The Only Path to Responsible Governance: The Social Reign of Christ the King

As has been discussed hundreds and hundreds of times on this website, we do not live in a world government by right principles informed by a due submission to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the temporal and eternal good of souls. This is why I will never tire of urging the readers of my work not to be distracted by the smoke and mirrors used the adversary to make us believe that “something” is being done to deal a death knell to the iron grip that the professional, entrenched unelected leeches who have burrowed under the rocks of the Federal bureaucracy have upon their wanton use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund waste, fraud, and abject evil.

Despite the efforts underway by President Donald John Trump and Elon Musk, who I remind readers is not our friend as no one but no who is amoral enough to think nothing of sins of impurity in order to “populate” the world, to smash the power of the Federal bureaucracy, the fact remains that the massive behemoth that acts as a fourth branch government is the consequence of the false, Calvinist/Judeo-Masonic/Pelagian principles upon which the government of the United States of America is founded.

It is important to remember this fact as the Constitution is utterly defenseless against being misinterpreted as its framers did not accept the fact that there is an ultimate teaching authority to be found in the Catholic Church to guide men as they pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End: the possession of the glory the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Although Holy Mother Church leaves it to the prudence of men to form the specific institutional arrangements by which they will govern themselves in a particular body politic, she does insist that men defer to her in all that pertains to the good of souls and that they seek to pursue virtue in their own lives by cooperating with the graces won for them by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on the wood of the Holy Cross that flows into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Men who do not accept this, however, will find that all of their efforts to provide for a just social order, no matter how well-intentioned, will decay over the course of time. The fact that the specific institutional arrangements found in the Constitution of the United States of America, none of which is objectionable in se to the Catholic Faith, have been used to pursue more and more manifest injustices that are at odds even the words found in the document's text and are opposed to written thought of the framers themselves is the result of the anti-Incarnational premises which formed their intellectual perspectives. We are witnessing only a more open and thus obvious collapse of the order that was meant to be provided by the Constitution for a variety of reasons, including, of course, the fact that there has been a deprivation of Sanctifying and Actual Graces in the world as a result of the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions of conciliarism.

The proximate root cause of this decay was caused by the false premises of the American founding that have led jurists and politicians to make as much short work of the text of the Constitution as the plain words of Holy Writ have been made by the Scriptural and dogmatic relativism that Protestantism let loose on the world nearly five hundred years ago. The framers of the American Constitution were but the victims of Protestantism's revolution against the objective nature of Revealed Truth.

The men who framed the Constitution of the United States of America were products of the Protestant Revolt and of the so-called Age of Reason (or Enlightenment). They accepted without question the belief that it was possible for men of divergent religious beliefs–or the lack thereof–to work together reasonably for the common good without referencing any one church as the foundation of a country’s civil order. They believed further in the heresy of semi-Pelagianism, which contends that men have enough inherent grace in themselves to be good, that we do not need belief, in access to or cooperation with sanctifying grace to be virtuous. The framers of the Constitution believed that men of “civic virtue” would present themselves for public service and would, after a long process of compromise, negotiation and bargaining amongst the diverse interests and opinions represented in the United States Congress, make decisions that redounded to the common good (see, for example, James Madison, The Federalist, Numbers 10 and 51).

James Madison himself quite specifically believed that there was no one “opinion” that could unite men of such divergent backgrounds as found themselves in the United States of America at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Thus, a dialectical process of conflict amongst divergent interests (religious, sectional, economic, occupational) had to be created to force those who took positions that constituted a majority “view” at any time to at least consider the viewpoints of those who were in the minority of a given issue. In this way, Madison reasoned, whatever majorities emerged in Congress on any piece of legislation would be transient, indigenous to one particular issue at one particular time, and sensitive to and concerned about the rights of those who disagreed with them. Such a system, which was premised on the exercise of statesmanship on the part of those elected to serve in Congress and as President, would create the “extended commercial republic” where no one person or interest could predominate on all issues at all times.

The institutional arrangements created to effect this “extended commercial republic” were very complex. A division of powers between the central government and the state governments (Federalism). A separation of powers amongst the three branches of the central government involving a number of checks and balances. Different powers given to each of the two chambers of the Congress (bicameralism). Staggered elections for the members of the United States Senate, a body whose members were elected by state legislatures until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Popular election originally of only one body, the House of Representatives. A President elected by electors appointed by whatever method deemed best by state legislatures. All of this was supposed to produce a tension that resulted in internal safeguards to prevent, although not absolutely make impossible, the abuse of power and the rise of the tyranny of the majority.

There is only one little problem with this schemata: it was premised on the belief that matters of civil governance do not have to be founded in a reliance on the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has entrusted to His true Church and that the Church herself has no role to play to serve as the ultimate, divinely-instituted check on the abuse of temporal governmental power. It was difficult enough for the Church at times during the Middle Ages, when she exercised the Social Reign of Christ the King, to restrain certain rulers. It is impossible for any purely human institution to restrain the vagaries of fallen human nature over the course of time. Men who are not mindful of their First Cause and their Last End as He has revealed Himself solely through His true Church will descend to their lower natures sooner rather than later.

Additionally, men who are imprisoned in the Pelagian lie of human self-redemption believe that social problems can be resolved by "structural" solutions agreed to by a majority of "reasonable men" without any need for understanding remote and proximate root causes will come to trust in total government control over men, their thoughts, and even their freedom no matter how many people get crushed in the process. 

From the Spoils System to the "Good Government Movement to Today's Deep State Progressives

Political parties arose during President George Washington’s tenure in office. Although Washington himself abhorred the rise of political parties and saw the dangers that would threaten national order if professional, career politicians emerged as a caste undo themselves, he was powerless to stop them from forming and taking over the entirety of the governmental process. Although the names of the political parties have changed over the last two hundred ten years, the partisan political divisions that developed during the Washington Administration have come to define the very nature of American electoral politics and the making of public policy. What is best for a particular political party is best for the nation. So much for the pursuit of the common temporal good on a purely naturalistic level, no less in light of man's Last End.

The era of “Jacksonian Democracy” from 1828 to 1836 spelled the death-knell for the founders’ misplaced hopes that the Constitution itself would serve as a safeguard against the dangers posed by raw majoritarianism, the essence of Andrew Jackson’s political beliefs, which were derived from the American Revolution’s foreign cousin, the French Revolution. All notion of a political system that restrained the exercise of raw political power was pure mythology from Jackson’s time forward.

