"Democracy" is the Problem, Not the "Solution"

Vice President James David Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference on Friday, February 14, 2025, the Feast of Saint Valentine, has drawn a great deal of well-deserved attention as it is one of the few times that anyone has dared to called high priests and priestesses of the European Union for being today’s neo-Bolsheviks who are intent on controlling  the speech and thoughts of their own citizens.  

However, Vice President Vance’s remarks, which will be discussed at length in this commentary, did not deal with a new phenomenon as the Western censorship of “forbidden thoughts” was seen quite clearly and denounced vigorously by Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for twenty years for making a joke about the mass murdering tyrant named Joseph Stalin, when he delivered his famous commencement address at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 8, 1978:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons - maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)

Things have changed for the worse in the past forty-seven years as scholars are no longer free in the legal sense to publish what they want or to teach as they please, something that I experienced personally even before Solzhenitsyn delivered his “A World Split Apart” commencement address and even more so thereafter.

The overt and covert suppression of scientific papers that dissented from the fake science that was being advanced by the likes of Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx has been very well documented since this trio exercised a Red Chinese-style grip on “public health” five years ago. Most of the countries of the European Union imposed their own draconian lockdowns and then, when the “emergency use” poisoned jabs were developed and mandated, developed “vaccine passports” as they kept careful watch on their own citizens and threatened medical practitioners with revocation of their licenses to practice medicine.

Although Canada has been a leading practitioner in the censorship and punishment of “proscribed “beliefs” and convictions, something I found out in 1999 when held up for several hours at the United States-Canadian border crossing north of Watertown, New York, because I stated my purpose of entry was to speak at a Catholic conference in Ottawa, Ontario, the United States of America caught up very quickly in 2020 as various potentates at the state and local level governed as though they were combinations of Xi Jinping and Walter Ulbrich, who was the Stalinist dictator of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1949 until his death in 1971. This was all eclipsed by the manner in which the administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Kamala Harris Emhoff used the levers of the Federal government of the United States of America to crack down on “disinformation,” meaning any and all opposition to the administration’s policies. Opponents were targeted for prosecution, armed raids, deplatformed from social media, and branded as “domestic terrorists” (see, for example, Believing Catholics Pose No Threat to a Just Social Order).

As has been noted so many times before on this website, the very people who deny that there are any truths that exist in the very nature of things and/or have been revealed definitively solely by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for their infallible explication and eternal safekeeping believe that they, mere mortals whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave, are the arbiters of truth, which is, in effect, whatever it is they decide it to be at any given time. This means that all opposition to the chemical and/or surgical execution of babies, the “science” of “brain death,” the “safety” of vaccinations containing all manner of gene-altering poisons over and above the use of fetal tissue cells derived from butchered babies, statism, the “science” of “global warming” and the “necessity” of raising the cost of fossil fuels as a prelude to eliminating their use entirely, the “science” of “social distancing” and, of course, the ever-widening scope of the hedonistic demands of those engaged in perverse practices, whether natural or unnatural, in violation of the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments will be strictly restricted if not prohibited entirely.

The very people who have denounced Holy Mother Church for censoring heretics, correcting erroneous theological opinions and censoring books, publications, motion pictures, magazines and journals that pose threats to the good of souls have always been censorious. Believe me, I know this from my three decades plus of college teaching, not including a brief return to the classroom in 2014 that was cut short because I refused to be “neutral” on matters of right and wrong and thus follow slavishly the dictates of a computerized program written by our new censors who believe in all that passes for “truth” in an era of falsehood masquerading as truth, an era in which vice is portrayed as virtue.

Censorship and the manipulation of language has been one of the foundational building blocks of the entire anti-Incarnational era of Modernity. Alas, the embrace of such censorship by the entire welter of the forces of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry is but an inversion of the fact the Catholic Church has long taught that error has no rights and that whatever is injurious to men and that it is thus illegitimate to bring forth ideas and beliefs that tickle the ears and make men believe the old lie of the serpent, namely, that they can be like unto God, knowing good and evil.

Thus, Vice President James David Vance used his address to the Munich Security Conference to describe the Sovietization of Europe, and he did this brilliantly. As will be discussed shortly, however, he does not realize that this Sovietization is the inevitable result of Protestantism’s overthrow of the Social Reign and the institutionalization of a Calvinist/Judeo-Masonic “liberalism” that was bound to give sway over time to outright totalitarianism, something that Dr. George O’Brien noted over a century ago:

The thesis we have endeavoured to present in this essay is, that the two great dominating schools of modern economic thought have a common origin. The capitalist school, which, basing its position on the unfettered right of the individual to do what he will with his own, demands the restriction of government interference in economic and social affairs within the narrowest  possible limits, and the socialist school, which, basing its position on the complete subordination of the individual to society, demands the socialization of all the means of production, if not all of wealth, face each other today as the only two solutions of the social question; they are bitterly hostile towards each other, and mutually intolerant and each is at the same weakened and provoked by the other. In one respect, and in one respect only, are they identical--they can both be shown to be the result of the Protestant Reformation.

We have seen the direct connection which exists between these modern schools of economic thought and their common ancestor. Capitalism found its roots in the intensely individualistic spirit of Protestantism, in the spread of anti-authoritative ideas from the realm of religion into the realm of political and social thought, and, above all, in the distinctive Calvinist doctrine of a successful and prosperous career being the outward and visible sign by which the regenerated might be known. Socialism, on the other hand, derived encouragement from the violations of established and prescriptive rights of which the Reformation afforded so many examples, from the growth of heretical sects tainted with Communism, and from the overthrow of the orthodox doctrine on original sin, which opened the way to the idea of the perfectibility of man through institutions. But, apart from these direct influences, there were others, indirect, but equally important. Both these great schools of economic thought are characterized by exaggerations and excesses; the one lays too great stress on the importance of the individual, and other on the importance of the community; they are both departures, in opposite directions, from the correct mean of reconciliation and of individual liberty with social solidarity. These excesses and exaggerations are the result of the free play of private judgment unguided by authority, and could not have occurred if Europe had continued to recognize an infallible central authority in ethical affairs.

The science of economics is the science of men's relations with one another in the domain of acquiring and disposing of wealth, and is, therefore, like political science in another sphere, a branch of the science of ethics. In the Middle Ages, man's ethical conduct, like his religious conduct, was under the supervision and guidance of a single authority, which claimed at the same time the right to define and to enforce its teaching. The machinery for enforcing the observance of medieval ethical teaching was of a singularly effective kind; pressure was brought to bear upon the conscience of the individual through the medium of compulsory periodical consultations with a trained moral adviser, who was empowered to enforce obedience to his advice by the most potent spiritual sanctions. In this way, the whole conduct of man in relation to his neighbours was placed under the immediate guidance of the universally received ethical preceptor, and a common standard of action was ensured throughout the Christian world in the all the affairs of life. All economic transactions in particular were subject to the jealous scrutiny of the individual's spiritual director; and such matters as sales, loans, and so on, were considered reprehensible and punishable if not conducted in accordance with the Christian standards of commutative justice.

