Jesus is the ultimate, endearing, and definitive answer to the world’s problems, not any political party or ideology, nor any religion or the combination of the two.
The Magnificat invites us to enter into, consider, and embrace the worldview of a teenaged Jewish girl and her geriatric aunt: The one bearing the prophet Elijah which was to come and the other carrying within her womb the God whom she and her nation worshipped and feared.
If Easter is about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation, then the Ascension is about His enthronement as the One who rules forevermore on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Authentic proclamation, then, is the love of Christ for our souls, which we have seen and experienced through the under-shepherd’s pastoral care put into the words of Christ Himself.
The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.