Aborting Christ the King
by Thomas A. Droleskey
The devil sets up various snares to entrap us during the course of our lives. He hates each of us because we have immortal souls made in the image and likeness of the One he hates, the Most Blessed Trinity--God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. His hatred for God is such that he will spare no effort to take the zenith of God's creative, man, body and soul with him into Hell for all eternity. Snares are thus laid up for us in our own personal lives on a daily basis as various appeals are made to our pride, our vanity, our egotism, our narcissism, our sloth, our gluttony, our desire for "peace" at all costs, our desire to be liked and respected by others, our desire to indulge in the fleeting pleasures of the world and the flesh. These personal snares are made easier to fall into when the whole fabric of social life is reduced to the merely natural level, where there is no place socially or politically or legally or constitutionally for the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen. Catholics who are exposed to a steady dose of naturalism will fall prey to the adversary's wiles sooner of later by coming to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than the world through the eyes of the true Faith.
Catholics in the United States of America fell into this naturalist trap of the devil almost from the very beginning. While they were pious and devout and were serious, at least for the most part, about saving their souls as members of the true Church, Catholics in the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century failed to understand that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America was as much a protection for practical atheism, the consequence of religious indifferentism, as it was for them to practice their Faith openly and without state-sponsored persecution from the national level. It was nevertheless the case that Catholics thus had to fight for their "rights" under the First Amendment when threatened by various efforts at the state and local level to discriminate against them, leading them to look to politics as the means of providing themselves with some degree of "representation" in the levers of civil government and as the means of upward social and economic mobility. Thus opened the trap down for Catholics to immersed in the false opposites of the naturalism of electoral processes that are divorced and dissevered from a due submission in all that pertains to the good of souls to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.
The devil thus created a more subtle means of repressing the Catholic Faith in social terms than had been done by the blunt instrumentalities he used during the Protestant Revolt in Europe. Many martyrs for the Faith were produced as a result of those blunt instrumentalities. Catholics resisted Protestantism to profess the Faith and to seek to win converts from Protestantism back to the true Church's maternal bosom. Catholics were killed and enslaved in England and Ireland. Catholics in Acadia (now Nova Scotia) in 1755 were rounded up, shipped out and sent to various quarters of the world as families were broken up and many of them were sold into slavery because they refused to give up the Faith and the Immemorial Mass of Tradition to "worship" as Anglicans. (Although the subject of a forthcoming article, there would be, among other outrages, special irony if it turns out to be the case the conciliar Vatican accepts the "conversion" of Anglicans en masse without requiring them to abjure their errors and by accepting the very "Mass" that Catholics went to their deaths rather than to acknowledge in the slightest, no less participate in at all.) These blunt instrumentalities prepared Catholics weary of persecution to accept "religious freedom" to practice their Faith in the religiously indifferent United States of America.
An illusion of "freedom" blinded most Catholics to the subtleties of the dangers posed by a cultural milieu that was not confessionally Catholic. National greatness was defined in naturalistic, materialistic terms, as Orestes Brownson noted in
National Greatness.) Pope Leo XIII saw these dangers very clearly at the end of the Nineteenth Century as he attempted to warn the Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, of the fact that Catholics were being coopted by the appearance of an acceptable social environment as the necessity to defend the truths of the Faith as the foundation of social order faded from the very minds of Catholics:
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. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)
By that time, of course, most Catholics in the United States of America had plunged themselves headlong into the fury--and that word is very carefully chosen--and the "rush" of partisan politics as the means of "improving" the nation and of improving their own social lot. The Democrat Party in the northeast and industrial Midwest became the vehicle by which Catholics became immersed in the naturalistic world of electoral politics, creating a whole social network that revolved around politics and partisan identities as members of the true "secular church," the Democrat Party, outside of which there is no temporal salvation. That slavish adherence to the Democrat Party has been passed down from generation to generation no matter what stands in support of statism and one abject moral evil after another have been taken by its leaders over the decades. All consideration of First and Last Things have had to be subordinated to the interests of the "party" and its candidates and its policies.
