To the Precipice and Over the Cliff of Nihilism and Self-Annihilation

As is so frequently noted on this site, we are living at a time when the twin, inter-related forces of Judeo-Masonic Modernity and the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism have produced a world steeped in paganism and awash in the blood of innocent human beings. What should be the safest of all places in human existence, the sanctuary of a mother’s womb, has become one of the dangerous places for innocent human lives, and what should be places of health and healing, hospitals, are now places where innocent lives can be snuffed out at any time after birth for a variety of utilitarian reasons.

Moreover, there are marauding savages who drive the highways without regard to the safety of others and who gather with others in mobs to attack innocent victims at random. There is no safe refuge anywhere during this time of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Then again, we should expect nothing less when men do not know who they are in light of Who has created and redeemed them and thus do not see the Divine impress in themselves, no less in all others. Very few people know to treat others as we would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Himself in the very Flesh as they are ignorant of His Sacred Teaching and may even be contemptuous of any mention of His Holy Name. Paganism and barbarism hold sway in this mad world of ours where what was unthinkable fifty years ago has become commonplace and where all that is immoral and unjust is considered eminently just.

This random violence has caught the attention of the United States Department of Justice, which has labeled these barbaric acts with the label of nihilistic violent extremism:

As Americans continue to witness senseless violence throughout their communities, the rise of nihilistic violence is raising alarms for law enforcement as officials try to prevent attacks that often come without warning following a mass shooting in New York City that left four dead last month. 

The concept of nihilistic violence – acts lacking an ideological motive and often driven by a need to gain approval in extremist online communities – remains a key conversation whenever a mass tragedy is carried out.  

"Nihilistic violence is destruction for its own sake," Jonathan Alpert, a New York City-based psychotherapist, told Fox News Digital. "It isn’t about money, ideology, or revenge; rather, it’s violence born of emptiness."

"Other acts of violence, however twisted, usually have a motive that can be identified," he said. "Nihilistic violence is different because the act itself is the message: a statement of meaninglessness, a way of saying ‘nothing matters, so I’ll be destructive.’"

In 2024, 65% of terrorist attacks carried out in Western countries were not associated with any belief system of the perpetrator, marking a significant rise compared with data from previous years, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index. 

The report acknowledges that a portion of the increase can be attributed to a lack of information regarding specific attacks; it also likely indicates a rise of "ideologically confused" acts of terrorism. 

However, the inability to tie an attack to a well-defined belief system could represent a terrorist’s decision to combine numerous ideologies in an attempt to justify their acts of violence, according to the report. 

"This approach complicates counterterrorism efforts," the report states. "As it makes these actors unpredictable and harder to profile."  

The rise of random, unprovoked violence has also caught the attention of law enforcement. 

The Department of Justice has named the concept "Nihilistic Violent Extremism" (NVE), while recently defining it as "criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability," according to Just Security.  

The DOJ’s definition points to a broader concept of nihilistic violence being carried out solely for the sake of committing an attack, with experts indicating a specific psychological profile is often consistent among perpetrators. 

"The common thread is alienation and despair," Alpert said. "These are people who feel invisible, powerless, or irrelevant. In that state, violence becomes a way to exist, to be noticed, to make a statement. It’s a perverse attempt to transform inner emptiness into outward impact." 

Wallace Chadwick, a Virginia police lieutenant and former gang detective, cites the difficulties law enforcement officers face when trying to get ahead of random violence before it is committed. 

"It’s very difficult to predict things that are happening," Chadwick told Fox News Digital. "With this random violence, [like if] you get somebody who shows up in Times Square with a firearm, it’s hard to predict." 

However, Chadwick also echoed the same sentiments regarding a common mental profile among attackers. 

"These people have precursors," Chadwick said. "I believe there's somebody that knows that this person is disturbed [or] this person has made mention that they wanted to do something. It goes back to the rules, if you see something, say something." 

Regarding recent instances of nihilistic violence, Alpert looks to the July 28 mass shooting in a New York City office building that left four innocent people – along with the gunman – dead.

The tragedy unfolded when a gunman walked into 345 Park Ave., an office building that is home to Blackstone and the NFL, and opened fire. The shooter struck three individuals in the building’s lobby before taking the elevator to the 33rd floor, where he shot a fourth person before turning the gun on himself. 

"When someone decides life has no value, they often conclude that other lives don’t either," Alpert said. "Violence then becomes a way to make their hopelessness visible to the world." 

While officials believe the shooting was rooted in the gunman’s feelings toward the NFL, while also revealing he traveled from Las Vegas to New York City to carry out the attack, Alpert points to the overall lack of an agenda from the perpetrator. 

"The randomness of the attack suggests this wasn’t about settling a score or advancing a cause," Alpert told Fox News Digital. "It was despair projected outward." 

As data suggests an ongoing trend upward in randomized, nihilistic violence, Alpert said the looming threat of an attack is eroding Americans’ sense of safety within their communities. 

"They’re more frightening because if there’s no motive, there’s no way to protect yourself," he said. "Gang violence or political violence has targets. Nihilistic violence, by contrast, says anyone can be a victim, anywhere, at any time. That unpredictability shatters the sense of safety we rely on in public spaces."  (Nihilistic violence rises as random attacks alarm law enforcement.)

Nihilistic violence, though, is what must happen when men who are bereft of even any rudimentary understanding of First and Last Things and thus do not see the Divine impress within their own immortal souls nor in those of others and who do not understand that all the problems in the world, both personal and social, are caused by Original Sin and the Actual Sins of men. Men who do not live in the shadow of the Holy Cross and thus do not live in light of eternity can never accept misfortune, rejection, pain, illness, discomfort, and injustices, whether real or perceived, personal and social, and must be prone to a sense of despair that leads to mindless acts of violence that are inspired, whether directly or indirectly, by the adversary himself, who probably has more direct possession of souls today than we would like to think is the case.

The rise of supposedly random acts of violence, though, did not occur overnight as they are but the consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King by the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent rise and institutionalization of Judeo-Masonry. Pope Leo XIII explained that nihilism and anarchy had begun to become part of a secularized civil order wherein “public life is stained with crime”:

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.)

There is no naturalistic, electoral, political or legal way out of the mess in which we find ourselves. We are witnessing the manifestation of the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles, a degeneration that includes social decadence and nihilism.

Speaking about the decadence in the supposedly “free” West in his famous commencement address on June 6, 1978, at Harvard University, “A World Split Apart,” the Nobel Laureate Russian nationalist and Soviet dissident, Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, observed that what passes for “civilization” in the West hangs by slender threads:

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being.

Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?  (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts .)

The Nobel Laureate gave this address nearly eleven months after riots had broken out in the Borough of Brooklyn in the City of New York, New York, when the inept utility company, Consolidated Edison, suffered an outage at a power plant in Astoria in the Borough of Queens on Wednesday, July 13, 1977. Solzhenitsyn was saying in his address, in effect, that Americans are in trouble if the only thing keeping the masses from rioting and looting is Consolidated Edison, known colloquially in New York and environs as “Con Ed.”

Neither liberalism (or its variants) nor socialism and its variants are the foundation of social order. Catholicism, though not a guarantor of order given the vagaries of fallen human nature, is alone the only means that can provide men and their nations with the foundation for a just social order, a truth that Solzhenitsyn, whose Russian Orthodoxy caused him to loathe Catholicism, failed to understand or accept.

What we are witnessing at present as groups of rioters, many of whom are well-armed and part of the notorious “Antifa” terrorist group while others have joined in the mayhem simply to promote mayhem, to destroy property, attack police officers, innocent bystanders and store owners while stealing whatever they can from “high end” stores owned by companies that have long promoted
a “progressive” agenda, is the logical result of Modernity’s rejection of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Holy Ghost and a concomitant rejection of His true Church as the one and only foundation of order within the soul and thus within society.

Human nature is wounded, although not entirely corrupted, by Original Sin, leaving the souls of the unbaptized in the grip of the devil and the souls of the baptized with its vestigial after-effects: a darkened intellect, weakened will and the overthrow of the rational, higher faculties in favor of the lower sensual appetites. The Actual Sins of men incline them to sin more and more and to blind them to anything other than what pleases them and their immediate self-interests, no matter how distorted or perverted those self-interests are in the objective order of things.

Men who not seek to reform their lives by confessing their sins to a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and then cooperating with the ineffable graces of the Divine Redeemer’s Most Precious Blood that flow into their souls once a priest utters the words of Absolution or, worse yet, do not even realize that there is any need to so will descend to barbarism over the course of time. There is no turning back the tide of the new barbarians who have been let loose as a direct and inevitable consequence of the fatally flawed belief that men can establish social order without reforming their lives in cooperation with the graces won for them by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and without a due submission in all that pertains to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which the entirety of social order depends.

Pope Leo XIII explained in his second encyclical letter, Quod Apostolici Muneris, December 28, 1878, that the socialist desire for “social” and “economic” equality ran contrary to the very nature of how God has ordered the world for His own greater honor and glory and our salvation, a desire he traced back to its proximate origins with the Protestant Revolution, admitting that Original Sin itself was caused by our first parents’ succumbing to the tempter’s allure to be like unto God in all things, in other words, being God’s very equal:

At the very beginning of Our pontificate, as the nature of Our apostolic office demanded, we hastened to point out in an encyclical letter addressed to you, venerable brethren, the deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibers of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction; at the same time We pointed out also the most effectual remedies by which society might be restored and might escape from the very serious dangers which threaten it. But the evils which We then deplored have so rapidly increased that We are again compelled to address you, as though we heard the voice of the prophet ringing in Our ears: “Cry, cease not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet.”[1] You understand, venerable brethren, that We speak of that sect of men who, under various and almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, or nihilists, and who, spread over all the world, and bound together by the closest ties in a wicked confederacy, no longer seek the shelter of secret meetings, but, openly and boldly marching forth in the light of day, strive to bring to a head what they have long been planning — the overthrow of all civil society whatsoever. (Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris, December 28, 1878.)

Tragic events such as the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, therefore, simply provide a spark to the inflame the masses who do not understand the sins of individual men, including their own, are never the cause to engage in wanton destruction and killing, generally under the cover of darkness, while knowing that they will never be prosecuted for their crimes of destruction, theft and murder because they have the protection of their enablers and abettors in the civil government who always become tongue-tied and paralyzed when confronted by those who are thieves, marauders and killers who commit their crimes in the name of a “social justice” that is a cover for the works of darkness.

Pope Leo XIII’s Quod Apostolici Muneris explained that Sacred Scripture speaks of the sort of people whose bestial nature impel them “defile the flesh, despise dominion and blaspheme majesty”:

Surely these are they who, as the sacred Scriptures testify, “Defile the flesh, despise dominion and blaspheme majesty.”[2] They leave nothing untouched or whole which by both human and divine laws has been wisely decreed for the health and beauty of life. They refuse obedience to the higher powers, to whom, according to the admonition of the Apostle, every soul ought to be subject, and who derive the right of governing from God; and they proclaim the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties. They debase the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, they weaken, or even deliver up to lust. Lured, in fine, by the greed of present goods, which is “the root of all evils which some coveting have erred from the faith,”[3] they assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one’s mode of life. These are the startling theories they utter in their meetings, set forth in their pamphlets, and scatter abroad in a cloud of journals and tracts. Wherefore, the revered majesty and power of kings has won such fierce hatred from their seditious people that disloyal traitors, impatient of all restraint, have more than once within a short period raised their arms in impious attempt against the lives of their own sovereigns. (Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris, December 28, 1878.)

The riotous looters, thieves, marauders, and killers have been taught to live only for sense pleasures and material goodies. They have received this message from the ideological propagandizing of the mainslime media and that they received in however much schooling they decided to undertake. Moreover, the message of material goodies as man’s raison d’etre has been stated repeatedly by many of the Jacobin/Bolshevik “progressives” within the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

To wit, it was at the recommendation of a former professor of mine in 1983, by then a colleague, that I replaced him as a speaker at something called the "First Annual Brooklyn Catholic Charities Congress" on Saturday, May 7, 1983. Among the other speakers were none other than the conciliar “bishop” of Albany, Howard Hubbard, who spoke on the necessity of “economic justice.” It was a pure exercise in naturalism of the false opposite of the "left" from beginning to end. Another speaker was a Sister Amada Miller of the Archdiocese of Detroit, the home of the insidious revolutionary cell named “Call to Action” that was the brainchild of the Modernist named John Cardinal Dearden, who said that poor people needed to be given more material goods to make them happy. (No, I am not making this up! I was there. I heard this with my own thirty-one and one-half year-old ears. My own address, which was a condemnation of the Lockean liberalism upon which the congress was predicated, was not well received, save for three older religious sisters, dressed in their full habits, who applauded furiously.)

Writing in Rerurm Novarum, May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII, explained that human goods do not provide earthly happiness and that the unequal distribution of such goods is just part of the nature of things ordained by God Himself:

17. It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition. As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would not have remained wholly idle; but that which would then have been his free choice and his delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience. “Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life.”[5]

18. In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on earth; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must accompany man so long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let them strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there are who pretend differently — who hold out to a hard-pressed people the boon of freedom from pain and trouble, an undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment — they delude the people and impose upon them, and their lying promises will only one day bring forth evils worse than the present. Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek elsewhere, as We have said, for the solace to its troubles.

19. The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice. (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.)

Pope Pius XI made much the same point in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, noting that men no longer acted as brothers to other men, but “as strangers, and even enemies,” that should resonate with us at all times:

Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14) . . . . (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Catholicism is the one and only foundation for all legitimate social order

Pope Pius XI made the same point in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

Since the Church is the safe and sure guide to conscience, for to her safe-keeping alone there has been confided the doctrines and the promise of the assistance of Christ, she is able not only to bring about at the present hour a peace that is truly the peace of Christ, but can, better than any other agency which We know of, contribute greatly to the securing of the same peace for the future, to the making impossible of war in the future. For the Church teaches (she alone has been given by God the mandate and the right to teach with authority) that not only our acts as individuals but also as groups and as nations must conform to the eternal law of God. In fact, it is much more important that the acts of a nation follow God's law, since on the nation rests a much greater responsibility for the consequences of its acts than on the individual.

When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.

It is apparent from these considerations that true peace, the peace of Christ, is impossible unless we are willing and ready to accept the fundamental principles of Christianity, unless we are willing to observe the teachings and obey the law of Christ, both in public and private life. If this were done, then society being placed at last on a sound foundation, the Church would be able, in the exercise of its divinely given ministry and by means of the teaching authority which results therefrom, to protect all the rights of God over men and nations. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

In other words, Catholicism is the sole source of human sanctification and the legitimate teacher of men, and thus possesses the sole ability to provide the foundation for a social order that can be as just as possible in a world filled with fallen men, a point that Pope Pius XI reiterated in his encyclical letter commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the issuance of Rerum Novarum, Quadregesimo Anno, May 15, 1931:

127. Yet, if we look into the matter more carefully and more thoroughly, we shall clearly perceive that, preceding this ardently desired social restoration, there must be a renewal of the Christian spirit, from which so many immersed in economic life have, far and wide, unhappily fallen away, lest all our efforts be wasted and our house be builded not on a rock but on shifting sand.[62]

128. And so, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Sons, having surveyed the present economic system, We have found it laboring under the gravest of evils. We have also summoned Communism and Socialism again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified, to wander far from the precepts of the Gospel.

129. "Wherefore," to use the words of Our Predecessor, "if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it."[63] For this alone can provide effective remedy for that excessive care for passing things that is the origin of all vices; and this alone can draw away men's eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixed on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven. Who would deny that human society is in most urgent need of this cure now?

130. Minds of all, it is true, are affected almost solely by temporal upheavals, disasters, and calamities. But if we examine things critically with Christian eyes, as we should, what are all these compared with the loss of souls? Yet it is not rash by any means to say that the whole scheme of social and economic life is now such as to put in the way of vast numbers of mankind most serious obstacles which prevent them from caring for the one thing necessary; namely, their eternal salvation. (Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.)

Most men today are more concerned about the acquisition or possible loss of wealth once attained than they are about their immortal souls as they have “excessive care passing things that” are “the origin of all vices.” Only the true Faith can draw “men’s eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixated on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven.”

Unfortunately, most men today, including many Catholics, do indeed deny that human society is in urgent need of the remedy that only Holy Mother Church can provide. Men who believe that they are descended from apes will come to act like them over the course of time. The ideology of biological evolutionism leads inexorably to the devolution of men and their societies into conditions of chaos, violence, and the worst kind of self-seeking that the world has ever seen. We are seeing this unfold before our very eyes in the irrational, self-destructive violence and destruction that has ravaged cities governed by socialists who live like the thugs of yore in their own personal lives and chuckle at the “misfortune” of small business owners whose property has been damaged, perhaps irreparably, and the survivors of the victims whose relatives have been killed by the raging mobs that are in the grip of the devil himself.

Those who live with a lawless disregard for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law will come to celebrate violence committed by deranged people who seek to “solve” this or that problem, something that we saw eight months with the targeted execution of United Health chief executive officer Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione outside of the New York Hilton hotel at 1335 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) in the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, New York, on December 4, 2024, the Feast of Saint Peter Chrysologus and the Commemoration of Saint Barbara. Mangione has become a cult hero for many young people, who, not living under the shadow of the Holy Cross and not seeing the image of the Divine Redeemer Himself in all others, believe that targeted executions of those they deemed to be “guilty” are not only justifiable but socially necessary.