The whole of this elaborate system for the preservation of justice in the affairs of everyday life was shattered by the Reformation. The right of private judgment, which had first been asserted in matters of faith, rapidly spread into moral matters, and the attack on the dogmatic infallibility of the Church left Europe without an authority to which it could appeal on moral questions. The new Protestant churches were utterly unable to supply this want. The principle of private judgment on which they rested deprived them of any right to be listened to whenever they attempted to dictate moral precepts to their members, and henceforth the moral behaviour of the individual became a matter to be regulated by the promptings of his own conscience, or by such philosophical systems of ethics as he happened to approve. The secular state endeavoured to ensure that dishonesty amounting to actual theft or fraud should be kept in check, but this was a poor and ineffective substitute for the powerful weapon of the confessional. Authority having once broken down, it was but a single step from Protestantism to rationalism; and the way was opened to the development of all sorts of erroneous systems of morality. (Dr. George O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Efforts of the Reformation, IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003.) 

Every aspect of our law, politics, education and culture has been corrupted by Protestantism’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King. An amoral world has been created wherein most people alive today live only according to the exigencies of expediency, something that unites the warring tribes of the false opposites of naturalism even though none of the tribesmen understand this or will ever accept it as being so. Such a world becomes convinced of its independence from all higher authority, which is why atheism and agnosticism have been on the rise in recent decades. The officials of the counterfeit church of conciliarism have contributed to this situation by reconciling themselves to the very false, anti-Incarnational principles upon which the Modern world is founded and by actually celebrating paganism as virtuous no matter the binding precepts of the First and Second Commandments.

This having been noted, I want to highlight a few salient points from Vice President Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference on Friday, February 14, 2025:

However, the threat that I worry most about for Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values that are shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.

For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.

Everything—from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship—is billed as a defense of democracy.

But when we see European courts canceling elections, and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.

And I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

Within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against tyrannical forces on this continent.

Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, closed churches, and canceled elections. Were they the good guys?

Certainly not. And thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty—the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.

As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.

We believe those things are certainly connected. Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.”

Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online, as part of "Combating Misogyny on the Internet: A Day of Action."

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britain in the crosshairs.

A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.

Not obstructing anyone. Not interacting with anyone. Just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply: “It was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.”

Now, the officers were not moved.

Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zone” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.

He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.

But no.

This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called Safe Access Zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.

Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizen suspected guilty of thought crime.

In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat. (Full Speech: Vice President JD Vance Tells Munich Security Conference "There's A New Sheriff In Town".)

An Interjection:

First, while James David Vance was correct to point out the fascistic nature of the laws the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland forbidding even silent prayer on the streets within fifty meters of a baby-butchering mill and criminalizing private prayer even in one’s own home, there is a more basic problem, and it is this: no country has the “right” to permit the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being under any circumstances whatsoever. If one is going to risk diplomatic capital by calling thugs by their proper names to their very faces, why not take the further risk of condemning baby butchery as violative of the Fifth Commandment and even of the Natural Law, which even the pagan orator Cicero knew bound all human consciences in all places as it is eternal and universal:

True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. And by so doing he will endure the severest penalties even if he avoid the other evils which are usually accounted punishments. (Cicero, The Republic.)

Cicero had it almost entirely correct. Almost. He was wrong in asserting that the natural law does not need any "other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience." He lived before the Incarnation and before the founding of the true Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Cicero thus did not know that man does need an interpreter and expositor of the natural law, namely, the Catholic Church. Apart from this, however, Cicero understood that God's law does not admit of abrogations by a vote of the people or of a "representative" body, such as the Roman Senate in his day or the United States Congress or state legislatures, et al. in our own day.

Pope Pius XI explained in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, the Natural Law is authoritatively explicated by Holy Mother Church even though it can be known by human reason and is thus not, unlike the Divine Positive Law, her exclusive possession:

The Church does not say that morality belongs purely, in the sense of exclusively, to her; but that it belongs wholly to her. She has never maintained that outside her fold and apart from her teaching, man cannot arrive at any moral truth; she has on the contrary more than once condemned this opinion because it has appeared under more forms than one. She does however say, has said, and will ever say, that because of her institution by Jesus Christ, because of the Holy Ghost sent her in His name by the Father, she alone possesses what she has had immediately from God and can never lose, the whole of moral truth, omnem veritatem, in which all individual moral truths are included, as well those which man may learn by the help of reason, as those which form part of revelation or which may be deduced from it  (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

James David Vance could have reminded the Eurosocialists that no one has the civil right or even a moral duty to oppose baby butcher that a mother can never dispose of the fruit of her womb as she desires. She has an obligation before God to provide the love that is the child’s due. True justice is, after all, giving to each that which his is due.

There are no “decisions” to be made about a child, only selfless, unconditional love to be offered.

There are no “difficult choices” to be made, only a firm reliance upon Our Lady’s graces to provide all the supernatural and natural helps necessary to fulfill one’s maternal duties with the distinction of a saint and imitation of the Queen of All Saints, Our Lady herself.

Our first pope, Saint Peter, explained that we are not to use our liberty as a cloak for malice, and the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being is act of malice:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, to refrain yourselves from carnal desires which war against the soul, [12] Having your conversation good among the Gentiles: that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by the good works, which they shall behold in you, glorify God in the day of visitation. [13] Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God's sake: whether it be to the king as excelling; [14] Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good: [15] For so is the will of God, that by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

[16] As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God. [17] Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. [18] Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. [19] For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God, a man endure sorrows, suffering wrongfully. [20] For what glory is it, if committing sin, and being buffeted for it, you endure? But if doing well you suffer patiently; this is thankworthy before God.

[21] For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps. [22] Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. [23] Who, when he was reviled, did not revile: when he suffered, he threatened not: but delivered himself to him that judged him unjustly. [24] Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed. [25] For you were as sheep going astray; but you are now converted to the shepherd and bishops of your souls. (1 Peter 2: 11-25.)

The founder of modern medicine, Hippocrates, forbade physicians to do anything to cause or induce an abortion, are being true to the father of modern medicine himself, Hippocrates:

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

Hippocrates forbade physicians from killing the unborn child and he forbade them to do anything to cause the death of anyone. Thus, in modern terms, human organ vivisection, which was the father to the lie that is “brain death,” which will be the subject once again of the next commentary on this site, suicide (and assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide), euthanasia and “disguised” euthanasia (“palliative care,” hospice—see Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry).

Furthermore, the Roman playwright Juvenal, who lived in the early Second Century A.D. and was fierce hater of Christians, had this to say about the crime of the murder of innocent preborn children:

So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb. Ancient History Sourcebook: Juvenal: Satire VI 

Even a proto-feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first "women's rights" conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, referred to abortion as "disgusting and degrading crime," going on to write:

When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter to Julia Ward Howe, October 16, 1873, recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library.)