Trapped by the snares of the devil's naturalism, most of those Catholics who do oppose the evils promoted under cover of law and protected in popular culture by the Democrat Party believe that the "solution" rests in working in the false opposite that is the other major organized crime family of American naturalism, the Republican Party. The devil knows this, thus raising up Democrat bogeymen who are alleged to represent "greater" evils in order to divert the time, energy and attention and finances of believing Catholics into accepting ever-increasingly higher doses of so-called "lesser" evils in the Republican Party. Yet Catholics are convinced that it is a naturalistic ideology or philosophy (conservatism, libertarianism) that will provide the foundation for "civil liberty" and a safe, limited government.
What unites these false opposites of the naturalistic "left" and the naturalistic "right" is the utter and categorical rejection that Catholicism and Catholicism alone is the one and only foundation of personal of social order. This utter and categorical rejection of Catholicism as the one and only foundation of social order is the basis of Modernity. It is also the basis of Modernism and the counterfeit church of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity itself.
Multiple absurdities are produced by any kind of accommodation to these false principles of naturalism. These absurdities are on view on a daily basis. They come from the naturalist "left" and they come form the naturalist "right."
One of the old revolutionary war horses who has championed the cause of Catholic allegiance to the Democrat Party in the name of "peace and justice" has been the nefarious Father Andrew Greeley, a true priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago who has no sense of sin or modesty, having written novels laced with indecencies that are too vile and vulgar even to contemplate, things that do issue from the mouths of Catholics who take the pursuit of sanctity seriously. Father Greeley championed the cause of the appointment of the then conciliar"archbishop" of Cincinnati, Ohio, Joseph Bernardin, as the successor to John "Cardinal" Cody as the conciliar "archbishop" of Chicago, Illinois, although he had his quarrels with Bernardin on various matters after his transfer from Cincinnati to Chicago in 1982. (I wrote to a true priest, Father Arthur Meloche, who had given a parish mission at Epiphany Church in Normal, Illinois, in September of 1978, to say in 1979 that Greeley would never live to see "Pope" John Paul II appoint Bernardin as the "archbishop" of Chicago. Shows you how much I knew, how much I projected my own beliefs into the mind of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. Incidentally, I have just discovered after doing an online search for Father Meloche, a priest of the Diocese of London, Ontario, Canada, that he passed away last month. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord!)
Father Greeley, who writes a nationally syndicated column, has suggested in a column in the Chicago Sun Times that it might be racist not to vote for Senator Barack Obama, D-Illinois, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democrat Party.
The end of the longest primary last week was high drama. Some might want to compare it with the work of the great Greek playwrights, such as Euripides and Sophocles, for hubris and catharsis and purification. It is difficult, however, to see how characters such as Harold Ickes, Howard Wolfson and Terry McAuliffe would fit into such a drama. They might be better suited for a Swedish film by Ingmar Bergman or, even better, a surrealistic Italian play by Luigi Pirandello such as "Six Characters in Search of an Author" or perhaps "Right You Are, If You Think You Are."
Sen. Barack Obama's victory, we are told by the cheering sections, was a great victory for the American dream. Racism may well be in retreat. In the immortal words of Humphrey Bogart: Not so fast, Louis. The United States looks pretty good now -- for a change. What if Obama is defeated? The whole world and most African Americans will scream "racism!" Better not to try at all than to try and fail.
In fact, only a little more than half of the Democratic voters chose the senator from Illinois as their candidate. Were the other voters racist? Influenced by racism? Inclined to racism, which they hide even from themselves? Surely all of these factors were at work, but it is virtually impossible with the current research technology to sort them out. Moreover, is the voter a bigot who says -- to himself or others -- "He's too young for it," "I don't know anything about him," "He's an elitist," "He's just a lot of fancy talk," "The country isn't ready for a man like that," "He's weak in his support of Israel," "He's Muslim, possibly the anti-Christ!" Are these hints of lurking prejudice? Are the voters of regular members of the Democratic coalition -- Hispanics and union members -- against Obama partly because of racism?
How many of the male readers of this column who are habitues of bars, locker rooms, commuter train bull sessions, pool rooms and men's clubs have not heard the indigenous racial slurs of such environments applied to Obama?
And surely some of the explicit chatter during the campaign was racist, especially the obsession with the various clergy who mounted the pulpit of his church. By what stretch of sick logic could the candidate be responsible for what his clergy said and did?