The situation is so inverted today that over 2.5 million have signed a petition to ask for “leniency” for an illegal immigrant who was driving with a commercial driver’s license (CDL) in Florida issued by the People’s Republic of California when he made an illegal U-Turn on the Flordia Turnpike near Fort Pierce, Florida, in a tractor-trailer that killed three people in a minivan whose driver had no chance to stop as the big rig attempted to complete the illegal maneuver:

A petition urging Florida officials to show leniency toward Harjinder Singh, an illegal immigrant truck driver accused of causing a crash that killed three people, has garnered nearly 2.5 million signatures as of Sunday afternoon.

The petition — posted on the website Change.org and addressed to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — calls for both DeSantis and the Florida Board of Executive Clemency to re-examine the case against the 28-year-old. Singh faces three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of manslaughter in connection with the deadly Aug. 12 crash.

Harjinder Singh, 28, an illegal immigrant, was operating a commercial semi-truck with a trailer on the Florida Turnpike in Fort Pierce when he allegedly attempted a U-turn in an unauthorized area. The trailer jackknifed and collided with a minivan, killing all three of its passengers, according to officials.

Singh was arrested in Stockton, California, on Aug. 16 and later extradited to Florida. Investigators determined that he and his passenger, Harneet Singh, fled to Sacramento the day after the crash, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

On Saturday, a Florida judge denied bond to Singh, ruling that he is an unauthorized alien and a substantial flight risk. St. Lucie County Judge Lauren Sweet also found probable cause for all six charges against Singh and classified them as forcible felonies under Florida law.

"This was a tragic accident — not a deliberate act," the petition states. "While accountability matters, the severity of the charges against him does not align with the circumstances of the incident."

If convicted, the petition requests that Singh receive a "proportionate and reasonable" sentence, that parole eligibility be granted after part of his sentence is served and that alternatives to incarceration — like counseling or community service — be considered.

Authorities said Singh crossed into the U.S. illegally in 2018 via the southern border, later obtaining a commercial driver's license in California. He attempted to obtain work authorization, but it was rejected by the first Trump administration on Sept. 14, 2020, according to Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that the U.S. is halting work visas for foreign commercial truck drivers, a move praised by conservatives in the wake of the deadly crash. (Nearly 2.5M sign petition for illegal immigrant truck driver in fatal crash.)

Leniency.

What did Harjinder Singh did on August 12, 2025, the Feast of Saint Clare of Assisi, was not an accident. He chose to violate a sign, marked with the universal signage of no U-Turn for which one does not need to read English to understand, forbidding the action he undertook and he did so without any regard for the fact that motorists on the other side of the highway would have no chance to stop before he complete his illegal action. Singh had reckless disregard for human life, and then he compounded the situation by leaving the scene of the accident and fleeing to Gavin Newsom’s sanctuary state of California, from which officials of the State of Florida had to extradite him.

Leniency?

Yes, in our world turned upside down because of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry illegal immigrants can do no wrong and must be indemnified when their crimes cannot be denied simply because they are illegal immigrants, a variation of the longstanding attitude of so-called “criminal justice reformers,” such as County of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, that recidivist violent criminals must not be required to post bail after committing violent acts nor be subject to a vigorous prosecution fitting the nature of their crimes as to do would be to deprive perpetrators of their “freedom” even though more and more innocent people will suffer consequently. As readers of this site know very well, such wanton disregard for the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment are the direct result of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century and the subsequent rise of the religiously indifferentist Judeo-Masonic civil state of Modernity, It is a slippery slope from Protestantism to religious indifferentism, and from religious indifferent to atheism, and from atheism to anti-Theism. Men will have no regard for the lives and property of others if they do not see in each other the Divine impress and treat each other as they would treat the Divine Saviour in the very Flesh.

The contemporary disregard for the inviolability of all innocent human life has manifested itself very clearly in the daily slaughter of the preborn, both by chemical and surgical means, as well as in the institutionalization of in vitro fertilization, the medical industry’s manufactured, profit-making myth of “brain death,” the “starvation and dehydration of brain-damaged human beings, palliative care/hospice, euthanasia, forced euthanasia, suicide, assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide and in a myriad of other ways, Most of these attacks upon human life have been promoted by secular Jewish organizations, whose attorneys have been in the forefront of judicial edicts and legislative enactments that have resulted in the acceptance of sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance as “acts of mercy” that constitute “core” human “rights” and thus can and must be defended and celebrated throughout what passes for popular culture.

Indeed, in vitro fertilization itself is said to be responsible for over a quarter of a billon deaths since was institutionalized following the 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby”:

The in vitro fertilization business has likely directly killed 270 million unborn children or more since the beginning of the process in 1978, LifeSiteNews has estimated.

A new academic paper in Fertility and Sterility estimates there were around 13 million babies born through “Assisted Reproductive Technology,” or ART, between 1978 to 2018. While there are other forms of ART that do not necessarily involve the creation of extra embryos, IVF is used 99 percent of the time when referring to “reproductive technology.” The first person was born from IVF in England in 1978.

The authors estimated that another four million or so babies have been born through IVF between 2018 to 2024. The authors acknowledge their data is not complete, due to spottiness in record keeping across different countries. However, their final number is “13–17 million infants” born via IVF since 1978.

“This large number of infants born from both conventional and innovative applications of ART confirms that ART has helped millions of people realize parenthood, is now mainstream medicine, has had a significant societal impact, including novel family formation, and highlighted inequities regarding [so-called] reproductive rights and access to care,” the researchers claim.

While some factions of the pro-life or conservative movement would view this as a positive sign, because, they argue, these are people who had children, the truth is much grimmer.

This is because a low estimate is that IVF requires the intentional killing of at least 16 human embryonic children for every baby born.

270+ million embryos destroyed through IVF

Every IVF cycle typically involves the direct killing of at least three embryos, although the number could be larger. For example, Reproductive Medicine Associates, an IVF facility, says a typical cycle of 19 eggs will yield about 12 embryos. About six of these will develop far enough to be considered for implantation. The facility whitewashes over this, but it says that of these six, three will be considered “normal” and thus viable for implantation.

Left unsaid is that the other three are often discarded. A study in the United Kingdom similarly found “almost half of embryos used to help a women conceive through in vitro fertilization were thrown away during or after the process.”

According to pro-abortion, pro-IVF MedPage Today, “discarding embryos is inherent to the IVF process.” Indeed, even a “normal” embryo that is implanted may still lead to an abortion if the embryo develops into a twin.

“Additionally, if IVF results in a multifetal pregnancy, professional guidance recommends reducing [killing] the number of fetuses to have a safer pregnancy,” MedPage Today reports.

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“Extra” embryos are often discarded, according to a “fertility clinic director” who told MedPage “99% of the time, when people are done with family building and have no need for any remaining embryos, they opt to have them discarded.”

However, even this underestimates the problem, because it can take six or more cycles of IVF to get one born-alive baby. So the discarded embryos come after multiple cycles. “On average, research has shown that about 65.3% of patients, or two-thirds, have a successful outcome after six or more IVF cycles,” Pinnacle Fertility states.

For this estimate, LifeSiteNews erred on the side of caution and assumed that a woman used five cycles of IVF. The real number is likely much higher, although we do not know the average number of cycles used throughout the years in every country.

But a couple that wanted one child from IVF would end up directly killing 16 human embryonic children. They would use five cycles (as a low estimate) to get one healthy, born-alive baby. In the first four cycles, we assume they end up with six potentially viable embryos but kill three due to perceived “defects.” The other three are not carried to term. In the fifth cycle, they successfully implant and give birth to one baby and may have one or two “viable” embryos left, which they then discard. They have also already discarded three embryos deemed not “viable” in this cycle.

The truth: IVF is no better than abortion

There is then no real difference between aborting a baby growing in his mother’s womb because of prenatal genetic testing and discarding a frozen embryo because a lab predicts he might be predisposed to cancer or diabetes or the parents are done with the humans they created.

Unfortunately, segments of the conservative movement do not see the clear eugenics and pro-abortion angle to the IVF industry.

President Donald Trump, for example, ordered his administration to come up with a way to expand “access” to this embryo-destroying procedure in a February executive order. The good news is that the changes may have been killed – a May due date came and went without much fanfare. Reportedly, the plan to mandate IVF coverage is dead due to legal constraints.

This is great news, as “free” IVF would intentionally kill 2.4 million babies per year, twice that killed through legal abortion.

Still, there are elements of the Republican Party, even those generally considered pro-life, who are either blind to the moral problems or are intentionally looking the other way as a matter of political expediency.

Soon after the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the basic pro-life principle that babies are worthy of legal protection inside and outside of the womb, Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Katie Britt rushed to declare a “right” to IVF.”

Cruz, a Texas Republican, teamed up with Britt, an Alabama Republican, to push failed legislation that would strip all Medicaid health insurance funds from states that restricted access to the procedure.

However, it is clear that every pro-life individual should be opposed to IVF. We rightly weep for the millions of innocent human babies who are mercilessly killed through abortion.

We should do the same for the millions of humans killed through in vitro fertilization. (IVF has killed more than 250 million human embryos since 1978: analysis.)

It is this narcissistic and sentimentally-driven belief that led certain scientists who have no regard for the laws of God to create a “market” for the infertile by means of in vitro fertilization. This immoral process of creating a human being outside of the laws ordained by God was based on the expectation that untold thousands of fertilized human embryos, who are human beings, will die before being implanted within a woman’s uterus. Perhaps it should be noted that it came to pass that artificially fertilized human beings were implanted in the wombs of “surrogate” mothers. A very profitable money-making industry was created to cater to human sentiment in an era when people are indifferent to, ignorant or just plain hostile to the laws ordained by God.

A 2015 news story about this supposed biological breakthrough recounted the story, which includes a matter-of-fact statement that in vitro fertilization has made it possible for “same sex” couples and “single mothers” to have children without being at all cognizant of the fact this monstrous development has been and continues to be yet  another phase in the realization of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

In July 1978 Louise Brown was hailed as the world's first "test-tube baby", born through the fertility treatment IVF. But how does her story compare with modern procedures?

"On the day I was born, my mum had to be taken to the operating theatre for her Caesarean section in pitch darkness, with just a torchlight showing the way," Louise Brown explains.

"Only a few staff knew who she was, and my parents didn't want others realising her identity and tipping off the newspapers."

Louise's birth was cloaked in secrecy. Even her father John's first visit to see her in Oldham General Hospital was under the eye of police officers, who lined the corridor outside.

The reason was that his daughter, from Bristol, had become the world's first "test-tube baby", as the press hailed her.

More accurately, she was the first to be born through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), a process in which an egg is removed from the woman's ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory, before being implanted into the uterus.

It is a treatment used to enable couples with a range of fertility problems to conceive a child, and now allows same-sex couples and single mothers to have children too.

Technological advancements mean - according to 2013 estimates - more than five million people worldwide have been born through this process.

But in 1978 it was highly experimental, and Dr Mike Macnamee, chief executive at the world's first IVF clinic - Bourn Hall in Cambridge - believes Louise "really was a miracle".

The two men who pioneered the treatment - gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Robert Edwards - "had gone through hundreds of embryo transfers before Louise was conceived", he adds.

The pair had joined forces a full 10 years earlier, with skills that perfectly complemented one another - Edwards having developed a way to fertilise human eggs within the laboratory and Steptoe having devised a method for obtaining the eggs from the ovaries.

When Louise's mother Lesley was put in contact with Steptoe by her doctor, she was warned there was a "one in a million" chance of success.

So when it worked, it was such a momentous scientific advancement that the birth had to be filmed - under agreement with the government - to give documented evidence that Louise was indeed her mother's.

Even before her mother was able to hold her newborn, Louise had undergone around 60 different tests to ensure she was "normal".

This is a far cry from modern procedures, which - owing much to the work of Bourn Hall in the 1980s - follow a refined and well-established clinical process.

"Once they [Steptoe and Edwards] worked out how to fertilise the egg, they very soon wanted to restrict the number of embryos they transferred into women - so they didn't have too many multiple births," Dr Macnamee explains.

"Development of the freezing technique in the mid-80s meant they could implant one or two embryos [into the would-be mother] and then freeze other embryos for future use, saving her the uncomfortable procedure of having the eggs removed again."

Progress can also be seen in the modern use of ultrasound imaging to harvest the eggs under a mild sedation, rather than the form of keyhole surgery known as laparoscopy that was previously employed.

Techniques developed in the late 1980s also made a big difference in treating male infertility by injecting single sperm directly into the egg.

These, and other, small incremental steps mean the success rate for each round of IVF has grown from 10% to 40% since the early 80s, when Dr Macnamee's first role included the hands-on task of mixing the eggs and sperm in a petri dish.

The chances of successfully conceiving through IVF decline with age, but the process is now more effective per cycle than natural reproduction. It does not, however, have approval from all quarters.

In November, Pope Francis said the process promoted children as "a right rather than a gift to welcome" and was "playing with life".

Yet in August 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani - shortly to become Pope John Paul I - unexpectedly refused to criticise Louise's parents for using IVF, saying they had simply wanted to have a baby.

"It helped to counteract some of the negative things people were saying," Louise says.

"My mum got loads of letters from people. They were mostly positive, but there was some hate mail. (Louise  Brown Reflects at thirty-five.)

Acknowledging the fact that children conceived artificially are human beings who have immortal souls made in the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and ignoring this news report’s celebration of a violation of the laws of God that the adversary has used to further destroy the family and to convince a large percentage of people worldwide to accept any kind of “family” as perfectly legitimate as long as those involved are “happy,” the section in bold just above should disprove any lingering myths that Archbishop Albino Luciani, who was a true bishop, was any kind of “traditionalist.” He was not. He was a heretic, and he believed that there could be instances in which married couples could use contraception licitly, which is why he could accept in vitro fertilization so blithely.

Alas, the pull of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic sentimentality is such that even most Catholics alive today have the sensus Catholicus of the late Albino Luciani/John Paul I, which is to say that they believe there is no conflict between doing what one wants for “good motives” and doing what God commands.

After all, a “merciful God” wants people to be “happy.”

Why shouldn’t they use contraception and/or in vitro fertilization?

The temptations to go along with everyone else in a pluralist culture are so strong that it gets easier and easier over time for even believing Catholics to grow silent in the face of evil and to sublimate even any attenuated sense of serving as a soldier in the Army of Christ the King to openly oppose the incremental advance of that which is offensive to God and injurious to souls—and thus to the common good of one’s own nation and the world-at-large.

This is why even most supposedly “pro-life” Catholics were deaf, dumb and blind as then President George Walker Bush, the son of the late President George Herbert Walker Bush, increased the Federal funding for “family planning” programs, permitted his Food and Drug Administration to authorize the over-the-counter sale of the “Plan B” baby-killing pill and decided to continue Federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Indeed, Dubya Bush was proud of the fact that his administration increased the amount of money being spent by our tax dollars on domestic and international "family planning" programs, which, of course, dispatched innocent preborn babies to death by chemical means. Here is a letter sent in behalf of then President Bush to United States Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) on May 25, 2006:

The Honorable Carolyn B. Maloney
House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Ms. Maloney:
Thank you for your letter to President Bush to request his views on access to birth control. The President has asked that I respond on his behalf. This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception.

The Department of Health and Human Services faithfully executes laws establishing Federal programs to provide contraception and family planning services. The Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid are each significant providers of family planning services.

Additionally, this Administration strongly supports teaching abstinence to young people as the only 100 percent effective means of preventing pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

I will provide this response to the other signatories of your letter.

Sincerely yours, John O. Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary for Health (Bush Supports Contraception Letter)

Contraception, of course, of its very evil nature, over and above the fact that most contraceptives serve as abortifacients that kill babies chemically or act to expel fertilized human beings from implanting in the uterus, is denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and has led to the rise of promiscuity, an epidemic of venereal diseases, surgical abortion, broken homes, maladjusted children, the feminization of poverty and to the open proselytizing in behalf of sodomy, one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

As noted just above, George Walker Bush announced at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 9, 2001, that he was going to permit the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research on embryonic human beings whose "lines" were created before the time of his announcement. In so doing, of course, Bush authorized the death of those human beings and at the same time justify the immoral, evil practice of in vitro fertilization while doing nothing to stop the privately funded death and destruction of such embryonic human beings on those "lines" created after the date and time of his announcement:

My administration must decide whether to allow federal funds, your tax dollars, to be used for scientific research on stem cells derived from human embryos.  A large number of these embryos already exist.  They are the product of a process called in vitro fertilization, which helps so many couples conceive children.  When doctors match sperm and egg to create life outside the womb, they usually produce more embryos than are planted in the mother.  Once a couple successfully has children, or if they are unsuccessful, the additional embryos remain frozen in laboratories. (Remarks by the President on Stem Cell Research.) 

This is what I wrote at the time in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos:

Indeed, this whole controversy is the direct result of the rejection of the teaching authority of the Church on matters of faith and morals, as well as on matters of fundamental justice. For it is the rejection of the Deposit of Faith our Lord entrusted to Holy Mother Church that gave rise to the ethos of secularism and religious indifferentism, which became the breeding grounds for secularism and relativism and positivism.

A world steeped in all manner of secular political ideologies comes not only to reject the Deposit of Faith but to make war against all that is contained therein, especially as it relates to matters of the sanctity of marital relations and the stability of the family.

