by
Thomas A. Droleskey
This is a day of reparation, not of celebration. Yes, we are called by the binding precepts of the Fourth Commandment and of the Natural Law itself to love our country. Authentic love of one's nation, however, wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization, that is, the subordination of everything in her national life to that which redounds to the good of the souls of her citizens as that good as been entrusted to and defined by the one and only true Church, the Catholic Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. One who recognizes this immutable truth of the Catholic Faith can see quite readily that is is a day of reparation, not of celebration.
Some careful distinctions must be made proceeding proceeding with a topic that has been explored in my writing and speaking and teaching long before this site was launched as a continuation of the work of the printed journal of the same name, Christ or Chaos.
One of the first distinctions that should be made on this day, the Fourth of July, is that it is likely the case that the abuses, no matter how exaggerated by the American colonists in favor of independence from the United Kingdom, associated with King George III would never have arisen if England had remained Catholic. The Kings of England would have continued to recognize the fact that they had to reign their subjects with a view to promoting all that redounded to their sanctification and salvation as members of the Catholic Church, understanding that Holy Mother Church possessed the right, exercised as an absolute last resort following the discharge of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to intervene with them when the good of souls demands such an intervention.
We must keep very much in mind, therefore, that the very conditions that were used as the pretext for the "Declaration of Independence" might never have existed if England had remained Catholic. The devil wants men and their nations to assert their "independence" from the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised exclusively by the Catholic Church. Catholic England's break from the Faith under King Henry VIII--and his subsequent persecution and execution of Catholics who remained faithful to Rome as he confiscated the lands of monasteries and convents to distribute them amongst his political supporters, making them dependent upon the Protestant Revolt in England for their very property and wealth--was used by the devil so as to foment all manner of mischief in subsequent centuries, including the founding of the first secular, religiously indifferentist nation in the history of the world, the United States of America.
A second distinction that should be made on this day the Fourth of July, is that the thirteen English colonies in North America located up and down the Atlantic seaboard from what is now the State of Maine to the Georgia-Florida border were not bastions of Christianity. The true popes of the Catholic Church always used the word Christianity to refer to the true Faith, that is, Catholicism. Although adherents of individual Protestant sects may be Christians if they had been baptized validly, Protestantism in all of its mutant forms is heretical. "Christianity" must of its nature be free of heresy. Protestantism, therefore, is neither a means of personal salvation or of social order.
To wit, the grubby little Calvinists who founded the Plymouth Colony, which lasted between 1620 and 1691 before being subsumed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony, left England (and the Netherlands) in the hope of founding a settlement free of any taint of "impurity" in religion, that is, free of any taint of the remaining vestiges of Catholicism (hierarchy, sacramental system, veneration of the saints, including Our Lady, the sporadic, intermittent reliance upon an attenuated version of "Apostolic Tradition") found in the Anglican "Church." The Calvinists hated the Catholic Church and they loathed Catholics. Although they had great natural fortitude, to be sure, they believed quite resolutely that no man needed to follow the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and that no man needed to be sanctified by the worthy reception of Holy Communion or that he had the obligation to worship God in the ineffable, august Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Such wretched beliefs are from Hell, not from God. Such people are to be pitied, not exalted as "role models' for the triumph of a notion of "civil liberty" that is indifferent, if not directly hostile, to the pursuit of man's Last End as a member of the Catholic Church.
This legacy of anti-Catholicism, which was strong in each of the thirteen colonies, would lead Protestant land-owners to subject the free Catholics of Acadia who were expelled from their homes by Governor Charles Lawrence in 1755 to slavery in many instances. It is indeed more than a little curious that few great "flag wavers" of the "American" way mention the fact that members of heretical sects enslaved Catholics whose families had been broken up by Charles Lawrence and sent hither and yon, including to the colonies in what became the United States of America. To recount this history accurately might interfere, I suppose, with the mythology of "decency" that is said to have characterized the people in the English colonies who believed that material success was a sign of divine election and that there could be no greater "tyranny" for man than to be "yoked" to the "dictates" of the priesthood.