Certainly there are solid political and personal reasons that some Americans might have had for voting against the senator that would not be in principle racist. He is one of the most "liberal" members of Congress. He stole the election from a woman who was entitled to it. He is one of the "boys" beating up on the female candidate. He is a not a patriot dedicated to final victory in Iraq. He is weak on national security. He lacks experience. He supports abortion. Yet behind these arguments, might racism lurk?
The point is that racism permeates American society and hides itself under many different disguises. The nomination of an African-American candidate was a near-miracle. Only the innocent and the naive think that the November election will not be about race.
The odds against the replication of the primary miracle in November, even against a disgraced and discredited Republic administration, are very high.
Race will silently trump the war, the economy, the cost of gasoline, the disgust with President Bush. One may wish that it will not be so, that if Obama loses it will not be because of the color of his skin but because the country genuinely wants another Republican administration.
Fall election hinges on race
Notice how Father Greeley uses sarcasm when listing some of the reasons why someone "might have had for voting against Senator Obama that "would not be in principle racist," seeming to imply that Obama's firm and unequivocal support for the unrestricted killing of innocent preborn babies in their mothers' wombs is not an ipso facto disqualification to any public office, whether elected or appointed. It doesn't matter that Barack Obama is black. It wouldn't matter if he was white. It wouldn't matter if he was brown or yellow or green or turquoise.
Barack Obama's race has nothing to do with whether he is qualified to hold public office. No one who supports even one abortion under cover of law, whether by chemical or surgical means, is qualified to hold any office of public trust, whether elected or appointed, as that person does not understand that a strict observance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted to the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church is the absolute prerequisite for personal and social order. Such a person does not understand that the very thing--sin--that caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be plunged through and through with Seven Swords of Sorrow can never be promoted under cover of law or promoted in popular culture.
Pope Leo XIII made this point very clear in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:
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 way 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.
Father Greeley is a product of the diabolical trap that is the naturalism of Modernity, believing that the Democrat Party is the means by which to pursue "peace and justice" after years of Republican Party misrule under the naturalist, pro-death administration of President George Walker Bush (whose administration has funded the chemical assassination of innocent preborn children by means of domestic and international "family planning" programs far in excess of what was done by the openly pro-death administration of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.). Father Greeley is oblivious to the fact that the abortion is, as willful murder, one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, and that it is not a minor thing at all to support anyone who supports this willful murder as a so-called "civil right" enforceable under cover of the civil law.
Father Greeley does not realize (or perhaps he does not care) that each abortion is an attack mystically upon the very person of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Whose very presence in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb sanctified the womb. He is in solidarity with every child in every mother's womb. To dismember, burn, suck out, carve or otherwise crush the body of an innocent preborn human being is to do the same mystically to Our Lord Himself. No one can say that he "loves" Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ while he supports His mystical dismemberment in the wombs of mothers and/or promotes the careers of those who do in public life. No one who supports abortion under any circumstances or under any conditions whatsoever can be an instrument of promoting the common temporal good, no less promoting the common temporal good in light of fostering those conditions in civil society wherein citizens could better sanctify and to save their souls as members of the Catholic Church.
As has been noted on this site frequently, the true popes of the Catholic Church have made all of the proper distinctions concerning the boundaries of the relationship between Church and State. The Church has taught from time immemorial that men are free to choose whatever particular form of government they desire, that she can accommodate herself to all legitimate forms of government, and that civil governments have wide ranges of latitude to act in pursuit of the common temporal good, noting that men of good will can disagree about this or that matter of public policy (what constitutes a level of just taxation, the specific relationship that should exist between a national or central government and state or provincial governments, whether to build a particular highway or what kind of energy policy a nation should pursue or the specific sort of defense strategies to be employed in the protection of a nation's citizenry and a nation's overall strategic interests). These are all matters that belong in the realm of Caesar. All well and good.
The true popes of the Catholic Church have nevertheless pointed out from time immemorial that the civil state has an obligation to recognize the true religion and to accord her the favor and the protection of the laws, seeking to discharge its responsibilities in the realm of "Caesar" in light of man's eternal destiny. That most Catholics in the United States of America, including most of those who assist at chapels administered by true bishops and true priests in the Catholic catacombs who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its Modernist shepherds, do not understand this at all is one of the sorry legacies of the condemned heresy of Americanism, the very ethos of which is at the heart of the conciliarist approach to Church-State relations.