Contraception gave rise to abortion. Contraception also gave rise to the mentality which resulted in artificial conception. If a child's conception can be prevented as suits "partners," then it stands to reason that a child can be conceived "on demand" by using the latest technology science has to offer.

The Church has condemned artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization on a number of occasions as offenses to the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity of marital relations. Yet it is the very rejection of the Church's affirmation of what is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law which leads people, including George W. Bush, into thinking that artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization are morally licit to help couples deal with the problem of childlessness, ignoring the simple little truth that no one is entitled to a child.

Children are gifts from God to be accepted according to His plan for a particular couple. If a married couple cannot have a child on their own, they can adopt -- or they can use their time to be of greater service to the cause of the Church in the evangelization of the true Faith. No one, however, is entitled to a child.

Indeed, the whole tragedy of harvesting the stem cells of living human beings has arisen as a result of discoveries made by scientists experimenting on human beings conceived in fertility clinics to help couples conceive artificially.

That George W. Bush endorses this immoral enterprise (which is big business, by the way) and actually commends it as a way to "help" couples is deplorable.

It is as though he is saying the following: "We are not going to kill any more Jews for their body parts. We will only use the body parts of the Jews we have killed already. After all, we have people who will benefit from this research, do we not?"

Living human embryos do not have the "potential" for life, as Bush asserted on August 9, 2001. They are living human beings! To seek to profit from their destruction is ghoulish and will only wind up encouraging the private sector to fund all stem-cell research, creating more "stem cell lines" from the destruction of living human beings. ("Preposterous," Christ or Chaos, September 2001) 

Mrs. Judie Brown, the president and founder of the American Life League, wrote a retrospective on Caesar Georgii Bushus Ignoramus's stem cell decision some years later:

You have probably heard that right at the top of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's agenda is the promise of "hope to families with devastating diseases."

What she is promising, of course, is a Congressional action that will result in tons of federal tax dollars being spent on failed research using the dead bodies of embryonic children.

The White House, of course, is saying "the president has made it clear he believes in stem cell research so much -- the administration has done more to finance stem cell research, embryonic and otherwise, than any administration in history."

You see, Bush never really banned research using the bodies of embryonic children, he merely curtailed how much research could be done using tax dollars. So it would appear that everyone ... Democrat and Republican ... is on the same page.

The tragic reality underlying such statements is that over the course of the last 34 years, politicians and a whole lot of pro-lifers have let the principle of personhood slide away into oblivion for the sake of winning elections. And the result is staring us all in the face. (Embryo Wars.)

Mrs. Judie Brown wrote another commentary in 2012 about the human cost of in vitro fertilization featuring the conversion of a Catholic physician who believed he was advancing the "gift of life" by promoting the artificial conception of children:

During the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology this July, it was announced that five million babies have been born following in vitro fertilization procedures since 1978. Today, approximately 350,000 IVF babies are born annually, and the numbers are increasing.

An eerie silence hangs over these numbers. Unspoken is that most human beings created in the laboratory will die before even given a chance. It is commonly estimated that only one in six embryos created following IVF will make it to birth. However, the numbers published by Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority may be more accurate. In July of 2011, Britain announced that, for every child born by IVF, 30 embryos were created.

This means that for a typical couple seeking IVF, somewhere between five and 30 of their children died so they could give birth to one. On a worldwide scale, this means that 30-150 million children have died because of IVF. In light of such staggering numbers the Church’s teaching makes perfect sense; it is “deeply disturbing” that “the number of embryos sacrificed is extremely high” (Dignitas Personae n. 14). At best, IVF is like playing Russian Roulette with six people, except only one chamber of the gun is empty. IVF treats the new human being as little more than a cluster of cells to be graded, selected, and discarded. As the Church has noted, “In other areas of medicine, ordinary professional ethics and the healthcare authorities themselves would never allow a medical procedure which involved such a high number of failures and fatalities” (Dignitas Personae n. 15).

Unfortunately, such a loss of life is ignored and accepted by the IVF industry. Such “failures and fatalities” are not even recognized for what they are by most physicians who do IVF—it has all become a normal and standardized aspect of the procedure. Further, the beautiful images of babies, slogans about “building families,” and the pristine walls of the typical fertility clinic hide this harsh reality from would-be parents.

The truth, and the gentle yet firm guidance of a priest, recently led a leading IVF doctor in Chicago, Anthony Caruso, to call it quits. As a July 30 Chicago Tribune article attests, “We see babies in our Catholic faith as children of God. . . . What doesn’t get thought about is the process that brought the babies to be.”

Over time Dr. Caruso came to recognize that, regardless of the best intentions, the process of in vitro fertilization is a “false and deceptive solution” and an alarming attack on life. He is grateful to his parish priest for his courage to share the Church’s teaching concerning the industry that Caruso had been involved in for years. He now dedicates his professional life to promoting solutions to infertility that are consonant with Church teaching. (In Vitro Fertilization: The Human Cost .)

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, no one is “pro-life” unless he opposes all offenses against the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity of marriage and the inviolability of all innocent human life without any exception or qualification. In vitro fertilization is monstrous. We will only find out in eternity how many billions of innocent human beings were deprived of the Beatific Vision by being conceived artificially, experimented upon in their embryonic states and then killed off and consigned to Limbo.

The monstrous activities of a scientific world untethered by any respect for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Lw have been premised upon the acceptance upon the disproved ideology of evolutionism. A veritable race of mad men posing as respectable scientists are rushing to be seen as pioneers in the development of artificial intelligence implanted into robots (one such robot assigned to the International Space Station a few years ago asked a human astronaut not to be “mean” to him—see Cimon Robot Accuses International Space Crew of Being Mean to it.)

It is a short step from denying the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of Holy Matrimony to the slaughter of the innocent preborn by surgical means—and from there to the killing all other innocent human beings, including oneself by direct suicide, euthanasia, or “palliative care,” which is nothing other than a euphemism for expediting the deaths of innocent human beings who have been diagnosed as terminally ill and, in more recent decades, has been extended to those who are chronically ill or whose “quality of life” has been deemed by so-called “medical professionals” to be below that which one is said to be “entitled.”

The large-scale acceptance of “palliative care,” scandalously among many fully believing Catholics, has led to the mainstreaming and “legalization” of direct euthanasia, which a very long article in The Atlantic recently examined under the title of “Canada is Killing Itself.” The article discusses euthanasia favorably, and the cold, sterile manner in which Canadians have not only accepted euthanasia but are asking for it and/or being pressured by deathcare workers to consider it for their “own good.”

There is no need to quote at length from The Atlantic article, but I will provide a few excerpts to demonstrate the truly diabolical procedures that have become part of medical malpractice in Canada:

The euthanasia conference was held at a Sheraton. Some 300 Canadian professionals, most of them clinicians, had arrived for the annual event. There were lunch buffets and complimentary tote bags; attendees could look forward to a Friday-night social outing, with a DJ, at an event space above Par-Tee Putt in downtown Vancouver. “The most important thing,” one doctor told me, “is the networking.”

Which is to say that it might have been any other convention in Canada. Over the past decade, practitioners of euthanasia have become as familiar as orthodontists or plastic surgeons are with the mundane rituals of lanyards and drink tickets and It’s been so long s outside the ballroom of a four-star hotel. The difference is that, 10 years ago, what many of the attendees here do for work would have been considered homicide.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

The two-day conference in Vancouver was sponsored by a professional group called the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia, told me that people often ask him about the “stress” and “trauma” and “strife” of his work as a MAID provider. Isn’t it so emotionally draining? In fact, for him it is just the opposite. He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

Rishad Usmani remembers the first patient he killed. She was 77 years old and a former Ice Capades skater, and she had severe spinal stenosis. Usmani, the woman’s family physician on Vancouver Island, had tried to talk her out of the decision to die. He would always do that, he told me, when patients first asked about medically assisted death, because often what he found was that people simply wanted to be comfortable, to have their pain controlled; that when they reckoned, really reckoned, with the finality of it all, they realized they didn’t actually want euthanasia. But this patient was sure: She was suffering, not just from the pain but from the pain medication too. She wanted to die.

On December 13, 2018, Usmani arrived at the woman’s home in the town of Comox, British Columbia. He was joined by a more senior physician, who would supervise the procedure, and a nurse, who would start the intravenous line. The patient lay in a hospital bed, her sister next to her, holding her hand. Usmani asked her a final time if she was sure; she said she was. He administered 10 milligrams of midazolam, a fast-acting sedative, then 40 milligrams of lidocaine to numb the vein in preparation for the 1,000 milligrams of propofol, which would induce a deep coma. Finally he injected 200 milligrams of a paralytic agent called rocuronium, which would bring an end to breathing, ultimately causing the heart to stop.

Usmani drew his stethoscope to the woman’s chest and listened. To his quiet alarm, he could hear the heart still beating. In fact, as the seconds passed, it seemed to be quickening. He glanced at his supervisor. Where had he messed up? But as soon as they locked eyes, he understood: He was listening to his own heartbeat.

Many clinicians in Canada who have provided medical assistance in dying have a story like this, about the tangle of nerves and uncertainties that attended their first case. Death itself is something every clinician knows intimately, the grief and pallor and paperwork of it. To work in medicine is to step each day into the worst days of other people’s lives. But approaching death as a procedure, as something to be scheduled over Outlook, took some getting used to. In Canada, it is no longer a novel and remarkable event. As of 2023, the last year for which data are available, some 60,300 Canadians had been legally helped to their death by clinicians. In Quebec, more than 7 percent of all deaths are by euthanasia—the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world. “I have two or three provisions every week now, and it’s continuing to go up every year,” Claude Rivard, a family doctor in suburban Montreal, told me.

Rivard has thus far provided for more than 600 patients and helps train clinicians new to MAID. This spring, I watched from the back of a small classroom in a Vancouver hospital as Rivard led a workshop on intraosseous infusion—administering drugs directly into the bone marrow, a useful skill for MAID clinicians, Rivard explained, in the event of IV failure. Arranged on absorbent pads across the back row of tables were eight pig knuckles, bulbous and pink. After a PowerPoint presentation, the dozen or so attendees took turns with different injection devices, from the primitive (manual needles) to the modern (bone-injection guns). Hands cramped around hollow steel needles as the workshop attendees struggled to twist and drive the tools home. This was the last thing, the clinicians later agreed, that patients would want to see as they lay trying to die. Practitioners needed to learn. “Every detail matters,” Rivard told the class; he preferred the bone-injection gun himself.

The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; a Catholic priest to deliver last rites; extended-family renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside. For $10.99, you can design your MAID experience with the help of the Be Ceremonial app; suggested rituals include a story altar, a forgiveness ceremony, and the collecting of tears from witnesses. On the Disrupting Death podcast, hosted by an educator and a social worker in Ontario, guests share ideas on subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life—a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard. . . .

For some MAID practitioners, however, it took encountering an eligible patient for them to realize the true extent of their unease with Track 2. One physician, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized by his hospital to speak publicly, recalled assessing a patient in their 30s with nerve damage. The pain was such that they couldn’t go outside; even the touch of a breeze would inflame it. “They had seen every kind of specialist,” he said. The patient had tried nontraditional therapies too—acupuncture, Reiki, “everything.” As the physician saw it, the patient’s condition was serious and incurable, it was causing intolerable suffering, and the suffering could not seem to be relieved. “I went through all of the tick boxes, and by the letter of the law, they clearly met the criteria for all of these things, right? That said, I felt a little bit queasy.” The patient was young, with a condition that is not terminal and is usually treatable. But “I didn’t feel it was my place to tell them no.”

He was not comfortable doing the procedure himself, however. He recalled telling the MAID office in his region, “Look, I did the assessment. The patient meets the criteria. But I just can’t—I can’t do this.” Another clinician stepped in.

In 2023, Track 2 accounted for 622 MAID deaths in Canada—just over 4 percent of cases, up from 3.5 percent in 2022. Whether the proportion continues to rise is anyone’s guess. Some argue that primary-care providers are best positioned to negotiate the complexities of Track 2 cases, given their familiarity with the patient making the request—their family situation, medical history, social circumstances. This is how assisted death is typically approached in other countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands. But in Canada, the system largely developed around the MAID coordination centers assembled in the provinces, complete with 1-800 numbers for self-referrals. The result is that MAID assessors generally have no preexisting relationship with the patients they’re assessing.

How do you navigate, then, the hidden corridors of a stranger’s suffering? Claude Rivard told me about a Track 2 patient who had called to cancel his scheduled euthanasia. As a result of a motorcycle accident, the man could not walk; now blind, he was living in a long-term-care facility and rarely had visitors; he had been persistent in his request for MAID. But when his family learned that he’d applied and been approved, they started visiting him again. “And it changed everything,” Rivard said. He was in contact with his children again. He was in contact with his ex-wife again. “He decided, ‘No, I still have pleasure in life, because the family, the kids are coming; even if I can’t see them, I can touch them, and I can talk to them, so I’m changing my mind.’ ”

I asked Rivard whether this turn of events—the apparent plasticity of the man’s desire to die—had given him pause about approving the patient for MAID in the first place. Not at all, he said. “I had no control on what the family was going to do.”

Some of the opposition to MAID in Canada is religious in character. The Catholic Church condemns euthanasia, though Church influence in Canada, as elsewhere, has waned dramatically, particularly where it was once strongest, in Quebec. But from the outset there were other concerns, chief among them the worry that assisted death, originally authorized for one class of patient, would eventually become legal for a great many others too. National disability-rights groups warned that Canadians with physical and intellectual disabilities—people whose lives were already undervalued in society, and of whom 17 percent live in poverty—would be at particular risk. As assisted death became “sanitized,” one group argued, “more and more will be encouraged to choose this option, further entrenching the ‘better off dead’ message in public consciousness.”

For these critics, the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement had been the solitary consolation in an otherwise lost constitutional battle. The elimination of that protection with the creation of Track 2 reinforced their conviction that MAID would result in Canada’s most marginalized citizens being subtly coerced into premature death. Canadian officials acknowledged these concerns—“We know that in some places in our country, it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair,” Carla Qualtrough, the disability-inclusion minister, admitted in 2020—but reiterated that socioeconomic suffering was not a legal basis for MAID. Justin Trudeau took pains to assure the public that patients were not being backed into assisted death because of their inability to afford proper housing, say, or get timely access to medical care. It “simply isn’t something that ends up happening,” he said.

Sathya Dhara Kovac, of Winnipeg, knew otherwise. Before dying by MAID in 2022, at the age of 44, Kovac wrote her own obituary. She explained that life with ALS had “not been easy”; it was, as far as illnesses went, a “shitty” one. But the illness itself was not the reason she wanted to die. Kovac told the local press prior to being euthanized that she had fought unsuccessfully to get adequate home-care services; she needed more than the 55 hours a week covered by the province, couldn’t afford the cost of a private agency to take care of the balance, and didn’t want to be relegated to a long-term-care facility. “Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system,” Kovac wrote. “I could have had more time if I had more help.”

Earlier this spring, I met in Vancouver with Marcia Doherty; she was approved for Track 2 MAID shortly after it was legalized, four years ago. The 57-year-old has suffered for most of her life from complex chronic illnesses, including myalgic encephalomyelitis, fibromyalgia, and Epstein-Barr virus. Her daily experience of pain is so total that it is best captured in terms of what doesn’t hurt (the tips of her ears; sometimes the tip of her nose) as opposed to all the places that do. Yet at the core of her suffering is not only the pain itself, Doherty told me; it’s that, as the years go by, she can’t afford the cost of managing it. Only a fraction of the treatments she relies on are covered by her province’s health-care plan, and with monthly disability assistance her only consistent income, she is overwhelmed with medical debt. Doherty understands that someday, the pressure may simply become too much. “I didn’t apply for MAID because I want to be dead,” she told me. “I applied for MAID on ruthless practicality.”

It is difficult to understand MAID in such circumstances as a triumphant act of autonomy—as if the state, by facilitating death where it has failed to provide adequate resources to live, has somehow given its most vulnerable citizens the dignity of choice. In January 2024, a quadriplegic man named Normand Meunier entered a Quebec hospital with a respiratory infection; after four days confined to an emergency-room stretcher, unable to secure a proper mattress despite his partner’s pleas, he developed a painful bedsore that led him to apply for MAID. “I don’t want to be a burden,” he told Radio-Canada the day before he was euthanized, that March.

Nearly half of all Canadians who have died by MAID viewed themselves as a burden on family and friends. For some disabled citizens, the availability of assisted death has sowed doubt about how the medical establishment itself sees them—about whether their lives are in fact considered worthy of saving. In the fall of 2022, a 49-year-old Nova Scotia woman who is physically disabled and had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer was readying for a lifesaving mastectomy when a member of her surgical team began working through a list of pre-op questions about her medications and the last time she ate—and was she familiar with medical assistance in dying? The woman told me she felt suddenly and acutely aware of her body, the tissue-thin gown that wouldn’t close. “It left me feeling like maybe I should be second-guessing my decision,” she recalled. “It was the thing I was thinking about as I went under; when I woke up, it was the first thought in my head.” Fifteen months later, when the woman returned for a second mastectomy, she was again asked if she was aware of MAID. Today she still wonders if, were she not disabled, the question would even have been asked. Gus Grant, the registrar and CEO of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Nova Scotia, has said that the timing of the queries to this woman was “clearly inappropriate and insensitive,” but he also emphasized that “there’s a difference between raising the topic of discussing awareness about MAID, and possible eligibility, from offering MAID.”

