Supreme Masters of Sophistry

The task of writing about the events of a world gone mad has become increasingly difficult for me as there is really nothing “new” to write that I have not written in great, copious detail thousands of times before.

Look, how many more times can one write about the fact that the Catholic Church, she who is the spotless, virginal mystical spouse of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom, cannot give her children error of any kind?

How many more times can one point out there has never been nor can there ever be a “heretical” pope?

How many more times can one point out that one does not have any “right” to oppose a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter?

How many more times can one point out that naturalism of any kind, whether of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” or that of the false opposite of the naturalist “right,” can never be the foundation of a well-ordered society?

How many more times can one point out that all the agitation caused by this, or that “latest” controversy solves nothing as no one in public life today and no secular commentor, including those Catholics who know better, is either able or willing to state clearly that the remote cause of all human problems, personal and social, is Original Sin, and that the proximate causes of those problems are our own Actual Sins?

The purpose of this commentary, therefore, is to provide brief discussions of several recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America that are simply manifestations of a world that has gone mad because of the logical, inexorable, inevitable consequences of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church. Men who are set free from the sweet yoke of Our Divine Redeemer’s true Church and thus are deprived of the supernatural helps they need to overcome the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin (the darkened intellect, the weakened will, the overthrow of the higher, rational faculties in favor of the lower, sensual passions) must fall into the throes of their own Actual Sins, which become habitual and result in the descent of men and their nations into rank barbarism.

There is no “once and for all” “solution” to the problems in the world now or, quite indeed, in any other epoch of human history as the extent to which there will be order within nations depends entirely upon the extent to which men conform themselves to the binding precepts of the Divine Law and the Natural Law and maintain themselves by Our Lady’s graces in a state of Sanctifying Grace. As each of us is a sinner subject to the vagaries of human nature and of its concupiscence, each of us, whether we realize it or want to accept it, is responsible for contributing to the building up of the Kingdom of God in the world or, sadly, for being an instrument of the kingdom of the adversary. In this regard, therefore, one must remember that there has never been any “perfect” time in history since the Adam’s fall while remembering as well that there have been periods where more men than not tried to please Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church and thus sought to avoid sin and its near occasions and to live in a manner truly befitting redeemed creatures.

Pope Pius XI made this point very clearly in Mitt Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, as he condemned Nazism, without naming it as such, and the religious faith that many that it demanded of all German citizens as the means to “cure” the ills of Germany, many of which had been caused, proximately speaking, by the revanchist schemes of the “Allied” powers at the Paris Peace Conference that were incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919:

We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.  (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)

As we know so very well, most men alive today live for base pleasures without any thought of the supernatural. Men are thus prone to believe in the nonexistent “salvific” power of this or that political ideology du jour (the “woke” movement of “progressivism, which is but another name for Bolshevism) and/or in the equally nonexistent “salvific” powers of this or that political figure, whether of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” or “right,” which leads to nothing other than endless agitation and utterly needless divisions on matters that exist in the nature of things and are thus not subject to human debate, “revision” or “rejection.”

Anyhow, the diabolical electoral system that creates such agitation and division, which is the exact opposite of the peace and unity that is produced by the Catholic Faith, has been rigged from its beginning to be an instrument of disorder and chaos. This is so because the men who founded the United States of America had a contempt for the “old ways” of Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages, believing themselves to be the evangelists, if you will, of what the gnostic political scientist Leo Strauss called “the new science of politics.” This “new science” was designed to blunt the force of the true Faith in public life by convincing one and all that it is “enough” to be “Americans” and that it is possible to pursue the common temporal good without reference to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they are explicated by Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which rests the very fate of nations.

A system of false opposites has evolved over time that attempts to convince voters that they face “real” choices in every election, each of which is said to be the “most important election of our lifetimes,” when the fact is that adherents of the “left” and the “right” are in total agreement about the underlying premise of the American “experiment,” namely, that religious truth is a matter of complete indifference to the welfare of the “well-ordered” republic.

Let me reprise an explanation that has appeared on this site a number of times before:

I refer to the "false opposites" of the "left" and the "right" because, despite their differences over  the powers "government" over that of the "individual," both the "left" and the "right" reject Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal and social order. The adherents of the "left" and the "right" believe that it is neither prudent or necessary to acknowledge that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother has changed human history. Such adherents also reject any suggestions that both men and their nations must be subordinate to Christ the King and the authority of His true Church on all that pertains to the good of souls and that the civil government has an obligation to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End.

No matter the differences between "conservatives" and "liberals," my friends, they both have one mind and one heart in the belief that man does not need the teaching and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church to guide them in their private and social lives. This is, of course, the triumph of the Judeo-Masonic spirit of naturalism that was dissected so well by Pope Leo XIII. It matters little as to who is or is not a formally enrolled member of the "lodges" when most Catholics and non-Catholics alike are infected with the ethos of naturalism.

Similarly, any civil leader who believes that can, either by himself or with others, pursue genuine order without the help of Our Lady and the use of her Most Holy Rosary is a fool. We must give public honor to Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen.

That's the point I try to make repeatedly on this site.

The bifurcation between Catholics of the "left" and Catholics of the "right" in the United States of America is such that the statists on the "left" try to wrap themselves up in the mantle of a perverted and distorted notion of what they think is Catholic Social Teaching as presented by the conciliar "bishops" in this country, many of whom are just unreconstructed socialists who attempt to make various government programs that are said to aid the poor and the suffering appear to be consonant with the Christian precepts of charity.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that individual human beings have been charged by Our Lord, Christ the King, to provide for the needs of those who cannot provide for themselves, not wasteful, duplicative government programs that are created in full violation of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity, enunciated very clearly by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931. The very establishment of these programs in this country during the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" created an entire class of nonelected bureaucratic rulers who have a vested interest in seeing to it that their clients become so dependent upon their programs that they will agitate with great fury if they are threatened in any way so as to scare off elected officials who understand these programs to be boondoggles that enrich only those who administer them.

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

"Leftism" in the United States of America has many roots, each of which go back to the Protestant Revolution wrought by Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., against the Divine plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church. 

As has been noted many times on this site, one of the proximate root causes of what can be called "liberalism" is the writing of John Locke, whose views were the direct result of the Protestant Revolution that began in England under King Henry VIII in 1534 and resulted in the proliferation of Protestant sects in a kingdom that had been Catholic for nearly a millennium. Readers of this site know that I care very much about root causes. Well, permit me to remind you of at least one of the roots of the American "left":

The Protestant Revolt engendered murder and mayhem in the German states after it was launched by the hideous, lecherous, drunken Augustinian monk named Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., on October 31, 1517, when he posted his "ninety-five theses" on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther himself was aghast to see the almost instantaneous moral degeneration of his "evangelicals" into violent mobs who pilfered and sacked formerly Catholic churches and lived riotously, oblivious to the fact that he was responsible for this degeneration by depriving those who followed his revolution against Christ the King of the Sacraments and of the true teaching that Our King has entrusted to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.

In like manner, of course, the Protestant Revolt in England engendered murder and violence, much of which was state-sponsored as Henry Tudor was responsible between the years of 1534 and 1547 for ordering the executions of over 72,000 Catholics who remained faithful to the Catholic Church following the decree that Parliament has passed that declared him to be the "supreme head of the Church in England as far as the law of God allowed." As was the case in the German states as princes gave Luther protection so that they, the princes, could govern in a Machiavellian manner free of any interference from Rome or their local bishops, so was it the case in England that the Protestant Revolution provided the receipt for the unchecked tyranny of English monarchs.

Indeed, the kind of state-sponsored social engineering that has created the culture of entitlement in England and elsewhere in Europe has its antecedent roots in Henry's revolt against the Social Reign of Christ the King and His Catholic Church in the Sixteenth Century.

Henry had Parliament enact various laws to force the poor who had lived for a nominal annual fee on the monastery and convent lands (as they produced the food to sustain themselves, giving some to the monastery or convent) off of those lands, where their families had lived for generations, in order to redistribute the Church properties he had stolen to those who supported his break from Rome. Henry quite cleverly created a class of people who were dependent upon him for the property upon which they lived and the wealth they were able to derive therefrom, making them utterly supportive of his decision to declare himself Supreme Head of the Church in England. Those of the poorer classes who had been thrown off of the monastery and convent lands were either thrown into prison (for being poor, mind you) or forced to migrate to the cities, where many of them lost the true Faith and sold themselves into various vices just to survive. The effects of this exercise of state-sponsored engineering are reverberating in the world today, both politically and economically. Indeed, many of the conditions bred by the disparity in wealth created by Henry's land grab in the Sixteenth Century would fester and help to create the world of unbridled capitalism and slave wage that so impressed a German emigre in London by the name of Karl Marx. Unable to recognize the historical antecedents of the real injustices he saw during the Victorian Era, Marx set about devising his own manifestly unjust system, premised on atheism and anti-Theism, to rectify social injustice once and for all. In a very real way, Henry of Tudor led the way to Lenin of Russia.

The abuses of power by English monarchs led to all manner of social unrest in England, especially as those Anglicans who were followers of John Calvin sought to eradicate all remaining vestiges of Catholicism from Anglican "worship" and "doctrine" (removing Latin from certain aspects of the heretical Anglican liturgy, smashing statues, eliminating high altars in favor of tables, things that have been undertaken in the past forty years in many formerly Catholic churches that are now in the custody of the counterfeit church of conciliarism). This unrest produced the English Civil Wars of the 1640s and the establishment in 1649 of what was, for all intents and purposes, a Calvinist state under the control Oliver Cromwell that became a Cromwellian dictatorship between the years of 1653 to 1660 until the monarchy under the House of Stuart was restored in 1660. Oh yes, King Charles I lost his head, quite literally, in 1649 as the "Roundheads" of Oliver Cromwell came to power in 1649 following seven years of warfare between "parliamentarians" and "royalists." Revolutions always wind up eating their own. The English monarchy itself was eaten up by the overthrow of the Social Reign of the King of Kings by Henry VIII of the House of Tudor in 1534.

