Politics & Power Quote by Roger Mahony

Mahony’s sentence reads like a pastoral diagnosis delivered in the language of policy briefings: a calm inventory of anxieties that, taken together, imply a deeper moral unease. The intent isn’t to offer a clever turn of phrase; it’s to legitimize fear as the dominant civic mood after 9/11 while quietly warning what that mood does to a society’s priorities. By calling national security a “legitimate concern,” he grants the post-attack consensus its due, then widens the frame to show how quickly that single concern metastasizes into an all-purpose crisis narrative.

The subtext is about permission: once “terrorism” becomes the master category, everything else gets re-read through threat and scarcity. A “rising deficit” isn’t just accounting; it’s a sign that the nation is financing its future with borrowed confidence. “Globalization” is positioned as change that happens to people rather than with them, a passive construction that echoes the way communities experience plant closures, wage pressure, and cultural dislocation. Even “the price of oil” functions as shorthand for dependency and vulnerability, the sense that distant shocks can reach straight into the household budget.

Context matters: a Catholic cleric speaking in the early-2000s American climate of heightened surveillance, war authorization, and market jitters is doing a kind of moral triage. He stacks security, debt, globalization, and energy in one breath to argue that the country’s “economic health” is not a separate spreadsheet from its ethical health. The rhetoric works because it sounds nonpartisan while smuggling a critique: a nation can win battles abroad and still lose its steadiness at home.