Furthermore, the anti-intellectual Andrew Jackson used demagoguery to appeal to mass prejudices and to eschew any need for education or other qualifications, such as honesty and competence, to be appointed to public office as the only “qualification” that mattered was to belong to the “victor’s” political party according to the old maxim “To the victor belongs the spoils.” Thus was born what came to be known as the “spoils” or “patronage” system of appointments to political positions. Lacking a firm foundation to work assiduously and honestly for the honor and glory of God as befits redeemed creatures, such a system easily produced institutionalized graft, fraudulent election results in many states and localities, and widespread corruption. The patronage system became the means whereby Catholic immigrants, first from Ireland and then, after the War between the States, could climb the ladder of social, political, and economic power at a time when rank anti-Catholic nativism ran rampant amongst prevailing elites at that time.

Masquerading their elitism and anti-Catholic nativism as “Good Government Movement,” many WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) elitists and secular social Darwinists/social “progressives” became alarmed at the growing political influence of Catholic immigrants in urban politics. There was the fear that these immigrants and their descendants could become so influential as to have a major say in national politics and thus be able to elect a Catholic as President of the United States of America. Such an event, the “progressives” believed, would make the United States of America a vassal of Pope Leo XIII.

Those who are familiar with my own writing over the decades know that the fear of these early “progressives” was unfounded as none of the Catholic immigrants who used the ward or election district political clubs of the Democratic Party in urban areas had any intention whatsoever of converting the United States of America to become a Catholic country. They simply wanted to use the local political clubs as a means of upward social and economic mobility that was being denied to them in a systematic manner by the pronounced and sometimes overtly violent anti-Catholicism that is deeply embedded in the American soil that is manifested very clearly today by the open contempt which the current generation of “progressives” has for believing Catholics.

It was to blunt the rise of the growing influence of Catholic immigrants from Ireland (both those who arrived in the 1820s and those who arrived in the 1840s and thereafter), Italy (especially after the overthrow of the Papal States), Hungary and other places in Central Europe during the revolutions of 1848, Germany (during the Freemason Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Holy Mother Church), and Eastern Europe (after the War between the States as the need for skilled and unskilled labor increased during the Second Industrial Revolution) that the WASPS and their Judeo-Masonic compatriots devised various “reforms” to take as much political power as possible away from the political party bosses who controlled, if not rigged, elections and who controlled the entire process of hiring government employees and awarding contracts for the provision of various services. The hiring, retention and promotion of government employees was solely in the hands of the ward bosses and their over-bosses at the county and city levels.

Such a situation, the “progressives” said at the time, resulted in institutionalized political graft and fraudulent election results. It was time, the “good government reformers believed, to “professionalize” public administration to insure a supposedly unbiased and competent set of well-trained administrators who would serve the public interest and not that of professional politicians. It was time, the “good government” do-gooders bellowed, to implement a professional civil service at all levels of government in the United States of America.

Although there were multiple other reforms designed to limit the power of political bosses and thus to produce “efficient,” “honest” and “competent administration of public policy (primary elections, which were designed to take the power of nominating candidates for public office away from professional political party bosses, nonpartisan elections at the civic level, the county or city manager system, whose goal was to place the actual administration of a city or a county under the supervision of a professionally trained “nonpartisan,” thus leaving a mayor or county executive as a ceremonial figurehead who cut ribbons when the next Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company or F. W. Woolworth store opened in the community, and what are called the direct democracy reforms—the referendum, whether binding or nonbinding, the initiative, which was proposed to take power out of the hands of boss-controlled city councils and state legislatures, and the recall, which is a petition-initiated “citizen” effort to remove an elected official from office before his term has expired), the institutionalization of the civil service by the government of the United States of America by means of the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, prompted by the assassination of President James Abram Garfield by a deranged office-seeker, Charles Guiteau, two years before, provided the model that would be adopted over time by state and local governments.

The Pendleton Civil Service Act, which underwent some reforms of itself with the passage of the United States Civil Service Act of 1978, established a system requiring most positions in the Federal government to be filled by a “merit system” that selected the top candidates who had the best scores on publicly announced, competitive examination (usually the “rule of seven” or the “rule of eleven” or the “rule of three) for advertised positions. Those hired serve a probationary period of usually nine months, after which they cannot be dismissed except for a long, cumbersome process known as “administrative cause.” In other words, civil servants have life tenure as long as the positions they hold are not eliminated by budgetary restrictions, noting a few restrictions and qualifications in the cases of civil servants who have been grossly incompetent or negligent in the performance of their duties.

This “professional” civil service was to be modeled after that instituted in the 1840s in England that was supposed to merely administer the government’s policies but wound up becoming so entrenched that the civil bureaucracy became a political force of its own even though civil servants did not sand for elections. Senior civil servants in the British civil service knew that governments come and go but that they constituted the permanent ruling class, which is precisely what has happened here in the United States of America.

Although the civil service took root at the Federal level in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, the patronage system remained strong at the state and local levels until the Great Depression, which made it very difficult for the political party bosses and their under-bosses to dole out “welfare” (government jobs and contracts, food, legal favors, etc.) in exchange for loyalty expressed by working as volunteers to elect the party’s candidates given the large number of people in need of help, it was the aforementioned Great Depression that dealt the death blow to the boss system in many places, admitting a few exceptions here and there. The Welfare State, which had some of its roots in the administrations of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Woodrow Wilson, arose to take the place of the boss system and, more importantly, to take the place of the extended family, which was under attack by means of liberalized divorce laws in some states and the ready access to and acceptance of contraception. The Welfare State was administered by career civil servants, who then had a vested interest in keeping their clients dependent upon “their” largesse and expanding the scope of those who would become dependent upon government support for their very existence.

Even long before the Great Depression and over forty years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Otto von Bismarck, the prototypical socialist and social engineer, sought to make large segments of the German population dependent upon the largesse of the civil state so that the citizenry would be more inclined to look the other way as it, the civil state, increased control of their daily lives over the course of time. The Eurosocialist states are all descended from Otto von Bismarck and Karl Marx, whose "radicalism," as the Freemason Bismarck saw it, he sought to preempt by the creation of his own social welfare state. It was this social welfare state that American liberals saw as the basis of creating the more “perfect” social order on purely secular grounds.