King James II, who had converted to Catholicism in France in 1668 while he was the Prince of York under his brother, King Charles II of the restored monarchy, acceded to the English throne in on June 6, 1885, following his brother's death, which occurred after Charles II himself had converted to the the Faith on his deathbed. Suspicious that the property that had been acquired and the wealth that had been amassed as a result of Henry VIII's social-engineering land grab of 150 years before would be placed in jeopardy, Protestant opponents of King James II eventually forced him to abdicate the throne in 1688, his rule having been declared as ended on December 11 of that year. The abdication of King James, whose second wife, Mary of Modena, had been assigned Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere as her spiritual director when she was the Princess of York, is referred to by Protestant and secular historians as the "glorious revolution," so-called because it ushered in the penultimate result of the Protestant Revolution, the tyranny of the majority.

It was to justify the rise of majoritarianism that John Locke, a Presbyterian (Calvinist) minister, wrote his Second Treatise on Civil Government. Locke believed, essentially, that social problems could be ameliorated if a majority of reasonable men gathered together to discuss their situation. The discussion among these "reasonable men" would lead to an agreement, sanctioned by the approval of the majority amongst themselves, on the creation of structures which designed to improve the existing situation. If those structures did not ameliorate the problems or resulted in a worsening of social conditions then some subsequent majority of "reasonable men" would be able to tear up the "contract" that had bound them before, devising yet further structures designed to do what the previous structures could not accomplish. Locke did not specify how this majority of reasonable men would form, only that it would form, providing the foundation of the modern parliamentary system that premises the survival of various governments upon the whims of a majority at a given moment.

In other words, England's "problem" in 1688 was King James II. The solution? Parliament, in effect, declared that he had abdicated his throne rather than attempt to fight yet another English civil war to maintain himself in power as the man chosen by the parliamentarians to replace him, his own son-in-law William of Orange, who was married to his daughter Mary, landed with armed forces ready to undertake such a battle. The parliamentary "majority" had won the day over absolutism and a return to Catholicism.

Unfortunately for Locke, you see, social problems cannot be ameliorated merely by the creation of structures devised by "reasonable men" and sanctioned by the majority.

All problems in the world, both individual and social, have their remote causes in Original Sin and their proximate causes in the Actual Sins of men. There is no once-and-for-all method or structure by which, for example, "peace" will be provided in the world by the creation of international organizations or building up or the drafting of treaties.

There is no once-and-for-all method or structure by which, for example, "crime" will be lessened in a nation by the creation of various programs designed to address the "environmental" conditions that are said to breed it.

The only way in which social conditions can be ameliorated is by the daily reformation of individual lives in cooperation with the graces won for men by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ upon the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. And to the extent that social structures can be effective in addressing and ameliorating specific problems at specific times in specific places those who create and administer them must recognize their absolute dependence upon God's graces and that there is no secular, non-denominational or inter-denominational way to provide for social order. Social order and peace among nations depend entirely upon the subordination of the life of every person and the activities of every nation to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it is exercised by the Catholic Church. 

There is, therefore, amongst American Catholics who adhere to some kind of "leftist" worldview a belief that it is indeed the role of government to "solve" social ills, most of are the result, over and above the after-effects of Original Sin, the systematic, planned breakdown of the stability of the family that was one of the chief goals of Freemasons in state legislatures, starting in North Dakota, in the late-Nineteenth Century to liberalize divorce laws. This systematic, planned breakdown of the family was expedited by the spread of contraception in the 1920s, leading ultimately to an epidemic of divorce and remarriage as spouses felt "free" to be violate the Sixth Commandment injunction against adultery. Husbands abandoned wives. Wives abandoned husbands. Children became lost and confused. Entire classes of people became dependent upon the largesse of the civil state as a result. And this is to say nothing of the direct effort on the part of Margaret Sanger to break down the stability of the families of black Americans so that they could enjoy the benefits of her sort of social engineering, a fact that has been documented on this site many times now.

These points should be very familiar to longtime readers of this website. It is with these points in made that a few observations on several decisoins of the Supreme Court of the United States of America to help tamp down the constant agitation into which so many Catholics live as they seem incapable of tearing themselves away from the mainslime merchants of propaganda that is accepted as “news” but whose main purpose is precisely to agitate so as to keep the suckers glued to their seats for more and more punishment hour in, hour out, day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out without any kind of relief in sight.

Supremely Sophisticefore the Supreme Court of the United States of America

As I noted in 2012 and then again in 2015, ObamaDeathCare (aka Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) is here to stay.

Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., has demonstrated over and over again that he has great respect of legal precedent that has no standing in the eyes of God, and it must be remembered as well that he has little regard for the Constitution itself when it means that an unconstitutional “goody” created by Congress would be overturned. This is what did when Roberts deliberately rewrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in order to uphold its nonexistent constitutionality because he wanted to show “deference” to then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro’s only legislative “achievement” in his first term, which is why he shifted his vote against the act’s constitutionality and then wrote the Court’s opinion in the case of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., June 28, 2012, that was so full of tortured reasoning and fallacies that even the “moderate” (no one who supports baby-killing or perversity under the cover of law, is a “moderate”) Anthony McLeod Kennedy found without any constitutional or legal merit:

The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the Act makes available.

The Court regards its strained statutory interpretation as judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision. 

The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is, does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation. And the judgment on the Medicaid Expansion issue ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union. Those States that decline the Medicaid Expansion must subsidize, by the federal tax dollars taken from their citizens, vast grants to the States that accept the Medicaid Expansion. If that destabilizing political dynamic, so antagonistic to a harmonious Union, is to be introduced at all, it should be by Congress, not by the Judiciary.

The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent. (Minority Opinion, at pages 64-65 of opinion, page 190-191 of the full .pdf.)

Roberts was it again in 2015 in the case of King v. Burwell, which upheld the “individual mandate” portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act a second time while ignoring the fact that the “individual mandate” was a “penalty” not as a “tax” that had not been passed properly by the Congress of the United States of America and that the whole act itself was unconstitutional as there is no authority in the Constitution of the United States of America for Congress to take over a private industry to achieve its stated ideological ends that are, of course, inimical to the physical health of American citizens. Roberts wrote the following in his conclusion:

In a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people. Our role is more confined—“to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). That is easier in some cases than in others. But in every case we must respect the role of the Legislature, and take care not to undo what it has done. A fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.

Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter. Section 36B can fairly be read consistent with what we see as Congress’s plan, and that is the reading we adopt. (King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015.)

Congress hath no constitutional authority to do what it did eleven years ago, and John Glover Roberts, Jr., whose first goal is always to “protect” the “image” of the Supreme Court of the United States of America (he has already succeeded in convincing Associate Justices Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to be the joint successors of former Associate Justice Anthony MacLeod Kennedy as fellow “moderating influences” on the Court in several recent cases), misused his judicial authority to provide a “remedy” to a law that he had upheld three years previously, something that was pointed out by the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in his blistering dissent in King v. Burwell:

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress “[a]ll legislative Powers” enumerated in the Constitution. Art. I, §1. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them. This Court holds only the judicial power—the power to pronounce the law as Congress has enacted it. We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct. We must always remember, therefore, that “[o]ur task is to apply the text, not to improve upon it.” Pavelic & LeFlore v. Marvel Entertainment Group, Div. of Cadence Industries Corp., 493 U. S. 120, 126 (1989).

Trying to make its judge-empowering approach seem respectful of congressional authority, the Court asserts that its decision merely ensures that the Affordable Care Act operates the way Congress “meant [it] to operate.” Ante, at 17. First of all, what makes the Court so sure that Congress “meant” tax credits to be available everywhere? Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges. More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. “If Congress enacted into law something different from what it intended, then it should amend the statute to conform to its intent.” Lamie, supra, at 542. In the meantime, this Court “has no roving license . . . to disregard clear language simply on the view that . . . Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.” Bay Mills, 572 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11).

Even less defensible, if possible, is the Court’s claim that its interpretive approach is justified because this Act “does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.” Ante, at 14–15. It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. A law enacted by voice vote with no deliberation whatever is fully as binding upon us as one enacted after years of study, months of committee hearings, and weeks of debate. Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility.

Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges. If Congress values above everything else the Act’s applicability across the country, it could make tax credits available in every Exchange. If it prizes state involvement in the Act’s implementation, it could continue to limit tax credits to state Exchanges while taking other steps to mitigate the economic consequences predicted by the Court. If Congress wants to accommodate both goals, it could make tax credits available everywhere while offering new incentives for States to set up their own Exchanges. And if Congress thinks that the present design of the Act works well enough, it could do nothing. Congress could also do something else alto- gether, entirely abandoning the structure of the Affordable  Care Act. The Court’s insistence on making a choice that should be made by Congress both aggrandizes judicial power and encourages congressional lassitude.