Yes, it is possible by reason alone to come to recognize that a child, an innocent preborn human being, is the natural fruit of human conjugal relations. It is an accident if one falls down a flight of stairs. It is an accident if the motor vehicle one is driving goes out of control on an icy road. It is not an "accident" if a child is conceived as the result of human conjugal relations. To invade the sanctuary of the womb, therefore, in order to suck out, burn, slice or otherwise destroy a living human being is opposed to the very laws of nature itself. And if the child inside a mother's womb is not alive, why is it necessary to kill it? As to the child's humanity, you see, even secular science has proved that every fertilized embryonic human being has a distinctive DNA of his very own that does not change over the course of his life. All that is added, physically and temporally speaking, is time and nutrition.

As I said to an abortion advocate in a debate at Hofstra University, Hempstead, Long Island, New York, on the Feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, 1985:

"I will quit this debate right now if you can demonstrate to me which one of the cells in your body has a DNA structure different from the moment that you were conceived."

No true, objective biologist can deny the fact that a living, growing human being is created at the moment of fertilization. Ideologues can deny all arguments that can be advanced by means of reason and science, however, which is why arguing against abortion on the grounds of reason alone only takes one so far. Indeed, it is precisely because of naturalism that we have abortion-on-demand and in most other countries in the "developed" world today. Naturalistic arguments are not going to end abortion-on-demand, although the use of scientific facts and basic Natural Law reasoning can be useful as tools to help people to see through some of the illogic of the pro-death arguments. Such arguments are merely "building blocks," if you will, to lead people to accept the simple fact that it is God Himself Who has ordained these immutable facts of nature that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force or for their validity.

Vice President Vance would have been well-advised to make these points? After all, what did he have to lose as he had already “lost” his audience of pro-abortion, anti-family globalist elitists by calling them out for their use of Soviet-style suppression of dissent and the prosecution of thought criminals.

Second, Vance, who converted to the Holy Faith only in 2019, does not realize that American and European Bolsheviks and admirers of all things to with the current Red Chinese control over citizens and their thoughts have inverted Holy Mother Church’s teaching concerning the censorship of anything that is offensive to the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity, and/or is injurious to the sanctification and salvation of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem. Vance spoke about “shared values” of “free speech,” but the belief in unfettered free speech is Judeo-Masonic, and is a danger about which our true popes had warned us in no uncertain terms:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of “naturalism,” as they call it, dare to teach that “the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones.” And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.” From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an “insanity,” viz., that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.” But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching “liberty of perdition;” and that “if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling.”

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?” (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only passport to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The entire premise of unfettered “freedom of speech,” freedom of press” and of Modernity and Modernism’s embrace “religious liberty” gives free rein to the devil, who has been using the veneer of “liberty” to sow such chaos and confusion as to make inevitable the triumph of a brutal totalitarianism. The adversary uses different means to accomplish his nefarious goals, and thus it has been and continues to be in the “free” United States of America that has never been as “free” as Americans have been convinced while they were lulled to sleep by an endless array of “bread circuses” (entertainment, good restaurants, competitive sports, etc.) while the coercive power of the civil state was being used to advance evil here and abroad in a manner that is almost unsurpassed in human history.

As I have noted in many other commentaries but will do so only in the appendix of this commentary, the United States of America has had a long and storied tradition of suppressing, investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning political dissidents.  

Sure, I know what Vice President Vance meant when he championed free speech. Of course. However, there can be no truly responsible free speech absent a due submission of men and their nations to Christ the King and His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls

Vice President James David Vance would do well to inform himself of the fact that is not a set of false “shared values” that must unite Europe and the United States of America but the bonds of the true Faith that united Europe in the glories of Christendom and provided men with the life-giving sustenance found in the Sacraments and taught them to live, work, and die as befits redeemed creatures:

25. Perhaps — God grant it — one may hope that this hour of direct need may bring a change of outlook and sentiment to those many who, till now, have walked with blind faith along the path of popular modern errors unconscious of the treacherous and insecure ground on which they trod. Perhaps the many who have not grasped the importance of the educational and pastoral mission of the Church will now understand better her warnings, scouted in the false security of the past. No defense of Christianity could be more effective than the present straits. From the immense vortex of error and anti-Christian movements there has come forth a crop of such poignant disasters as to constitute a condemnation surpassing in its conclusiveness any merely theoretical refutation.

26. Hours of painful disillusionment are often hours of grace — “a passage of the Lord” (cf. Exodus xii. 11), when doors which in other circumstances would have remained shut, open at Our Savior’s words: “Behold, I stand at the gate and knock” (Apocalypse iii. 20). God knows that Our heart goes out in affectionate sympathy and spiritual joy to those who, as a result of such painful trials, feel within them an effective and salutary thirst for the truth, justice and peace of Christ. But for those also for whom as yet the hour of light from on high has not come, Our heart knows only love, Our lips move only in prayer to the Father of Light that He may cause to shine in their hearts, indifferent as yet or hostile to Christ, a ray of that Light which once transformed Saul into Paul; of that Light which has shown its mysterious power strongest in the times of greatest difficulty for the Church.

27. A full statement of the doctrinal stand to be taken in face of the errors of today, if necessary, can be put off to another time unless there is disturbance by calamitous external events; for the moment We limit Ourselves to some fundamental observations.

28. The present age, Venerable Brethren, by adding new errors to the doctrinal aberrations of the past, has pushed these to extremes which lead inevitably to a drift towards chaos. Before all else, it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which We deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined; the voice of conscience is stilled or at any rate grows very faint, that voice which teaches even to the illiterate and to uncivilized tribes what is good and what is bad, what lawful, what forbidden, and makes men feel themselves responsible for their actions to a Supreme Judge.

29. The denial of the fundamentals of morality had its origin, in Europe, in the abandonment of that Christian teaching of which the Chair of Peter is the depository and exponent. That teaching had once given spiritual cohesion to a Europe which, educated, ennobled and civilized by the Cross, had reached such a degree of civil progress as to become the teacher of other peoples, of other continents. But, cut off from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, not a few separated brethren have gone so far as to overthrow the central dogma of Christianity, the Divinity of the Savior, and have hastened thereby the progress of spiritual decay.

30. The Holy Gospel narrates that when Jesus was crucified “there was darkness over the whole earth” (Matthew xxvii. 45); a terrifying symbol of what happened and what still happens spiritually wherever incredulity, blind and proud of itself, has succeeded in excluding Christ from modern life, especially from public life, and has undermined faith in God as well as faith in Christ. The consequence is that the moral values by which in other times public and private conduct was gauged have fallen into disuse; and the much vaunted civilization of society, which has made ever more rapid progress, withdrawing man, the family and the State from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear, in regions in which for many centuries shone the splendors of Christian civilization, in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, the signs of a corrupt and corrupting paganism: “There was darkness when they crucified Jesus” (Roman Breviary, Good Friday, Response Five).