Moreover, it has been case for most of this country’s history that our minders in the Federal government of the United States of America have violated the laws of God and of men to suit their sorry purposes whenever they deemed it “necessary” to do so.

Congress after Congress abdicated its legislative authority to the Executive Branch of the Federal Government of the United States of America from the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” forward, although, as noted earlier, a lot of the spade work had been done during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Nearly seventy independent or quasi-independent regulatory agencies within the Federal government exist to this very day, each composed of commissioners who are beyond the control of a president to remove and who chafe at the thought of true legislative oversight of their unconstitutional “rule-making” authority (deemed to be “constitutional” by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Company, April 12, 1937).

Readers will note I claimed that independent regulatory commissions (and the quasi-independent commissions) are unconstitutional. I have taught this in my government classes over the decades. I will make this claim whenever I write about this subject (or have taught about it in my bygone days as a college professor of political science and constitutional law) no matter the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States of America has ruled that such agencies, which are staffed by commissioners who are appointed by a president for a term, usually seven years, that is longer than one presidential administration but shorter than two, and confirmed by the United States Senate are constitutional (see, for example, Humphrey's Executor v. United States of America, May 27, 1935).

My reasoning is simple: these agencies exercise each powers that are particular to each of the three branches of government as they make rules that having the binding force of law (which rules are supposed to be founded in Congressional legislation) and also enforce the very rules that they create while serving finally as the court of first instance for litigants to appeal decisions made about the enforcement of these rules. Although readers of this site, few in number though you may be, know that I am a critic of the founders of this nation, they are the individuals who crafted the Constitution in order to prevent what they believed could be a tyranny of the majority. Writing in The Federalist, Number 47, James Madison explained:

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system. I persuade myself, however, that it will be made apparent to every one, that the charge cannot be supported, and that the maxim on which it relies has been totally misconceived and misapplied. In order to form correct ideas on this important subject, it will be proper to investigate the sense in which the preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct. (Federalist No. 47.)

Behold a system, however, that has indeed degenerated to a point where non-elected officials have the accumulated powers of the three branches of government--legislative, executive, and judicial. This has occurred because James Madison, a virulent anti-Catholic who is considered to be the "father" of the Constitution, believed that there were sufficient safeguards contained within the Constitution to provide a check upon the consistent misuse of power by those serving in the three branches of government. (May the great French monarch come soon!)

To be sure and speaking only on a natural level, the level of the entrenched corruption and waste can appear shocking to the average observer, this is only because most people do not follow current events closely and thus have been completely oblivious to the fact that one Republican Senate Leader (Arthur Vandenberg, William Knowland, Everett McKinley Dirksen, Hugh Scott, Howard Baker, Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., Trent Lott, William Frisch, Addison Mitchell McConnell) and one Republican House leader/Speaker (Joseph Martin, Charles Halleck, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., John Rhodes, Robert Michel, Newton Leroy Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, John Boehner, Paul Davis Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and even Michael Johnson) have cooperated with, been indifferent to, or resigned to the inevitability of the passage of an "omnibus spending act" that includes all manner of "pork" to satisfy constituents, thus bribing taxpayers with their own money, empower the bureaucrats who made rules, enforce, interpret, and adjudicate the rules they make, create groups dependent upon government largesse for their existence, maintenance, and institutionalization, and make it possible for parasitical lawyers to line their pockets representing clients who are unable to negotiate the morass of rules and rules designed to criminalize almost every aspect of private business, and increasing the annual Federal deficit and of the national debt. Members of Congress happyily go home after passing such bills with only a handful of Senators and Congressmen utterly remorseless about their immoral use of taxpayer dollars to benefit the few and solidify their political bases of power. 

Consider, for example, some of the following details of the Paul Davis Ryan-Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi-Addison Mitchell McConnell-Harry Reid Omnibus spending bill that was passed by both Houses of Congress on Friday, December 18, 2015, Ember Friday in Advent and the Feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that had everything to do with "normalizing" illegal immigration:

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisconsin) first major legislative achievement is a total and complete sell-out of the American people masquerading as an appropriations bill.

Too harsh, you say? Let the programs, the spending, and the implications speak for themselves.

(1) Ryan’s Omnibus Fully Funds DACA

Though much of the public attention has surrounded the President’s 2014 executive amnesty, the President’s 2012 amnesty quietly continues to churn out work permits and federal benefits for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. Paul Ryan’s bill funds entirely this 2012 executive amnesty for “DREAMers”—or illegal immigrants who came to the country as minors.

Specifically, Division F of Ryan’s omnibus bill contains no language that would prohibit the use of funds to continue the President’s unconstitutional program. Obama’s executive action, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), has granted around 700,000 illegal aliens with work permits, as well as the ability to receive tax credits and federal entitlement programs. A recent GAO report documented how this illegal amnesty program for alien youth is, in large part, responsible for the illegal alien minor surge on our southern border.

In 2013, Paul Ryan said that it is his job as a U.S. lawmaker to put himself in the shoes of “the DREAMer who is waiting” and work to find legislative solutions to his or her problems.

(2) Ryan’s Omnibus Funds Sanctuary Cities

Five months ago, 32-year-old Kate Steinle was bleeding to death in her father’s arms. She was gunned down in broad daylight by a five-time deported criminal alien whose presence in the country was the direct result of San Francisco’s refusal to comply with U.S. immigration law—yet Paul Ryan’s omnibus rewards these lawless Sanctuary Cities with federal grants. Division B Title II of Ryan’s omnibus funds various grant programs for the Department of Justice (pages 167, 168, and 169) and contains no language that would restrict the provision of such grants to sanctuary jurisdictions.

In a Congressional hearing, Steinle’s father demanded Congressional action and recalled his daughter’s dying words: “Help me, Dad.”

(3) Ryan’s Omnibus Funds All Refugee Programs

Despite broad support amongst Republican lawmakers for a proposal introduced by

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX)

to halt all refugee resettlement, Ryan’s appropriations bill will fund President Obama’s refugee resettlement operation and will allow for the admission of tens of thousands of refugees with access to federal benefits. Division H Title II of Ryan’s bill contains appropriations of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and contains no language that would restrict the program. Nor are there any restrictions for the program in Division K of Ryan’s bill, which provides funding for the Department of State, which oversees refugee admissions.