Just ponder the significance of the Court’s decision to take matters into its own hands. The Court’s revision of the law authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to spend tens of billions of dollars every year in tax credits on federal Exchanges. It affects the price of insurance for millions of Americans. It diminishes the participation of the States in the implementation of the Act. It vastly expands the reach of the Act’s individual mandate, whose scope depends in part on the availability of credits. What a parody today’s decision makes of Hamilton’s assurances to the people of New York: “The legislature not only commands the purse but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over . . . the purse; no direction . . . of the wealth of society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will but merely judgment.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

*  *  *

Today’s opinion changes the usual rules of statutory interpretation for the sake of the Affordable Care Act. That, alas, is not a novelty. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, this Court revised major components of the statute in order to save them from unconstitutionality. The Act that Congress passed provides that every individual “shall” maintain insurance or else pay a “penalty.” 26 U. S. C. §5000A. This Court, however, saw that the Commerce Clause does not authorize a federal mandate to buy health insurance. So it rewrote the mandate-cum-penalty as a tax. 567 U. S., at ___–___ (principal opinion) (slip op., at 15–45). The Act that Congress passed also requires every State to  accept an expansion of its Medicaid program, or else risk losing all Medicaid funding. 42 U. S. C. §1396c. This Court, however, saw that the Spending Clause does not authorize this coercive condition. So it rewrote the law to withhold only the incremental funds associated with the Medicaid expansion. 567 U. S., at ___–___ (principal opinion) (slip op., at 45–58). Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medicaid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

I dissent. (King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015.)

Justice Scalia was correct, and he remains correct in death as Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., having convinced former Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy, who wrote the principal dissenting opinion in National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., June 26, 2012  nine years ago, to join him in the case of King v. Burwell, managed to bring over two of former President Donald John Trump’s appointees, Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett as well as Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented in both and King v. Burwell, to join him in preserving ObamaDeathCare on the grounds that the eighteen states challenging the “individual mandate” portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act lacked the legal standing to bring the suit as they could not, in the view of Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the Court, prove that they suffered damages from the provision.

Joined by Associate Justice Neal Gorsuch, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who is third most senior Associate Justice after Justices Thomas and Breyer, concluded his well-reasoned dissent as follows to explain that this was just another effort to preserve a law with many provisions that are fatally flawed constitutionally:

No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again.

But I must respectfully dissent. (California v. Texas, June 17, 2021.)

Although the case will not be heard until October of this year and will not be decided until a year from now, I have no doubt that John Glover Roberts, Jr., remans fully capable of twisting himself into a constitutional pretzel to “uphold” Roe v. Wade once the Court renders its decision about the State of Mississippi law banning most surgical abortions after the fifteenth week of the preborn child’s development in the sanctuary of his mother’s womb. It is my further belief that Roberts will convince Associate Justices Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to join him in protecting the “precedent” of Roe v. Wade that has no standing before the bar of Divine Justice.

How can I say this?

Well, look at how Roberts ruled just last year, 2019, in the case of June Medical Services v. Russo.

The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike. The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.

Stare decisis (“to stand by things decided”) is the legal term for fidelity to precedent. Black’s Law Dictionary 1696 (11th ed. 2019). It has long been “an established rule to abide by former precedents, where the same points come ROBERTS , C. J., concurring Cite as: 591 U. S. ____ (2020) 3 ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment again in litigation; as well to keep the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion.” 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 69 (1765). This principle is grounded in a basic humility that recognizes today’s legal issues are often not so different from the questions of yesterday and that we are not the first ones to try to answer them. Because the “private stock of reason . . . in each man is small, . . . individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” 3 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 110 (1790).

Adherence to precedent is necessary to “avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 529 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). The constraint of precedent distinguishes the judicial “method and philosophy from those of the political and legislative process.” Jackson, Decisional Law and Stare Decisis, 30 A. B. A. J. 334 (1944).

The doctrine also brings pragmatic benefits. Respect for precedent “promotes the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles, fosters reliance on judicial decisions, and contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process.” Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 827 (1991). It is the “means by which we ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion.” Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265 (1986). In that way, “stare decisis is an old friend of the common lawyer.” Jackson, supra, at 334.

Stare decisis is not an “inexorable command.” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 20) (internal quotation marks omitted). But for precedent to mean anything, the doctrine must give way only to a rationale that goes beyond whether the case was decided correctly. The Court accordingly considers additional factors before overruling a precedent, such as its adminstrability, its fit ROBERTS , C. J., concurring 4 JUNE MEDICAL SERVICES L. L. C. v. RUSSO ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment with subsequent factual and legal developments, and the reliance interests that the precedent has engendered. See Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 585 U. S. ___, ____–____ (2018) (slip op., at 34–35).

Stare decisis principles also determine how we handle a decision that itself departed from the cases that came before it. In those instances, “[r]emaining true to an ‘intrinsically sounder’ doctrine established in prior cases better serves the values of stare decisis than would following” the recent departure. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U. S. 200, 231 (1995) (plurality opinion). Stare decisis is pragmatic and contextual, not “a mechanical formula of adherence to the latest decision.” Helvering v. Hallock, 309 U. S. 106, 119 (1940). (June Medical Services v. Russo, June 29, 2020.)

Here is a newsflash for the mercurial man without a legal principle to be found in his judicial  robes, the man who saw fit to censor United States Senator Rand Paul’s mention of Eric Ciaramella’s  name when the junior senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky saw fit to mention the infamous “whistleblower” during the first impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump in early 2020, John Glover Roberts: The legal principle of stare decisis had no standing in the Court of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King.

Roberts’s own piece of sophistry contains the following key points:

1. The State of Louisiana’s law requiring baby-killers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of their slaughterhouses is indistinguishable from the Texas law that had been struck down by his august Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, June 26, 2015.)
2. Roberts must stand by the outcome of the Whole Women’s Health case even though he had voted to uphold it.
3. Many philosophers, including Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, have argued that one must take stock of the “general bank and capital of nations and ages.”
4. Respect for stare decisis promotes respect for judicial integrity.
5. Stare decisis can give way “only to a rationale that goes beyond whether the case was decided correctly.”

John Glover Roberts’s exercise of rationalizing his own judicial cowardice and desire to appease the Court’s critics in defense of not placing an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to kill her preborn baby in a “safe” facility is not only beneath contempt, it would be grounds for his impeachment and removal from office if the Congress of the United States of America were composed of right-thinking people, which it is not.

One of the first duties of a public official is to protect innocent human life, but almost no one in public life today, including most of those who consider themselves to be “pro-life” but who make immoral and illicit “exceptions” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, believes this is so as they are focused almost exclusively on the Judeo-Calvinist pursuit of material well-being as the ultimate end of human existence and thus of government activity.

With this in mind, therefore, permit me to remind you of how I dealt last year with the Roberts’s five principle points from the passage of his concurring opinion in June Medical Services v. Russo excerpted just above:

1. No law permitting the execution of any innocent human being—whether from the moment of conception through all subsequent stages—is unjust and invalid. Arguing about what constitutes an “undue burden” on actions that cry out to Heaven for vengeance is insanity of the sort that, objectively speaking, will weigh heavily upon the salvation of John Glover Robert’s immortal soul.
2. To insist that one is bound by a “precedent” of protecting expectant mothers’ unfettered access to American slaughterhouses even though one voted against the “precedent” when it has been established only four years previously is an exercise in self-justification before men. It is, to use the colloquial, a “cop out.” It is, more formally, a dereliction of one’s judicial duty.
3. It strains credulity to think even for a moment that Edmund Burke would have considered a legal “precedent” of four years’ vintage part of the “general bank and capital of nations and ages.” The “general bank and capital of nations and ages” refers to the entire heritage of Christendom even though Burke himself was an adherent of the Church of Ireland and thus had, no matter his sympathies for Catholics and for Catholicism, abandoned that “general bank and capital of nations and ages,” which includes the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by His true Church. One cannot say that the wanton slaughter of preborn babies, whether by surgical or chemical means, is part of the “general bank and capital of nations and ages.”
4. Judicial integrity? Is John Roberts kidding? He is so enamored of his own brilliance that he cannot see that he has done much to erode judicial integrity by his constant efforts to misread the Constitution of the United States of America and to twice uphold the nationalization of the healthcare industry by seeking to legislate from the bench to preserve the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. There can be no judicial integrity when judges ignore the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law to indemnify statists, baby-killers and sodomites while accepting statist claims about a pandemic as ground to shut down churches while allowing massive public protests.

Here is a rationale for throwing out stare decisis when the decisis itself has no standing with Christ the King:

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

John Glover Roberts does not consider this part of the “general bank and capital of nations and ages” as he is a self-made prisoner of judicial expediency masquerading as a respect for precedent. As I noted a few weeks ago but will do so again, John Glover Roberts is ignorant about Pope Pius XI’s admonition to magistrates who subject innocent children in the womb to execution and, most likely, he wouldn’t care even if is informed about one day:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

Alas, everything must “be up for grabs” when the souls of men are not taught, sanctified and governed by Holy Mother Church. Unrepentant sins of the most vile manner imaginable must abound, resulting ultimate in entire races of walking “blank slates,” human beings who must decide “for themselves” that which has been ordained by God Himself in the Order of Nature (Creation) and the Order of Redemption (Grace.) Men come to think that they are demigods, beings who have the ability “to decide” what to think in matters to pertaining to Faith and Morals without assenting their intellects completely and without any reservation at all to what Holy Mother Church teaches infallibly.

I have tried to explain repeatedly on this site—and long before that in my teaching career, when running for office on the Right to Life Party line in the State of New York, and in the pages of The Wanderer and then The Remnant, a reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, something that will never happen, would not end surgical baby-killing on demand in this country as even the “conservative” justices believe that the states are free to act as they see fit, and several states already have “trigger laws” to make sure that baby-killing-on-demand can continue unfettered and unrestricted. Roe v. Wade is as here to stay as the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

As I noted earlier in this commentary, John Glover Roberts, Jr., has convinced Associate Justices Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to join him in forming a new “centrist” of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. This should come as no surprise to readers of this website as I told you nearly three years ago to Don't Place Your Bets on Brett and that Amy Coney Barrett was a prisoner of Americanism and conciliarism through no fault of her own.