31. Many perhaps, while abandoning the teaching of Christ, were not fully conscious of being led astray by a mirage of glittering phrases, which proclaimed such estrangement as an escape from the slavery in which they were before held; nor did they then foresee the bitter consequences of bartering the truth that sets free, for error which enslaves. They did not realize that, in renouncing the infinitely wise and paternal laws of God, and the unifying and elevating doctrines of Christ’s love, they were resigning themselves to the whim of a poor, fickle human wisdom; they spoke of progress, when they were going back; of being raised, when they groveled; of arriving at man’s estate, when they stooped to servility. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it; “they became vain in their thoughts” (Romans i. 21).

32. With the weakening of faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the darkening in men’s minds of the light of moral principles, there disappeared the indispensable foundation of the stability and quiet of that internal and external, private and public order, which alone can support and safeguard the prosperity of States. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 20, 1939.)

This is very similar to what Pope Leo XIII wrote in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, and in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

23. But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. . . .

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The errors of pluralism have divided people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order. So many Americans live from election to election, always believing that "change," whether it be in the direction of "progress" for naturalists of the "left" or in the direction of "constitutionalism" or "liberty" or "limited government" for aturalists of the "right." Although divisions on some matters will always occur until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day at the Second Coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is also true that men today have been needlessly divided about matters pertaining to First and Last Things, oblivious to the fact that they have been given a spotless mother, Holy Mother Church, to serve as their mater and magister (mother and teacher) in this passing, mortal vale of tears. Most men today believe that they are automatons, either independent of any concept of God or "free" from the "dictates" of a hierarchical church.

Personal and social disaster cannot but be the result of such a brew of error. Men resort more and more to violence today because they do not know of the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. They do not know that they have a Blessed Mother who made possible their salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the father at the Annunciation. They do not realize that the supernatural helps they need to overcome all sin in their lives and to pray for the conversion of those who are promoting evil in society flow through the loving hands of that same Blessed Mother, who gave the Rosary with her own blessed hands to Saint Dominic de Guzman so that we could be more closely united to her Divine Son, Christ the King, through the mysteries contained in her psalter, the Rosary.

Most men today do not realize that there is nothing that any of us can suffer, whether personally or socially, that is equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused those Seven Swords to be thrust through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. They tend, therefore, to dwell on their own pain, whether real or imagined, and to stew in their own juices as they conjure up hatred for their fellow human beings, each of whom is made in the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and for whose salvation we must pray fervently as one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy.

Living in a world that has been deprived of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, most men today are "catechized" by television or the internet or what passes for "entertainment" in popular culture. They are tossed about from one thing to another without having any clear, coherent understanding of they identity as redeemed creatures and that each of us will have to make an accounting of our lives at the moment of our Particular Judgments. Men who lack the Catholic Faith, you see, must descend more and more into a coarseness of life and culture that produces a class of neo-barbarians who are not only at the gates but who are well inside of the fort of the city.

As been noted exhaustively on this site and for more than a decade before that in printed journals (and for decades in my college classrooms), the descent into neo-barbarism just did not happen suddenly. It has been gradual, almost imperceptible at times. Having ridden the shock waves of the Protestant Revolution, which was a violent and very blood revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church as they order their own lives and the laws of their nations in accord with His Deposit of Faith, men descended by steps into theological relativism, religious indifferentism and the worldliness that feeds on a ethos of naturalism and an unbridled licentiousness that passes for what libertarians tell us is "civil liberty."

No, a return an American concept of “free speech” is not what Europe needs and it is not what the United States of America needs. All countries need to be united in the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can never be a truly just social order within nations or peace among them.

Similarly, the nations of the West must rediscover Christendom and not the demigod of “democracy” according to Vice President Vance in his address to the Munich Security Conference six days ago:

To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way—or even worse, win an election.

Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years, in line with some new target.

But what German democracy—what no democracy, American, German, or European—will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle, or you don’t. Europeans—the people—have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.

And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we have built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.

And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said:

“Do not be afraid.”

We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership. (Full Speech: Vice President JD Vance Tells Munich Security Conference "There's A New Sheriff In Town".)

Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul II quoted Our Lord when he said, “Be not afraid” (cf. Luke 12: 4), not “do not be afraid.”

This having been noted, though, Vance was correct when he called the Polish Phenomenologist in whose thrall I was so for far, far too long an “extraordinary champion of democracy.” This is true, but it is also very sad as a man who believes himself to be a true pope should be a champion of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

It is worth pulling the following chestnut out of the fire once again to demonstrate the falsity of the belief that “democracy” is the solution when it is in its Judeo-Masonic form the problem:

Democracy is an imperfect regime, as a regime in ratione regiminis, as a result of the lack of unity and continuity in the direction of interior and exterior affairs. Also this regime should only be for the perfect already capable of directing themselves—those virtuous and competent enough to pronounce as is fitting upon the very complicated problems on which the life of a great people depends. But it is always true to say as Saint Thomas noted that these virtuous and competent men are extremely rare; and democracy, supposing such perfection among subjects, cannot give it to them. From this point of view, democracy is a bit in politics what quietism is in spirituality; it supposes man has arrived, at the age or the state of perfection, even though he still may be a child. In treating him as a perfect person, democracy does not give him what is required to become one.

Since true virtue united to true competence is a rare thing among men, since the majority among them are incapable of governing and they have a need of being led, the regime which is the best for them is the one which can make up for their imperfection. This regimen perfectum in ratione regiminis, by reason of unity, continuity, and efficacy of direction towards a single end which is difficult to achieve is monarchy. Above all a tempered monarchy which is always attentive to the different forms of national activity. It is better than democracy or than the feudal regime. Monarchy assures the interior and exterior peace of a great nation, and permits her to long endure. (Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On Royal Government: translated by Andrew Strain, On Royal Government)

Men in public life must put First Things first, which means that they must be serious about the sanctification and salvation of souls, something that Pope Leo XIII noted in his last encyclical letter, Mirae Caritatis, May 25, 1902:

Indeed it is greatly to be desired that those men would rightly esteem and would make due provision for life everlasting, whose industry or talents or rank have put it in their power to shape the course of human events. (Pope Leo XIII, Mirae Caritatis, May 28, 1902.) 

Pope Leo XIII had the sad duty to note, however, that most of the men of civic importance in the world one hundred eleven years ago, like most of the men of civic importance today, believe that they and their ideas can save the world, a version, of course of semi-Pelagianism (the heresy that contends human beings more or less stir up graces in themselves to be virtuous and to save themselves, a form of human "self-redemption" that is of the very blasphemous essence of the "American way").