Ryan is not one of the 84 cosponsors of Babin’s bill to halt the refugee operation, and he recently told Sean Hannity that he does not support halting resettlement because, “We’re a compassionate country. The refugees laws are important laws.” Similarly, this outcome represents a legislative win for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who told Sean Hannity he’d “hate to use” Congress’s power of the purse to deny funding for Obama’s resettlement operation. 

(4) Ryan’s Omnibus Funds All of the Mideast Immigration Programs That Have Been Exploited by Terrorists in Recent Years 

Although multiple immigrant and visa programs in recent years have been exploited by terrorists (such as the F-1 “student” visa, the K-1 “fiancée” visa, and our green card and refugee programs), Ryan’s proposal does nothing to limit admissions from jihadist-prone regions. As Senators Shelby and Sessions of Alabama noted in a joint statement: “The omnibus would put the U.S. on a path to approve admission for hundreds of thousands of migrants from a broad range of countries with jihadists movements over the next 12 months, on top of all the other autopilot annual immigration.”

(5) Ryan’s Omnibus Funds Illegal Alien Resettlement

On page 917 of Ryan’s omnibus a section titled “Refugee and Entrant Assistance” funds the President’s resettlement of illegal immigrant border crossers.

(6) Ryan’s Omnibus Funds the Release of Criminal Aliens

Senior legislative aides tell Breitbart News that Ryan’s bill does not do anything to change the enforcement priorities that Jeh Johnson established a little over a year ago that would shield entire categories of criminal aliens from immigration law, nor does it include language recommended by Sessions and Shelby to “deny the expenditure of funds to issue visas to countries that refuse to repatriate criminal aliens.”

(7) Ryan’s Omnibus Quadruples H-2B Foreign Worker Visas 

Despite Ryan’s pledge not to move an immigration compromise with President Obama, tucked 700 pages into Ryan’s spending bill is language that would resuscitate and expand a controversial provision of the Schumer-Rubio Gang of Eight plan to increase the H-2B visa program.

The provision “would quadruple the number of H-2B visas for unskilled guest workers, for a total of more than 250,000,” writes immigration attorney Ian Smith. The Americans who fill these jobs are typically “society’s most vulnerable — including single women, the disabled, the elderly, minorities, teenagers, students, and first-generation immigrants,”  Smith explains.

A recent BuzzFeed exposé revealed how this program allows businesses to discriminate against American workers and “deliberately den[y] jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead.” As one GOP aide told Breitbart News, “This provision is a knife in the heart of the working class, and African Americans.”

(8) Ryan’s Omnibus Funds Tax Credits for Illegal Aliens

Ryan’s bill preserves the expansion of the President’s expiring child tax credits without any accompanying language to prevent illegal aliens from receiving those tax credits. While Sen. Sessions attempted to include language in the bill that would prevent illegal immigrants from receiving tax credits, his recommendation was rejected.

(9) Ryan’s Omnibus Locks-In Huge Spending Increases

The bill funds the Obama-Boehner budget deal, which eliminated spending caps, and will increase both defense and non-defense spending next year by $25 billion more each.

(10) Ryan’s Omnibus Fails to Allocate Funds to Complete the 700-Mile Double-Layer Border Fence That Congress Promised the American People

Nearly a decade ago with the passage of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, the American people were promised a 700-mile double-layer border fence. However, funding for the fence was later gutted and, as a result, its construction was never completed. Despite heightened media focus over the past six months about Americans’ desire for this barrier to illegal entry, Ryan’s bill does not require that funds be allocated to finish the construction of the 700-mile double-layer fence.

A vote could occur as early as Thursday after midnight, giving lawmakers and the public only one full business day to review the 2,242 page package. The Ryan-Pelosi package represents nothing short of a complete and total betrayal of the American people.

Yet Ryan’s omnibus serves a second and equally chilling purpose. By locking in the President’s refugee, immigration, and spending priorities, Ryan’s bill is designed to keep these fights out of Congress by getting them off the table for good. Delivering Obama these wins–and pushing these issues beyond the purview of Congress–will suppress public attention to the issues and, in so doing, will boost the candidacy of the Republican establishment’s preferred presidential contenders, who favor President Obama’s immigration agenda.

What may prove most discouraging of all to Americans is that recent reports reveal that conservatives in the so-called House Freedom Caucus are praising Ryan even as he permanently locks in these irreversible and anti-American immigration policies. According to Politico, the House Freedom Caucus will “give Ryan a pass” even as he funds disastrous policies that prioritize the interests of foreign nationals and global corporatists above the needs of the American people whom lawmakers are supposed to represent. (Paul Ryan Betrays America.)

Alhough many Republicans in Congress have expressed horror at the apparent activities of Planned Parenthood, revealed through numerous investigative videos, the $1.6 trillion omnibus deal announced by House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would still give taxpayer funds for the nation’s largest abortion provider.

It’s disappointing that Congressional leaders refused to put in a rider to defund Planned Parenthood into the omnibus,” Kristan Hawkins – president of Students for Life of America – tells Breitbart News. “Americans are forced donors every year of the nation’s largest abortion chain who was caught on video discussing the harvesting and selling of aborted baby body parts. That is horrific and something no one should be forced to fund, either directly or indirectly.”

According to the Washington Examiner, House and Senate lawmakers reached an agreement that will fund the government through 2016. A vote on the bill is expected as early as Thursday or Friday in the House.

Paul Ryan said about the bill, “Democrats won some, they lost some; we won some, we lost some,” states Roll Call.

McConnell said he expects the Senate would take up the bill and move it along quickly after the House passes it.

A recent poll by Robert Morris University found the majority of Americans–53 percent to 31 percent–favor a plan backed by Republicans to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and redirect that funding to other clinics that do not perform abortions.

Throughout the summer a series of videos exposed Planned Parenthood’s apparent practices of selling the body parts of aborted babies on the open market, and altering the position of babies during abortions in order to harvest intact organs.

The abortion business has also been discovered – most recently in Ohio – to send the remains of aborted babies to be steam-heated and disposed of in landfills with other waste.

“In divided government, no one gets exactly what they want,” Speaker Ryan said Wednesday, according to CNSNews.com. “But this week, we have completed two bipartisan agreements that advance Republican priorities.”