Indeed, Justice Barrett really meant it when she said the following at the White House on the evening of her Senate confirmation on October 26, 2020:

The confirmation process has made ever clearer to me one of the fundamental differences between the federal judiciary and the United States Senate. And perhaps the most acute is the role of policy preferences. It is the job of a Senator to pursue her policy preferences. In fact, it would be a dereliction of duty for her to put policy goals aside. By contrast, it is the job of a judge to resist her policy preferences. It would be a dereliction of duty for her to give into them. Federal judges don’t stand for election, thus they have no basis for claiming that their preferences reflect those of the people.

This separation of duty from political preference is what makes the judiciary distinct among the three branches of government. A judge declares independence, not only from Congress and the President, but also from the private beliefs that might otherwise move her. The Judicial Oath captures the essence of the judicial duty. The rule of law must always control. (Remarks by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett at her Swearing-In Ceremony, The White House, Washington, District of Columbia, October 26, 2020.)

Independence from one’s “private beliefs” that might otherwise “move” one?

Not according to Pope Leo XIII, Justice Barrett:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Behold the joining together of “good and evil” and of “putting man in conflict with himself.”

Behold the madness wrought by Modernity, the misbegotten stepchild of the Protestant Revolution.

The binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment are not silly putty to be shaped at the will of the “people” in a plebiscite or at the pleasure of their elected representatives. The civil state hath not the authority from God to do such a thing.

“Stopgap” measures based on the “lowest common” naturalistic denominator will always collapse as they are built on the quicksand of naturalism and thus consist of internal contradictions and inconsistencies that render its objectives merely symbolic and rhetorical in nature.

Those who are concerned about “results” rather than even any kind of the truth on the natural level wind up making up their rationalizations on a case-by-case basis without any regard for consistency. This has been made possible by triumph of positivism (the belief that something is so because it has been asserted as such), one of the many consequences of Martin Luther’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King, and this is exactly what happened nine years ago in the case of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., six years go in King v. Burwell and just two weeks ago and again two weeks ago in the case of California v. Texas.

As I noted eleven years ago when the Congress of the United States of America was debating the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the entire contemporary health care industry as it has developed within the framework of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic naturalism should not exist. Sure, it does exist. Granted. However, it should not exist as good Catholic health care was once readily available around the world, including here in the United States of America as various religious communities ran hospitals and clinics according to principles of Catholic moral teaching and as those who worked in those institutions viewed each patient through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith and thus treated them as Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ would Himself have them to do. The corruption of the contemporary medical industry is the result of

What is more tragic still is the simple fact that American jurisprudential decision-making admits of nothing higher than human positive law (that is, laws passed by legislative bodies or by popular referenda and/or executive orders/directives/mandates of one kind or another) as the basis for judicial review. There can be no thought given to the binding precepts of the Divine Law or the Natural Law, and those who oppose moral evils of one kind or another on secular grounds must concede that this is so and wind up making legal arguments of “compelling interest” that can never be

That leaves the interest of the City in the equal treatment of prospective foster parents and foster children. We do not doubt that this interest is a weighty one, for “[o]ur society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth.” Masterpiece Cakeshop, 584 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 9). On the facts of this case, however, this interest cannot justify denying CSS an exception for its religious exercise. The creation of a system of exceptions under the contract undermines the City’s contention that its nondiscrimination policies can brook no departures. See Lukumi, 508 U. S., at 546–547. The City offers no compelling reason why it has a particular interest in denying an exception to CSS while making them available to others. * * *

As Philadelphia acknowledges, CSS has “long been a point of light in the City’s foster-care system.” Brief for City Respondents 1. CSS seeks only an accommodation that will allow it to continue serving the children of Philadelphia in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs; it does not seek to impose those beliefs on anyone else. The refusal of Philadelphia to contract with CSS for the provision of foster care services unless it agrees to certify same-sex couples as foster parents cannot survive strict scrutiny, and violates the First Amendment. In view of our conclusion that the actions of the City violate the Free Exercise Clause, we need not consider whether they also violate the Free Speech Clause. The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. (Fulton v. Philadelphia, June 17, 2021.)

We have reached such a point of absurdity in a world shaped by the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity that contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined for the corruption of the grave, having first arrogated unto themselves the “authority” to “decide” matters that exist in the very  nature of things, can now determine now to “balance” conflicts between those dissent from their determinations and those who are the beneficiaries of them. This is insanity.

However, insanity is the only thing that can result from Modernity’s anti-Theistic revolution against all supernatural truth, a revolution that has been aided and abetted in no small measure by drying up of the wellsprings of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces caused by the conciliar revolutionaries’ invalid and sacramentally valid liturgical rites, to say nothing of the actual support for perversity that is being exhibited throughout the conciliar universe by the appointees of Jorge “Who am I to judge?” Mario Bergoglio (see Brazilian “Cardinal” presides over “Memorial Mass for LGBT-Phobia Victims” featuring Drag Queen – Novus Ordo Watch).

It is absurd for the Catholic Social Services attorneys to have argued in its behalf that the agency did not seek to “impose” its “religious beliefs” upon anyone as this makes it appear as though opposition to adoption by people unfit to adopt because of their persistence in perverse vices against nature that cry out to Heaven for vengeance is peculiar to a particular religion and not a truth found both in the Order of Nature (Creation) and the Order of Grace (Redemption).

That is, having established in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, June 26, 2015, the Feast of Saint William the Abbot, a nonexistent “right” for people of the same gender to “marry,” United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony MacLeod Kennedy, a Catholic in “good standing” in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism despite his repeated support for the surgical execution of children in their mothers’ wombs as a matter of “settled” constitutional principle, found a way three years later in the case of Masterpiece Cakemakers v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, June 8, 2018, to accommodate business owners who object on religious grounds to the absurdity and perversity of “gay marriage” without creating a blanket “right” to “discriminate” against practitioners of the sin of Sodom and its related perverse vices.

Lost in all these efforts to deal with false conflicts over absurdities that bring down the wrath of God on men and their nations is the simple fact that these very conflicts have been engendered by the teleology of the falsehoods known as “freedom of conscience” and “freedom of religion” that are taken for granted as the twin foundations of modern nations. Such conflicts are entirely the result of a world premised upon the belief that men can pursue genuine justice and live in a stable society absent the Social Reign of Christ the King and the guiding hand of Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.

There is no such thing as a “gay person.” There are only sinners who base their human self-identification on the basis of their proclivity to commit sins of unnatural vice with persons of the same gender.

There are no such things as “gay couples.” There are only sinners who have chosen to practice their perversity together, either for a short or longer period of time, and who demand that others not only recognize the nonexistent legitimacy of their sinful lives but to refrain from any criticism of them.

This calls to mind once again the following words of Saint Paul the Apostle in his Epistle to the Romans:

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1: 18-32.)

[9] Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, [10] Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God. (1 Cor. 6: 9)

[6] And the angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved under darkness in everlasting chains, unto the judgment of the great day. [7] As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty. [9] When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee. [10] But these men blaspheme whatever things they know not: and what things soever they naturally know, like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted.  (Jude 1 6-10.)

In other words, the Supreme Court of the United States of America has articulated firm, absolute and unshakeable legal principles that a person with religious objections to the perversity that is “marriage” between people of the same gender is rooted on that bedrock foundation of American jurisprudence: It all depends on what they, the judges, say is legal at a particular time. Legal positivism reigns supreme at the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Children are to be raised by a father and a mother who seek to educate them in the truths of the Holy Faith as members of the Catholic Church so that they can save their souls and go to Heaven to enjoy the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity. No one “loves” another human being authentically if he does or says anything contrary to that person’s eternal good, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of his immortal soul. Those engaged in perversely sinful lives are disqualified from “adopting” children as their very relationship is unnatural, odious in the sight of the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, and an abomination to the good of society. Such “couples”

That the attorneys representing Catholic Social Services contended that the agency did not seek to “impose” its religious beliefs on anyone demonstrates once again what happens when one uses naturalism to oppose naturalism: Naturalism wins. No battle to defend faith and morals can be fought on the terms of the adversary, who has done a pretty good job of convincing most people in the “developed” world to reject what is natural and pleasing to God in favor that which is unnatural and an abomination in His sight.

Thus it is that the process of reading the Constitution in light of “contemporary circumstances” has been occurring for a very long time now. It is nothing new at all. We are merely witnessing the end result of the perfection of the document’s inherent degeneracy and the absolute defenselessness of the clearly intended meaning of its own text in the hands of those had grown used to the “demythologization” of Sacred Scripture, first by Protestant “scholars” and then by Modernists in the Catholic Church. If Holy Writ can be deconstructed of its plain meaning, my good readers, then so can every other written document. Why is this so difficult for some of you out there to understand and accept? Stability of constitutional interpretation in a pluralistic nation is as impossible as stability of doctrine in a false church, including, of course, the counterfeit church of conciliarism itself.

It will be impossible to balance claims of religious objections such as those at issue in the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, June 17, 2021, on anything other than the shifting arbitrariness of those who believe themselves to be empowered to decide that which is impossible for humans to decide. Even the effort to seek such a “balance” is itself based on the fatally flawed premise that practitioners of sodomy and its related perverse vices have special “rights” that are beyond legal challenge. One can see the depths to which nations must fall when their laws treat the true religion as a matter of indifference, something that Pope Gregory XVI prophesied in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832:

13. Now We consider another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained. Surely, in so clear a matter, you will drive this deadly error far from the people committed to your care. With the admonition of the apostle that “there is one God, one faith, one baptism”[16] may those fear who contrive the notion that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever. They should consider the testimony of Christ Himself that “those who are not with Christ are against Him,”[17] and that they disperse unhappily who do not gather with Him. Therefore “without a doubt, they will perish forever, unless they hold the Catholic faith whole and inviolate.”[18] Let them hear Jerome who, while the Church was torn into three parts by schism, tells us that whenever someone tried to persuade him to join his group he always exclaimed: “He who is for the See of Peter is for me.”[19] A schismatic flatters himself falsely if he asserts that he, too, has been washed in the waters of regeneration. Indeed Augustine would reply to such a man: “The branch has the same form when it has been cut off from the vine; but of what profit for it is the form, if it does not live from the root?”[20]

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

15. Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again? (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

There is no rational or consistent standard by which one can defend the right not to accord special privileges to those who engage in freely chosen acts of perversity once it is conceded that such acts are protected under the cover of the civil law. Fulton v. City of Philadelphia did nothing to provide such a standard, which is impossible on its face to establish and maintain, as Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., limited his decision to the facts in this particular case, meaning that the advocates of perversity will live to fight another day, thus enriching attorneys, bankrupting individuals persecuted for their convictions founded in truth, and agitating the masses anew so that various interest groups can raise gazillions upon gazillions of dollars from the dolts who permit themselves to be agitated endlessly to no good end.  