Vice President James David Vance would do well to consider the fact that, as Dr. George O’Brien noted a century ago, a sober, clear understanding of how Protestantism leads to the triumph of Bolshevism is necessary to call men and their nations to the bosom of Holy Mother as Father Edward Leen had done in The Holy Ghost seventy-two years ago:

A shudder of apprehension is traversing the world which still retains its loyalty to Jesus expressing Himself through the authority of His Church. That apprehension has not its sole cause the sight of the horrors that the world has witnessed in recent years in both hemispheres. Many Christians are beginning to feel that perhaps all may not be right with themselves. There is solid reason for this fear. The contemplation of the complete and reasoned abandonment of all hitherto accepted human values that has taken place in Russia and is taking place elsewhere, causes a good deal of anxious soul-searching. It is beginning to be dimly perceived that in social life, as it is lived, even in countries that have not as yet definitely broken with Christianity, there lie all the possibilities of what has become actual in Bolshevism. A considerable body of Christians, untrained in the Christian philosophy of life, are allowing themselves to absorb principles which undermine the constructions of Christian thought. They do not realise how much dangerous it is for Christianity to exist in an atmosphere of Naturalism than to be exposed to positive persecution. In the old days of the Roman Empire those who enrolled themselves under the standard of Christ saw, with logical clearness, that they had perforce to cut themselves adrift from the social life of the world in which they lived--from its tastes, practices and amusements. The line of demarcation between pagan and Christian life was sharp, clearly defined and obvious. Modern Christians have not been so favorably situated. As has been stated already, the framework of the Christian social organisation has as yet survived. This organisation is, to outward appearances, so solid and imposing that it is easy to be blind to the truth that the soul had gradually gone out of it. Under the shelter and utilising the resources of the organisation of life created by Christianity, customs, ways of conduct, habits of thought, have crept in, more completely perhaps, at variance with the spirit of Christianity than even the ways and manners of pagan Rome.

This infiltration of post-Christian paganism has been steady but slow, and at each stage is imperceptible. The Christian of to-day thinks that he is living in what is to all intents and purposes a Christian civilisation. Without misgivings he follows the current of social life around him. His amusements, his pleasures, his pursuits, his games, his books, his papers, his social and political ideas are of much the same kind as are those of the people with whom he mingles, and who may not have a vestige of a Christian principle left in their minds. He differs merely from them in that he holds to certain definite religious truths and clings to certain definite religious practices. But apart from this there is not any striking contrast in the outward conduct of life between Christian and non-Christian in what is called the civilised world. Catholics are amused by, and interested in, the very same things that appeal to those who have abandoned all belief in God. The result is a growing divorce between religion and life in the soul of the individual Christian. Little by little his faith ceases to be a determining effect on the bulk of his ideas, judgments and decisions that have relation to what he regards as his purely "secular" life. His physiognomy as a social being no longer bears trace of any formative effect of the beliefs he professes. And his faith rapidly becomes a thing of tradition and routine and not something which is looked to as a source of a life that is real.

The Bolshevist Revolution has had one good effect. It has awakened the averagely good Christian to the danger runs in allowing himself to drift with the current of social life about him. It has revealed to him the precipice towards which he has was heading by shaping his worldly career after principles the context of which the revolution has mercilessly exposed and revealed to be at variance with real Christianity. The sincerely religious--and there are many such still--are beginning to realise that if they are to live as Christians they must react violently against the milieu in which they live. It is beginning to be felt that one cannot be a true Christian and live as the bulk of men in civilised society are living. It is clearly seen that "life" is not to be found along those ways by which the vast majority of men are hurrying to disillusionment and despair. Up to the time of the recent cataclysm the average unreflecting Christian dwelt in the comfortable illusion that he could fall in with the ways of the world about him here, and, by holding on to the practices of religion, arrange matters satisfactorily for the hereafter. That illusion is dispelled. It is coming home to the discerning Christian that their religion is not a mere provision for the future. There is a growing conviction that it is only through Christianity lived integrally that the evils of the present time can be remedied and disaster in the time to come averted. (Father Edward Leen, The Holy Ghost, published in 1953 by Sheed and Ward, pp. 6-9.)

As has been noted in the past, no, it's just not this former professor who writes these things. I have only attempted to give voice, however poorly, to the simple Catholic truth summarized so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique on August 15, 1910:

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Father Edward Leen was simply giving expression in 1953 to simple, timeless and immutable truths that true pope after true pope had reiterated time and time again in the last three centuries now. No Catholicism, no social order. It's that simple.

William Thomas Walsh put the matter as follows eighty-five years ago:

Within a generation we have seen our Liberal politicians denounce the Soviet, cultivate friendly relations with it, and denounce it again – this time more coyly. As the world grows smaller in time, may not all the forms of Socialism be gathered together by skillful hands into a World Sate, such as many Masonic writers have advocated, and the League of Nations sought to achieve? It is not only conceivable,  but probable; for all forms of Socialism (even if some still call themselves Democracies) will be animated by a single obscure but powerful principle: the worship of the material, which is and always must be the negation of Christianity. Here, then, by a masterly anithesis, Pius XI has cast a strong light upon the shapes of things to come. It is all the more revealing when it shows us only the recurrence upon a larger stage of a deathless drama that happened long ago. Christ still lives in His Mystical Body, the Church, as truly as in the human body he took from Our Lady; and when the time comes for Him to be crucified again in His Church, depend upon it, Pilate and Herod that day will find a way to patch up their differences, some Caiaphas will cry, “Crucify Him! We have no king but Caesar!” and there will always be found some Judas to give the kiss of death.

Admittedly (perhaps my wish is father to this thought) we may by some miracle escape that fate, here in America. Perhaps despite their affiliations, Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Wilkie, as political Catholic admirers of each will tell us, will be led in the right direction by a divine hand. Again, perhaps not. Only the future can reveal this. Meanwhile this much is certain: the United States, in a very few years, will be either a Catholic country (and therefore a free country) or a Socialist country, (and therefore a slave country). “He who is not with Me is against Me.” History demonstrates the unfailing truth of this dilemma.

Here on the last edge and in the twilight of the world, the stage is set for the reenactment of an ancient tragedy – or can it this time be a comedy? Here are all the actors who have appeared over and over again in that tragedy in Europe. Here we have most of the Freemasons of the world, the Jews, most of the gold and its masters; Parthians and Medes and Elamites – men gathered together from all nations under the sun, speaking one language, leading a common life; and among them heirs of all the isms and heresies that the Catholic Church has denounced throughout the centuries, and some millions of good bewildered folk who have ceased to believe much in anything, and do not know what they believe, or whether anything be worth believing; and, scattered among these millions with their roots in such movements of the past, some twenty-five millions of Catholics.