A third distinction that should be made on this day, the Fourth of July, is that the Catholics who arrived in Maryland in 1634 being told by a Jesuit priest to "practice their Faith, but as quietly as possible." This started a "tradition," if you will, now of 373 years' vintage, of Catholics subordinating their Faith to the exigencies of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and pluralism and religious indifferentism. Yes, the history of the Catholic Church in the United States of America is very complex, full of examples of bishops and priests who believed in the Faith but who were "ahead of their time," so to speak, concerning the heresy of "religious liberty" and the religiously indifferentist civil state and also full of examples of bishops and priests who defended the totality of the Faith with great distinction. The bottom line, however, is this: there is a difference between accommodating oneself to the particular realities of a given situation, such as those that existed in a world of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and various "Enlightenment" philosophies in the Eighteenth Century, and refusing to seek the conversion of a nation to the true Faith.
A very clever trap had been set by the devil to lull Catholics to sleep in the former colonies of the United Kingdom that became the first thirteen states of the United States of America. The adversary raised up Protestants in Europe who attacked the Catholic Church and individual Catholics with a furious abandon, subjecting Catholics in England and Ireland to a particularly vicious persecution that killed thousands of thousands of them and deprived thousands more of their homes and their freedom. This made the tiny number of Catholics of English and Irish descent in the colonies and the original thirteen states "grateful" to the "nice" Protestants who left them alone, for the most part, that is, to practice their Faith privately. This "gratitude" was ingrained in the minds and hearts of Catholic immigrants to the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century, thus predisposing them to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.
Pope Leo XIII noted this in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae , January 22, 1899:
But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.
In the apostolic letters concerning the constitution of states, addressed by us to the bishops of the whole Church, we discussed this point at length; and there set forth the difference existing between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.
It is well, then, to particularly direct attention to the opinion which serves as the argument in behalf of this greater liberty sought for and recommended to Catholics.
It is alleged that now the Vatican decree concerning the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff having been proclaimed that nothing further on that score can give any solicitude, and accordingly, since that has been safeguarded and put beyond question a wider and freer field both for thought and action lies open to each one. But such reasoning is evidently faulty, since, if we are to come to any conclusion from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, it should rather be that no one should wish to depart from it, and moreover that the minds of all being leavened and directed thereby, greater security from private error would be enjoyed by all. And further, those who avail themselves of such a way of reasoning seem to depart seriously from the over-ruling wisdom of the Most High-which wisdom, since it was pleased to set forth by most solemn decision the authority and supreme teaching rights of this Apostolic See-willed that decision precisely in order to safeguard the minds of the Church's children from the dangers of these present times.
These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.
We, indeed, have no thought of rejecting everything that modern industry and study has produced; so far from it that we welcome to the patrimony of truth and to an ever-widening scope of public well-being whatsoever helps toward the progress of learning and virtue. Yet all this, to be of any solid benefit, nay, to have a real existence and growth, can only be on the condition of recognizing the wisdom and authority of the Church.
Pope Leo XIII "took off the gloves" in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, having praised what he could of various elements of the American founding, including the natural virtues of George Washington, in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, before making it clear in that encyclical letter that the American bishops were not doing what they could to Catholicize the nation, especially as pertains to making his own encyclical letters on Church-State relatoins known to the Catholics of the United States of America. Pope Leo wanted to make it abundantly clear in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae that some of the American bishops did indeed want to view the Deposit of Faith through the lens of the American Constitution as the prototype of a "future church" modeled along the lines of "democracy" and "collegiality" and "egalitarianism" and "ecumenism." This telling passage from Pope Leo's Apostolical Letter to the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, is a prophetic warning about the counterfeit church of conciliarism that would owe much of its origins to the heresy of Americanism:
For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive of and desire the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.