This is all utter and complete insanity. Insanity. This insanity is so hard to stomach as hostility to the true religion characterized the beliefs of many of the American founding fathers (see appendix below and, in case you are unware of it,  Converse in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics.)

Hostility to religion, no less the true religion, is to be found in governmental bureaucracies and on various commissions is the direct, unavoidable result of the nation’s religiously indifferentist founding that provides room for any religion—or no religion at all—in the “public square.” Practical atheism is the logical result of religious indifferentism, something that Pope Leo XIII pointed out in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

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

Yet it is that men, having conceded nonexistent “rights” to those whose sinful acts bring down the wrath of God on themselves and their nations, find themselves trying to act in rational terms in order decide what it is or is not an infringement on the very thing that got us into this mess to begin with, “religious liberty,” which itself is but the long-term product of the Protestant Revolution and its misbegotten stepchild, Judeo-Masonry. This is nothing other sophistry of the most insane order.

The mere fact that the Supreme Court of the United States of America has put its constitutional imprimatur on a moral abomination does nothing to change the fact that what is odious in the sight of God is harmful to men and the good order of their nations. Moreover, there is no such thing as “offensive religious convictions” as there is only one true religion, Catholicism, whose teachings are from the hand of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, and provide order and peace within the souls of fallen men.

While it is true that we live in pluralistic land and that we have to do the best that is possible under the circumstances, it is erroneous to concede as a matter of principle that false religions an unfettered “freedom of conscience” represent an advancement in the course of human civilization. Pope Leo XIII explained in Immortale Dei that whatever is harmful to our salvation has no right to be brought before the eye of man, noting as well that it is a fatal proposition to believe that one can exclude the true religion from the course of public business:

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

It is a grave and fatal error to exclude Holy Mother Church from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth and from influencing the whole direction of domestic society. The Western world is on a death march from which, humanly speaking, there is no retreat. This is all a preparation for the coming of Antichrist to take control of a world that has been torn apart by the proliferation of sin and error by those who believe that men can make their lives better without Christ the King and His true Church.

To be sure, Pope Leo XIII made the proper distinctions in Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888, between tolerating various evils in the modern civil state as opposed to supporting their nonexistent “right” to proliferate at will. His Holiness also deplored the deplorable state that befalls nations when their laws (and, by extension, its people) accept increasingly higher doses of evil as normal and natural:

Yet, with the discernment of a true mother, the Church weighs the great burden of human weakness, and well knows the course down which the minds and actions of men are in this our age being borne. For this reason, while not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest, she does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good. God Himself in His providence, though infinitely good and powerful, permits evil to exist in the world, partly that greater good may not be impeded, and partly that greater evil may not ensue. In the government of States it is not forbidden to imitate the Ruler of the world; and, as the authority of man is powerless to prevent every evil, it has (as St. Augustine says) to overlook and leave unpunished many things which are punished, and rightly, by Divine Providence. But if, in such circumstances, for the sake of the common good (and this is the only legitimate reason), human law may or even should tolerate evil, it may not and should not approve or desire evil for its own sake; for evil of itself, being a privation of good, is opposed to the common welfare which every legislator is bound to desire and defend to the best of his ability. In this, human law must endeavor to imitate God, who, as St. Thomas teaches, in allowing evil to exist in the world, "neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills only to permit it to be done; and this is good.'' This saying of the Angelic Doctor contains briefly the whole doctrine of the permission of evil.

But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.

And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless license of which We have spoken, they exceed all limits, and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty. And because the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, and the unerring teacher of morals, is forced utterly to reprobate and condemn tolerance of such an abandoned and criminal character, they calumniate her as being wanting in patience and gentleness, and thus fail to see that, in so doing, they impute to her as a fault what is in reality a matter for commendation. But, in spite of all this show of tolerance, it very often happens that, while they profess themselves ready to lavish liberty on all in the greatest profusion, they are utterly intolerant toward the Catholic Church, by refusing to allow her the liberty of being herself free. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)

This is exactly what has happened over the course of time in the United States of America, and it has happened in large measure because, for the first time in the history of the Church, Catholics made their accommodations to a hostile environment rather than to plant the seeds for the conversion of their fellow citizens and their nations. These accommodations, which had the support of most of the American bishops in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries despite the warnings given by Pope Leo XIII in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1894, and Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, received the official sanction and “blessing” of the bishops at the “Second” Vatican Council and have served as the foundation of the conciliar rapprochement with the civil state of Modernity. (For another iteration of this point, which has been a repeated theme of my writing in the past thirty years, see Forge and Anvil: Catholics Failed in America, part three. No, the judgments expressed on this site are not solitary.)

The final case to be examined in this commentary involves a teenaged cheerleader candidate who, after being turned down for the “cheer squad” at her local high school, posted obscene messages on what is called “social media” that officials at her public indoctrination center (public high school) deemed were inappropriate and the grounds for the student’s suspension. Such a case should never have made its way to any court, no less the Supreme Court of the United States of America, but we have such a state of moral obtuseness that the parents of a teenaged girl who could not handle the cross of being rejected for the opportunity to wear immodest attire and serve as an instrument of temptation for men believed, it would appear, that their daughter had a fundamental “right” to use obscene language outside her school’s direct jurisdiction.

Once again, lost upon each of the nine justices, including Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in his lone dissenting opinion, is the fact that no one has the right to speak obscenely, profanely, or vulgarly.

Granted. Men have spoken in such terms throughout the ages, and they will do so until the end of time.

Stipulated. It is both practically impossible and entirely imprudent to seek to impose civil sanctions upon those who speak obscenely, profanely, or vulgarly.

Fine.

On the other hand, however, we have reached quite a state of degeneration when some public school administrators have sought to suspend students who invoke the name of God generically or the Holy Name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ specifically in commencement addresses or other presentations and have sought to prevent students from wearing shirts that displayed religious messages as being “obscenely offensive” to “unbelievers” while at the same time accepting profane speech on campus and off without complaint in most instances. The fact that the school district in question did seek to impose a punishment upon one of its students for profane language used off campus could also be seen primarily as providing them with the “authority” to censure students for their “offensive” religious beliefs expressed off-campus. Such is the absurdity of a false concept of “free speech” that admits of no limits upon what humans can say but is being defined at the current time to make anything that is true considered “offensive” and “obscene.” It is my belief that the school district in question wanted to “preserve its options” to control “speech” its officials find “offensive” and considered that the profane posting at issue in this case to have been one worth pursuing.

Acknowledging, of course, that public schools are an abomination and should not exist, the fact of their existence has created all kinds of problems from the beginning, problems that have grown exponentially in the past sixty years as even standards of Judeo-Masonic decency have been cast aside in favor of rank barbarism.

The issue before the Court was limited to whether school officials had the authority to impose a censure on student’s obscene speech outside of the school’s limits. That’s the “great” issue that was facing the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a Minor, June 23, 2021. Associate Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the Court’s opinion for the eight-justice majority. Here is a salient passage that indicates encapsulates some of the principal problems with unfettered “free speech” as has existed in the United States of America from its inception”:

Second, from the student speaker’s perspective, regulations of off-campus speech, when coupled with regulations of on-campus speech, include all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day. That means courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all. When it comes to political or religious speech that occurs outside school or a school program or activity, the school will have a heavy burden to justify intervention. Third, the school itself has an interest in protecting a student’s unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus. America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy. Our representative democracy only works if we protect the “marketplace of ideas.” This free exchange facilitates an informed public opinion, which, when transmitted to lawmakers, helps produce laws that reflect the People’s will. That protection must include the protection of unpopular ideas, for popular ideas have less need for protection. Thus, schools have a strong interest in ensuring that future generations understand the workings in practice of the well-known aphorism, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (Although this quote is often attributed to Voltaire, it was likely coined by an English writer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall.) Given the many different kinds of off-campus speech, the different potential school-related and circumstance-specific justifications, and the differing extent to which those justifications may call for First Amendment leeway, we can, as a general matter, say little more than this: Taken together, these three features of much off-campus speech mean that the leeway the First Amendment grants to schools in light of their special characteristics is diminished. We leave for future cases to decide where, when, and how these features mean the speaker’s off-campus location will make the critical difference. This case can, however, provide one example. (Mahanoy Area School Dist. v. B. L. , June 23, 2021.)

Ah yes, the “marketplace of ideas.” We can see with great clarity today that that “marketplace” is a closed “union shop” wherein all who enter the doors of the ideological programming centers know as public schools must adhere to the party line or come under suspicion for being “anti-government.” Indeed, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation is raiding homes of some people who merely went to the ill-considered “stop the steal” rally on January 6, 2021, the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that was the subject of Put Not Your Trust in Princes: In the Children of Men in Who There is No Salvation without entering the Capitol building (see FBI Tears Innocent Man's Life Into Shreds Over Capitol Riot.) The “marketplace of ideas” has led to the triumph of rank totalitarianism of thought and practice in public places.