If they do not [oppose socialism and liberalism as two sides of the same Protestant and Judeo-Masonic coin], it will be the first time in history that the Mystical Body of Christ (and American Catholics, like all others, are “cells” of that Body) has not aroused violent and unreasoning antagonism. This has been so uniformly a characteristic of the life of Christ and the life of the Catholic Church, that when persons calling themselves Christian or Catholic do not meet with oppositions, and strong opposition, one may well begin to wonder whether they are profoundly Christian and truly Catholic. Perhaps then it is a reflection upon us American Catholics that we have inspired so little antagonism (comparatively) thus far. Perhaps we have not been telling our neighbors the truth, the strong truth, the hard saying they will not like: that the real test of our republican experiment here must ultimately be whether it accepts or opposes the Church of Christ; that it must become either a Catholic state, or a slave state. (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 188-189.)

William Thomas Walsh summarized in a few paragraphs the theme that I have tried to hammer home in hundreds upon hundreds of lengthy commentaries on this site—and in countless hours of lectures around the country and online.

We must follow the Catholic way—the way of the Social Reign of Christ the King and His true Church—and no other.

We must take heed as we consider that, although He takes His time, God is just. Indeed, the seers of apparitions, on which, much like Our Lady’s apparitions in Garabandal, Spain, in 1961, Holy Mother Church has not ruled, in Heede, Germany, between 1937 during the height of Adolph Hitler’s so-called “Third Reich” were warned by Our Lady and then her Divine Son about the chastisements that human beings deserved for their wretched sins.

This what Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ told the seers at Heede in 1945 after His Most Blessed Mother had appeared to them between 1937 and 1940:

“Men have note listened to My Most Holy Blessed Mother when she appeared to them at Fatima, to exhort everyone to penitence. Now I, Myself, am coming in this last hour to warn and admonish mankind! The times are very serious! Men should at last do penance for their sins, turn away from their sins and pray, pray much in order the wrath of God may be mitigated. Particularly the Holy Rosary should be prayed very often. The Rosary is very powerful with God. Worldly pleasures and amusements should be restricted.

Men do not listen to My voice. They harden their hearts; they resist My grace. They do not wish to have anything to do with My Mercy, My Love, My merits. Mankind is worse than before the deluge. Mankind is suffocating in sin. Hatred and greed rule their hearts. This the work of the devil. They live in great darkness. All this is the work of satan. The world sleeps in a dense darkness…. This generation deserves to be annihilated but I desire to show Myself as Merciful.

Through the wounds that bled, Mercy will again gain victory over justice. My faithful souls should not be so asleep now like the disciples on Mount Olivet. They should pray without ceasing and gain all they can for themselves and for others.

Tremendous things are in preparation; it will be terrible as never before since the foundation of the world. All those who in these grave times have suffered so much, are martyrs and form the seed for the renovation of the Church. There were privileged to participate in My captivity, in My scourging, in My crown of thorns, and My Way of the Cross.

The Blessed Virgin Mary and the choirs of angels will active during these events. Hell believe that it is sure of the harvest, but I will snatch it away from them. I will come with My peace. Many curse me now, but these sufferings will come over mankind that they may be saved through it … Many expiate all they can for those who curse me Me now …

With a few faithful I will build up my Kingdom. As a flash of lightning this Kingdom will come … much faster than mankind will realize. I will give them a special light. For some this light will be a blessing; for others darkness. The light will come like the Star that showed the way to the wise men. Mankind will experience My love an My power … My beloved, the hour comes closer. Pray without ceasing. (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

Lest the skeptic doubt whether it is worthwhile to reflect on the apparitions of Our Lady and her Divine Son at Heede, Germany, it is good to consider what has been written in their defense:

It has been falsely reported that the Vatican rejected or even condemned the apparitions of Heede. While there has been no formal judgment issued about the apparitions or message, the Bishop of Osnabrück received a favorable report from two priests he sent to investigate. It was only after wonderful cures occurred that the parish priests and other clergy supported the seers (forbidding a public dance announced for October 21, 1945, in response to their warnings). A new parish priest, appointed by the Bishop at the time the apparitions commenced, declared that there are “undeniable proofs of the seriousness and authenticity of these manifestations.” Pilgrimages and devotions in honor of Our Lady of Heede have always been freely permitted. The history of the apparitions and messages has appeared in numerous publications bearing the Imprimatur of various bishops. Great caution is required on the part of the faithful, however, because of the flood of allegations of apparitions and supernatural messages plaguing the world these days. These phony apparitions almost always contradict the true Catholic Faith in some way. But in the apparitions and messages of Heede we find nothing contrary to the Faith; indeed, their similarity to the approved apparitions of Fatima, Lourdes and La Salette give good. (See Our Lady of Heede.)

I think that the content of the message that the seers at Heede received from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is quite valid, and it is even more relevant to our times today that they were given between 1937 and 1945, especially since Our Lord Himself warned a seer, Greta Ganseforth, about a dance that was to take place at school in Heede:

There was an occasion when a school dance was being prepared which apparently was going to exceed Catholic norms for modesty and decency. At the request of Jesus, Greta sought to have the dance cancelled or at least modified so that it would not be a dangerous occasion of sin for the youth. Greta even appealed to the parents of the students to not go against the warning from Jesus, who stated:

“If they proceed with that dance, all involved will have to answer to Me at their Judgment.” (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

“Rock for Life,” anyone?

I do not think so, and the danced schedule to take place in Heede, Germany, in 1945 was about eight years or so before the appearance of the diabolical disturbance of the soul called “rock and roll” and its various mutations, each of which come straight from hell.

The narrative proceeds:

The dance for October 21, 1945, was cancelled. Along with this event and a number of other miraculous healings, other priests and clergymen finally believed. (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

It had been three years previously that Bishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning, the Prefect of Schleswig -Holstein, “made the following remarks” during a sermon delivered on July 23, 1942:

“From Heede came a rich blessing. I could see that Marian devotion dramatically increased—that sacramental life, in particular, has flourished dramatically in this parish.” (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

I believe that the warning of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ should sober us up from believing that there is anything short of Catholicism that can retard the evils of these days, evils that are caused what are in the objective order of things the Actual Sins of Men, leaving subjective culpability for them to God, Who alone judges individual souls, in world that has been deprived of the true teaching offices of Holy Mother Church and is devoid of the superabundance of Actual Graces caused by the spiritual barrenness of the conciliar sect’s abominable liturgical rites.

Indeed, most Catholics have never even heard of, no less read, this beautiful and moving summary of Catholic truth found in Pope Leo XIII's Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, that has been oft quoted on this site:

We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.  (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Having made war against the Social Reign of Christ King by its embrace of "religious liberty" and "healthy secularity--and blasphemed Him by means of the Protestant and Judeo Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination, the counterfeit church of conciliarism has actually fed into the social evils it seeks to oppose as it robs Catholics yet attached to its structures of the means by which they can see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus come to a recognition that we must be uncompromisingly Catholic in thought, word and speech at a times and in all circumstances without any exception whatsoever.