The Rhine flows into the Tiber. So does the Potomac. So does the Potomac. The "healthy secularity" and "religious liberty" of conciliarism owe much of their nefarious origin to the Seventeenth Century view that living "quietly" in a non-Catholic world was preferable to winning converts to the true Faith.
A fourth distinction that needs to be made on this day, the Fourth of July, concerns the displacement of the authority of the Catholic Church on matters pertaining to the right ordering of the civil state in accord with the pursuit of man's Last End with the "authority" of the founders of the United States of America in general and the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America in particular. Even Catholics, sad to say, look to the "authority" of the Declaration of Independence or to the "original intent" of the "framers" to judge various issues and to comment upon them publicly as though the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church is a complete and total irrelevancy. Dr. John C. Rao commented upon this at length in
Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers: 666-0. As noted in one of yesterday's commentaries, Pope Pius XII, reiterating what Pope Pius XI had written in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, noted that Catholics are not free to ignore the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church or to assert that her magisterial authority does not extend to the social and political sphere:
Assuming false and unjust premises, they are not afraid to take a position which would confine within a narrow scope the supreme teaching authority of the Church, claiming that there are certain questions -- such as those which concern social and economic matters -- in which Catholics may ignore the teachings and the directives of this Apostolic See.
This opinion -- it seems entirely unnecessary to demonstrate its existence -- is utterly false and full of error because, as We declared a few years ago to a special meeting of Our Venerable Brethren in the episcopacy:
"The power of the Church is in no sense limited to so-called 'strictly religious matters'; but the whole matter of the natural law, its institution, interpretation and application, in so far as the moral aspect is concerned, are within its power.
"By God's appointment the observance of the natural law concerns the way by which man must strive toward his supernatural end. The Church shows the way and is the guide and guardian of men with respect to their supernatural end." (Pope Pius XII,
Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1896.)
Quite specifically, you see, a nation that is not founded on right principles must degenerate into the barbarism of our present era, having no immutable teaching authority to guide it, choosing to be "guided" by the demigods of national founding fathers and/or by the shifting winds of majoritarian sentiment at any particular point in time. Contradiction and instability are bound to result, as we can see with great clarity today. It is very much beside the point to argue that the "founders" would have opposed this or that social evil. They premised the entire fabric of national life under the Constitution upon the false belief that men could sort out their differences by means of a cumbersome process of negotiation and debate in the national legislative process, believing that there was no single belief that could unite men and guide them in the pursuit of the common good as the supreme and eternal good each man was kept in mind. There is no way, therefore, for naturalists to use a naturalist Constitution to defend against various evils. Evil must win when man does not subordinate himself to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and when men do not have belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.
Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:
1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.
2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.
3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.
4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.
5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.
6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.
7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.
8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.
9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her indirect power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.
10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law are the basis of the actions of civil governance and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, confessionally recognizing the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.
This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI, Blessed Pius IX, and Saint Pius X also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past fifteen years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).
The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:
1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation
3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.
4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.
5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the Bible for a Protestant (as mentioned above), is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact.
6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight. (See: This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI, Blessed Pius IX, and Saint Pius X also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past fifteen years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).
(See:
The Downward Spiral of a Country Founded on False Premises.)
A nation founded on false premises, no matter the "good intentions" of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American "popular culture" destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some "naturalist" hero or idea by which to win the "culture wars," oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.
Then again, of course, the average Catholic in the United States of America has never heard anything about the Social Reign of Christ the King before the false "Second" Vatican Council and has had his visceral Americanist instincts reaffirmed by the ethos of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. The devil thus convinces the average Catholic that there is indeed some naturalistic or inter-denominational or non-denominational way to address and ameliorate social problems, making the following statement of Catholic truth concerning the nature of the civil state and its obligations to foster the Last End of man completely foreign to him:
That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error.