And yet there is also a reason why, in some countries, clinicians are either expressly prohibited or generally discouraged from initiating conversations about assisted death. However sensitively the subject is broached, death never presents itself neutrally; to regard the line between an “offer” and a simple recitation of information as somehow self-evident is to ignore this fact, as well as the power imbalance that freights a health professional’s every gesture with profound meaning. Perhaps the now-suspended Veterans Affairs caseworker who, in 2022, was found by the department to have “inappropriately raised” MAID with several service members had meant no harm. But according to testimony, one combat veteran was so shaken by the exchange—he had called seeking support for his ailments and was not suicidal, but was told that MAID was preferable to “blowing your brains out”—that he left the country. . . .

Despite all of the questions surrounding Track 2, Canada is proceeding with the expansion of MAID to additional categories of patients while gauging public interest in even more. As early as 2016, the federal government had agreed to launch exploratory investigations into the possible future provision of MAID for people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental disorder, as well as to “mature minors,” people younger than 18 who are “deemed to have requisite decision-making capacity.” The government also pledged to consider “advance requests”—that is, allowing people to consent now to receive MAID at some specified future point when their illness renders them incapable of making or affirming the decision to die. Meanwhile, the Quebec College of Physicians has raised the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for infants born with “severe malformations,” a rare practice currently legal only in the Netherlands, the first country to adopt it since Nazi Germany did so in 1939.

As part of Track 2 legislation in 2021, lawmakers extended eligibility—to take effect at some point in the future—to Canadians suffering from mental illness alone. This, despite the submissions of many of the nation’s top psychiatric and mental-health organizations that no evidence-based standard exists for determining whether a psychiatric condition is irremediable. A number of experts also shared concerns about whether it was possible to credibly distinguish between suicidal ideation and a desire for MAID.

After several contentious delays, MAID for mental illness is now set to take effect in 2027; authorities have been tasked in the meantime with figuring out how MAID should actually be applied in such cases. The debate has produced thousands of pages of special reports and parliamentary testimony. What all sides do agree on is that, in practice, mental disorders are already a regular feature of Canada’s MAID regime. At one hearing, Mona Gupta, a psychiatrist and the chair of an expert panel charged with recommending protocols and safeguards for psychiatric MAID, noted pointedly that “people with mental disorders are requesting and accessing MAID now.” They include patients whose requests are “largely motivated by their mental disorder but who happen to have another qualifying condition,” as well as those with “long histories of suicidality” or questionable decision-making capacity. They may also be poor and homeless and have little interaction with the health-care system. But whatever the case, Gupta said, when it comes to navigating the complex intersection of MAID and mental illness, “assessors and health-care providers already do this.”

The argument was meant to assuage concerns about clinical readiness. For critics, however, it only reinforced a belief that, in some cases, physical conditions are simply being used to bear the legal weight of a different, ineligible basis for MAID, including mental disorders. In one of Canada’s more controversial cases, a 61-year-old man named Alan Nichols, who had a history of depression and other conditions, applied for MAID in 2019 while on suicide watch at a British Columbia hospital. A few weeks later, he was euthanized on the basis of “hearing loss.”

As Canadians await the rollout of psychiatric MAID, Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying has formally recommended expanding MAID access to mature minors. In the committee’s 2023 report, following a series of hearings, lawmakers acknowledged the various factors that could affect young people’s capacity to evaluate their circumstances—for one, the adolescent brain’s far from fully developed faculties for “risk assessment and decision-making.” But they noted that, according to several parliamentary witnesses, children with serious medical conditions “tend to possess an uncommon level of maturity.” The committee advised that MAID be limited (“at this stage”) to minors with reasonably foreseeable natural deaths, and endorsed a requirement for “parental consultation,” but not parental consent. As a lawyer with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan told the committee, “Parents may be reluctant to consent to the death of their child.”

Whether Canadian officials will eventually add mature minors to the eligibility list remains unclear. At the moment, their attention is largely focused on a different category of expansion. Last year, the province of Quebec took the next step in what some regard as the “natural evolution” of MAID: the honoring of advance requests to be euthanized. Under the Quebec law, patients in the province with cognitive conditions such as Alzheimer’s can define a threshold they don’t wish to cross. Some people might request to die when they no longer recognize their children, for example; others might indicate incontinence as a benchmark. When the threshold seems to have been reached, perhaps after an alert from a “trusted third party,” a MAID practitioner determines whether the patient is indeed suffering intolerably according to the terms of the advance request. Since 2016, public demand for this expansion has been steady, fueled by the testimonies of those who have watched loved ones endure the full course of dementia and do not want to suffer the same fate. (Canada Gave Citizens the Right to Die. Doctors Are Struggling to Meet Demand This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Canada Is Killing Itself.”.)

There is not one consideration of anything above the nihilistic requests of patients and the cold, sterile utilitarianism of the merchants of death. This is beyond paganism. This is barbarism, and it is a barbarism that is global in scope:

(LifeSiteNews) — According to the most recent report of the New Zealand “Assisted Dying Service” (which sounds so benign and almost… helpful, doesn’t it?), covering April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, there were 472 “assisted deaths” during that period. This, as Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition noted, is an increase from 344 the previous year; additionally, there are also 1,137 active cases, an increase from 945 the previous year. From the report: 

For the 472 assisted deaths that took place between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025:

• 17 people chose ingestion, triggered by the person,
• 5 people chose intravenous delivery, triggered by the person,
• 9 people chose ingestion through a tube, triggered by the AMP or ANP
• 441 people chose injection, administered by the AMP/ANP. 

To clarify the terms: assisted suicide is when the person commits the act of suicide themselves, with help; euthanasia is when the person is killed by a lethal injection administered (usually) by a medical professional. In New Zealand, the vast majority of those seeking death are opting for euthanasia – 441 out of the 472 cited in the recent report. This, the report notes, is similar to Canada, where the euphemism “MAiD” is used, but euthanasia is almost universally practiced. 

It is important to note, Schadenberg emphasized, that of the 472 who died, “21% of the applicants were not receiving palliative care; 12% of the applicants were living with a disability; only 126 medical professionals were willing to participate in an assisted death in 2024, which indicates that most medical professionals are unwilling to kill their patients, and only 10 applicants (1137 active cases) had a psychiatric assessment to check for both competence and for any presence of coercion.”  

In New Zealand, as in Canada, the oversight for a process that ends in the death of the patient is shambolic or absent. Rather than rigorously ensuring that those seeking a lethal injection are able to grant consent and are free from any form of pressure or coercion, euthanasia providers instead seem inclined to hunt for reasons to approve people. For those who think this an exaggeration, journalist Alexander Raikin published two chilling reports last fall, noting that a quarter of all euthanasia practitioners in Ontario may have violated the Criminal Code of Canada. 

But as Raikin asked almost plaintively in his report at The Hub: “Does anyone care?” 

That is precisely my feeling reading reports from euthanasia regimes that tell us precisely what we have come to expect: that safeguards are weak, porous, and often seem non-existent; that euthanasia rates always climb, and few seem interested in asking why; that many opt for euthanasia or assisted suicide because they cannot get the care they actually want, and thus calling their final, fatal decision “choice” seems farcical at best and cruel at worst.  

New Zealand legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in November 2021 after the “End of Life Choices” Act passed by the narrow margin of 69 to 51 in 2019. In 2020, a referendum on euthanasia resulted in 65 percent of voters approving it. According to that legislation, New Zealanders are only eligible for euthanasia or assisted suicide if they have a terminal illness “likely to end the person’s life within six months” and are in an “advanced state of irreversible decline in physical capability” with “unbearable suffering that cannot be relieved in a manner that the person considers tolerable.” 

But of course, euthanasia activists and their political allies are not satisfied with that – because once they have legislated the “right to die,” they always, always push for expansion. And thus, David Seymour, the head of the ACT Party and a sponsor of the “End of Life Choices” Act, is calling for an expansion, and now says that the legislation they initially sold to the public was a “political compromise.” In other words, he and politicians like himself passed what they thought the public would tolerate, and now they’re pushing for more. 

Considering the latest euthanasia report, as well as the almost daily stories from Western euthanasia regimes, it is difficult not to conclude that leaders like Seymour do not believe their own propaganda lines about “safeguards” and “choice.” They can read, just like we can. They get the newspapers, just like we do. They know what’s happening. And they don’t care – or perhaps they’re getting precisely the results they want. It’s a dark thought, but increasingly unavoidable.  (Euthanasia rose 37% in New Zealand, and leftist politicians are pushing for more. Also see: UN warns France’s euthanasia plan undermines 'right to life of persons with disabilities’.)

As I have noted on a number of occasions, arguing against euthanasia on purely natural terms is no defense against the power of sentimentality to trump rational thought. A culture of well-being seeks to anesthetize pain and all other unpleasant realities.

Why should a person suffer when the truth of redemptive suffering is rejected as either fantastic or as just simply unrealistic in our modern world?

Those who believe that it is possible to combat the “mercy killers” with naturalistic arguments are as delusional as those who believe that a person who supports one abortion as a matter of principle is a defender of the sanctity of innocent human life.

Human suffering is one of the many consequences of Original Sin.

Indeed, physical suffering and death are two of the very tangible consequences of Original Sin, as well as of our own actual sins. It is only the Catholic Faith that teaches the full truth concerning human suffering, and it is a rejection of the Catholic teaching on human suffering that has permitted sentimentality to triumph so mightily in the world, even among many Catholics who attend Mass every Sunday. 

The Church teaches us that no suffering is beyond our capacity to bear by means of the graces won for us by the shedding of our Lord’s Most Precious Blood on Calvary. Further, the Church teaches us that no human suffering — no matter how intense — is the equal of the pain that just one of our venial sins imposed upon our Lord in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross. She also teaches us that our patient endurance of the sufferings we experience in our lifetimes can be the means by which we help the Poor Souls in Purgatory make satisfaction for the debt we owe as a result of our forgiven sins (and our general attachment to sin), and the means by which we can give exemplary witness to the world of the fact that we unite our sufferings with those of our Blessed Lord. Indeed, our patient endurance of suffering is one of the ways we prove our love for our Lord. Knowing that Our Lord never permits us to endure any suffering beyond our capacity to endure equips us with the knowledge that the more suffering we are sent, the more we receive a sign of His love for us, that He expects us to do great things for Him and His Church by becoming co-redeemers of the world with Him. 

A rejection of those simple truths results in the tyranny of the social engineers and the bioethicists (who don’t practice true biology and are not very ethical). Why not kill “unwanted” babies? Why not kill those who suffer? Why not clone yourself? Why not conceive a child in order to kill it and use its body parts to aid someone with Parkinson’s Disease?

Why can’t a woman who is sterile conceive a child by means of in vitro fertilization?

Why can’t two people of the same gender who “love” one another get “married”?

What’s wrong with surrogate motherhood?

Why can’t we use genetics to pick the sort of child we want?

The very people who reject the authority of the Church in those matters look to secular “experts” to provide them with guidance, ironically conferring on those pseudo-experts a spirit of infallibility that is rejected as belonging to the Successor of Saint Peter and the bishops who are in full communion with him. 

The Netherlands went first where other nations followed. That has been true both ecclesiastically and civilly. Look for Canada to follow the Dutch lead before too long. And the state of Oregon is already the de jure euthanasia pioneer in the United States. The actual de facto practice in most hospitals in most places in this country is pretty much the same as it has been in the Netherlands. Doctors are liberally dispatching people as a matter of routine, making decisions that certain people have simply outlived their usefulness. That is over and above the instances where poorly formed people (or their families) actually ask to be killed. No, there are all types of “mysterious” deaths in hospitals these days as doctors and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) play God and make cost-benefit analyses as to a person’s “worth.” 

It is no accident that the Netherlands is one of the leaders in utilitarian social engineering. At one time under the control of Catholic Spain, the Netherlands, like some other nations of Europe, eventually fell under the sway of Lutheranism and Calvinism. The Netherlands has long been home to relativists. After all, an essential tenet of Protestantism is that a person is saved if he makes a confession of faith in our Lord with his lips and in his heart. Nothing else matters after that profession of faith is made. There is no room for a theology of redemptive suffering in such a belief system. Protestantism rejects Purgatory as un-Scriptural. It contends that we do not prove our faith by good works. And it rejects the simple truth that we gain merit for our good works, merit that can be applied to the Poor Souls in Purgatory and help make expiation for the debt we owe our own forgiven sins. Why not annihilate yourself when pain becomes too severe? A “loving” God would understand that, wouldn’t He?
There are only two weapons that can stop the advance of the brave new world that has been evolving since the time of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt: the Cross of the Divine Redeemer and His Most Blessed Mother's Holy Rosary. 

When are we going to learn that we cannot fight the errors of Modernity culture of death without the weapon that brought us the possibility of eternal life and the one that Our Lady gave to Saint Dominic and which she implored us at Fatima to pray daily. (From: “Land of Windmills and Murder,” Christ or Chaos printed journal, February 6, 2001.)

It a mere eleven years thereafter for physicians in The Netherlands became emboldened to claim that a newborn child was only a “potential” human being, thus preparing the way for the likes of Andrew Mark Cuomo, Ralph Northam and others. Here is a news report at the time in 2013, which was included in "Open Season on Mankind," that appeared on this site seven years ago (the news report, which is double-indented, is followed by some of my own commentary in the aforementioned article, which is single-indented):

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.

“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”. (Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say.)

A Catholic knows that there is indeed no difference between killing a baby in the womb, no matter how young in his development he may be, and the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being at any point after birth. The Fifth Commandment admits of no exceptions. No one who says he supports a single, solitary "exception" to the absolute inviolability of innocent human life is not "pro-life" and can never be referred to as such. This is why it is laughable to believe that any naturalist of the false opposite of the "right" is going to produce "results" for a "better," more "prosperous" world, especially when he believes that the civil law can sanction the deliberate taking of any innocent human life as does the man who will be the Republican Party's presidential nominee this year, Willard Mitt Romney. It is madness to believe such a thing. Madness.

Yes, my good and few readers, anyone who makes any exception to the inviolability of innocent human life, no matter the means, whether chemical or surgical, used or the justification attempted, will do nothing but see the entire life issue as a distraction not worth "setting his hair on fire" for in order to "excite" the few voters who adhere to his brand of naturalism. The tide in favor of "after birth abortion" among certain ethicists in England will wash ashore here 'ere long as the pantheists who want to "go green" and worship the dirt from which we are made and to which we must return until the General Resurrection on the Last Day continue to shed the blood of innocent human beings as they indulge themselves in their bread and circuses. (From: Open Season On Mankind, March 4, 2012.)

Additionally, of course, readers of this site should be very familiar with the completely documented fact that “death panels” are part of ObamaDeathCare and existed over a decade before that monstrous takeover of the American medical industry in various states, most especially in the otherwise mostly free State of Texas, thanks to legislation signed into law by none other than then Governor George Walker Bush.

Readers may recall that the State of Texas, despite being freer than most states, especially with respect to home-schooling and with respect to freedom to do with use one’s property without much in the way of intrusive governmental regulations and oversight, has authorized hospital administrators to appoint a team of healthcare “professionals” to constitute what are, effectively, death panels to determine, regardless of a patient’s advance care directives and/or the express wishes of his relatives, to order the cessation of medical treatment and even the ordinary care given to a living human being. The authorizing statute (TEX HS. CODE ANN. § 166.046) was passed by the Texas State Legislature in 1999 and signed into law by the supposedly “pro-life” governor at the time, a chap who would later place American personnel needlessly into harm’s way in Iraq to overthrow one regime and destabilize that country to the extent that the Islamic Republic of Iran is now able to target the remaining Americans who should not have been put there to begin with, George Walker Bush, authorizing hospital administrators to override a patient’s directives to his physicians concerning healthcare decisions:

(a) If an attending physician refuses to honor a patient's advance directive or a health care or treatment decision made by or on behalf of a patient, the physician's refusal shall be reviewed by an ethics or medical committee. The attending physician may not be a member of that committee. The patient shall be given life-sustaining treatment during the review.

(b) The patient or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the individual who has made the decision regarding the directive or treatment decision:

(1) may be given a written description of the ethics or medical committee review process and any other policies and procedures related to this section adopted by the health care facility;

(2) shall be informed of the committee review process not less than 48 hours before the meeting called to discuss the patient's directive, unless the time period is waived by mutual agreement;

(3) at the time of being so informed, shall be provided:

(A) a copy of the appropriate statement set forth in Section 166.052; and

(B) a copy of the registry list of health care providers and referral groups that have volunteered their readiness to consider accepting transfer or to assist in locating a provider willing to accept transfer that is posted on the website maintained by the Texas Health Care Information Council under Section 166.053; and

(4) is entitled to:

(A) attend the meeting; and

(B) receive a written explanation of the decision reached during the review process.

(c) The written explanation required by Subsection (b)(2)(B) must be included in the patient's medical record.

(d) If the attending physician, the patient, or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the individual does not agree with the decision reached during the review process under Subsection (b), the physician shall make a reasonable effort to transfer the patient to a physician who is willing to comply with the directive. If the patient is a patient in a health care facility, the facility's personnel shall assist the physician in arranging the patient's transfer to:

(1) another physician;

(2) an alternative care setting within that facility; or

(3) another facility.