In addition to our daily Rosaries and the acts of reparation we make to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, who better to turn do in our efforts to restore the Faith in this time of barbarism in the world and apostasy and betrayal on the part of the Modernists than to our beloved Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful:

O Blessed Saint Joseph, tenderhearted father, faithful guardian of Jesus, chaste spouse of the Mother of God, we pray and beseech thee to offer to God the Father, His divine Son, bathed in blood on the cross for sinners, and through the thrice-holy Name of Jesus, obtain for us from the eternal Father the favor we implore (mention your petitions):

Appease the Divine anger so justly inflamed by our crimes, beg of Jesus mercy for thy children. Amid the splendors of eternity, forget not the sorrows of those who suffer, those who pray, those who weep; stay the Almighty arm which smites us, that by thy prayers and those of thy most holy Spouse, the Heart of Jesus may be moved to pity and to pardon. Amen.

No, Christ the King must reign in our minds, not naturalism of the "left" or naturalism of the "right" or the naturalism of "populism," whether inchoate or fully developed. The "people" are not sovereign. Christ the King is sovereign. Everything else is a lie and an illusion

The Rome of the pagan emperors was not converted at the ballot box. It was converted by the missionary activity of the Apostles and those who followed them, over thirteen millions of whom shed their blood in defense of the Holy Faith.

 Why do we think the conversion of the modern civil state will take any less than that? Why do we think that we are exempt from suffering for the Faith?

Why do we even think that we deserve some respite from the inexorable growth of the size and power of the modern civil state that is has arisen in the wake of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

Will we let her?

Will we run to her as we renew daily our total consecration to her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart?

The following words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, should give us cause before we continue to rush into the insanity of listening the naturalist babblers babble on and on about "issues" that they do not understand clearly or fully because they believe in one naturalist falsehood after another:

Nor can such misgivings be removed by any mere human effort, especially as a vast number of men, having rejected the Christian faith, are on that account justly incurring the penalty of their pride, since blinded by their passions they search in vain for truth, laying hold on the false for the true, and thinking themselves wise when they call "evil good, and good evil," and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness." It is therefore necessary that God come to the rescue, and that, mindful of His mercy, He turn an eye of compassion on human society. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

What can be a better description of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic constitutional regime in the United States of America?

May the Rosaries we pray this day help to the plant the seeds for the conversion of all world leaders and to help men such as Vice President James David Vance to be vice-regents of Christ the King and His true Church, not champions of false solutions that are responsible for establishing an iron curtain in western Europe that Vance can see exists but cannot explain how it came to be.

We had better take heed of the warnings issued in Heede, Germany, and to be ever read to see beyond the headlines and thus to at everything through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Appendix

A Long History of Repressing and Censoring Political Dissent in the Land of the “Free”

As initial overview, it must be remembered that tyrants have sought to silence Catholics from the very birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday, starting with the thugs who composed the Sanhedrin. Roman Emperors and the kings of barbaric tribes tried with all of their might to get Catholics to deny the Faith during the early part First Millennium. Mohammedans have tried to do so from the Seventh Century to this very day. Protestants and Freemasons and social revolutionaries have tried to do so with varying degrees of ferocity since 1517. The names of these perpetrators have ranged from Nero to Trajan to Diocletian to Mohammed to Luther to Henry to Cranmer to Calvin to Cromwell to Danton to Robespierre to Garibaldi and Bismarck to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Ho to Castro to Ortega and to all of the petty little men and women, many of them apostate Catholics, who have served in our own government in the past thirty to forty years, ever eager to sell out the Faith for their thirty pieces of silver of popularity and political power.

Tyrants never learn their lessons. Inspired by the adversary, who hates God and who hates us because our souls made in the image and likeness of God, new generations of tyrants arise to try to silence the voice of Catholics. This is why the accommodation of the Church in her human elements to the spirit of the world has made it more possible for the witches' brew of forces that has been coalescing and mutating and re-coalescing since the Sixteenth Century to be victorious in all aspects of the popular culture of most of the countries in the so-called "developed" world. The devil and his minions grow bolder when Catholics begin to speak with the voice of the world, something that the conciliar “popes” and their “bishops” have done for over sixty years now.

In particular, of course, the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King that began five hundred three years ago on October 31, 1517, was an effort to “provide” “evangelical liberty” to those who had been “enslaved” by a supposedly “dictatorial” hierarchical Church that had “corrupted” the Gospel message for her own purposes. This “evangelical liberty,” however, quickly descended into rank libertinage to the extent that even Martin Luther himself was aghast at what the decline in morals that took place once he had “liberated” men from the true Church, the Catholic Church, and set them “free” as “equals” to decide for themselves the meaning of Sacred Scripture and to sack and pillage Catholic churches, monasteries and convents. 

King Henry VIII, of course, was so intent on crushing all opposition to his taking England out of the Catholic Faith that he engaged in a bloodbath of 72,000 Catholics between 1534 and the tyrant's death in 1547, a little over three percent of the population of England at that time. The killing of over 72,000 people, the seizure of the monastery and convent lands and the other discriminatory measures imposed upon Roman Catholics in the wake of the English Protestant Revolt were undertaken done quite legally, thank you. Judges sentenced Catholics to death quite routinely. The England of the Anglican Church just went about its business as though anyone who resisted the new order of things was a disloyal extremist.

This lawless desire to crush opposition transcended the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and infected many of those who believed that the English colonies situated upon and down the Atlantic seaboard of the United States of America should break from England. Those arguing against such a break did so frequently at the very threat of their lives.

To wit, Jonathan Boucher, a Anglican preacher in England and in the Colony of Virginia in the years before the Revolutionary War in the Eighteenth Century, argued in very eloquent terms against a break of the thirteen English colonies from the British Crown by reminding his listeners that true freedom comes only from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour. Boucher made some very fine points in his sermon (On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience and Nonresistance), which should be studied if for no other reason than to realize that there was some effort made by "conservative" colonists to stem the tide of rebellion and to prevent a war for "independence," which was, after all, an act of high treason against King George III.

Boucher, who sometimes packed two single-shot pistols and kept them in his pulpit when he preached so that "patriots" would not attack him, argued against what could be called "liberation theology," urging Anglicans and other colonists to accept whatever sufferings were being imposed by King George III and to offer them up to God, stating that one should not seek to rebel from the authority which God has seen fit in His Providence to provide for the governance of men. The "disconnect" of Protestantism was such, however, that Boucher could not see that his own false "church" was born in a violent, bloody rebellion against the true authority given by God Himself over men in the form of the Church that He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. It was incongruous to argue that a rebellion against civil authority was unjust when one's very "church" was created as a result of a rebellion against God Himself.

Similarly, Americans have long fashioned their nation to be one of laws, not of men. However, this is simply not true. This is a fantasy. This is delusional.

The laws of God have been broken on these shores by the proliferation of unbridled error under the false slogans of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" from the very beginning.

