All Continues To Fall Apart Absent Christ the King
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Another tragic, mindless killing spree has taken the lives of twelve innocent human beings so far. Twelve others remain in critical condition. Forty-seven others have been wounded. Although the massacre that took place at the theater nine of the Century 16 movie complex in Aurora, Colorado, it is so similar to other recent shootings.
Variations of the scenario that unfolded at Midnight, Friday, July 21, 2012, the Feast of the Saint Jerome Emiliani and the Commemoration of Saint Margaret, have occurred at the Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16, 2007, and in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, January 8, 2011. Cold-blooded killers who had carefully planned their attacks methodically went about their business of planning their mass murders to execute innocent human beings in a cold, calculating manner.
Our first obligation is, of course, to pray for the souls of those who were killed and for those who may die in upcoming days, remembering also to pray for the recovery of the wounded and that true Heavenly consolation be given to the family members and survivors.
Such a tragedy, however, does call for a bit of Catholic commentary. The purpose of offering it at this time is not to take anything at all from the horror of the tragedy and the terrible impact that it is having on those immediately involved and on the nation as a whole. Nor is it the purpose of commentary at this time to appear insensitive to the pain, shock and grief that is being felt by those involved.
As we must, however, view all things through the eyes of the Holy Faith, it is useful to seek to remind the relatively few readers of this site of the simple fact that nations will be awash in the blood of the innocent at any time in any location when they are awash with the blood of the innocent preborn and the infirmed and the elderly who are dispatched so methodically and regularly in our supposedly "civilized" nation.
As Always, Root Causes, Remote and Proximate
We have been warned by our true popes as to what happens when nations permit licentiousness in the name of "civil liberty," when their laws not only do not punish but actually and encourage widespread indecency and immorality:
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. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)
For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."
And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)
Yes, of course, the remote cause for all human problems, both personal and social, is Original Sin. The proximate cause of human problems, both personal and social, is Actual Sin. Human beings are wounded by Original Sin. Those of us who are baptized suffer from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin (the darkened intellect, the weakened will, a disordering of the balance between our higher rational faculties and lower sensual passions). Those who are unbaptized suffer all of the ravages of Original Sin in their immortal souls that are captive to the devil and his minions. There is no legal, political, constitutional, electoral, interdenominational, nondenominational, secular, philosophical, ideological, naturalistic way to solve problems that are caused by the sin of Adam and the sins of us all. Men will descend into the depth of madness and violence over the course of time as men and their societies move more and more away even from the vestigial influences of Catholicism in the world.
It is indeed true that there were social problems during the era of Christendom in Europe. The difference between then and now is simple: most men understood that they were sinners in need of cooperating more fully with the graces won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, and that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. Men knew that they had to amend their lives, that social order depended upon order within their own souls. Is there any such understanding today?
Consider Pope Pius XII's concise description of the difference between Christendom and Modernity, contained in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939:
It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939.)
The errors of pluralism divide people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order. So many Americans live from election to election, always believing that "change," whether it be in the direction of "progress" for naturalists of the "left" or in the direction of "constitutionalism" or "liberty" or "limited government" for naturalists of the "right." Although divisions on some matters will always occur until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day at the Second Coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is also true that men today have been needlessly divided about matters pertaining to First and Last Things, oblivious to the fact that they have been given a spotless mother, Holy Mother Church, to serve as their mater and magister (mother and teacher) in this passing, mortal vale of tears. Most men today believe that they are automatons, either independent of any concept of God or "free" from the "dictates" of a hierarchical church.
Personal and social disaster cannot but be the result of such a brew of error. Men resort more and more to violence today because they do not know of the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. They do not know that they have a Blessed Mother who made possible their salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the father at the Annunciation. They do not realize that the supernatural helps they need to overcome all sin in their lives and to pray for the conversion of those who are promoting evil in society flow through the loving hands of that same Blessed Mother, who gave the Rosary with her own blessed hands to Saint Dominic de Guzman so that we could be more closely united to her Divine Son, Christ the King, through the mysteries contained in her psalter, the Rosary.
Most men today do not realize that there is nothing that any of us can suffer, whether personally or socially, that is equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused those Seven Swords to be thrust through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. They tend, therefore, to dwell on their own pain, whether real or imagined, and to stew in their own juices as they conjure up hatred for their fellow human beings, each of whom is made in the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and for whose salvation we must pray fervently as one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy.
Living in a world that has been deprived of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, most men today are "catechized" by television or the internet or what passes for "entertainment" in popular culture. They are tossed about from one thing to another without having any clear, coherent understanding of they identity as redeemed creatures and that each of us will have to make an accounting of our lives at the moment of our Particular Judgments. Men who lack the Catholic Faith, you see, must descend more and more into a coarseness of life and culture that produces a class of neo-barbarians who are not only at the gates but who are well inside of the fort of the city.