(e) If the patient or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the patient is requesting life-sustaining treatment that the attending physician has decided and the review process has affirmed is inappropriate treatment, the patient shall be given available life-sustaining treatment pending transfer under Subsection (d). The patient is responsible for any costs incurred in transferring the patient to another facility. The physician and the health care facility are not obligated to provide life-sustaining treatment after the 10th day after the written decision required under Subsection (b) is provided to the patient or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the patient unless ordered to do so under Subsection (g).

(e-1) If during a previous admission to a facility a patient's attending physician and the review process under Subsection (b) have determined that life-sustaining treatment is inappropriate, and the patient is readmitted to the same facility within six months from the date of the decision reached during the review process conducted upon the previous admission, Subsections (b) through (e) need not be followed if the patient's attending physician and a consulting physician who is a member of the ethics or medical committee of the facility document on the patient's readmission that the patient's condition either has not improved or has deteriorated since the review process was conducted.

(f) Life-sustaining treatment under this section may not be entered in the patient's medical record as medically unnecessary treatment until the time period provided under Subsection (e) has expired.

(g) At the request of the patient or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the patient, the appropriate district or county court shall extend the time period provided under Subsection (e) only if the court finds, by a preponderance of the evidence, that there is a reasonable expectation that a physician or health care facility that will honor the patient's directive will be found if the time extension is granted.

(h) This section may not be construed to impose an obligation on a facility or a home and community support services agency licensed under Chapter 142 or similar organization that is beyond the scope of the services or resources of the facility or agency. This section does not apply to hospice services provided by a home and community support services agency licensed under Chapter 142. (As found at Advanced Directives Act.)

In other words, you see, it is up to a patient or his surrogate to find another facility that is willing to follow his directives within ten days of a review board’s decision to uphold his physician’s refusal to honor those directives. A sick or injured human being then must play a contemporary version of Beat the Clock to save his life. A world governed by Catholic principles would feature physicians who strove to heal their patients. Our own Protestant and Judeo-Masonic world features devils masquerading as physicians who strive to find every pretext imaginable to avoid giving ordinary care to patients they deem worthy of death.

Scores of human beings are being consigned to liquidation by death panels without family members uttering a word of protest. After all, most Americans have been taught that the “doctor is always right,” serving as bobble-head dolls to the high priests and priestesses of medicine and Big Pharma. It is only when a patient and/or his family objects to decisions made by Modernity’s body-snatchers that a particular case makes headlines. Very few patients or their families actually do object, which is why cases such as Tinslee Lewis’s make the news.

In reality, of course, every hospital and but a very miniscule handful of nursing homes and “assisted living centers” base decisions about medical treatment on purely utilitarian grounds of subjective judgments about who is considered to be “fit” enough and who is said to be “better off” with “compassionate care,” meaning that someone whose “quality of life” is judged to be in “decline” and/or who has a chronic or terminally ill condition must be convinced by a “team” of healthcare professions (physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and chaplains) to sign off on his execution, whether gradually or more immediately, by a combination of “comfort” drugs, including morphine and Atavin, that are designed to stop his heart.

As noted in Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry over eight years ago now:

In other words, utilitarianism is now “hard wired,” if you will, into the very fabric of the American healthcare industry. The Hippocratic Oath’s injunction to do no harm” has been replaced by an effort to carefully prepare an unsuspecting human being to accept a course of “treatment” that will conclude with his death. Such a course of “treatment,” of course, is offered by a “compassionate” “inter-disciplinary team” of “professionals” in white coats while clergymen of one sort or another assure them that “everything” is being done for them:

The palliative care team helps develop relationships. It is designed to promote and then help implement advance care planning. The team communicates risks and benefits of various "treatments" with an emphasis on “realistic” expectations, discusses the patient’s concerns—all with the objective of helping the patient develop goals of care. The underlying problem is that they emphasize supportive rather than “real” medical services, and they base their analysis on a quality of life index. The palliative care team will insert itself into the family dynamic and try to bring consensus that it is time to “let go”!

Under the direction of Dr. Diane Meier CAPC has become a well-oiled training and marketing machine. Among its projects was to develop a list of triggers for recommending palliative care consultation in the presence of a serious or chronic illness. This is an all-encompassing list that considers not only the medical state of the patient but the dynamic between the patient and the physician and also the family relationships. Several of those triggers indicate clearly how the new palliative care does not wait to enter at the end of life like it used to! The universe of hospitals and other care facilities presently under the influence of this new palliative care where a patient care team can be found, and the list of triggers for adult and pediatric patients to be referred for a palliative care consult is available at www.getpalliativecare.org. Practically everyone and their cousin will qualify. Here are a few examples of the triggers:

Declining ability to complete activities of daily living

Weight loss

Multiple hospitalizations

Difficult to control physical or emotional symptoms related to serious medical illness

Patient, family or physician uncertainty regarding prognosis

Patient, family or physician uncertainty regarding goals of care

Patient or family requests for futile care

DNR order conflicts

Use of tube feeding in cognitively impaired or seriously ill patients

Limited social support and a serious illness (e.g., homeless, chronic mental illness

Patient, family or physician request for information regarding hospice appropriateness

Patient or family psychological or spiritual distress

These triggers will introduce the palliative care process into patient populations which may be declining but are not dying. Note especially that those with limited social support and/or declining abilities are identified as ripe for palliative care. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

These are facts. To ignore these facts is to make oneself and one’s relatives vulnerable to a highly-sophisticated program of mental and emotional manipulation whereby one becomes conditioned to accepting the word of the “experts” as to what is in their best interests. Patients and their relatives are accepted to sign on the dotted line upon the “recommendation” of the “professionals,” whose word must be taken at face value because the legal forms put in front of patients contain all manner of code words that enable them to be killed:

Box ‘Em

Polst

Not enough people signing living wills? Enter the POLST or MOLST, a living will with teeth. Once it is completed, all medical personnel must obey it. The Physician’s Order for Life Sustaining Treatment has been crafted to scare and intimidate patients from acute surgical or medical care using technical medical jargon and through persons trained to present the document or via video. Moreover, the creators of such forms nowhere include food and water under comfort care or any other level of care for that matter. They bend over backwards to make the form more clinical and sterile. In later iterations they prefer the wording Comfort-Focused Treatment over Comfort Care. Has caring become anathema? How voluntary is the from when a patient is being manipulated to sign it and nudged to check the boxes that they will hasten their death? The designers use words like natural death as a moving target placing them where they will best steer the patient toward refusing treatment.

Food and water provided in any manner provided in any manner are merely ordinary care but the POLST creators make it medical care to induce withholding of essential for life. They even propose a trial period! Why would anyone who can eat and drink suddenly stop because they surpassed the trial period on the form? There is no goal for the trial period and there are no parameters to continue it or discontinue it. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

This is entirely correct. Those who believe that the provision of food and water, no matter how they are administered, to a human being is somehow “extraordinary” “medical care” have permitted themselves to become duped by the propaganda that has been spread by the Soros and Robert Wood Johnson foundation axis of evil that has sought to make the natural and necessary seem to be unnatural and extraordinary. 

To amplify this point, we know of several recent cases in which relatives have asked for their hospitalized loved ones to be permitted to have a drink of water only to be told by the "experts" that doing so would "prolong" the process. What process? The process of causing their death by means of starvation and dehydration and is aided by the use of heavy sedation designed to stop their hearts from beating when the pain of the hunger and thirst becomes intolerabe to bear.

Natural death means whatever the merchants of death want it to be any given time during the course of their “caring” for a patient and his relatives to help them “accept” what they have made inevitable and which they can justify legally by having secure “informed consent”:

These forms, when introduced and completed by other parties, create a wedge between patients and their doctors. These forms fail informed consent when all the variables surrounding a future medical condition are unknown. These forms lack a conscience clause for health care professionals who may have concerns about medical orders they are asked to fulfill. Many states don’t even require that the patient sign the form! In Oregon, it’s only recommended that the patient sign it. See the enclosed Oregon POLST. Later in some versions they dispensed with the word recommended altogether. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.).

The communitarian nature of the organized system of death that has been institutionalized into of American healthcare industry. This system of death was incorporated into the Robert Wood Foundation’s grant to Last Act, which is an organization that was created to organize a network of various healthcare “communities” into a “groupthink” ideology that was to become the sole basis of “palliative care.” (Excerpted from   Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry.)

In this regard, the late Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., noted during a parish mission at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Hicksville, New York, in January 1991 that we were indeed living with barbarians, not pagans. “Give me a good, honest pagan. We are living among barbarians today.”

Father Groeschel, a true priest, was very much enamored of conciliarism and its false precepts. However, he did have some interesting insights now again, and he was absolutely correct thirty-four years ago that we were faced with barbarism, not paganism, as a similar point had been made over sixty years before by the Catholic apologist and essayist Hilaire Belloc.

Thus, the rest of this commentary is going be spent providing readers with Belloc’s essay on “The New Paganism,” interspersed with my own interjections and comments:

Our civilization developed as a Catholic civilization. It developed and matured as a Catholic thing. With the loss of the Faith it will slip back not only into Paganism, but into barbarism with the accompaniments of Paganism, and especially the institution of slavery. It will find gods to worship, but they will be evil gods as were those of the older savage Paganism before it began its advance towards Catholicism. The road downhill is the same as the road up the hill. It is the same road, but to go down back into the marshes again is a very different thing from coming up from the marshes into pure air. All things return to their origin. A living organic being, whether a human body or a whole state of society, turns at last into its original elements if life be not maintained in it. But in that process of return there is a phase of corruption which is very unpleasant. That phase the modern world outside the Catholic Church has arrived at.

Comment Number One:

Put another way, men who lose the Holy Faith and/or who have never had it will descend into the pit of pagan superstition and barbarism if they do not have belief in, access to, and to attempt to cooperate with Sanctifying Grace.

Returning now to Hilaire Beloc’s “The New Paganism”:

We call Paganism an absence of the Christian revelation. That is why we distinguish between Paganism and the different heresies; that is why we give the name of Christian to imperfect and distorted Christians, who only possess a part of Catholic truth and usually add to it doctrines which are contradictory of Catholic truth. Moreover, the word "Christian" though so vague as to be dangerous, has this much reality about it, that there is something different between the general atmosphere or savor of any society or person or literature which can be called Christian at all and those which are wholly lacking in any part of Christian doctrine. For a Christian man or society is one that has some part of Catholicism left in him. [emphasis added] But when every shred of Catholicism is lost we call that state of things "Unchristian."

Now, it must be evident to everybody by this time that, with the attack on Faith and the Church at the Reformation, the successful rebellion of so many and their secession from United Christendom, there began a process which could only end in the complete loss of all Catholic doctrine and morals by the deserters. That consummation we are today reaching. It took a long time to come about, but come about it has. We have but to look around us to see that there are, spreading over what used to be the Christian world, larger and larger areas over which the Christian spirit has wholly failed; is absent. I mean by "larger areas" both larger moral and larger physical areas, but especially larger moral areas. There are now whole groups of books, whole bodies of men, which are definitely Pagan, and these are beginning to join up into larger groups. It is like the freezing over of a pond, which begins in patches of ice; the patches unite to form wide sheets, till at last the whole is one solid surface. There are considerable masses of literature in the modern world, of philosophy and history [and especially of fiction], which are Pagan and they are coalescing-----to form a corpus of anti-Christian influence. It is not so much that they deny the Incarnation and the Resurrection, not even that they ignore doctrine. It is rather that they contradict and oppose the old inherited Christian system of morals to which people used to adhere long after they had given up definite doctrine.

This New Paganism is already a world of its own. It bulks large, and it is certainly going to spread and occupy more and more of modern life. It is exceedingly important that we should judge rightly and in good time of what its effects will probably be, for we are going to come under the influence of those effects to some extent, and our children will come very strongly under their influence. Those effects are already impressing themselves profoundly upon the Press, conversation, laws, building, and intimate habits of our time.

There are two ways in which this is happening; according to whether the New Paganism is at work in a Catholic or a non-Catholic country. It is happening in Catholic countries by the separation of a Pagan set from the rest of the citizens. In those countries the full body of Christian doctrine, that is, Catholicism, puts up a permanent and successful resistance. Its consequences in morals are accepted by masses of people who do not practice the Catholic religion or who are indifferent to its doctrines, and this resistance shows no sign of weakening; not everywhere are the governments of Catholic countries in sympathy with Catholic tradition, however vague, but in these countries the laws defending morals and the general habits of people outside the Pagan set may properly be called anti-Pagan.

Comment Number Two:

Belloc saw what was happening in England ninety-four years ago, and he properly identified root causes, knowing full well that his beloved country had the lost the Faith and elsewhere in the world where it had never taken root or had been uprooted violently by the Protestant Revolutions and the diabolical forces unleashed thereby.

In other words, Hilaire Belloc made points in a far more succinct and accessible manner than this writer, for one, has tried to for the past thirty-three years of my published works (or an aggregate of over fifty years of college teaching and public speaking dating to back the beginning of my college teaching career as a doctoral student in the Spring 1974 Semester):

But though the way in which the New Paganism is establishing itself differs according to whether the society in which it takes root was originally Catholic or Protestant, it is everywhere of much the same tone, and its effects are very similar, whether you find them in Italy or in Berlin, in an English novel or a French one; and the marks peculiar to Paganism are very clearly apparent in all.

Of these marks the two most prominent are, first, the postulate that man is sufficient to himself-----that is, the omission of the idea of Grace; the second [a consequence of this], despair. [emphasis added]

The New Paganism is the resultant of two forces which have converged to produce it: appetite and the sense of doom. Of the forces which impelled it into being, the appeal of the senses to be released from restriction through the denial of the Faith is so obvious that none will contest it, the only controversy being upon whether this removal of restriction upon sensual enjoyment, declining every form of reticence and exercising the fullest license for what is called "self-expression," is of good or of evil effect upon the individual and upon society. The Christian scheme is still close enough even to the most Pagan of the New Pagans to be familiar, and the social atmosphere which it created still endures as a memory, or as a rejected experience, in their lives. That social atmosphere insisted on a number of restrictions. Of course, no society could exist in which there were not a great number of restrictions, but the restrictions imposed by Christian morals were severe and numerous, and most of them are meaningless to those who have abandoned Christian doctrine, because morals are the fruit of doctrine.

It is not only in sexual matters [the first that will be cited in this connection], but in canons of taste, in social conduct, traditional canons of beauty in verse, prose, or the plastic arts that there is outbreak. The restriction and, therefore, the effort necessary for lucidity in prose, for scansion in poetry and, according to our tradition, for rhyme in most poetry-----the restrictions imposed by reverence for age, for certain relationships such as those between parent and child, for the respect of property as a right-----and all the rest of it are broken through. A license in act and a necessarily more extended license in speech are therefore the mark of the New Paganism.

But to this negative force must be added a positive one to explain what is happening, and that positive one is a philosophy which may be called Monist, or Fatalist, or Determinist, or by one of any number of names all signifying either the absence of conscious Will from the universe or the presence of only one such Will therein.

The true origin of this attitude of mind in modern times is the powerful genius of Calvin, though those who most suffer his influence would most strenuously deny their subjection to it, partly because they have never read him, much more because they do not see it in their daily papers, and most of all because Calvin is vaguely mixed up in their minds with an interest in theology, which science is thought to have exploded-----there is also perhaps some little distaste for Calvin because he was a Frenchman, but as that deplorable fact is never emphasized it cannot count for much. Calvin, then, is at the fountainhead of this new sense of Doom. But behind Calvin the fatalist attitude is an attitude as old, of course, as the hills. It is a temptation to which the human intellect has yielded on important occasions from as far back as we can trace its recorded experience and definitions. To the mind in that mood all things are part of an unchangeable process following from cause to effect immutably.

What else may have produced this positive force of fatalism, itself a main factor in the new Paganism, I will not here discuss; I have said more about it in my essay on "Science as the Enemy of Truth." I am here only concerned with observing its presence; but I will say this much: that one very powerful agent in producing this mood is the desire to be rid of responsibility.

Comment Number Three:

Yes, this is all entirely correct.

Despite the efforts of Americanist Catholics to “baptize” the American founding principles as “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian,” the truth that the progenitors of the Protestant Revolution, having rejected the true Faith, started mankind on the path to personal and social ruin that must end with the triumph of an unrestrained atheistic barbarism of the sort that make some the worst savages the world has ever know blush with shame.

John Calvin’s responsibility for the anti-Incarnational world is vast, and even in its secularized version today enslaves man to theological, social, and economic falsehoods that were discussed as follows by a contemporary of Hilaire Belloc, Dr. George O’Brien:

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 Effects of the Reformation, IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003.) 