American "civil liberty" has given, therefore, free "rein" to errors of every type imaginable, spreading poisons in this country and throughout the world. As will be explained in tomorrow's commentary, the organized crime families known as "political parties" in the United States of America oppose each other on naturalist grounds, disagreeing only on the margins on some issues while they agree most fundamentally in augmenting the power of the state to serve as our ultimate "secular savior." Having first been founded on the false premises of the "sovereignty of the people" rather on the Sovereignty and the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, the government of the United States of America has become oppressive to an extent that makes King George III seem like a member of the Libertarian Party. There is only one answer to this madness of secularism and naturalism and pluralism and religious indifferentism: the conversion of the United States of America to become the Catholic States of America.
Pope Gregory XVI explained what happens to nation caught in the grip of the madness of "civil liberty" and novelty:
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.[21] 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. (Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)
Our Lady appeared to the Venerable Juan Diego, a fifty-five year old widower who was walking to an offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, on Tepeyac Hill on December 9, 1531, and December 12, 1531, to seek the conversion of the Americas to the Catholic Faith. Who has repealed the Mother of God's royal desire? George Washington? James Madison? Thomas Jefferson? Alexander Hamilton? Benjamin Franklin? Thomas Paine? Who?
Yes, the work of converting individual men and their nations is a continuous one. Each of us could lose the Faith if we do not keep close to the Mass of the ages and accuse ourselves regularly (preferably weekly) in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and spending time on our knees in fervent prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and keeping close to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, offering as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. This having been noted, however, we must seek the conversion of others and of the nation in which we live and are called to love without looking for results.
Remember the great missionaries who worked for the conversion of the peoples of Americas. Saint Francis Solano. Blessed John Massias. Saint Turibius Mogroveio. The North American Martyrs. The Venerable Marie of New France. Father Pierre Jean De Smet. Blessed Rose Philippine Duchesne. Father Junipero Serra. Mother Katherine Drexel. When was the last time Catholics in the United States of America were exhorted en masse to pray and to work for the conversion of the nation?
Well, there is nothing to stop us from doing so in our own homes today by refusing to participate in a celebration of a history of rebellion against the authority of Our Lord and His Holy Church, of the promotion of the most vile evils imaginable under cover of law and in every aspect of our popular culture in the name of "freedom."
No, this should be a day of reparation for the sins of a nation founded on false principles that has influenced most Catholics in this country to think in worldly, naturalist terms rather than in the supernatural terms of the true Faith.
We should mourn the millions of babies killed under cover of law by chemical and surgical means in this nation as most Americans chow down at barbecues and shoot off fireworks without giving the daily carnage of the preborn a moment's thought.
We should mourn the degradation of a culture wherein the young are formed by the prevailing fashions of the moment and wherein parents who attempt to educate their children at home are carefully monitored by the civil authorities.
We should mourn the fact that those who promote perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments can be accorded "civil rights" and be permitted to march openly in their degrading displays of indecency.
We should mourn the wars, both domestic and foreign, that have been fought to cement the power of the Federal government and/or to serve the interests of the organized forces of naturalism here and abroad.
We should mourn the loss of legitimate freedoms as the rights of God and His Holy Laws are mocked and reviled in our courts of law and in what passes for "culture."
We should mourn the daily assault upon the innocence and the purity of our children by means of commercial advertising (including billboards and scatological magazine covers placed in supermarket check-out lines) and the horror of "rock" music that would be prohibited entirely in a Catholic world.
We should mourn the fact that so few Catholics have taken heed of this prophetic warning given by Pope Leo XIII in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895:
Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.
None of us is free from the guilt of sin, which is why we must be earnest about making reparation for them to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Mindful of our need to make reparation of our sins and relying ever more confidently upon the maternal intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Empress of the Americas, may we be emboldened to plant the seeds, starting with the enthronement of our own homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the conversion of each man and woman and child in this nation to the Catholic Faith, thereby ushering in a Christendom in that part of North America located between Canada and Mexico wherein the wonderful cry of the Cristeros, voiced so proudly by Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J., will be on the lips of all men at all times:
Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