Though a rider to defund Planned Parenthood – a priority of the pro-life, conservative base of the GOP – is not included in the omnibus, Ryan added Republicans “are maintaining all of our pro-life protections, including the Hyde amendments; and we are making cuts to the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) program.”

Specifically, a release from Ryan’s office stated the following about “pro-life” features of the bill:

Maintains strong protections for life. This bill maintains important pro-life provisions, including the Hyde Amendment, and prohibits taxpayer funding for abortion. It also includes a new prohibition on gene editing and cuts funding for a program involved in abortion-related activities, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), by 7 percent.

“While both the House and Senate have voted to defund Planned Parenthood through reconciliation, it was our hope they would continue to do everything in their power to redirect taxpayer funding away from Planned Parenthood and to other federally funded community health centers that address similar healthcare needs but without performing abortions,” Hawkins said. (Planned Barrenhood Fully Funded for 2016.)

What happened in 2015 is nothing new as it happens annually around Christmas time almost every year, although in 1998 a massive omnibus spending bill was sent to the desk of President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton after having been passed by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress at a time when the Speaker of the House of Representatives was Newton Leroy Gingrich and the Senate Majority Leader was Trent Lott. Both were Republicans, of course: H.R.4328 - 105th Congress (1997-1998): Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999.

Thus, the "discoveries" made by the "Department of Government Efficiency" in the past three weeks, six days are only shocking because most Americans have not been paying any attention to the careless manner in which one complex, thousand pages or more omnibus spending bill after another has been passed by Congress after Congress without most Senators or Congressmen bothering to read even one page of the monstrosities they enact to empower bureaucrats and enslave the American people. 

Indeed, it was long before Elon Musk was born, the United States Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) issued what he called "The Golden Fleece" from 1975 to 1988:

Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) hadn’t been in Washington long before he observed a great deal of wasteful and often nonsensical government spending. 

So, the Democrat from Wisconsin decided to highlight the frivolity by issuing 168 “Golden Fleece” awards every month from 1975 to 1988. 

Kicking off what would become "the most successful public relations device in politics today,” according to The Washington Post, Proxmire gave his first award to the National Science Foundation for spending $84,000 ($420,304 inflation adjusted) on a study on love. 

“I believe that 200 million other Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right on top of the things we don't want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman and vice versa,” the senator said in 1975.

The public mostly reviewed his awards with either giggles or face palms. 

Also in 1975, Proxmire gave a Golden Fleece award to the Federal Aviation Administration for spending $57,800 ($289,209 inflation adjusted) to study the measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, including the "distance from knee to knee while sitting" and measuring the “length of the buttocks." 

In 1978, The National Institute for Mental Health earned a Fleece award for its $97,000 ($400,489 inflation adjusted) study on the activities inside a Peruvian brothel, where the researchers said repeated visits were made in the interests of accuracy.

In 1977, Proxmire gave an award to the Justice Department for spending $27,000 ($119,938 inflation adjusted) to determine “why prisoners want to get out of jail.” In 1979, the Pentagon was recognized for a $3,000 study ($11,123 inflation adjusted) to determine “if members of the military should carry umbrellas in the rain.”

In 1977, the U.S. Postal Service earned a Fleece award by spending more than $34 million ($151 million inflation adjusted) on a Madison Avenue advertising campaign to encourage Americans to write more letters to one another. 

The senator also gave an award to the National Institute on Drug Abuse for funding a project from psychologist Harris Rubin that developed "some objective evidence concerning marijuana's effect on sexual arousal.” The study had male pot-smokers watch pornographic films and measure their responses with sensors attached to their genitals, costing $121,000.

Here are a few more examples of the awards Proxmire gave out:

• To the National Science Foundation for spending $103,000 to compare aggressiveness in sun fish that drink tequila versus gin.
• To the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for spending $6,000 ($22,297 inflation adjusted) to show that marijuana is harmful to scuba divers (1979). 
• To the National Science Foundation for spending $46,100 ($170,935 inflation adjusted) to study the effect of scantily clad women on Chicago's male drivers (1976).
• To the National Endowment for the Humanities for spending $2,500 ($11,105 inflation adjusted) in Arlington County, Virginia, to study why people are rude, ill-mannered, cheat and lie on the local tennis courts (1977).
• To the Department of Agriculture for spending $90,000 ($333,712 inflation adjusted) on a two-year study titled "Behavioral Determinants of Vegetarianism” (1979).
• To the Department of Education's Institute of Museum Services for giving $25,000 ($81,675 inflation adjusted) to a California zoo to be used in part to send two animal keepers to attend a three-day elephant workshop in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1980). 

When Proxmire retired from the Senate in 1988, the award retired with him.

Then, in 2000, Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog, revived the Golden Fleece award and Proxmire served as an honorary chairman of the organization. 

According to their website, the Fleece hasn’t been awarded since 2016.

While Proxmire died in 2005, there’s no doubt that if he were alive today, he would have plenty of fodder in this era of government waste, fraud, corruption and taxpayer abuse. (U.S. Senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award Turns 46 Years Old.)

The Golden Fleece Award has not been issued since 2016, but the Department of Government Efficiency is making up for lost time:

DOGE investigations reveal mysterious Defense Department payments to Reuters for "large scale social deception" project between 2018-2022. While DARPA claims it was for cyber defense, questions swirl about why a news agency received millions for "social engineering." The revelation comes as other media outlets face scrutiny over federal funding. (Mario Nawfal on X: "DOD PAID REUTERS $9M FOR "SOCIAL ENGINEERING" PROGRAM DOGE investigations reveal mysterious Defense Department payments to Reuters for "large scale social deception" project between 2018-2022. While DARPA claims it was for cyber defense, questions swirl about why a news https://t.co/DAcppcf2j9" / X.)

A federal judge’s decision to bar Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from reviewing the Treasury Department’s payment system is most likely a temporary setback — but it illustrates the urgent need to secure a permanent win for transparency.

Progressives are panicking because their 100-year, largely successful assault on American constitutional government is in danger of being reversed.

Thanks to Musk’s wise plan to follow the money, he has a historic opportunity to mount a coup — not on behalf of himself or President Trump, but for We the People.

But to make the revolution stick, he’ll have to make transparency a permanent feature of our federal government.