Indeed, Associate Justice Breyer, who was appointed to the Court by President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton in 1993 and is the second ranking associate justice after Clarence Thomas, correctly termed public schools are the “nurseries of democracy” as state-controlled public education was designed from its beginnings to be the means to “Americanize” Catholic immigrants from Ireland in the early to middle Nineteenth Century so that they would place their first loyalties in the “beliefs” of “democracy” and not Catholicism.

Public schooling has been one of the principal means by which "professionals" have been able to indoctrinate the young in various "state approved" doctrines, being used first and foremost in the Nineteenth Century as the means to assert that the principal educator of children is the civil state, not the parents, and to teach the children of Catholic immigrants to accept Americanism and religious indifferentism as "goods" demanding of acceptance lest one's "patriotism" be questioned. (Please see Appendix A for a review of the philosophy behind "public schooling.")

Over and over again, ladies and gentlemen, we have been duped into believing that some kind of "restoration" was an election or a Supreme Court decision away when the truth of the matter is that such a belief has been and will forever remain delusion. One might as well believe in the "tooth fairy" as to hold out "hope" in the political process in the exepctation  Even some "conservative" commentators are beginning to realize that their belief in the "Trump Court" was misplaced, see, for example, The Supreme Court Will Never Be the Conservatives' Savior. As someone I have known for all sixty-seven and one-half years of his life used to say in his teen years by way of reacting very dismissively to something I had just said, "Do tell."

There is no secular salvation! 

We are the slaves of the state and its arbitrary whims.

We are slaves of a Constitution that is indifferent to the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate womb and hostile to the Deposit of Faith the God-Man has entrusted solely to His true Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.

We are the slaves of career politicians who believe that we exist in order to enable them to pick our pockets to enlarge the powers of the state and thus increase their ability to control every aspect of the legitimate exercise of our human free wills.

We are the slaves of the corporate robber barons who contribute mightily to the coffers of these career politicians while they manufacture products to appeal to our greed and our desire to luxury, entrapping us into various snares of endless materialism and hedonism. 

We are the slaves of the powerful Judeo-Masonic machinery that controls our banking and our entertainment and our courts and our "educational" system.

We are the slaves of stupid myths about this country being the "guarantor of human liberty worldwide" when the truth is that anyone who points out the absurdity of these myths is denounced fascistically as unpatriotic.

We are the slaves of pharmaceutical companies who produce poisons to addict us to their "cures" for diseases that have been produced by lives of excess and by the very chemical additives placed in our food and our water to make us sick so as to make us dependent upon these poisons.

We are the slaves of a medical industry that kills babies in the womb and also kills anyone thereafter by a variety of means ("brain death"/vital human organ vivisection and transplantation, "palliative care"/hospice, the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings, vaccinations that are actually gene-therapy treatments that have already killed several thousand people and will result in countless illnesses in the years ahead, etc.).

We are not a "free" people. We are slaves, and yet it is that even many Catholics wait with baited breaths on every Supreme Court decision that further institutionalizes evil and makes sophistry appear as a jurisprudential virtue.

Continue to Live in Agitation?

Or Listen to Our True Popes? 

The best citizens are well-informed and well-formed Catholics who are trying to save their immortal souls as Catholics in cooperation with the graces won for them by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood and which flow forth from the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, who has the absolute right to be honored as the Queen of all nations. It is that simple. Catholic truth reflects the simplicity of God Himself.

The modern civil state in the “free” United States of America is now the mirror image of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as envisioned by Vladimir Lenin and institutionalized with brute force by Joseph Stalin. We are all considered to be complete creatures of caesar and his minions. The entirety of human existence is under attack, starting with Special Creation and thus of the  Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and thus the reduction of human beings to merely utilitarian objects who can be disposed of by means of abortion, dehydration and starvation or "palliative care" while living in the name of the "betterment" of society and to serve the "needs" of "compassion" as killing is performed to maintain the "human dignity," "reproductive rights" and, of course, "to give the gift of life" in the case of human vivisection (see Comparison of Living Body With Those Declared Brain Dead).

We pray also that at least a few people who had never thought about First and Last Things will be prompted to do so now, recognizing that each moment of our lives might be our last, that we must get ourselves to the Sacrament of Penance on a regular basis, confessing even our Venial Sins to a true priest in the Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds, making sure also to be enrolled in and to wear the mantle of the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and to fulfill its conditions faithfully. We never know when the next breath we take will be the last breath we ever take.

Those who think that a "restoration" of a Judeo-Masonic sense of "civility" to popular discourse can be accomplished while ignoring the teaching authority of the Catholic Church and the whole of mankind's utter dependence upon that teaching authority and upon her sanctifying offices ought to reckon with this dialogue that Saint Gertrude the Great, the great apostle of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, had with Our Lord Himself:

"For what fault have you suffered most?" He replied: "For self-will and self-opinionatedness; for when I did any kindness for others, I would not do as they wished, but as I wished myself; and so much do I suffer for this, that if the mental agonies of all mankind were united in one person, he would not endure more than I do at present." She replied: "And what remedy will be the most efficacious for you?" He answered: "To perform acts of the contrary virtue, and to avoid committing the same fault." "But, in the meantime," inquired Gertrude, "what will afford you the greatest relief?" He replied: "The fidelity which I practiced toward others when on earth consoles me most. The prayers which are offered continually for me by many friends solace me as good news would solace a person in affliction. Each tone of the chant at Mass, or in the vigils which are said for me, seem to me as a most delicious reflection. All that is done for me by others, with a pure intention for God's glory, such as working, and even sleeping or eating, affords me great relief and shortens my sufferings, on account of the fidelity with which I labored for others." (The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude the Great, republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, p. 341.)

Yes, a pedagogic system based in every naturalist error imaginable must lead to death in land where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour is not King, and His Most Blessed Mother is not its Queen. The fact that the conciliar revolutionaries, men who have made their own accommodations to the anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity of the world, do not understand this and believe in "religious freedom as the path to peace" only worsens the state of the world-at-large.

A world that is founded in a rebellion against the Social Reign of Christ the King winds up demonstrating characteristics that Pope Pius XI noted were present fully four years after the end of World War at the end of the second decade of the Twentieth Century:

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)

23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)

26. Perhaps the advantages to one's family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. "It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch." (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)

27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)

28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

That last paragraph, number twenty-eight, says it all. The gist of the two hundred thirty-seven articles linked at the top of this article can be summarized in the following words written by Pope Pius XI eighty-eight and one-half years ago:

They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

As we know, Modernity itself is the problem. We live in a completely absurd world, naturally.

The world in which we live, born of the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent triumph of naturalism in all of its Judeo-Masonic guises, is collapsing because of its refusal to acknowledge the Word Who was made Flesh in His Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost and to submit in all that pertains to the good of souls to His true Church. It is really very simple to understand. Nations must fall into the abyss when Christ the King reigneth not over men and their nations and when men refuse to acknowledge His Most Blessed Mother as their Queen and to seek shelter in her loving arms as they lovingly unto her through her Most Holy Rosary.

We must be champions of the Sacred Heart of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christand Our Lady, she who is our Immaculate Queen . We must champions of the Catholic Church in this time of apostasy and betrayal, champions of the truth that Catholicism is the and only foundation of personal and social order. Those who disagree do so at the peril to the nation they say they love but for which they have a false sense of nationalistic pride that impedes her conversion to the true Faith, which is what Our Lord Himself mandates for each nation on the face of this earth.. 

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, 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.

Saints John and Paul, pray for us.

Appendix A

Public Schooling: From Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Brainwashing to an Instrument of Total Thought Control

The People's Republic of Massachusetts (an entity whose legal name is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) became the first state to mandate curricular standards on a statewide basis, creating in 1837 the first state Department of Education (thought control) in the United States of America, principally to Americanize the children of Irish immigrants to this country. Horace Mann, who had no initial interest in the subject of education, was recruited to head the new agency. He warmed to to this task with ready abandon, establishing the following guideline over the course of seven years:

1) Fifth Annual Report (1841). Mann argued successfully that economic wealth would increase through an educated public. It was therefore in the self interest of business to pay the taxation for public education.

(2) Seventh Annual Report (1843). Horace Mann inspected and appraised favorably the Prussian school system. This report led to widespread improvement .of education through the educational theories of Pestalozzi, Herbart and eventually Froebel.

(3) Tenth Annual Report (1846). Mann asserted that education was a natural right for every child. It is a necessary responsibility of the State to insure that education was provided for every child. This report led to the adoption of the first State law requiring compulsory attendance in school in 1852.

(4) Twelfth Annual Report (1848). He presented a rationale for the support of public education through taxation. Society improves as a result of an educated p public. He argued for non-sectarian schools, so the taxpayer would not be in the position of supporting any established religion with which he might disagree in conscience. (Educational Contributions of Horace Mann.)

The development of Horace Mann's thought was influenced heavily by the "Prussian Education System" that had its origins in the Eighteenth Century and whose own "evolution" over the course of the decades thereafter convinced him to use it as a model for Massachusetts, which, in turn, could be a model to "standardize" his brainwashing standards for the rest of the nation.

Indeed, Mann, who belonged to the extinct species of naturalist organized crime known as the Whig Party, convinced his fellow party adherents to become "true believers" in the "Prussian Education System." Mann even traveled to Prussia in 1843 to see the system for himself. The People's Republic of New York was one of the first to follow the model that Mann established in the neighbor statist stronghold of Massachusetts, and it is absolutely no accident at all that these two states remain two of the most hostile states to home schooling parents in the United States of America at this time (Maryland, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont round out the ranks of the states whose regulations are designed to make home schooling very difficult as parents are monitored at every turn).