Most Catholics in the United States of America across the ecclesiastical and ideological divides recoil in horror when they hear that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must reign as the King of men and of nations. What? The Constitution is defective. Yes! The Constitution of the United States of America is defective. Its rejection of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church has convinced men that it is possible to order their lives, both individually and collectively, without reference to First and Last Things as she teaches them in the Holy Name of her Divine Bridegroom and Invisible Head. An uncritical acceptance of a political system founded in a rejection or indifference to the true Faith winds up becoming the "secular church" in which people of all religions--or no religion at all--seek their secular salvation.
Father Andrew Greeley's belief that the Democrat Party will "save" the United States of America from another eight years of Republican rule is mirrored by the attitudes of those Americanist Catholics who, fearing Obama's statism and unrestricted support for baby-killing under all circumstances, believe that the only "alternative" is the false opposite posed by the Republican naturalist named Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, who believes that there are instances when the civil law can permit licitly the deliberate targeting of innocent babies for destruction by surgical means. McCain, as has been noted before, believes in nothing coherent save for a a vague sense of what he thinks is patriotism, heedless of the fact that true patriotism wills the good of one's nation, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization in every aspect of her social life without any reservations or exceptions whatsoever. A constant rearguard effort is thus fought to keep the "greater" evil out of office by become full-throated apologists for the supposedly "lesser" evil even though the dose of that alleged "lesser" evil becomes higher and higher with each passing election cycle.
This is all a trap from the devil. None of it has anything to with advancing the common temporal good at all. None it can advance the common temporal good at all, which is why some of us believe, making a prudential judgment that is not received from the hand of God, that it is a waste of time to give a false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational and semi-Pelagian electoral system any credibility. (Please see
When Lesser is Greater.)
Lost on Catholic adherents of the false opposites of the naturalist left and the naturalist right is the sensus Catholicus that should impel us to be champions only of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen, able to recognize in a heartbeat the truths contained in these words from the late Silvio Cardinal Antoniano:
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. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted in Pope Pius XI's Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Anyone who supports baby-killing, whether by surgical or chemical means, for any reason at any time believes that it is possible produce true temporal peace and tranquility by things repugnant and opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. That is why Barack Obama and John McCain are both disqualified from holding any office of public trust. The devil's trap of naturalism, however, has convinced Catholics attached to the Democrat Party version of naturalism to remain steadfast in their true "faith" no matter the evils that are advanced by so doing. And the devil's trap of naturalism has convinced Catholics opposed to the Democrat Party version of naturalism believe that they have to "hold their noses" and support the Republican version of naturalism, heedless of the fact that we go over the cliff no matter who gets elected, the only difference being whether we go over the cliff at eighty-five or seventy-five miles per hour. The devil wins more and more, whether by leaps and bounds or by increments, no matter who wins a particular election in Judeo-Masonic system of naturalistic self-redemption.
Pope Saint Pius X explained matters so simply and so succinctly in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:
. . . .
For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
I will never tire of reminding those who read this site that naturalism is not of God. The use of natural means will never defeat the devils of this day or any day.
Father Frederick Faber made this exact point in The Precious Blood:
It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are hindered by the Precious Blood; and this is not merely a hindering of so many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights. Falsehood would become so universal as to dissolve society; and the homes of domestic life would be turned into wards either of a prison or a madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But without the Precious Blood, such men would abound in the world. They might even become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we have in our souls. Civilization increases these possibilities. Education multiplies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Refinement adds a fresh malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad, until at last earth would be a hell on this side of the grave. There would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region of the unnatural. All highly-refined and luxurious developments of heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a highly-educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal.
The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose.
An earth, from off which all sense of justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes. The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way; and the same is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been just as it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this? All our struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no reason why we should not give ourselves up to that kind of enjoyment which our corruption does substantially find in sin. The gratification of our appetites is something; and that lies on one side, while on the other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser--is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness? Yet it would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world where there was no Precious Blood. Whatever relics of moral good we might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the most miserable; for they would be drawn away from the enjoyment of this world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and shame; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the allurements of sense are so vivid and strong.