He can do it with a simple tool allowing individual Americans to view the Treasury payment system in real time.

Call it “America’s Checkbook.”

Our nonprofit organization, Open the Books, is ready to help.

Our concept is based on a fundamental belief that the money the Treasury spends is the property of American taxpayers.

Those funds belong to We the People, not to any branch of government — and certainly not to an unelected administrative state.

Individual Americans have the same right to review “America’s Checkbook” as they do their own personal accounts.

Why not allow taxpayers to set up their own “fraud alerts” or “low balance alerts,” flagging them when their money goes to a purpose that they find objectionable?

Let taxpayers see their money flows — every dime, online, in real time — to infrastructure projects, cancer research, life-saving humanitarian assistance . . . and drag shows in Ecuador.

Then trust them to demand of their legislators more or less of each.

To be clear, Musk and his DOGE recruits only had “read-only” access to the payment system.

Despite all the leftist caterwauling, when Musk regains access he won’t be able to cut off Social Security payments to “enemies” or siphon off funds to Tesla or Space X.

Giving taxpayers that same “read-only” access through “America’s Checkbook” will be no less revolutionary.

Our founders wrote transparency into the Constitution, but my confidence in it is not merely theoretical: I’ve seen it work in the arena.

Transparency cuts through government like water cuts through stone. When it finds cracks, it can wash away mighty walls of opposition and create sudden and dramatic change.

When I worked with the late US Sen. Tom Coburn, we partnered with then-Sen. Barack Obama on a landmark transparency bill that put all federal spending online for the first time.

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 created USASpending.gov, with the goal of forming an ecosystem of citizen activists and organizations who would impose permanent downward pressure on spending.

Our strategy worked — and continues to do so.

Greater transparency helped Coburn and Tea Party allies in Congress secure a 10-year moratorium on congressional earmarks starting in 2011, and in 2012 achieve the first year-to-year reduction in federal spending since the end of the Korean War.

Data and citizen-led accountability helped us overcome the objections of both progressives and big-spending Republican “earmarxists” to save taxpayers more than $100 billion.

But the USASpending.gov website only gets us partway to full, real-time transparency.

It collects information on government contracts and grants, letting users see in broad strokes the spending decisions of the past.

But its data is partial and lags outlays by 30 days or even longer.

In today’s information environment, speed and accuracy are essential for a reality-based spending debate.

The payment system is where the sausage truly gets made as the government’s proverbial checks are cut to vendors and individuals.

“America’s Checkbook” would make it easier to detect when improper payments are made — and the ability to call out waste, fraud and abuse in real time would be a uniquely powerful tool that any citizen could use.

President Trump has given DOGE an 18-month mission, but whatever its result, the accountability project he has started will be required in perpetuity.

Creating “America’s Checkbook” now will put immense political pressure on future administrations: Any efforts to switch it off would effectively debank us.

Once we open the federal books, it will be near impossible to shut them again.

This is a 1989 moment for America: We have an opportunity to tear down the bureaucratic wall that has separated We the People from our government.

As George Will has put it, we’ve been living through a 100-year constitutional crisis courtesy of know-it-all progressives who created an administrative state to save us from ourselves.

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What do you think? Post a comment.

Crowd-sourcing oversight will shift the balance of power away from the bureaucracy and back to individuals.   

“America’s Checkbook” will give citizens a megaphone and silence critics.

It will prove our leaders’ confidence in the wisdom of We the People, our system of checks and balances and the genius of America’s founders. (Make DOGE stick: Let taxpayers monitor America's checkbook.)

Former aides to President Barack Obama admitted on an episode of "Pod Save America" they should have done "some of the stuff" President Donald Trump is doing with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

When discussing DOGE’s initiatives to cut federal spending, the "Obama bros" admitted to "lamenting" their situation. Jon Lovett, a former Obama speechwriter, implied he "didn’t know" they could make government so efficient. 

"Honestly, some of this is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should’ve done. We didn’t know you could do some of this," Lovett said. 

Jon Favreau, also a former Obama speechwriter, shared Lovett’s frustration, admitting the Obama administration tried to cut through bureaucracy and create government efficiency, but "it’s hard to do."

"We all know that government is slow. We all know government can be inefficient. We all know that the bureaucracy can be bloated. We all worked in the White House. We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It's hard to do," Favreau said. 

The liberal podcasters also complained about the federal government’s technology during the Obama era. 

"The technology in the federal government, at least when we were there, [was bad]. There was no service in the basement of the West Wing. You couldn't use your phone because there was no service." Favreau added. 

"Pod Save America" did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on which DOGE initiatives the Obama administration should have done. 

The podcast episode was released ahead of Trump signing an executive order on Tuesday directing agencies to coordinate with DOGE to reduce the size of the federal government. The executive order is the latest in a slew of government slashes these past few weeks, which have targeted everything from DEI funding to migrant hotel bills. 

The "Obama Bros" have been on the media circuit in recent weeks, directing Democrats on how to politically engage during Trump’s second term. Former Obama spokesman and "Pod Save America" co-host Tommy Vietor joined "Jesse Watters Primetime" last month to discuss the future of the Democratic Party.  (‘Obama Bros’ on DOGE: ‘Some of the stuff we should’ve done’. Also see “The DOGE team zeroes out the National Endowment for Democracy”, Inside FEMA’s sickening history of misspending billions of taxpayers’ dollars — and going largely unchecked, Fed up GOP congressman dispels liberal 'lies' against DOGE in letter to constituents.)

A $20 billion Biden administration green-energy slush fund was collecting interest at a private bank and is being distributed without proper oversight, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin reveals in an exclusive interview.

President Joe Biden’s EPA parked $20 billion at the financial institution, which The Post has learned is Citibank, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. But the awardees weren’t announced until August 2024 and Citibank was not brought in until September — after Biden’s disastrous June debate performance led him to withdraw from his re-election effort in July, making for a very different race with Vice President Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee.

Zeldin’s team is looking into whether former EPA employees are working at any of the grantees, which include the Opportunity Finance Network (receiving $2.29 billion), where vice president Laura Silverman says she brings “economic, financial, and social justice to communities,” and the Native CDFI Network ($400 million), which has featured Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as a speaker. Power Forward Communities, a $2 billion recipient, has no list of employees on its website — but does have openings for government affairs VP, communications VP and special assistant.