One of the keys to the "Prussian Education System" was the passage of laws to compel the attendance of children in state-run institutions of thought-control. The Prussians of the Eighteenth Century, however, were simply implementing the idea of a former Augustinian monk, a man named Martin Luther, who believed that it was necessary to require children to go to school in order that they learn how to read the Protestant version of the Bible  to make sure that all remnants of Catholicism could be eradicated from the German states influenced by his revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church and to organize society under the Social Reign of Christ the King, which, of course, Luther, much like another German, a priest from Bavaria who was ordained on June 29, 1951 (Father Joseph Ratzinger), rejected out of hand, a rejection shared by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of course.

By the way, the likes of Horace Mann, much like Luther three hundred years before him, desired compulsory so that those children of Catholic immigrants would be exposed to the "truth" in the blasphemous "King James" version of the Bible. We must remember that each and every Protestant "bible" is worthless it contains false translations and omit Sacred Books contained in the Canon of Sacred Scripture, thereby blaspheming God the Holy Ghost, under whose inspiration each word contained in Holy Writ was written. Do not permit yourselves into believing one of naturalism's greatest lies: that it doesn't matter what version of the Bible one reads. This belief is from the devil himself.

Compulsory attendance in state-run institutions of thought-control was essential to American "educational reformers" such as Horace Mann for many of the same reasons, although the Prussian system that they admired so much had made explicit what was implicit in Luther's call for "compulsory education:" the belief that the civil state has the "right" and thus the "duty" to educate children, not parents, thereby violating the precepts of the Fourth Commandment and denying the graces inherent in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony that equip every father and mother with the graces necessary to fulfill the primary end of their wedded union in Christ the King: the procreation and education of children.

Prussia, the land that gave birth to the Freemason named Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, whose imposition of a mandatory retirement age and of social security under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck also was designed to destroy the Fourth Commandment so as to "relieve" grown children from caring for their elderly parents if the latter could not care for themselves (and thus creating a dependency class that would look to the state, not to family members, for support and sustenance), can thus be seen quite rightly as having been in the vanguard of planting the seeds for the rise of the National Education Association (whose initials are, of course, "N.E.A.," the "Non-Education Association") and of the politicians who have enabled and empowered their fellow ideologues in the industry of professional thought-control so as to create a class of willing citizens who will never question what caesar and his minions tell them to do.

Attacks against the ability of parents to educate their children as they see fit have been waged by Freemasons throughout the country in the past two hundred years.

The State of Oregon, a den of Freemasonry which has championed "physician-assisted suicide" in recent years as a result of a voter initiative enacted into law by means of a popular referendum, became quite a laboratory to see how far the warfare against the Church could be taken. A voter initiative, sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan and the Oregon Scottish Rite Masons, was approved on November 7, 1922, to force all parents to send their children to public schools. A legal battle ensued, prompting the Supreme Court of the United States on June 1, 1925, to issue a decision in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters that invalidated the Oregon law, which would have become effective in 1926 had the Court not ruled against the law.

Writing for the Court, Associate Justice James C. McReynolds, an appointee of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson who served on the Court between 1914 and 1941, noted:

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. (Associate Justice James C. McReynolds, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925, p. 268 U. S. 535.) 

Although Justice McReynolds said that parents could not be forced to send their children to public schools, he did hold that the states had the right to compel attendance in some school and to establish educational standards, thereby providing the Supreme Court of the United States' imprimatur on the usurpation of the rights of parents and of the Church that had begun with Horace Mann eighty-eight years before. Consider the language of Justice McReynolds in this regard:

No question is raised concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare. (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925, Page 268 U. S. 534.) 

This is quite a loaded passage.

What constitutes "good citizenship?

Acceptance of American "values," including Calvinistic capitalism and religious indifferentism?

Being taught "the history and contributions" of those engaged in sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance? What is "manifestly inimical to the public welfare" if not this? 

Justice McReynolds, was, however, simply reaffirming what had become by his name an accepted article of the American "faith," that public schooling was the backbone of a "free" people.

Obviously, the very belief that we are a "free" people is itself a gigantic myth. We are not.

Our true popes have warned us that the attacks on the family are of the essence of Protestantism and the Judeo-Masonry that helped to spawn Marxism-Leninism in its wake.

Perhaps it would be useful once again to review how the lodge brothers and their fellow travelers in the world of the organized forces of naturalism sought to corrupt the young by seizing control of the education of their minds away from their parents and Holy Mother Church and by disseminating their filth in what passes for "popular culture." Pope Leo XIII noted the Masonic roots of public schooling in his encyclical letter on Freemasonry, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884:

Wherefore we see that men are publicly tempted by the many allurements of pleasure; that there are journals and pamphlets with neither moderation nor shame; that stage-plays are remarkable for license; that designs for works of art are shamelessly sought in the laws of a so-called verism; that the contrivances of a soft and delicate life are most carefully devised; and that all the blandishments of pleasure are diligently sought out by which virtue may be lulled to sleep. Wickedly, also, but at the same time quite consistently, do those act who do away with the expectation of the joys of heaven, and bring down all happiness to the level of mortality, and, as it were, sink it in the earth. Of what We have said the following fact, astonishing not so much in itself as in its open expression, may serve as a confirmation. For, since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring. . . .

With the greatest unanimity the sect of the Freemasons also endeavors to take to itself the education of youth. They think that they can easily mold to their opinions that soft and pliant age, and bend it whither they will; and that nothing can be more fitted than this to enable them to bring up the youth of the State after their own plan. Therefore, in the education and instruction of children they allow no share, either of teaching or of discipline, to the ministers of the Church; and in many places they have procured that the education of youth shall be exclusively in the hands of laymen, and that nothing which treats of the most important and most holy duties of men to God shall be introduced into the instructions on morals. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884) 

Pope Pius XI, writing in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, explained the failure of naturalists to understand the true purposes of education: 

This perfection they seek to acquire by means of education. But many of them with, it would seem, too great insistence on the etymological meaning of the word, pretend to draw education out of human nature itself and evolve it by its own unaided powers. Such easily fall into error, because, instead of fixing their gaze on God, first principle and last end of the whole universe, they fall back upon themselves, becoming attached exclusively to passing things of earth; and thus their restlessness will never cease till they direct their attention and their efforts to God, the goal of all perfection, according to the profound saying of Saint Augustine: "Thou didst create us, O Lord, for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it rest in Thee." (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

True education, wrote Pope Pius XI, must revolve around Our Lord as He has revealed Himself through His true Church: 

It is therefore as important to make no mistake in education, as it is to make no mistake in the pursuit of the last end, with which the whole work of education is intimately and necessarily connected. In fact, since education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created, it is clear that there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man's last end, and that in the present order of Providence, since God has revealed Himself to us in the Person of His Only Begotten Son, who alone is "the way, the truth and the life," there can be no ideally perfect education which is not Christian education. ( (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

(As a note of reference, it is important to bear in mind that the Popes of the Catholic Church, as opposed to the "pontiffs" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, used the word "Christian" to refer to the Catholic Faith. The reason for this is simple: although Protestants say that they are Christians, they do not truly know Our Lord since they reject His true Church and dissent from multiple articles He has revealed and deposited in His true Church. They do not represent Christianity at all. Only the Catholic Church represents Christianity. She alone has the right to use the appellation of "Christian.")

All other education is imperfect and thus must become a means to inculcate the very errors that gave rise to the existence of state-controlled schooling. The killing of human beings in public schools is but the consequence of a world born and nutured to full demonic maturity by a series of revolutions against the Holy Faith and, in due course, against all truth. The murder of souls leads to the murder of human beings by those inculcated in the pathways of violence, confusion and error.

Pope Pius XI, the great exponent of the Social Reign of Christ the King, noted in Divini Illius Magistri that the fate of nations depended upon the education of youth in the truths of the Catholic Faith:

From this we see the supreme importance of Christian education, not merely for each individual, but for families and for the whole of human society, whose perfection comes from the perfection of the elements that compose it. From these same principles, the excellence, we may well call it the unsurpassed excellence, of the work of Christian education becomes manifest and clear; for after all it aims at securing the Supreme Good, that is, God, for the souls of those who are being educated, and the maximum of well-being possible here below for human society. And this it does as efficaciously as man is capable of doing it, namely by cooperating with God in the perfecting of individuals and of society, in as much as education makes upon the soul the first, the most powerful and lasting impression for life according to the well-known saying of the Wise Man, "A young man according to his way, even when he is old, he will not depart from it." With good reason therefore did St. John Chrysostom say, "What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?" (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.) 

Man must always keep his mind his First Cause and Last End in all of his activities, whether he is acting individually or collectively with others in the pursuit of the common good of his nation. The state of a nation depends upon the state of souls, and the state of souls depends upon the extent to which individual citizens keep themselves in states of Sanctifying Grace and adhere completely to the Deposit of Faith, including the Church's immutable Social Doctrine on the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ, which does not worship at the altar of the false, mythological god of American "civil liberty."

The Church, therefore, must be free to pursue the entirety of the mission, including that of education, entrusted to her by her Divine Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, without any interference from the state. Parents, who form the domestic cell of the Church in their families, must be free to do so in the bosom of their homes.

Pope Pius XI noted this in Divini Illius Magistri:

Hence it is that in this proper object of her mission, that is, "in faith and morals, God Himself has made the Church sharer in the divine magisterium and, by a special privilege, granted her immunity from error; hence she is the mistress of men, supreme and absolutely sure, and she has inherent in herself an inviolable right to freedom in teaching.' By necessary consequence the Church is independent of any sort of earthly power as well in the origin as in the exercise of her mission as educator, not merely in regard to her proper end and object, but also in regard to the means necessary and suitable to attain that end. Hence with regard to every other kind of human learning and instruction, which is the common patrimony of individuals and society, the Church has an independent right to make use of it, and above all to decide what may help or harm Christian education. And this must be so, because the Church as a perfect society has an independent right to the means conducive to its end, and because every form of instruction, no less than every human action, has a necessary connection with man's last end, and therefore cannot be withdrawn from the dictates of the divine law, of which the Church is guardian, interpreter and infallible mistress.