As been noted exhaustively on this site and for more than a decade before that in printed journals (and for decades in my college classrooms), the descent into neo-barbarism just did not happen suddenly. It has been gradual, almost imperceptible at times. Having ridden the shock waves of the Protestant Revolution, which was a violent and very blood revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church as they order their own lives and the laws of their nations in accord with His Deposit of Faith, men descended by steps into theological relativism, religious indifferentism and the worldliness that feeds on a ethos of naturalism and an unbridled licentiousness that passes for what libertarians tell us is "civil liberty."
The libertarian concept of "civil liberty" as the antidote to the totalitarian monster state of the "left" is in and of itself a perversion the true gift of liberty that Our Lord has won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross, freedom from enslavement to Original Sin and the eternal death of the soul if we use our free will to follow Him through His true Church. No one has a "civil right" to sin or to promote sin under cover of the civil law and throughout what passes for popular culture. Men who live in such a flood errors and lies become, whether or not they realize it (and most do not), living poster children of semi-Pelagianism, the heresy that contends men can more or less stir up graces within their own souls to be good and virtuous and thus to save themselves and their societies.
Corrupt Culture Produces Corrupt Minds
While there may be some readers who recoil in horror upon reading this brief section of the article, it is nevertheless in the service of truth to point out that motion pictures such as For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada (see Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part one,
Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part two,
Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part three,
Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part four and
Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part five) are a rarity. Yes, there were graphic displays of violence in For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada. Those displays were not gratuitous. War was being made on the Catholic Faith, not on "religious liberty,: by Plutarco Elias Calles That war was violent. It was brutal. It was relentless. Indeed, those who have read the descriptions of the deaths of some of our martyrs that have been included in countless books, including Father A. J. O'Reilly's The Martyrs of the Coliseum, know that the shedding of blood for Christ the King is not a "sanitary" and "neat" affair. The producers of For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada did a great service in portraying martyrdom as they did. Our day may becoming soon. We had better be prepared.
Alas, a culture informed by the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith, a culture that glorifies sin with abandon and protects such glorification under cover of the civil law, must perforce fall completely into the hands of the devil, the master of violence against God and man himself, who wants human beings to wallow in dark, macabre thoughts of bloodshed. A steady diet of the macabre lead so many who live in a land of materialism and relativism and hedonism to be completely isolated from reality, including the reality of the humanity of fellow human beings.
According to some of the reports that have emerged thus far have indicated that James Holmes, who had withdrawn recently from a doctoral program in neuroscience, did not even speak to his neighbors who said hello to him in the apartment building he lived. He did not acknowledge their presence.
James Holmes, however, is far from alone in this regard.
We live in a world where men have become mad. They refuse to see any spark of humanity in others because they do not recognize that they bear within their own immortal souls the very image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity, in Whose image they have been made. Deluded by one naturalist lie after another and harmed immeasurably by the paucity of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the sacramentally barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, men are now suffering the effects of a world that knows not the soothing laver of redemption that is the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, seeking instead to shed as much innocent blood as possible, staring with the innocent preborn.
The world in which we live was described very prophetically by Father Frederick Faber in The Precious Blood one hundred fifty-two years ago now:
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 change, 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 made 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.)
While James Holmes is indeed solely responsible for his act of wanton murder, it is also true that he is a product of Modernity. James Holmes is a product of the contagion of sin abroad in the world with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "official" reconciliation, a world without the Social Reign of Christ and thus a world where even more than a handful of tradtionally-minded Catholic priests all up and down and across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide would find absolutely nothing wrong with going to such a macabre motion picture as Batman: The Dark Knight, no less taking newborn children to a theater at midnight to have one's immortal soul polluted by the images and sounds conveyed. No, I do not care that the motion picture was rated PG-13. Who cares about this. The motion picture itself is repugnant.
No responsible, sane human being wants to pollute his soul voluntarily, no less to pay money for the "privilege" of doing it.
No responsible, sane human being would let his children spend their significant portions of their waking hours on a given day in isolation on the computer of playing video games that involve violence and mayhem and killing of one sort or another.
Behold the insanity of Modernity, a world where parents, acting of habits born of ignorance, believe that they are doing themselves and their children a favor by letting them indulge themselves with video games, computers, iPads, and the watching of contemporary television programs, listening to the horror of "rock" music and patronizing the latest trash produced by Hollywood at the devil's inspiration. Those among them who are Catholics have no priests to correct them. Indeed, they are as likely to find their local presbyter in the movie theater as not. After all, look at how the Harry Potter franchise of motions has been praised by L'Osservatore Romano (see L'Osservatore Occulto).
Can anyone imagine Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ having His own holy eyes and ears polluted by the degrading images and vile, frightful sounds transmitted in many motion pictures today?
Why, then, are so many traditionally-minded Catholics not only so sanguine about such trash but wait with eager anticipation for it to be released?