The others: Climate United Fund (which got the biggest grant, nearly $7 billion), Coalition for Green Capital ($5 billion), Inclusiv ($1.87 billion), Justice Climate Fund ($940 million) and Appalachian Community Capital ($500 million).

Here Lee Zeldin tells The Post’s Kelly Jane Torrance why it was “a high priority for me and my great team to get to the bottom of these questions as quickly as possible.”

This was on our radar during the transition, when the video was posted online at the beginning of December of the Biden EPA political appointee admitting on camera they were “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”

To us, that very obviously meant the “gold bars” were tax dollars and “off the Titanic” meant they were wasting it — and they knew it.

That was causing a lot of sirens to go off. It was a frequent topic of conversation in my meetings with senators — we spoke about accountability of funding during my confirmation hearing. I committed during my hearing to making this a top priority as soon as I got in, and our team has been planning for what has been months now to be able to hit the ground running and jump all over this urgent situation the moment we came into office.

So this was an all-in, top-priority effort that has instantly been yielding very important results for the taxpayers — and we’re just getting started.

This was a deliberate rush job meant to obligate all this funding with less oversight. In that video, the Biden EPA political appointee was talking multiple times about “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” and at one point also talks about how they are giving out billions of dollars to these recipient NGOs with an eye towards getting themselves jobs at them — which added a whole other layer of massive concern.

As they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic, this $20 billion pot was sent to a financial institution outside government, which was collecting interest.

The $20 billion only goes to eight entities, and we want to know if any of those eight entities have any recently employed Biden administration officials and EPA employees.

But that’s just the start of the questions, not the end of it. We also want to know the same question as it relates to all the ultimate recipients of all the funding that was rushed out the door pre-inauguration. That’s where the biggest flag was raised in the video.

Every grant is equal. We’re doing a review of everything and reviewing all the contractual agreements.

And we’re going to explore every option that’s available to us as it relates to every dollar the bank currently has: We are going to seek it to be returned to the EPA, and the first step is establishing control of those funds.

But we’re going to walk and chew gum and continue our review — and in many, many other respects — simultaneously.

As far as exact dollar amounts of each of the eight pots, we want to know not just how much has been sent but also how much has been obligated and how much is currently available and not yet obligated.

These questions highlight one of the concerns with the lack of oversight with this scheme — these questions should all be instantly available and handy for us to have the answers on. They’re not.

And there are many, many other questions that we have that we are going to get answered.

I want to highlight there’s zero evidence whatsoever of anything being done improperly by the bank.

This was an arrangement the EPA sought out, working with the Biden Treasury Department to park $20 billion outside of government and that deliberately resulted in less transparency, accountability and oversight.

And I committed to Congress and the American people during my confirmation hearing that I would do everything in my power if confirmed to ensure there wasn’t any waste and abuse and I was going to get to the bottom of all of these funds. This is something that is a highest concern and priority for us.

We have very high confidence that this is just the tip of the iceberg. (EPA head Lee Zeldin reveals no real oversight of shocking $20 billion waste Biden administration funneled through Citibank.)

Billionaire oligarchs such as George and Alexander Soros, retired military and intelligence officials, globalists such as Klaus Schwab, and a phalanx of attorneys to fleece American taxpayers to fund anti-freedom, anti-family, and anti-national sovereignty statist programs and nongovernmental “not-for-profit” organizations with the common goal of suppressing dissent, impoverishing and enslaving the masses to the yoke of a national surveillance and though suppression machine by using the very taxes are coerced to pay these draconian schemes. and make them complicit in the destruction of their own legitimate liberty and in the confiscation of their own money, which the elite believes belong to them, not to the peons who earned it honestly.

It is that simple.

The common good?

Never.

The common temporal good undertaken with respect to the pursuit of man’s Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven?

How is it possible not to understand that nations that are reduced to the secular or naturalistic lowest common denominator must be doomed to the fate described by Pope Pius Leo III in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900?

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). 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.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, explained that we had to reject the false doctrines of the day, which false doctrines have an even stronger hold on Catholics now than they did nearly one hundred twenty-seven years ago now. We must come to realize that each of the problems of Modernity is the result of the rejection of the Catholic Faith as the one and only foundation of personal and social order and that we have an obligation to be informed about this truth and to help others to accept it:

Doctrines [Modern doctrines on the separation of Church and State and civil liberty] such as these, which cannot be approved by human reason, and most seriously affect the whole civil order, Our predecessors the Roman Pontiffs (well aware of what their apostolic office required of them) have never allowed to pass uncondemned. Thus, Gregory XVI in his encyclical letter "Mirari Vos," dated August 15, 1832, inveighed with weighty words against the sophisms which even at his time were being publicly inculcated-namely, that no preference should be shown for any particular form of worship; that it is right for individuals to form their own personal judgments about religion; that each man's conscience is his sole and allsufficing guide; and that it is lawful for every man to publish his own views, whatever they may be, and even to conspire against the State. On the question of the separation of Church and State the same Pontiff writes as follows: "Nor can We hope for happier results either for religion or for the civil government from the wishes of those who desire that the Church be separated from the State, and the concord between the secular and ecclesiastical authority be dissolved. It is clear that these men, who yearn for a shameless liberty, live in dread of an agreement which has always been fraught with good, and advantageous alike to sacred and civil interests." To the like effect, also, as occasion presented itself, did Pius IX brand publicly many false opinions which were gaining ground, and afterwards ordered them to be condensed in summary form in order that in this sea of error Catholics might have a light which they might safely follow. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity that makes no place for Christ the King and His true and that is premised upon a belief that men can pursue the common temporal good solely by the use of their own unaided powers must result in a dictatorship of the apparatchiks that is exercised in the name of “the people” under the banners of “equality.” We have gone from arguing the inarguable (supernatural and natural truths over which contingent beings have no authority and which are defied by those contingent beings to the detriment of themselves and their nations) to making that which is false so inarguable that all truth, supernatural and natural, must be suppressed.

Let it not be said about us that we were ignorant about First and Last Things or that we enabled career politicians to conserve the welfare state, which is but the logical result of the false premises of the modern civil state.