This truth is clearly set forth by Pius X of saintly memory:

"Whatever a Christian does even in the order of things of earth, he may not overlook the supernatural; indeed he must, according to the teaching of Christian wisdom, direct all things towards the supreme good as to his last end; all his actions, besides, in so far as good or evil in the order of morality, that is, in keeping or not with natural and divine law, fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church." (As quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.) 

Only a fool would contend that Pope Saint Pius X was wrong, that there is ever a moment when something we do in the "order of the things of the earth" can overlook the supernatural. Those "conservatives" who believe that they can devise plans to combat liberalism and statism and socialism of the likes promoted by the likes of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” without seeking to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King are indeed very mistaken, plain and simple. They tilt at windmills as they refuse, for whatever reason, usually involving a dogmatic adherence to a political philosophy that they contend pridefully contains the ability to "resolve" social problems, to state this simple truth: all things must be restored in Christ the King, both individually and collectively.

After delineating the rights of the Church and the family with respect to education—and discussing instances when a state ordered according to Catholic teaching might have to intervene to protect a child whose religious instruction was being ignored by his parents, Pope Pius XI wrote in Divini Illius Magistri about the simple fact that the welfare of the state itself depends entirely upon its submission to the truths of the Catholic Faith:

Whoever refuses to admit these principles, and hence to apply them to education, must necessarily deny that Christ has founded His Church for the eternal salvation of mankind, and maintain instead that civil society and the State are not subject to God and to His law, natural and divine. Such a doctrine is manifestly impious, contrary to right reason, and, especially in this matter of education, extremely harmful to the proper training of youth, and disastrous as well for civil society as for the well-being of all mankind. On the other hand from the application of these principles, there inevitably result immense advantages for the right formation of citizens. This is abundantly proved by the history of every age. Tertullian in his Apologeticus could throw down a challenge to the enemies of the Church in the early days of Christianity, just as St. Augustine did in his; and we today can repeat with him: 

"Let those who declare the teaching of Christ to be opposed to the welfare of the State, furnish us with an army of soldiers such as Christ says soldiers ought to be; let them give us subjects, husbands, wives, parents, children, masters, servants, kings, judges, taxpayers and tax gatherers who live up to the teachings of Christ; and then let them dare assert that Christian doctrine is harmful to the State. Rather let them not hesitate one moment to acclaim that doctrine, rightly observed, the greatest safeguard of the State."

While treating of education, it is not out of place to show here how an ecclesiastical writer, who flourished in more recent times, during the Renaissance, the holy and learned Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to whom the cause of Christian education is greatly indebted, has set forth most clearly this well established point of Catholic doctrine. He had been a disciple of that wonderful educator of youth, St. Philip Neri; he was teacher and Latin secretary to St. Charles Borromeo, and it was at the latter's suggestion and under his inspiration that he wrote his splendid treatise on The Christian Education of Youth. In it he argues as follows:

"The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity."(Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.) 

How can public schools produce temporal peace and tranquility as sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance are protected by law, promoted in the culture and taught to school children.

Penetratingly, Pope Pius XI eviscerated the theories that underlain the work of Horace Mann in the Nineteenth Century and were being promoted in his own day by the likes of the pragmatist John Dewey: 

Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher's authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or divine, in the work of his education. 

If any of these terms are used, less properly, to denote the necessity of a gradually more active cooperation on the part of the pupil in his own education; if the intention is to banish from education despotism and violence, which, by the way, just punishment is not, this would be correct, but in no way new. It would mean only what has been taught and reduced to practice by the Church in traditional Christian education, in imitation of the method employed by God Himself towards His creatures, of whom He demands active cooperation according to the nature of each; for His Wisdom "reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly." 

But alas! it is clear from the obvious meaning of the words and from experience, that what is intended by not a few, is the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law. So today we see, strange sight indeed, educators and philosophers who spend their lives in searching for a universal moral code of education, as if there existed no decalogue, no gospel law, no law even of nature stamped by God on the heart of man, promulgated by right reason, and codified in positive revelation by God Himself in the ten commandments. These innovators are wont to refer contemptuously to Christian education as "heteronomous," "passive","obsolete," because founded upon the authority of God and His holy law. 

Such men are miserably deluded in their claim to emancipate, as they say, the child, while in reality they are making him the slave of his own blind pride and of his disorderly affections, which, as a logical consequence of this false system, come to be justified as legitimate demands of a so-called autonomous nature. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Ah, what did I say about slavery a while back?

Anyone who does not place himself under the sweet yoke of the Divine Redeemer through the Catholic Church is a slave to many people and things, including his own blind pride.

Any country which does not place itself under the sweet yoke of the Divine Redeemer's Social Kingship is a slave to the devil and becomes an oppressor of its people.

Who desires "pedagogic naturalism?"

Who desires "the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law?"

Not Our Lord, ladies and gentlemen.

It is the adversary himself who desires these things. It is he who has been in control of American popular culture from its very inception. The devil reigns as king if Our Lord does not do so through His true Church. It is that simple. Anyone care to dissent from this plain truth? I mean, George Soros is taking full advantage of this most recent tragedy to advance an agenda that already serves as the basis of many curricular programs throughout the United States of America, and he is a complete agent of Antichrist.

Pope Pius XI completely and utterly rejected the whole notion of public schooling, allowing for rare exceptions in certain cases given the actual realities facing Catholics in places like the United States of America. As a matter of principle, however, Pope Pius XI minced no words: public schooling is a menace to souls and harmful to nations because it does not proceed from man's First Cause nor lead man back to his Last End:

From this it follows that the so-called "neutral" or "lay" school, from which religion is excluded, is contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist in practice; it is bound to become irreligious. There is no need to repeat what Our Predecessors have declared on this point, especially Pius IX and Leo XIII, at times when laicism was beginning in a special manner to infest the public school. We renew and confirm their declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions. Neither can Catholics admit that other type of mixed school, (least of all the so-called "école unique," obligatory on all), in which the students are provided with separate religious instruction, but receive other lessons in common with non-Catholic pupils from non-Catholic teachers. 

For the mere fact that a school gives some religious instruction (often extremely stinted), does not bring it into accord with the rights of the Church and of the Christian family, or make it a fit place for Catholic students. To be this, it is necessary that all the teaching and the whole organization of the school, and its teachers, syllabus and text-books in every branch, be regulated by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal supervision of the Church; so that Religion may be in very truth the foundation and crown of the youth's entire training; and this in every grade of school, not only the elementary, but the intermediate and the higher institutions of learning as well. To use the words of Leo XIII:

"It is necessary not only that religious instruction be given to the young at certain fixed times, but also that every other subject taught, be permeated with Christian piety. If this is wanting, if this sacred atmosphere does not pervade and warm the hearts of masters and scholars alike, little good can be expected from any kind of learning, and considerable harm will often be the consequence." (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Do I mean to condemn Catholics who teach or serve as administrators in public schools?

No.

Do I mean to expose my readers to papal condemnations of these schools as illegitimate and thus harmful to the souls of their students and to the good of their nations?

Yes.

Moreover, I mean to remind my readers once again that there is no secular, naturalistic, non-denominational or religiously indifferentist way to "resolve" problems associated with public schooling. Just as the abuses witnessed by so many Catholics in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service are the result of the Novus Ordo's s warfare against the Catholic Faith, so is it the case that the problems in public schooling, much like the problems with "judicial activism," are the result of the Protestant Revolt and of Judeo-Masonry. There is no expedient solution to problems that have been created by diabolically-inspired attacks against Our Lord and His Holy Church.

Those of us who are parents, no matter how old (in my case) or young we may be, have the obligation to avoid all contact with public schooling entirely.

We have the obligation also to avoid all contact with schools run by the institutions of the counterfeit church of conciliarism (diocesan or religious) given the influence of Modernism and the concomitant conciliarist ethos spawned in its sorry wake.

Similarly, we have the obligation to avoid contact with even a seemingly traditional school that makes any concession to the popular culture and/or does not demand a complete refusal on the part of parents and students to participate in any way with a culture that is from the devil and leads souls to Hell for all eternity. This is not Jansenism. This is Catholicism. The saints did not indulge the allurements of the world. They fled from them for love of God and for the love of souls for whom He offered His very life on the wood of the Holy Cross. No "traditional" school that does not inculcate in its students a manifest sense of resistance to the culture and which does not instill in its students an abiding commitment to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King is a fit place to send one's children.

Similarly, schools that purport to be traditional but which do not have teachers qualified to teach the subjects assigned (or who do not have the ability to teach in general) to them and/or who are not called upon by their superiors to challenge their students to pursue the heights of the rigors of academic excellence as befits redeemed creatures are unworthy of the souls of our children. Mediocrity is not of the Catholic Faith. Anyone who is content with educational mediocrity is content with the Capital Sin of Sloth.

Yet it is that the trillions of dollars that have been spent on what passes for "education" in the past fifty years have resulted in a nation of slothful ignoramuses who are moved by materialism, sentimentality and simple base instincts to conduct their daily lives.

Appendix B

A Founding Hatred for Catholicism

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. (President John Adams: "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787-1788)

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594).

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."—James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr„ April I, 1774

". . . Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."—James Madison, spoken at the Virginia convention on ratification of the Constitution, June 1778

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."—-James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance," addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December, 1813.)

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death. This letter is quoted in its entirety in Dr. Paul C. Peterson’s now out-of-print Readings in American Democracy. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1979, pp. 28-29.)