Amintore Fanfani, who died in 1999 and had served as the Prime Minister of Italy on six different occasions of varying lengths between 1954 and 1987, noted in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, that it is only when men keep a view on their eternal destiny that they can be just stewards of the this of this world. The success of the above-named Protestant revolutionaries and naturalistic "philosophers" and "theorists" was made possible by the overthrow of he authority of the Catholic Church. Unrestrained self-seeking replaced the authority of the Catholic Church:

Those who have followed our argument cannot fail to conclude, as we do, that in the Middle Ages it was the international trade ventures that did most to favour the rise of the capitalist spirit. In light of these considerations, the conception of trade in St. Thomas, the champion of the Catholic social ideal, appears only logical, "For, "says St. Thomas, "the city that for its subsistence has need of much merchandise must necessarily submit to the presence of foreigners. Now relations with foreigners, as Aristotle says in his Politics, very often corrupt national customs: the foreigners who have been brought up under other laws and customs, in many cases act otherwise than is the use of the citizens, who, led by their example, imitate them and so bring disturbance into social life. Moreover, if the citizens themselves engage in commerce, they open the way to many vices. For since the aim of merchants is wholly one of gain, greed takes root in the heart of the citizens, by which everything, in the city, becomes venal, and, with the disappearance of good faith, the way is open to fraud; the general good is despised, and each man will seek his own particular advantage; the taste for virtue will be lost when the honour which is normally the reward of virtue is accorded to all. Hence, in such a city civil life cannot fail to grow corrupt."

When these words are understood, and we bear in mind the ideal of a Catholic society and the aspirations of capitalism, we can easily see why the friar noted a tendency to reason only in a "venal" manner and ("despising the general good") to seek only "particular advantage."

The characteristics of capitalism are precisely the following: the adoption of an economic criterion as criterion of order; failure to consider third persons; a quest for purely individual profit. Nor did Aquinas exaggerate when he saw in the merchant the greatest danger in "civil life," as he understood it. It is not by chance that the first capitalistic figures presented to us are merchants--Godric, later St. Godric, presented by Pirenne; the Mariano by Heynen; the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Del Bene by Sapori; Datini by Bensa; the Fugger by Sreider. Nor is it by chance that though opinions differ as to whether capitalism sprang from land-owners or traders, all agree that even land-owners first showed themselves capitalistic in the quality of merchants. In mediaeval economic society the only individual who could easily and often find himself in a position to act otherwise than in conformity with pre-capitalistic ideals was the merchant. Having left his city, exposed to risks of every kind, free from such ties as the laws of country or the opinion of his acquaintances, surrounded by intriguing people who saw in him only someone to be cheated, he had to defend himself against the cheaters by cheating, against competitors by sharpening his wits to find new methods of competition, and against adverse circumstances by learning to overcome them. Although he may have been a God-fearing man, if it was urgent for him to take back to the warehouse at least the equivalent of what he had brought away, he was obligated to throw overboard something of his pre-capitalistic ideas, even if in paradaisal conditions they might have appealed to him.

In another part of the present work we have pointed out that in a pre-capitalistic society if a single individual breaks away from the norm, the others will be forced to follow his example if only in self-defence. Let the reader then consider the vast significance of encounters either with merchants of another religion, or with subtle, equivocal, and unscrupulous merchants, always ready to take advantage of any opportunity. Faced with these, men's faithfulness to their own ideals will have begun to waver; their consequent actions will have produced such remarkable results that we doubt whether their conviction of wrong-doing will have been reinforced. To reason in terms of utility means a tangible result; to reason in terms of Paradise means hope of a result of which the certainty vanishes if faith weakens. We must not forget how much the capitalistic ideal has the advantage in being concrete, and, remembering this, we can more easily understand how a profitable infraction of pre-capitalist normality would rather lead men to repeat such infractions than arouse in them such remorse as to lead them back to the old path. We hold it a very significant fact that among mediaeval merchants remorse led to notable conversion even when in no danger of death. It is enough to quote St. Godric, St. Francis, Blessed Colombini. It led also to death-bed restitutions, often complete, and which were the more wonderful the harder it had been for the dying man to scrape together his hoard, and the more reluctant he had been in his life to give a penny to anyone who had not earned it twice over. Such conversions, implying a return to pre-capitalistic modes of life, continue so long as there is faith, but when faith weakens there is no longer thought of reparation.

It is the waning of faith that explains the establishment of a capitalistic spirit in a Catholic world, but in a certain sense it is the establishment of the capitalistic spirit that brings about a waning of faith. The effect of the weakening of faith is that the material factors we have mentioned change from momentary circumstances to permanent ones. With the weakening of faith, remorse becomes rare; the "is" is no longer compared with the "should-be," and that which is accepted and exploited in accordance with its own standards; the world is judged by purely worldly criteria.

All the circumstances that, in the Middle Ages, led to a waning of faith explain the progressive establishment of the capitalistic spirit, for the pre-capitalistic spirit rests on facts that are not seen, but must be held by faith. Those faithful to it sacrifice a certain result for a result that is not guaranteed by faith; they eschew a certain mode of action in the certainty of losing riches, but believing that they will gain a future reward in heaven. Let man lose this belief, and nothing remains for him, rationally speaking, but to act in a capitalistic manner. If there are no longer religious ties uniting man to man, there will be a growing number of audacious men whose sole end, in the words of Villari, is to be ahead of their fellows. Such men existed before the modern era began, and of such men it has been said that they showed "a complete lack of scruples and contempt for every moral law."

Men were particularly encouraged to sharpen their wits to acquire wealth, and moral obstacles were removed by the fact that, by a subversion of ancient custom, the highest offices no longer fell to those summoned to them by law or custom, but to those who could win them either by their own or others' wit, by their own or others' material strength, or by their own ability and others' baseness. In each case the stair of ascent was provided by economic means, from the moment that economic difficulties made all feel the need of goods. The Emperor no longer sought homage but money, the Cities widened their domains more by gold than by arms. Bankers became masters of cities without striking a blow. Gold paved the way and opened the gates to the new tyrants. Even the man who, from lofty motives, had no need of money could not do without it, if he did not wish to cut a poor figure at banquets and ceremonies, or be behind hand in public largesse.

It is a vicious circle. A man seeks goods because he no longer believes in a faith that bounded his desires, and he no longer believes  because he has experienced the pleasures of possession and influence. We need not enquire at what moment the former or the latter of these causes came into operation; we know that their working varied from country to country, from individual to individual, and that now a man might be tempted to discount morality by the attraction of goods, and now might be tempted to enrich himself because, he is no loner believed in divine penalties and rewards. And if in the case of an individual it would be hard to say which cause came first, it would be impossible in the case of society. We may take it for granted that in society as a whole both causes worked simultaneously, each stimulated by the other.

There were other phenomena that encouraged either acquisition action or incredulity. Leaving aside the less important and local ones, and confining ourselves to those of which the action was most general at the close of the pre-capitalistic period, we may say that the greatest contribution to the new economic spirit informing fifteenth-century men was brought by the humanist conception of life, of which the exponents, such as Alberti, took the most significant step towards the capitalist spirit by detaching their conception of wealth from its moral setting, and withdrawing the acquisition and use of goods from the influence of the rules and restrictions of religious morality. The advent of similar tendencies in the political field had the result that the State ceased to oppose the new mode of thought and life, and instead itself threw off the influence of Catholic ideals, often in order to exploit human vices, as we see in legislation on gambling. (Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, published originally by Sheed and Ward, 1935, republished in 2002 by IHS Press, pp. 135-138.)

Fanfani went on to note how Protestantism exploited this weakening of the Catholic Faith and built an entire economic system to suit its own heretical purposes:

Protestantism encouraged capitalism inasmuch as it denied the relation between earthly action and eternal recompense. From this point of view there is no real difference between the Lutheran and Calvinistic currents, for while it is true that Calvin linked salvation to arbitrary divine predestination, Luther made it depend on faith alone. Neither of the two connected it with works. Nevertheless, Calvin's statement was the more vigorous, and therefore better able to bear practical fruit in a capitalistic sense.

Such an assertion invalidates any supernatural morality, hence also the economic ethics of Catholicism, and opens the way to a thousand moral systems, all natural, all earthy, all based on principles inherent in human affairs. Protestantism by this principle did not act in a positive sense, as [Max] Weber believes, but in a negative sense, paving the way for the positive action of innumerable impulses, which--like the risks entailed by distant markets,  in the pre-Reformation period, the price revolution at the time of the Reformation, and the industrial revolution in the period following—led man to direct his action by purely economic criteria. Catholicism acts in opposition to capitalism by seeking to restrain these impulses and to bring various spheres of life into harmony on an ideal plane. Protestantism acted in favor of capitalism, for its religious teaching paved the way for it. (Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, published originally by Sheed and Ward, 1935, republished in 2002 by IHS Press, p. 151.)

The belief that social life is defined solely by economic criteria is what unites the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and right” even though they do not realize this. As I have noted so many times in the past on this site, the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and “left,” despite their differences on the margins of the errors of Modernity, are united in their belief that men can order their lives without any reference to religion at all, no less the true religion, and that men can do anything they want by means of their own unaided powers. In others, the adherents of the “left” and the “right” believe that men do not need Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or His true Church and that it is not necessary for men to have belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to create a better and more just world. The adherents of the “left and the “right” believe that the “better world” is defined by economics and not by the state of the souls of men.

The late Dr. George O'Brien stressed the fact that there is only one institution that can reorder the world properly, and it is not a secular, naturalistic international organization or a secular, naturalistic political party:

There is one institution and one institution alone which is capable of supplying and enforcing the social ethic that is needed to revivify the world. It is an institution at once intra-national and international; an institution that can claim to pronounce infallibly on moral matters, and to enforce the observance of the its moral decrees by direct sanctions on the individual conscience of man; an institution which, while respecting and supporting the civil governments of nations, can claim to exist independently of them, and can insist that they shall not intrude upon the moral life or fetter the moral liberty of their citizens. Europe possessed such an institution in the Middle Ages; its dethronement was the unique achievement of the Reformation; and the injury inflicted by that dethronement has never since been repaired. (George O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation, first published in 1923, republished by IHS press in 2003, p. 132.) 

Father Edward Cahill, S.J., writing in The Framework of a Christian State, wrote the following about Luther and his revolution against the Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope: 

The assertion that Protestantism has introduced into Europe, or promoted, democratic freedom or real liberty of conscience is still more patently untrue. It is a fact, indeed, that at the beginning of the revolt Luther's professions were radically democratic. He promised to benefit the people at large by curtailing the power of both Church and State. But he and his followers ended up by supporting an irresponsible despotism such as Europe had not known since the days of the pagan Emperors of Rome.

Inspired by Luther's democratic professions and his denunciations of the "tyranny and oppression" of the rulers, the knights and the lesser nobility of many of the German States, and later on, the peasants rose in open revolt against the princes. When the revolution was crushed in blood (1525) the victorious princes, now without a rival and no longer kept in check by the moderating influence of the Catholic Church, used their augmented power to establish a despotism which they exceeded for their own personal advantage, in opposition to the interests of the people; while Luther, with unscrupulous inconsistency, now proclaimed the doctrine of the unlimited power of rulers. 

Soon even the Church in the Protestant States fell completely under the control of the ruling princes, who were thus established as the absolute masters of both Church and State. The wealth of the Church, which hitherto had been the patrimony of the poor; its authority; all the ecclesiastical institutions, including hospitals, schools, homes of refuge, etc., passed into the hands of the kings, princes, and the town magistrates. At the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which ended the first phase of the revolution in Germany, the principle was formally adopted that the prince of each state was free to dictate the religion of each and all of his subjects." (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., The Framework of a Christian State, published in 1932 in Ireland and republished by Roman Catholic books, pp. 93-94. William Cobbett, a Protestant historian who never converted to the Holy Faith, wrote a remarkably full and honest account of the plunder of monasteries and convents under King Henry VIII in England, thus beginning the rise of all economic miseries since that time as this plunder threw off the poor from their lands and consigned them to pauperism and vagabondage. Even most Catholics have no idea how the entirety of the modern economic system was the result of the Protestant Revolution, up to and including the concept of a “national debt” that has enriched Talmudic bankers and merchants in the past and that has reached such a point in the United States of America as to make this country’s resources a vassal of the Red Chinese tyrants, who are plundering the goods of the underground Church at this time with the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s full blessing and support.)

Thus began the rise of the statism that is upon us at this time. There is no way to regard the growth of statism by making advertence to some kind of “generic” Christianity and/or by relying upon the Judeo-Masonic principles of naturalism and its religious indifferentism. Catholicism is but the one and only foundation of personal and social order, which is why the devil worked very hard to plant the seeds of corruption in the two centuries leading up to Martin Luther’ revolution against God and His true Church. And far from being “peaceful,” Luther’s revolution was born in blood as Catholic churches and convents were plundered and ransacked.

There is no such thing as Judeo-Christian “values,” but there is no such thing as a generic Christianity as, to quote Father Frederick William Faber. “Where there is no Mass there is no Christianity,” a truth that Father Robert Mader reiterated seventy years later:

That we are vitally permeated with the actual presence of our King is characteristic of our religion. Catholicism is not merely a marvellous teaching, a wonderful moral system, an unexcelled organization. It is more. It is the real, living, present Jesus with His Mystical Body, i.e., the faithful united with Him. It is not so much a theory as it is something living. A Catholicism that would not be united with Jesus would be nothing but a phantom in the mist, a soulless shell with another name and another outlook than its own.

That is why it is perhaps dangerous to faith if we use misunderstood words like Christianity and Catholicism somewhat too often. Let us repeat: Catholicism is not a theory, not a teaching, Christianity is the invisible but truly living presence of Christ among us, the Kingship of Jesus. To be Catholic means to stand in vital communication, through faith, hope and love, with the invisibly present Redeemer, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Thus it is that there, where Jesus is not present in the Host and no living communication with Him takes place, there can be no living Christianity. In that moment when Luther rejected the Sacrament of the Altar and therewith Christ present, he rejected Christianity.

Christianity equals Christ with the Christians! What does Jesus do when He is with the Christians? The same thing he did for three years in Palestine: be King. We often have no real concept of the life and the effectiveness of Jesus in the tabernacle. We think that because our eyes and ears are too weak to observe the divine-human activity of Jesus in the tabernacle, only the stillness of death reigns there. That is a gross deception.

His activity depends neither upon the greatness of his work room nor the loudness of sounds. What gigantic work is done by sun and nature, although no eye and ear can observe its progress! The Jesus of the tabernacle is the same as the Jesus in the Gospels, the same in Holiness, in Might, in Wisdom, in Omniscience, in Mercy and in Love. St. Paul writes in Hebrews (13:8) that "Jesus Christ, yesterday, and to-day; and the same for ever."

So what is Jesus doing in the tabernacles? He exercises His priestly office. The King prays. He holds perpetual adoration. He holds services in the name of the parish. He celebrates the Holy Mass. The visible Mass is over with the Ite missa est. The invisible Mass continues day and night since Jesus is present in the tabernacle, as an offering of praise and thanks and reparation. The parish priest is obliged by canon law to "read" Holy Mass for the congregation every Sunday. That is called "application." Jesus does more than the visible priest. He prays and makes application for HIs people continually.

What else Jesus do in the tabernacle? He exercises His office Shepherd. He does pastoral care of souls. The King keeps watch. The eyes of the Good Shepherd never sleep. They see everything that happens in the parish, in the houses and in the hearts. The eyes of the Good Shepherd take note of every longing for help and every danger. The Heart of the Good Shepherd beats for all with unending love, and that is the soul of pastoral work.

What else does Jesus do in the tabernacle? He exercises the preaching office, a preaching that penetrates deeper than just to the ears and without the preaching of the clergy in the pulpit remains nothing but sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The King speaks. The angels are His parish helpers. They visit the individual souls of the parishioners on assignment from the Saviour and with the power of the Holy Spirit. That proves what ought to be proven: that Christianity is not empty theory. Christianity is Christ with the Christians! The King lives!

Christianity should not be anything for us than it was for the Apostles: a living relationship to Jesus present. This personal relationship expresses itself in faith, hope and love for Jesus the King. Above all it is the Christian with Christ through love! Take for example in thought. Love expresses itself in its domination of the entire world of our thoughts. The world of thoughts usually is preoccupied with business, pleasure, the latest sensation, exaggerated worries and often just dirt. It is materialistic, money-grabbing, sensual, alcoholic, worldly. It is the thought of a baptized heathen. If we want to call ourselves Christians, then we ought to think of nothing but Christ Who is present among us. Neither work nor politics, neither the press nor sports ought to occupy us in the least in comparison to the occupation of our memory and our understanding by Jesus. That's Christianity!

The same applies to the world of feelings. Measure your temperature in Church, near to Jesus. It is much lower than when you are in a theater, a restaurant, in the office. That's not normal. You must have a heart defect. And today it seems that cardiac defects have become the mass epidemic of Christianity. We love everything, only not for Jesus. I repeat: that's not normal! A patient whose temperature has sunk so low is very ill. Christianity is the Christian with Christ. Not only with his thoughts and his feelings, but in all his doings must he be with Him. The church, the house where Jesus lives, ought to be a stronger attraction for every genuine Christian than any other house in in town, even during the week. Tell me where I can find you most often, and I will tell you who are are.

We want to be Christians again! Yet a little while, and we shall see Jesus. The Invisible will become visible. The hidden King of the tabernacle is Judge over punishment or reward for eternity! The great movement of decision over heaven and hell has come. What is heaven? The place of blessed happiness in love. It is clear that whoever does not know the great law of Christianity, the law of love between the Christian and Christ, cannot enter into heaven. Not want to love Christ, Who is Love, is the sins of sins! Whoever does not love will be damned. We want to become Christians again. We want to love again, love and die for Christ the King. (Father Robert Mader, Cross and the Crown, edited and translated by Dr. Eileen Kunze, Sarto House, 1999, pp. 92-94.)