We must always keep uppermost in our minds that our sins have worsened the state of the Church Militant on earth and the state-of-the world in general, which is why we must always seek to make reparation for our own sins as well as for those of the whole world and to pray for the conversion of everyone in public life as there is not one—as in no one—figure in public life who believes in the primacy of Christ the King and His Catholic Church over men and their nations in all that pertains the good of souls. We must hate only the devil, sin, especially our own sins, and the promotion of sin as we pray fervently for the conversion of one and all, starting with our own daily conversion from worldliness and self-absorption to detachment and a pure love of God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through his true Church.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous, whose religious name was Sister Marie-Bernarde, explained in 1871 how Our Lord was using the heretical and Masonic Prussians to punish the French for their sinful and revolutionary ways. Francis Parkinson Keyes described this in her book, Bernadette: Maid of Lourdes:

The Franco-Prussian War affected her poignantly, as indeed it affect the entire congregation. Its member did not remain withdrawn from the conflict, as a cloistered Order could do, to some extent. In 1870 the Sisters of Nevers at the four Houses in Paris obtained permission from the Superior General to remain at their posts throughout the siege. They considered this the greatest favor which could be shown the, since it gave them a chance of dying in the performance of their duties and thus testifying to the faith that was in them. They were entirely self-forgetful, devoting themselves, day and night, to bandaging the wounded, nursing the sick, and consoling the dying. Several of them succumbed to typhus and smallpox, which they caught from their patients. Their heroic example, even more than their pious precepts, resulted in numerous conversions and many “Christian deaths” were attributed to them.

From afar, Marie Bernard followed the consecrated task of her successful Sisters. She withdrew more and more into the silences which solaced her. There was nothing she herself could do except pray, but she did that. One of her biographers has likened the form and effect of her prayers to the manners and methods of a peasant who, in his youth, served as shepherd at the manor of Villaine, where wild boars constantly threatened the harvest with their ravages. The boy had no weapons. But every evening he took his rustic flute and seated himself on the borderline between the dark forest, whence the danger, and the ripening wheat fields, which glistened like gold under the mellow moon. All night long he sat there and played the simple tunes which were the only ones he knew. But they sufficed. Their melody pierced the silences of the wood and kept the boars away.

To me this comparison is apt as well as exquisite. The young shepherd felt no animosity toward the boars; he did not wish to harm the, only to save the harvest. In like measure, Bernadette did not feel too harshly toward the Prussians. “I know they are doing their duty,” she said sadly, realizing that the soldiers had no choice but to go where they were sent. She seems also to have felt that, to a certain extent, France was expiating its own sins, and that it must work out its own salvation. The Third Empire was a period of great luxury and frivolity; the cloister and the court were inevitably far apart, and in many religious circles that was a strong conviction that just chastisements was being meted out.

One day in late October, the pale autumnal sky was suddenly flooded with dark lurid red, the color of blood. Its effect and its symbolism were unmistakable. The entire community at Nevers assembled on the terrace to watch it and to wait anxiously for its passing. Some of the Sisters were terribly frightened. Bernadette was not among these. But as she gazed at the strange somber clouds, she accepted them unquestioningly as an omen and a warning.

“And to think,” she exclaimed sadly and compassionately, “that there are still people who resist conversion!”

Tumult of a sort had taken possession of her quiet soul. But still she was not frightened even when the Prussians came closer and closer to Nevers. The Chevalier Gougenot des Mousseaux, who came to break the bad news, received a negative answer when he asked her if she were not alarmed. She spoke with such obvious tranquility and sincerity that he went on questioning her, his curiosity and his admiration both aroused.

“So you think there is nothing to fear?”

“I am afraid only of bad Catholics.”

“Really? Not anything else at all?”

“No, Monsieur.”

She meant it. Perhaps her courage, which proved contagious, played its own small part in saving Never, for danger has a way of retreating before those who confront it calmly and casually, where it pounces mercilessly on those who cower before it. Be that as it may, the Prussian advance was checked. The alien army, which had been sweeping over the countryside, leaving death and disaster in its wake, never succeeded in entering Nevers. But Bernadette did not gloat over its escape. She continued to center her concern on soldiers' souls rather than on their successes.

“Oh!” she wrote to the Superior of the Hospice at Lourdes. “We should weep rather than rejoice to see our unfortunate country so blind and so obdurate. Let us pray constantly for these poor sinners that they may be converted. Let us ask Our Saviour and the Blessed Virgin to change these savage wolves into gentle sheep.”

In mind and spirit she was still very close to the hillside at Bartres after all. Another young girl—Joan of Domremy—had tended flocks before she had saved France. Bernadette did not know that she belonged in Joan's glorious company and in the glorious company of Heaven, where, no doubt, Joan was among the first to welcome her. But she did know that the Saviour of all the world was also the Good Shepherd, that He would protect His flock, and that He would draw into the fold again all those who had strayed far from it but who returned penitently, seeking salvation. (Francis Parkinson Keyes, Bernadette: Maid of Lourdes, Julian Messner, Inc., pp.115-117.)

We should be afraid only of being a bad Catholic. After all, did not Our Lord Himself tell us the following?

Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of men. For they will deliver you up in councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. And you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles: But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.

The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come. The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?

Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me. (Matthew 10: 16-40.)

These words apply to us. Here and now.

As we continue to pray for a true pope to be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter on this great solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, remembering the whole Church was breaking for Saint Peter to rescued from his chains (a feast that is celebrated on August 1 with the same lesson as found in today’s Holy Mass), we need to keep focused on First and Last Things.

Indeed, although the readership of this site is negligible, something about which I have never had any illusions (I mean, the printed version of Christ or Chaos only had a little over three hundred subscribers at its height between 1996 and 2003, and many of those were complimentary!), I use the work that is published on this site to try to help readers to see the world through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith without being agitated by the events of the world, each of which are being used by God to direct men’s attention to Him and to get them to rely ever more faithfully upon the maternal intercession of His Most Blessed Mother, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary and by offering up unto Him whatever merit we earn from the patient endurance of our crosses during this most remarkable times as the consecrated slaves of His Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

It is a privilege to alive in these times to work out our salvation in fear and in trembling as members of the true Church. May Our Lady protect us now and at the hour our death as she protected the twin pillars of the Church of the Rome, our first pope, Saint Peter, and the Apostle of the Gentiles, Saint Paul, to the point of shedding their blood for the sake of Our King, Christ the King, at the hands of the same kind of statist pagans with whom we are confronted today.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

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.