What sort of love could there be, when we could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other, what a separation death would be! We should commit our dead to the ground without a hope. Husband and wife would part with the fearfullest certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation. Mothers would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to offend God with their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of our nature would become unnatural, and the most honorable ties be dishonored. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our hearts would have to learn to beat another way, in order to avoid the dismal consequences which our affections would bring upon ourselves and others. But it is needless to go further into these harrowing details. The world of the heart, without the Precious Blood, and with an intellectual knowledge of God, and his punishments of sin, is too fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity.
But how would it fare with the poor in such a world? They are God's chosen portion upon the earth. He chose poverty himself, when he came to us. He has left the poor in his place, and they are never to fail from the earth, but to be his representatives there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood, would any one love them? Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot? If the stream of almsgiving is so insufficient now, what would it be then? There would be no softening of the heart by grace; there would be no admission of of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our incomes; there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large;and yet even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with skilful concentration to different acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. Vocation is a blossom to be found only in the gardens of the Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God. Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining.
Even in countries professing to be Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel, the poor grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be supported by compulsory taxes; and they are in other ways a continual subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due to the Precious Blood that the principle of supporting them is acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history--even the history of nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation, and for literary and artistic refinement--it would not be extravagant for us to conclude that, if the circumstances of a country were such as to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves, so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition.
Such would be the condition of the world without the Precious Blood. As generations succeeded each other, original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to themselves. Every thing which makes life tolerable, which counteracts any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness, which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which consoles any sadness--is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in heathen as well as in Christian lands. It changes the whole position of an offending creation to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such a matter to speak of chang, the aspect of God's immutable perfections toward his human children. It does not work merely in a spiritual sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We are all of us every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden, so imperceptible, so unsuspected? Perhaps because it is so universal and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents if it pressed sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of all his attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out?
Men would be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him; but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.
Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which mae life unbearable to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)
What I wrote a little over a week ago is apposite once again:
Such a world as that described by Father Faber one hundred forty-eight years ago years ago now has come into existence not only because of the forces of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry. Such a world as that described by Father Faber one hundred forty-eight years ago now has come into existence in no small measure as a result of the the deficit of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that is extant as a result of conciliarism's bogus sacraments as we have become the slaves of the state that recognizes not Christ the King while it exalts itself as "god."
Devils of one sort or another will always abound in the corridors of the false opposites of the naturalist "right" and the naturalist "left." We will not drive them out at the ballot box, as I used to believe, at least in part, or by the use of naturalistic or interdenominational or nondenominational means. No, we will help to do our part to drive them out by clinging to true bishops and to true priests in the Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the "legitimacy"of its false shepherds. We will help to do our part to drive them out by spending time in prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. We will help to do our part to drive them out by offering up each of our daily prayers and penances and sufferings and humiliations in reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world, giving all we have and do and suffer to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Go to the daily offering of the Mass of the ages offered by a true bishop or a true priest. Spend some time on your knees before Our Eucharistic King. Consecrate yourselves totally to Our Lord through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, and tell Him that a fellow sinner, a terrible sinner who has much in his life to make reparation for before he dies, sent you His way through His Most Blessed Mother to be a champion of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.
Modernity and Modernism both have aborted Christ the King from His rightful place as the ruler of men and their nations. Our sins have played no small role in this, which is why we must make sure to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world on a daily basis. We must also recognize that the crimes of Modernity against the innocent preborn have been made more possible by Modernism's warfare against the Catholic Faith, exemplified by the counterfeit church of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with the principles of Modernity that have overthrown the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen with such disastrous consequences, including the widespread acceptance of the falsehood that political systems divorced and dissevered from the true Faith can do anything other than lead men and their nations further and further into the grip of the devil himself, now and quite possibly for all eternity.
Trusting in Our Lady's Fatima Message and encouraged by the brave example that Saint Basil the Great gave us during the Arian heresy, may we seek at all times to be champions of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen, praying our Rosaries for the day when the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will be made manifest, the day on which the secular and apostate devils who plague us at present will be driven out once and for all as Our King is enthroned once more to shouts of:
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
