Every Crisis Is a Judgment Waiting to Happen–and Politics Is Where It Shows

“Every historical crisis is a rehearsal for the Last Judgment. Crisis does not create character; it reveals it.”

– Fulton J. Sheen, Thinking Life Through

Some sentences do more than explain the world. They suspend it briefly and compel us to look again. Sheen’s observation about crisis works in that way. It resists comforting narratives, removes our preferred excuses, and suggests–quietly but firmly–that history is not neutral. It is diagnostic. When things come apart, they do not merely fail. They disclose what was already there.

We tend to treat crises as interruptions. Economic collapse, war, pandemics, and cultural fracture–these are framed as detours from “normal life,” as though stability were the natural order and judgment an unfortunate malfunction. Yet that assumption deserves scrutiny. What if crisis is not history misbehaving, but history finally speaking without euphemism?

The word itself points in that direction. “Crisis” comes from the Greek “krisis”: judgment, decision, the moment when a verdict can no longer be deferred. A crisis is not primarily about disorder. It is about disclosure. It draws to the surface what comfort kept submerged. Pressure does not invent new instincts; it accelerates existing ones. Once the pressure is on, neutrality becomes an illusion.

Modern culture, however, prefers a softer account. We tell ourselves that extreme circumstances change people–that pressure transforms ordinary men into villains or heroes. “Anyone would have done the same,” we say, usually in our own defense. Sheen will have none of it. Pressure does not write the script. It lifts the curtain. If that feels severe, the better question is why stress so consistently exposes the same fault lines.

When fear rises, do we reach first for accuracy or advantage? When resources thin, do we look outward or begin counting what is ours? When authority wavers, do we incline toward service or toward control? These answers do not appear spontaneously at the moment of crisis. They were practiced long before. What surprises us is not what emerges, but that it can no longer be denied.

At the political level, this dynamic becomes unavoidable. Crises draw private instincts into public view, and politics is where the exposure becomes most visible. Such moments do not ask whether one identifies as conservative or liberal. They ask what one ultimately trusts, what one fears losing, and what one is willing to justify when the stakes feel existential.

Consider the recent fate of appeals to open debate. Many on the left trace their lineage to free inquiry, minority voices, and the belief that better arguments–not stronger hands–should prevail. Yet when crises gather around health, race, or identity, a different reflex often asserts itself. Disagreement begins to register as danger. Certain questions are treated less as curiosity than as recklessness. Gradually, it seems easier to clear the field than to contest it. Conversation comes to feel like a luxury; compliance like responsibility. Beneath this lies a quieter anxiety: not simply the fear of being wrong, but the fear of losing control of the narrative.

A different tension emerges on the right. Conservatives often speak in the language of restraint–limited government, local authority, and skepticism toward centralized power. Still, when disorder threatens, whether through violence, migration, or rapid cultural change, those reservations can dissolve with surprising speed. Tools once regarded as dangerous begin to look necessary. Powers once resisted feel acceptable, even prudent, when they promise to hold the line. The unease here is less hypocrisy than apprehension: a suspicion that without a firm hand, what matters most will not endure.

Compassion exposes another fault line. Progressive politics regularly emphasizes solidarity and care for the marginalized, often with sincere intent. Yet under pressure, that concern can drift upward into abstraction. Individuals become data points. Losses are acknowledged, then absorbed into projections and models. Hardship is recognized but dismissed as unavoidable. Over time, one senses a widening distance between policy and person, as though suffering becomes easier to tolerate once it is averaged out. Loving humanity proves simpler than sitting with a neighbor whose pain disrupts the plan.

Conservatives encounter a mirror image of this difficulty. Appeals to responsibility, discipline, and moral seriousness are staples of conservative rhetoric. Crisis, however, tests how far those commitments extend. Shared obligations are quickly reframed as impositions. Calls for sacrifice soften when they approach home. Moral language remains sharp when aimed outward, but grows cautious when it turns inward. Principles hold–until they begin to demand something.

Taken together, a common pattern appears. Allegiance starts to matter more than accuracy. Facts are excused if they flatter our side. Failures are explained away if they belong to familiar faces. Indignation becomes selective, mercy conditional. Politics begins to resemble a liturgy of belonging, complete with rituals of denunciation and absolution reserved for insiders. At that point, it becomes difficult to know whether truth is being defended or merely deployed.

Another revealing habit follows close behind: the impulse to simplify people. Opponents are reduced to caricatures–ignorant, malicious, irredeemable. Motives are assumed. Conversations are closed in advance. This offers a certain relief. It is easier to dismiss a label than to engage a person. Yet something essential is lost. Once contempt governs the exchange, understanding no longer seems necessary, and charity quietly exits.

Underlying much of this is a shared mood: the conviction that everything depends on winning now. This election, this ruling, this moment are cast as the final stand. Urgency hardens into ultimatum. Anything that slows momentum looks irresponsible. Anything that complicates the cause feels like betrayal. Beneath the urgency lies an unspoken assumption–that history now rests entirely in our hands and that if we fail, nothing else will hold.

Here, Sheen’s insight finally sharpens. A crisis is not a malfunction in the system. It is the system revealing the truth. It reveals what we reach for when reassurance disappears. It exposes habits we mistook for principles and principles that depended on comfort to survive.

If judgment is a form of unveiling, what follows must be a form of rebuilding. At this point, Catholic Social Teaching offers not only critique but also direction.

Where partisanship demands loyalty and fear demands control, Catholic Social Teaching proposes a framework of balance, tension, and humility–one ordered toward truthfulness rather than victory. It holds together realities modern politics tends to separate: rights and responsibilities, personal freedom and the common good, justice and mercy, and truth and dialogue.

At its center lies the conviction that every person bears the image of God. No plan is worth pursuing if it forgets the person standing before it. Society must be ordered not by efficiency or ideology, but by what allows the weak to stand and the strong to serve.

It also insists that no single level of society–neither the state nor the individual–possesses all the answers. Some matters belong locally. Others require broader cooperation. Yet all must aim toward solidarity rather than suspicion.

Finally, it reminds us that justice does not begin at the ballot box or in the courts, but in the daily decisions to listen, to act, and to refuse both the temptation to excuse the powerful and the habit of stepping over the poor.

These principles are not designed to score points. They are meant to form people–people capable of entering a crisis without panic, not because they have mastered every contingency, but because they are anchored in something deeper than strategy and steadier than tribal instinct.

This is why Catholic Social Teaching is not merely a set of positions. It is a way of remaining human, particularly when politics invites us to become something less.

That is also why Sheen could speak of every crisis as a rehearsal for the Last Judgment without despair. Every unveiling is a warning, but also a summons: a chance to re-center, to re-form, to become the kind of people who do not need to be exposed because they have already chosen to live in the light.

History grants us smaller unveilings ahead of time. It presses us before the final light arrives. The purpose of noticing these patterns is not to catalogue the failures of our opponents–that would only confirm the diagnosis. The purpose is to allow the mirror to do its work.

The final question will not be whether we voted red or blue. It will be whether we learned to love truth more than belonging, whether we held fast when fidelity carried a cost, and whether we allowed the light to correct us before it was forced to expose us.

Every crisis provides us another rehearsal. The question is whether we are learning new lines–or simply repeating the same evasions under brighter light.