As we know, the ineffable Sacrifice of the Cross is not offered universally today as it was when Father Mader wrote eighty-five years ago. Our Lord is not present in His Real Presence in most tabernacles in the world today. The new religion wrought by conciliarism has reduced the days of mandatory fast and abstinence during Lent to two, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. That’s it. Forty days of Lent. Only two days of mandatory fast and abstinence under penalty of sin. A religion that eschews the necessity of fasting and abstinence during Lent has nothing to do with Catholicism. Nothing. The lack of sacrifice in the conciliar sect has led to a loss of faith in the souls of millions and to the actual celebration of sin in one conciliar-controlled parish, school, university and seminary after another. The “popes” of the conciliar sect have celebrated “religious liberty” and the “separation of the Church and State,” which were the goals of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry, and had already produced a mess in the world by the time that the “Second” Vatican Council took place.

Father Mader explained how things had degenerated in his own time from 1914 to 1934 because nations had revolted against Christ the King and His true Church:

What happened? World War I began in 1914. In the whole world there was no Catholic government. All of them without exception had become more or less liberal. It seemed as though Jesus Himself had become "liberal" in order to punish the nations. He did not "interfere in the political affairs of the nations." He apparently did what all the popular assemblies and the newspapers had been demanding of Him for more than a hundred years. And now look at the paradox! The nations which had been liberal for a century and which had given themselves liberal constitutions and elected liberal representatives now accused God of committing a crime, because He did not want to interfere in politics! If one is liberal, then one has no right to accuse God of non-intervention. If the liberals want to be consistent, then they have to keep silence on our question.

A word to the sentimental souls: The World Wars and the revolutions with all their injustices that cry to heaven and their cruelties are supposed to be proof that there is no God, and that Jesus is a failure. Answer: The world has not only become unbelieving and liberal; it is godless. Of course there have always been godless individuals. But it has been reserved to modern times to raise godlessness to public power. And what is worse, godlessness had turned into actual glowing hatred of God. It became a fury. Mankind fell upon God in order to strangle Him, kill Him and eradicate Him.

Whoever casts a glance into the secrets of modern Freemasonry knows that we are not exaggerating. Freemasonry is the secret government behind most of the earth's governments. What we are experiencing since the French Revolution is the radical, implacable, irreconcilable war against God, the revolution of earth against heaven.

If this is the case, what did God have to do? All graces had been thrown to the wind, all warnings were ridiculed. The world had become unteachable and incapable of conversion. God's mercy and patience were taken as an excuse for more impertinence and new ridicule. And it must be emphasized that we stood it! We watched the outbreaks of hatred against God and had no laws and no courts with which to defend the rights of God and His Christ. We made ourselves accomplices. (Father Robert Mader, Cross and the Crown, edited and translated by Dr. Eileen Kunze, Sarto House, 1999, pp. 63-64.)

The same can be said of Catholics here in the United States of America. We have been accomplices to placing the godless in power, those who curse and who revile their opponents as they seek to revenge every slight and injustice, whether real or imagined. We have trusted in the ability of politics to keep “bad guys” out even though anyone who does not acknowledge Christ the King is advancing evil whether or not they realize it. Even fully believing Catholics

Following the destruction of Jerusalem, the Romans covered the places of hallowed memory to the Christian with rubble. The cave of the Holy Sepulchre was buried under such rubble, and over as well Golgotha pagan images and temples were erected in honor of Venus and Jupiter. For this reason the Christians did not go there anymore, in order not to be mistaken for idol-worshippers. Emperor Constantine ordered the temples and images torn down and the rubble carried away. After long and hard work the cave of the Holy Sepulchre was found. Not found away three crosses with nails were discovered, and along with them the superscription, which, however, lay separate from the cross.

Without doubt one of the these must be the Cross of the Savior, but there was no certain sign that would differentiate it from the crosses of the two thieves. This was given when a mortally il woman was suddenly cured by touching the true Cross. The Holy Cross was then encased in silver and precious gems, and a church was built over it, which according to Emperor Constantine's order was to be more magnificent than anything ever seen before. In memory of these events, the Church recalls the Finding of the Most Holy Cross on May 3, in order that on every day until the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), land and people with be blessed with a splinter, a particle of the Cross.

We have every reason to remember these events. Christianity is the religion of the Crucified One. In his first letter to the Corinthians the Apostle of the Nations, St. Paul, declares: "For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). St. Paul's preaching, no matter how many-sided it appears, always returns to the central Sun of Christendom: Jesus on the Cross, King of the World! Everything else is either a ray from this Sun, or it is nothing. In the Crucifix lies our entire dogmatic and moral theology, our entire teaching on faith and morals, our catechism. The Cross is our library. Every other book has value only inasmuch as the spirit of the Cross speaks in it.

Modernists have attempted to ban the old preaching of St. Paul, the Gospel of the Cross, to oblivion. The Cross means the teaching of the necessity of sacrifice and of grace, and this now lies under the rubble on which a new paganism has erected once again the pagan images and temples of Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Bacchus--in other words, the absolutist state, capitalism, immorality, and addiction to pleasure. A certain superficial Christianity, which puts more value on being modern than on being Catholic and Biblical, and for which the imitation of the spirit of the times is more understandable than the imitation of Christ, has made itself a willing accomplice.

We have lost the Cross. We have a Christianity that no longer understands sacrifice and there is no Christianity or only a soulless version of Christianity. We need Constantines and Helens who will once again dig out the the Cross from under the rubble and make it their shrine and their sign, and who believe that the King's throne is the Cross.

The crucified King! In the family we must have a Finding of the the Most Holy Cross! The modern family has lost the crucifix, and in its place it has raised up the political hero, the artist, old pagan gods, nudity and the prostitute. The crucifix does not fit into the modern home. The modern living room preaches money-grabbing, pride, vanity, lasciviousness, laziness. The modern living room is the exaltation of the seven deadly sins. At least one is honest enough to feel the Cross no longer fits into this milieu and has got rid of it because in the long run the crucifix can only remain there where the spirit of the Crucified One remains, and the spirit of the Crucified is no longer there.

The spirit of the Crucified is the spirit of love and sacrifice, but the spirit of the modern family is the spirit of selfishness and enjoyment. The speech of the Crucified says: First the others, I come last! The speech of selfishness is: First I, then again I, the others come last! The Christian family is built on the notion of sacrifice and devotion. The concept of the Christian father is: Work from morning to evening for others. The concept of the Christian mother is: Care for others! Let the self always come last! The concept of the Christian child is: Respect, love, obedience. Father and mother first, only then I!

The notion of sacrifice is dying out in the modern family. The modern family is built upon the law of egotism. The modern family takes as its motto: "As much enjoyment and as little sacrifice as possible!" This is the source of Malthusianism. That is where characterless education comes from. And that is the doom of the family. Only the Cross and its sermon of self-discipline, self-denial and devotion can save the dying family. . . .

If one knows Who Jesus is: the Creator and the Conserver, the Savior, the Owner of the earth, then one must regard the liberal sin, that of fundamental social refusal to recognize the spiritual monarchy of Christ over society, as the most grievous sin committed since Good Friday. It is deicide, God-murder, committed in the name of law and of Satan, true Antichristianity. Cardinal Mercier therefore rightly called the official apostasy of the nations the greatest crime of our times.

At present this is the situation of the Sign of the Son of Man. They do not want it to shine in the heavens. Just like back then on Good Friday: We will not have Him reign over us! (Father Robert Mader, Cross and the Crown, edited and translated by Dr. Eileen Kunze, Sarto House, 1999, pp. 117-119.) 

Yes, the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the religiously indifferentist Judeo-Masonic civil state of Modernity is indeed the “most grievous sin committed since Good Friday.” The world today like the Jews of Jerusalem on Good Friday “will not have Him reign over us.”

There was much Catholic truth being written by various Catholics at the time Hilaire Belloc lived, but each author understood that was either Catholicism or the abyss.

Returning now to Hilaire Belloc’s “The New Paganism”:

A direct consequence of this philosophy, though again it is a consequence furiously denied by its victims, is the elimination of right and wrong. Our actions do not depend upon our own wills; those who think that they proceed from an act of the will suffer an illusion; human action, from what used to be called the noblest self-sacrifice to the basest commercial swindling, is the inevitable result of forces over which the perpetrator has no control-----or, as Dean Swift has admirably put it in that great masterpiece, The Tale of a Tub, "It was ordained some three days before the Creation that my nose should come against this lamp post."

It is true that the professors of this creed are illogical; for no one gives louder vent to moral indignation than themselves, especially when they are denouncing the cruelties or ineptitudes of believers in moral responsibility, but then, as the denial of the human reason is also part of their creed, or, at any rate, the denial of its value as the instrument for the discovery of truth, they will not be seriously disturbed by the incongruity of their outbursts; for what is incongruous or illogical is not to them blameworthy or ridiculous-----rather in their mouths does the word "logical" connote something absurd and empty.

Now, it is with this element of Monism that there enters a highly practical consideration in our survey of the New Paganism. It is this: the New Paganism is in process of building up a society of its own, wherein will be apparent two features novel in what used to be Christendom. Those two features have already appeared and will spread each in its own sphere, the one in the sphere of law-----that is, of coercive enactment-----the other in the sphere of status, that is, in the organization of society.

In the first sphere, that of positive law, the New Paganism has already begun to produce and cannot but produce more and more a mass of restrictive legislation. [emphasis added] It is a paradox, of course, that such restrictive legislation should be bred from a mood which proceeded originally from rebellion against restriction, but the fact is undoubted-----it is before all our eyes. With the denial of the will there necessarily appears the questioning of any content to the word "freedom." In a Christian society you were free to do a number of acts, for some of which you could be punished under Christian laws, for others of which no state or other authority could punish you, but which were opposed to the social atmosphere in which you lived. But the New Paganism will tend, not to punish, but to restrain with fetters; to prevent action, to impose coercive bonds. It will be at issue more and more with human dignity. It has already, in certain provinces [the Calvinist canton of Vaud in Switzerland is an example], enacted what is called "the sterilization of the unfit" as a positive law. It has not yet enacted, though it has already proposed and will certainly in time enact, legislation for the restriction of births. Not only in these, but in many other departments of life, one after another, will this mechanical network spread and bind those subject to it under a compulsion which cannot be escaped.

Comment Number Four:

As has become clear in recent decades, the sterilization of the “unfit” is being effected by means of “vaccines” not only in Third World countries but in the so-called “civilized” West. The Wuhan Virus jabs have rendered scores of women infertile, which was simply part of the plandemicists’ overall depopulation strategy that began with the cookie-cutter protocols that were designed to delay treatment of infect patients until the virus had reached its final stages, whereupon the afflicted and/or their relatives were subjected to “common care” pressures discussed earlier in this commentary,

Back to Belloc:

In the sphere of social texture the New Paganism must also inevitably and of its nature, wherever it gives its tone to society, reintroduce that status of slavery from which our civilization sprang and which only very gradually disappeared under the influence of the Christian ethic. [emphasis added] This revival of slavery must not be confused with the spread of mechanical restriction applicable to all. They are cousins, but they are not identical. Slavery is the compulsion of one man or set of men to work for the benefit of others. It is a compulsion to work, backed by the arms of the State. The way has been prepared for it by that already half-Pagan thing-----industrial capitalism, of which I write on a later page; and the steps whereby the New Paganism will achieve slavery develop naturally from industrial capitalism. It is a thesis I have developed at greater length in my book, The Servile State; I here only touch on it as a main social result to which the New Paganism will give birth. That this novel status will bear the name "slavery" I doubt; for it is in the nature of mankind, when they are proceeding to call that good which once they called evil, to avoid the old evil name. [emphasis added] In the same way fornication is not called fornication but "companionate marriage."

Probably slavery, when it comes, will be called "permanent employment"; and a century hence, a rich man will say to his friends, talking of his new gardener: "He's a permanent. Paid for him at the Bureau only last Thursday."

In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency. [emphasis added]

As yet, during the transition, there is an illogical, and therefore an ephemeral mixture of the old and the new. The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast. [emphasis added]

The New Paganism will then, I say, give us, in those societies over which it shall obtain the control of the mind, increasing restriction against general freedom and increasing restriction against the particular freedom which left some equality between the man who worked and the man who exploited him under a contract-----it will replace that idea of contract by the older idea of status. In saying this, my object is to point out that the discussion of the New Paganism is not a mere academic discussion, but, as I have called it, one of immediate practical importance. If we adopt it we must be prepared for its consequences; if we abhor those consequences, it is our business to fight the New Paganism vigorously.

And here I have, as on so many other points, a quarrel with those moderns who will make of religion an individual thing [and no Catholic can evade the corporate quality of religion], telling us that its object being personal holiness and the salvation of the individual soul, it can have no concern with politics. On the contrary, the concern of religion with politics is inevitable. [emphasis added] Not that the Christian doctrine and ethic rejects anyone of the three classical forms of government-----democracy, aristocracy or monarchy, or any mixture of them-----but that it does reject certain features in society which are opposed to the Christian social products, and are opposed to them because they spring from a denial of free will.

The battle for right doctrine in theology is always also a battle for the preservation of definite social things [institutions, habits] following from right doctrine; nor is there anything more contemptible intellectually than the attitude of those who imagine that because doctrine must be stated in abstract terms it therefore has no practical application nor any real fruit in the real world of real men. Contrariwise, difference in doctrine is at the root of all political and social differences; therefore is the struggle for or against true doctrine the most vital of struggles.

But apart from these aspects of the New Paganism there is another which I confess I happen to feel myself closely concerned with. It is the connection between the New Paganism and that lure of the antique world, which is of such power over all generous minds, and especially upon those who are in love with beauty.

It is in my judgment an argument which has certainly been of powerful effect in the immediate past, and will continue for some time longer, even in our declining culture, to be of powerful effect, that Paganism is to be sought, respected and achieved because our race, before the advent of the Catholic Church, wrote what it did, built what it did, chiseled what it did, and everywhere created the loveliness to which we Christians are the heirs. Yet this attraction of the antique world I conceive to be a dangerous decoy, leading us on to things very different from and very much worse than that classic Paganism from which we all descend.

I know that to affirm the connection between the New Paganism and a wistfulness for the Old will sound in most modern ears fantastic, because most modern people who fall into the New Paganism know nothing about the Paganism of antiquity; there never was a time when educated men had a larger proportion among them ignorant of Latin and Greek, since first Greek was taught in the universities of Western Europe; and there was certainly never a time during the last two thousand years when the mass of people, the workers, were given less knowledge of the past and were less in sympathy with tradition.

Nonetheless, it is true that the idea of Pagan antiquity as a model runs through the whole new movement. With a few scholars it is at first-hand, with most people at second, third, fourth or fifth; but it is there with everyone. There is a general knowledge that men were once free from the burden of Christian duty, and a widespread belief that when men were free from it, life was better because it was more rational and directed to things which they could all be sure of and test for themselves, such as the health of the body and physical comforts and pleasant surroundings, and the rest. To direct life again to these objects, making man once more sufficient to himself and treating temporal good as the supreme good, is the note of the New Paganism.

Now what seems to me by far the most important thing to point out in this connection is that the underlying assumption in all this is false. The New Paganism differs, and must differ radically, from the Old; its consequences in human life will be quite different; presumably much worse, and increasingly worse.

The reason of this is that you cannot undo an experience. You cannot cut off a man or a society from their past, and the world of Christendom has had the experience of the Faith. When it moves away from the Faith to return to Paganism again it is not doing the same thing, not producing the same emotions, not passing through the same process, not suffering the same reactions, as the old Paganism did, which was moving towards the Faith. It is one thing to go south from the Arctic towards the civilized parts of Europe; it is quite another thing to go north from the civilized parts of Europe to the Arctic. You are not merely returning to a place from which you started, you are going through a contrary series of emotions the whole time.

The New Paganism, should it ever become universal, or over whatever districts or societies it may become general, will never be what the Old Paganism was. It will be other, because it will be a corruption. The Old Paganism was profoundly traditional; [emphasis added] indeed, it had no roots except in tradition. Deep reverence for its own past and for the wisdom of its ancestry and pride therein were the very soul of the Old Paganism; that is why it formed so solid a foundation on which to build the Catholic Church, though that is also why it offered so long and determined a resistance to the growth of the Catholic Church. But the New Paganism has for its very essence contempt for tradition and contempt of ancestry. It respects perhaps nothing, but least of all does it respect the spirit of "Our fathers have told us."

The Old Paganism worshipped human things, but the noblest human things, particularly reason and the sense of beauty. In these it rose to heights greater than have since been reached, perhaps, and certainly to heights as great as were ever reached by mere reason or in the mere production of beauty during the Christian centuries.

But the New Paganism despises reason, and boasts that it is attacking beauty. It presents with pride music that is discordant, building that is repellent, pictures that are a mere chaos, and it ridicules the logical process, so that, as I have said, it has made of the very word "logical" a sort of sneer.

The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see.

The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing; the other is declining towards a condition where the society it informs will be blind and deaf, even to the main natural pleasures of life and to temporal truths. It will be incapable of understanding what they are all about.

The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing; all the poetry of the Old Paganism, even where it despairs, has this sense. And you may read in those of its writers who actively opposed religion, such as Lucretius, a fine religious sense of dignity and order. The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.

There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil.  One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism. (Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic Layman in England (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931. As found at: Hilaire Belloc’s 1931 Insights from His Survey of the New Paganism.)

