If I could have anything I want this year? Here’s my short list. I obviously don’t think of these as occupying the same category of importance—but in their own context, each has its own significance.

* A massive, decisive and successful international military intervention to end the genocide in Darfur.

* The birth of an effective, and determined national movement of concerned wives and mothers who are absolutely fed up with Internet p*rnography, fed up with the havoc their husband’s p*rn addiction has wreaked on their marriage, and fed up with easy access to this filth on the Internet. Add to that how much I would love to see every one of those pimps who run the multi-billion dollar Internet p*rn industry end up behind bars.

* The prompt move to clinical trials for therapies using tissues derived from non-embryo destructive sources of pluripotent stem cells.

* A Congress with the moral integrity to pass a federal ban on research cloning and the clinical production of human embryos for any other purpose than implantation in a human womb for their gestation and live birth.

* A renewed surge of support—material, moral and spiritual—for the men and women who have served in recent years or currently serve in our armed forces. Ultimately, in the great scheme of things—whatever our views happen to be on the Iraq war—these servicemen and women place themselves at risk to preserve our freedoms, not least among them, the freedom to worship God as our conscience directs us. We especially thank Almighty God for those who have truly “laid down their lives for their friends,” and to Him we entrust their eternal rest.

* A sudden outpouring of scientific honesty within the global warming research community. When dissenters from the dominant theory are publicly compared with—and treated with as much contempt as—Holocaust deniers, you know there’s a big problem.

* An end to the “steroids era” of American league baseball, and a return to the great American pastime as I knew it growing up as an avid Brewers fan in Milwaukee in the 70’s and early 80’s. “Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades—commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players—shares to some extent the responsibility for the Steroids Era,” said former Sen. George Mitchell. “There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and deal with it early on.” And how!

Finally, what do I ask for all of you?

To put it one way, I ask something that Pope John Paul the Great appealed to several times in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: that we may all grow in an interior understanding of that ultimate Ground and Foundation of our lives, and use this knowledge for the transformation of culture:

Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone…[we] must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises (86).

To put it another way, I ask something that St. Paul asked for the Christians at Ephesus:

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Have a very blessed Christmas!

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