American tradition as a rotten thing to be rejected.

Hannah Joneses, a modern progressive, accepts the linearity of history. They’re not Hindus or Buddhists; they emerge out of the Western tradition,

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