Yes, outright satanism is much with us, present in both the so-called “free” West with its attacks upon innocent human life from the moment of conception through all subsequent stages with its becoming bold enough to advance outright murder in the name “compassion as seen at the beginning of this commentary and also includes efforts on the part of the same people who brought us the Wuhan Virus, the Red Chinese, to develop artificial wombs in which to incubate children:

Scientists are developing robot surrogates with artificial wombs designed to “give birth” to human babies.

These artificial wombs are designed to mimic a pregnancy from conception to delivery, with the infant receiving nutrients through a tube.

Chinese scientist Dr. Zhang Qifeng, founder of the company Kaiwa Technology, said that the technology is already in a “mature stage” and that a prototype will be sold for 100,000 yuan (approx. 13,929 USD) next year.

“Now it needs to be implanted in the robot’s abdomen so that a real person and the robot can interact to achieve pregnancy, allowing the fetus to grow inside,” Zhang stated.

According to media reports, the details of how exactly a human embryo would be created and later implanted in the machine remain unclear. However, it would likely involve some form of in vitro fertilization.

The developing babies would be inside the robot for the entire gestation period and be surrounded by artificial amniotic fluid designed to create an atmosphere similar to a womb.

The robot is allegedly intended to address rising infertility rates in China and elsewhere.

The Telegraph claimed that the artificial wombs “could revolutionise medical science and our notions of family and fertility,” implicitly admitting that they are an attack on the natural family.

Critics have warned that it is unethical and cruel to deprive a baby of the natural womb of its mother. Medical experts have raised doubts about whether the artificial womb could replicate human gestation. They stressed that the complex biological processes, like maternal hormone secretion, cannot be replicated by robots.

Moreover, the unborn baby and its mother exchange cells during pregnancy, in a process called microchimerism. The transfer likely helps the baby’s immune system by providing exposure to maternal immune factors and, therefore, potentially reducing the risk of autoimmune disease.

Babies also begin to recognize their mother’s voice while still in the womb, fostering bonding, emotional regulation, and language development.

Artificial wombs for potentially IVF-created babies are not the only dystopian plan that powerful and influential groups are currently developing. As LifeSiteNews reported recently, billionaire investors are also funding companies to genetically manipulate embryos in order to create “designer babies” that could be gene-selected for certain desired traits such as higher IQ. (Chinese scientists are developing robots with artificial wombs to 'give birth' to babies.)

Many Americans believed that the United States of America was morally superior to Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich without realizing that the path to Hitler in Germany had been paved by social scientists and natural scientists there during the Weimar Republic. Yes, democratic Germany was home to scores of biological and eugenic experimentations. Science is a tool given us by God to use as a means of assisting the legitimate development of human progress in the natural world. Absent the direction provided by the true Church, however, science can become a terrible weapon of destruction and of maniacal social and biological engineering.

Thus, the fuller development in the Third Reich of the monstrous policies pursued during the Weimar Republic was quite logical. In 1935, the German populace quite docilely accepted Hitler’s implementation of the wholesale extermination of the retarded and infirm. Germans had become used to the principle that the state knew best. Only Clemens von Galen, the Bishop of Munster, had the courage to speak out publicly against Hitler’s eugenics, which is why it is useful at this juncture to keep in mind the degenerative state to which the so-called “professionals” in the medical, scientific, “public health” and pharmaceutical world bears a striking if not identical resemblance to what the famous Bishop Clemens von Galen denounced in his three sermons against the Nazi eugenics laws in 1941:

It is a deeply moving event that we read of in the Gospel for today. Jesus weeps! The Son of God weeps! A man who weeps is suffering pain either of the body or of the heart. Jesus did not suffer in the body; and yet he wept. How great must have been the sorrow of soul, the heartfelt pain of this most courageous of men to make him weep! Why did he weep? He wept for Jerusalem, for God's holy city that was so dear to him, the capital of his people. He wept for its inhabitants, his fellow-countrymen, because they refused to recognise the only thing that could avert the judgment foreseen by his omniscience and determined in advance by his divine justice: “If thou hadst known . . . the things which belong unto thy peace!" Why do the inhabitants of Jerusalem not know it? Not long before Jesus had given voice to it: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" (Luke 13,34).

Ye would not. I, your King, your God, I would. But ye would not! How safe, how sheltered is the chicken under the hen's wing: she warms it, she feeds it, she defends it. In the same way I desired to protect you, to keep you, to defend you against any ill. I would, but ye would not!

That is why Jesus weeps: that is why that strong man weeps; that is why God weeps. For the folly, the injustice, the crime of not being willing. And for the evil to which that gives rise which his omniscience sees coming. which his justice must impose if man sets his unwillingness against God's commands, in  opposition to the admonitions of conscience, and all the loving invitations of the divine Friend, the best of Fathers: “If thou hadst known, in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But then wouldst not!.: It is something terrible, something incredibly wrong and fatal. when man sets his will against God's will. I would) than wouldst not! It is therefore that Jesus weeps for Jerusalem.

Dearly beloved Christians! The joint pastoral letter of the German bishops, which was read in all Catholic churches in Germany on 26 June 1941, includes the following words.

“It is true that in Catholic ethics there are certain positive commandments which cease to be obligatory if their observance would be attended by unduly great difficulties; but there are also sacred obligations of conscience from which no one can release us; which we must carry out even if it should cost us our life. Never, under any circumstances, may a man, save in war or in legitimate self-defence, kill an innocent person.”

I had occasion on 6th July to add the followings comments on this passage in the joint pastoral letter:

“For some months we have been heating reports that inmates of establishments for the care of the mentally ill who have been ill for a long period and perhaps appear incurable have been forcibly removed from these establishments on orders from Berlin. Regularly the relatives receive soon afterwards an intimation that the patient is dead, that the patient's body has been cremated and that they can collect the ashes. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty. that these numerous unexpected deaths of the mentally ill do not occur naturally but are intentionally brought about in accordance with the doctrine that it is legitimate to destroy a so-called “worthless life,” in other words to kill innocent men and women, if it is thought that their lives are of no further value to the people and the state. A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons who are no longer capable of work, of cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm!”

I am reliably informed that in hospitals and homes in the province of Westphalia lists are being prepared of inmates who are classified as “unproductive members of the national community” and are to be removed from these establishments and shortly thereafter killed. The first party of patients left the mental hospital at Marienthal, near Munster, in the course of this week.

German men and women! Article 211 of the German Penal Code is still in force, in these terms: “Whoever kills a man of deliberate intent is guilty of murder and punishable with death”. No doubt in order to protect those who kill with intent these poor men and women, members of our families, from this punishment laid down by law, the patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was. I have been assured, however, that in the Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Conti, no secret is made of the fact that indeed a large number of mentally ill persons in Germany have already been killed with intent and that this will continue.

Article 139 of the Penal Code provides that “anyone who has knowledge of an intention to commit a crime against the life of any person . . . and fails to inform the authorities or the person whose life is threatened in due time . . . commits a punishable offence”. When I learned of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal I reported the matter on 28th July to the State Prosecutor of Munster Provincial Court and to the Munster chief of police by registered letter, in the following terms:

“According to information I have received it is planned in the course of this week (the date has been mentioned as 31st July) to move a large number of inmates of the provincial hospital at Marienthal, classified as ‘unproductive members of the national community’, to the mental hospital at Eichberg, where, as is generally believed to have happened in the case of patients removed from other establishments, they are to be killed with intent. Since such action is not only contrary to the divine and the natural moral law but under article 211 of the German Penal Code ranks as murder and attracts the death penalty, I hereby report the matter in accordance with my obligation under article 139 of the Penal Code and request that steps should at once be taken to protect the patients concerned by proceedings against the authorities planning their removal and murder, and that I may be informed of the action taken".

I have received no information of any action by the State Prosecutor or the police.

I had already written on 26th July to the Westphalian provincial authorities, who are responsible for the running of the mental hospital and for the patients entrusted to them for care and for cure, protesting in the strongest terms. It had no effect. The first transport of the innocent victims under sentence of death has left Marienthal. And I am now told that 800 patients have already been removed from the hospital at Warstein.

We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self-defence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy.

No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”.

The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?

I will not pursue the comparison to the end, so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.

But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function.

No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as productive?

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm! If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients ” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!

I will give you an example of what is happening. One of the patients in Marienthal was a man of 55, a farmer from a country parish in the Munster region I could give you his name who has suffered for some years from mental disturbance and was therefore admitted to Marienthal hospital. He was not mentally ill in the full sense: he could receive visits and was always happy, when his relatives came to see him. Only a fortnight ago he was visited by his wife and one of his sons, a soldier on home leave from the front. The son is much attached to his father, and the parting was a sad one: no one can tell, whether the soldier will return and see his father again, since he may fall in battle for his country. The son, the soldier, will certainly never again see his father on earth, for he has since then been put on the list of the “unproductive”. A relative, who wanted to visit the father this week in Marienthal, was turned away with the information that the patient had been transferred elsewhere on the instructions of the Council of State for National Defence. No information could be given about where he had been sent, but the relatives would be informed within a few days. What information will they be given? The same as in other cases of the kind? That the man has died, that his body has been cremated, that the ashes will be handed over on payment of a fee? Then the soldier, risking his life in the field for his fellow-countrymen, will not see his father again on earth, because fellow-countrymen at home have killed him.

The facts I have stated are firmly established. I can give the names of the patient, his wife and his son the soldier, and the place where they live.

“Thou shalt not kill!” God wrote this commandment in the conscience of man long before any penal code laid down the penalty for murder, long before there was any prosecutor or any court to investigate and avenge a murder. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was a murderer long before there were any states or any courts of law. And he confessed his deed, driven by his accusing conscience: “My punishment is greater than I can bear . . . and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me the murderer shall slay me” (Genesis 4,13-14).

“Thou shalt not kill!” This commandment from God, who alone has power to decide on life or death, was written in the hearts of men from the beginning, long before God gave the children of Israel on Mount Sinai his moral code in those lapidary sentences inscribed on stone which are recorded for us in Holy Scripture and which as children we learned by heart in the catechism.

“I am the Lord thy God!” Thus begins this immutable law. “Thou shalt have not other gods before me.” God ” the only God, transcendent, almighty, omniscient, infinitely holy and just, our Creator and future Judge ” has given us these commandments. Out of love for us he wrote these commandments in our heart and proclaimed them to us. For they meet the need of our God-created nature; they are the indispensable norms for all rational, godly, redeeming and holy individual and community life. With these commandments God, our Father, seeks to gather us, His children, as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. If we follow these commands, these invitations, this call from God, then we shall be guarded and protected and preserved from harm, defended against threatening death and destruction like the chickens under the hen's wings.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Is this to come about again in our country of Germany, in our province of Westphalia, in our city of Munster? How far are the divine commandments now obeyed in Germany, how far are they obeyed here in our community?

The eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not lie.” How often is it shamelessly and publicly broken!

The seventh commandment: “Thou shalt not steal”. Whose possessions are now secure since the arbitrary and ruthless confiscation of the property of our brothers and sisters, members of Catholic orders? Whose property is protected, if this illegally confiscated property is not returned?

The sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Think of the instructions and assurances on free sexual intercourse and unmarried motherhood in the notorious Open Letter by Rudolf Hess, who has disappeared since, which was published in all the newspapers. And how much shameless and disreputable conduct of this kind do we read about and observe and experience in our city of Munster! To what shamelessness in dress have our young people been forced to get accustomed to” the preparation for future adultery! For modesty, the bulwark of chastity, is about to be destroyed.

And now the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”, is set aside and broken under the eyes of the authorities whose function it should be to protect the rule of law and human life, when men presume to kill innocent fellow-men with intent merely because they are “unproductive”, because they can no longer produce any goods.

And how do matters stand with the observance of the fourth commandment, which enjoins us to honour and obey our parents and those in authority over us? The status and authority of parents is already much undermined and is increasingly shaken by all the obligations imposed on children against the will of their parents. Can anyone believe that sincere respect and conscientious obedience to the state authorities can be maintained when men continue to violate the commandments of the supreme authority, the Commandments of God, when they even combat and seek to stamp out faith in the only true transcendent God, the Lord of heaven and earth?

The observance of the first three commandments has in reality for many years been largely suspended among the public in Germany and in Munster. By how many people are Sundays and feast days profaned and withheld from the service of God! How the name of God is abused, dishonoured and blasphemed!

And the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In place of the only true eternal God men set up their own idols at will and worship them: Nature, or the state, or the people, or the race. And how many are there whose God, in Paul's word, “is their belly” (Philippians 3:19)” their own well being, to which they sacrifice all else, even honour and conscience ” the pleasures of the senses, the lust for money, the lust for power! In accordance with all this men may indeed seek to arrogate to themselves divine attributes, to make themselves lords over the life and death of their fellow-men.

When Jesus came near to Jerusalem and beheld the city he wept over it, saying: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the day shall come upon thee, that thine enemies . . . shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” Looking with his bodily eyes, Jesus saw only the walls and towers of the city of Jerusalem, but the divine omniscience looked deeper and saw how matters stood within the city and its inhabitants:       “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings ” and ye would not!" That is the great sorrow that oppresses Jesus's heart, that brings tears to his eyes.   I wanted to act for your good, but ye would not!

Jesus saw how sinful, how terrible, how criminal, how disastrous this unwillingness is. Little man, that frail creature, sets his created will against the will of God! Jerusalem and its inhabitants, His chosen and favoured people, set their will against God's will! Foolishly and criminally, they defy the will of God! And so Jesus weeps over the heinous sin and the inevitable punishment. God is not mocked!

Christians of Munster! Did the Son of God in his omniscience in that day see only Jerusalem and its people? Did he weep only over Jerusalem? Is the people of Israel the only people whom God has encompassed and protected with a father's care and mother's love, has drawn to Himself? Is it the only people that wou1d not ? The only one that rejected God's truth, that threw off God's law and so condemned itself to ruin?

Did Jesus, the omniscient God, also see in that day our German people, our land of Westphalia, our region of Munster, the Lower Rhineland? Did he also weep over us? Over Munster?

For a thousand years he has instructed our forefathers and us in his truth, guided us with his law, nourished us with his grace, gathered us together as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. Did the omniscient Son of God see in that day that in our time he must also pronounce this judgment on us: “Ye would not: see, your house will be laid waste!” How terrible that would be!

My Christians! I hope there is still time; but then indeed it is high time: That we may realise, in this our day, the things that belong unto our peace! That we may realise what alone can save us, can preserve us from the divine judgment: that we should take, without reservation, the divine commandments as the guiding rule of our lives and act in sober earnest according to the words: “Rather die than sin”.

That in prayer and sincere penitence we should beg that God's forgiveness and mercy may descend upon us, upon our city, our country and our beloved German people.

But with those who continue to provoke God's judgment, who blaspheme our faith, who scorn God's commandments, who make common cause with those who alienate our young people from Christianity, who rob and banish our religious, who bring about the death of innocent men and women, our brothers and sisters with all those we will avoid any confidential relationship, we will keep ourselves and our families out of reach of their influence, lest we become infected with their godless ways of thinking and acting, lest we become partakers in their guilt and thus liable to the judgment which a just God must and will inflict on all those who, like the ungrateful city of Jerusalem, do not will what God wills.

O God, make us all know, in this our day, before it is too late, the things which belong to our peace!

O most Sacred Heart of Jesus, grieved to tears at the blindness and iniquities of men, help us through Thy grace, that we may always strive after that which is pleasing to Thee and renounce that which displeases Thee, that we may remain in Thy love and find peace for our souls!

Amen. (Three Sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen.)

Anyone who does not think that the situation in Nazi Germany that was described so clearly and condemned so forcefully by the late Bishop Clemens von Galens in 1941 obtains in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world at the present time is spiritually blind. We are living through the precise situation now as that described and condemned by Bishop Clemens von Galens.

Please do yourself a favor and re-read the late bishop's remarks again as they are quite relevant to the institutionalization of undisguised, uneuphemized euthanasia around the world.

Self-annihilation is the work of the devil and it is a diabolical escape from the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer.

Bishop von Galens's remarks resonate with Catholic truth and serve as prophetic warnings to us not to trust in the diagnoses and judgments of so many doctors today who have accustomed themselves to lying and killing, something that is especially the case as a result of everyone in the medical industry having to undergo “training” in the ethos of “palliative care.” Patients are evaluated by many, although not all, medical professionals now on a “quality of life,” cost-benefit basis that dehumanizes them and permits medical “professionals” to start the processes, tailored to the “needs” of each person and carried out by conditioning patients and their families to accept the “inevitable,” of expediting their deaths in the name of “mercy” and “compassion” in hospices across the word.

Our world of satanic nihilism will come to an end in God’s good time but not, I believe, without some cataclysmic chastisements that men who have defined Him and His Holy Laws will visit upon us all to serve as unwitting instruments in His Divine Plan to effect our own sanctification and salvation as we are given opportunities to suffer and thus to make reparation for our own many sins.

While we must be aware of the problems in the world-at-large and in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, we can never surrender to despair.

We are Catholics!

We trust completely in the efficacy of the graces won for us by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, to prosper under the crosses sent into our lives as the means to show forth our love in Him and our total trust in the intercessory power and protection of His Most Blessed Mother.

Entrusting ourselves to Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, may with not be unduly distracted by the events of this world and remain confident in, without being the least bit presumptuous of, the abiding help of Our Lady, Queen of Mercy, now, and at the hour of our death.

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.

Pope Saint Zephyrinus, pray for us.