President after president has engaged in activities designed to suppress legitimate dissent and opposition.

It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of America, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials.

The sixteenth President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannis!" as he jumped onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.

Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)

Just as an aside, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted to use the unconstitutional Federal Reserve System, created in an act passed by the Congress of the United States of America and signed into law by Wilson on December 23, 1913, as the means to centralize the banking and monetary systems under the authority of the government of the United States of America in order to restrict the legitimate freedom of Americans to control their own private property and to make private industry dependent upon the "direction" provided it by governmental regulators and overseers. It was for this reason as well that Wilson saw to it that Congress enacted legislation, following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, to create our current system of confiscatory taxation on our incomes. And it was Wilson, of course, who believed that the Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico, aping the "example" established by the French Revolutionaries, could "build" or "engineer" the "better" society in Our Lady's country by the killing of thousands upon thousands of Catholics:

Wilson replied [in 1915, to Father Francis Clement Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries. All efforts of Catholic to succor their coreligionists across the border were to prove fruitless, as they were to prove once again in 1924, when the fiercest persecution of all was begun by Plutarco Calles. In this systematic pogrom, all public worship came to an end in Mexico an priests were methodically hunted down and executed like outlaws. It was of this travail which Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory. Generally, however, the world press ignored the Calles persecution in a “conspiracy of silence” which the American hierarchy and Pope after Pope were powerless to break. (Robert Leckie American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 274.)

In other words, Thomas Woodrow Wilson really believed that it was "necessary" for the Freemsaonic/Communist Mexican government that enjoyed his favor to kill Catholics, whose "backward" beliefs were impediments to the institutionalization of "liberal values" that required him to suppress all opposition to his policies right here in the United States of America.

It was a scant twelve years after the stroke-disabled Wilson left office on March 4, 1921, that the thirty-third Freemason named Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service to audit his "enemies." He contravened the law in numerous ways as he used the legislative powers illicitly given to regulatory agencies by Congress during the Great Depression and during World War II to set the stage for Barack Hussein Obama's rule by decree and presidential fiat. Roosevelt, the fifth cousin of the Republican statist and fellow thirty-third degree Freemason, Theodore Roosevelt, the uncle of Eleanor Roosevelt, even ordered his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to engage in domestic espionage. Roosevelt’s directive took the form of a memorandum dated May 21, 1940.

Robert Jackson, who was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America on July 11, 1941, did not like the directive as he believed that Franklin Roosevelt had authorized domestic surveillance on anyone suspected of being subversive. Jackson’s successor, however, Francis Biddle, who took office as the Attorney General of the United States of America on August 25, 1941, had no qualms about the directive, delegating the task of carrying it out to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, John Edgar Hoover, who was more than happy to run with this new expansion of his authority to investigate anyone at any time for any reason. The history of the Federal government’s surveillance since that time is one of completely unchecked growth.

Do not think for a single moment that abuses of deep state bureaucrats being exposed at this time is anything new. Illegal surveillance by the Federal government has been on the rise since World War II and the establishment of permanent intelligence agencies. Modern technology has advanced to such a point that these agencies, acting both legally and illegally, monitor every means of human communication today save for those done with an old-fashioned typewriter that has not connection of any kind to the internet or to a telephone line.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself, as noted just above, has long seen itself as a “check” upon elected officials, and John Edgar Hoover, who served as Director of the Bureau of Investigation from May 10, 1924, to March 22, 1935, and then as the founding Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from March 23, 1935, until the time of his death on May 2, 1972, believed in the suppression of political dissent dating back to his days as the head of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s “War Emergency Division’s” “Alien Enemy Bureau” one hundred years ago. Please, what is going on now, although certainly shocking to those not conversant with the darker sides of American history, is really nothing new at all.

Although Presidents Harry S. Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy each considered firing Hoover, the latter had amassed too much information on too many people. This information, most of it gathered quite illegally and/or by the improper use of Federal Bureau of Investigation field agents, was Hoover’s own kind of “insurance policy.”

President Lyndon Baines Johnson, on the other hand, knowing what kind of “insurance policy” that Hoover had on him, whetted Hoover’s appetite for domestic surveillance under the thinnest of legal pretexts, including wiretapping his own vice president, the garrulous spendthrift with taxpayer dollars named Hubert Horatio Humphrey:

Resigned to Humphrey's candidacy [in 1968], Johnson pressed his Vice President throughout the campaign not to stray too far from the Administration's position on Vietnam.

Humphrey largely complied. But at the end of September, when he showed greater flexibility than the White House on how to end the war, Johnson reacted angrily. He told Clark Clifford that he doubted Humphrey's ability to be President. He lacked the guts for the job. After Humphrey had become Vice President and expressed doubts about the war, the White House, according to a Humphrey aide, Ted Van Dyk, had arranged for wiretaps on Humphrey's office phones. Van Dyk learned this from two Secret Service agents on the vice-presidential detail. Neither Van Dyk nor Humphrey was surprised. Though Johnson in principle disliked taping and wiretaps, he secretly taped more than 7,500 of his own telephone conversations as President. Moreover, during the 1964 campaign, after a visit to the White House, Richard Russell wrote, "Hoover has apparently been turned loose and is tapping everything.... [Johnson] stated it took him hours each night to read them all (but he loves this)." The speed with which Johnson had information about Humphrey's presidential campaign suggested to Van Dyk that the White House was still tapping Humphrey's phones in 1968. Johnson apparently wanted the taps to gain advance notice and a chance to dissuade him should Humphrey decide to break away on the war. (Three New Revelations about Lyndon Baines Johnson.)

It should be noted, however, that the liberal Robert Dallek, who authored the synopsis of his own book about Lyndon Baines Johnson, did not include the following fact about Johnson’s wiretapping in 1968 that is covered in another book:

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson ordered Hoover to tap the phone of Republican vice- presidential nominee Spiro Agnew on the suspicion that Agnew was telling the South Vietnamese that they would get a better peace agreement from Nixon if he were elected president. The taps did not reveal that Agnew ever made such a deal. (Henry M. Holden, FBI 100 Years: An Unofficial History, Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008, p. 218.)

Mind you, this is only a partial listing of abuses that have been committed in this alleged land of "laws and not men," a land where over fifty-five million innocent babies have been butchered by surgical means (hundreds of millions more by chemical means) since, most of those having taken place in the forty-seven years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. That staggering figure does not include those babies who were killed by surgical means in their mothers' wombs between 1967 and 1973 when various states, including Colorado, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Alaska, and Washington (and Washington, District of Columbia) decriminalized surgical baby-killing in some or all cases at various stages of a baby's development in his mother's womb.

A "civilized" nation of "laws." I don't think so.

The lawless imposition of policies even in violation of constitutions and civil code or statutory law and the suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly-held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.

You see, good readers, those who believe in the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.

This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their world view shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes that are contrary to the Catholic Faith and thus to the good of both men and their nations.