Although armed attacks of the sort that occurred yesterday morning in Aurora, Colorado, can occur at any time in any place, they are increasing with greater frequency in the world today because of the glorification of violence in the culture, a glorification that leads to the dehumanizing of men and the entertaining of thoughts of those steeped in fantasies of violence to kill large numbers of people in a spectacular display of firepower.
Everyone is at risk in a nation where God can be blasphemed with impunity as a "civil right" and where over fifty-four million innocent human beings have been put to death by means of surgical abortion alone in the past forty-five years since Hawaii, Colorado and California began to "liberalize" existing laws that permitted the surgical execution of the preborn in certain "exceptional" cases.
Talking Heads Talking Ideological Nonsense and Worse
Much is unknown about James Holmes. One thing is fairly certain at this juncture: he was not making any kind of "political" statement with his massacre of the innocent.
The unknown did not stop the all too predictable is the manner in which professional naturalists of the "left" are attempting to blame their counterparts in the "right" of escalating their rhetoric to the point that such violence is incited.
Quite irresponsibly, reporter Brian Ross of the American Broadcasting Company television network's news division speculated that a member of the Taxed Enough Already Party (TEA Party) might have been responsible for the shooting yesterday morning. Sure enough, he found a James Holmes listed on a Tea Party website in the Aurora, Colorado, area. Without even bothering to contact this particular James Holmes, Brian Ross reported his finding, which prompted host George Stephanapoulos, who once served as a spokesflack for William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, to thank Ross for his news that was not news at all but irresponsible, ideologically-driven journalism at its ugliest:
ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed what used to be a fatal mistake to a journalist’s career: He blurted out a wild, unsubstantiated, speculative observation that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and was explosively political at the same time.
Via Breitbart:
Here is the exchange between ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross and host George Stephanapoulos about apparent suspect James Holmes:
Stephanapoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanapoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.
Thanks for what? Ross just tried to connect the Tea Party to the murder of 12 innocents based on the thinnest of speculation: that the name on the website almost matched the name of the suspect.
The political implications of the attempted smear were dynamite. And yet, the casual manner in which Ross reported this “fact” — even with a fig leaf caveat — was shocking. No attempt was made to confirm anything.
ABC News has now issued a correction and Ross has included an apology.
Politico:
ABC News and Brian Ross are apologizing for an “incorrect” report that James Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado theater shooting, may have had connections to the Tea Party.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” ABC News said in a statement. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”
In a similar statement released minutes earlier, ABC News said the report was “incorrect” but did not include the apology. “Several other local residents with similar names were also contacted via social media by members of the public who mistook them for the suspect,” the initial statement read.
Several other residents may have been contacted but how many of their employers, associations, or political affiliations were broadcast live on air?
And what made Ross make a beeline straight for the Tea Party website in the first place? Did he also check the Occupy Denver page? Somehow, I doubt whether it even crossed his mind.
There used to be a time when journalists had a rough integrity about what they said over the air and took pride in striving for accuracy. Who could ever forget ABC’s Frank Reynolds, ABC News anchorman, who, after receiving and announcing word that James Brady had been killed in the Reagan assassination attempt only to discover the press secretary was still alive, got visibly angry and to no one in particular barked on air, “Let’s get this right. Let’s nail this down.”
Today, Stephanopoulos thanked Brian Ross for smearing the Tea Party by reporting a lie. Ross should be suspended or lose his job for this attempt to inject politics into a national tragedy. (Why Is Brian Ross Still Working for ABC News?.)
This happened, after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. It is happening again. The very same people who are absolutely silent when Mohammedans, such as Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Food Hood, Texas, on Thursday, November 5, 2009, kill or plan to kill innocent human beings use every act of violence committed by someone who they presume is associated with some kind of "conservative" or "anti-government" cause to be representative of all naturalists of the "right," whose views are, the leftists believe, a threat to social order and "tolerance" and "diversity," to say nothing of their plans to make us more and more the mere creatures of the civil state.
Let me correct part of that last sentence. The very same people who ascribe all violence against abortuaries and abortionists and public officials of the "left" as representative of all of those who oppose baby-killing under cover of the civil law and who understand that the civil state is meant of its nature by God to be limited in its scope, that it is not to exercise a tyranny over the people in the name of the falsehoods of one naturalistic ideology after another aren't merely silent about the crimes perpetrated by Mohammedans on Americas: they try to hide the identities of these fiends for as long as they can in order not to offend those who worship the false god of their false religion. This has happened time and time again in order to protect the "religion of peace" from the slightest bit of suspicion as being based in violence against "infidels," including the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan in 2009 and that of the Times Square bomber,
Faisal Shahzad, last year as the pro-abortion, perversity New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, contrary to all of the evidence that was being amassed, said the following to avoid the Mohammedan elephant that right in front of him:
"If I had to guess, twenty five cents, this would be exactly that," Bloomberg said. "Homegrown maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything." (Bloomberg: "No Evidence" Anyone Else Involved - CBS Evening.)
Bloomberg was at it again yesterday, pleading with the President Barack Hussein Obama an Willard Mitt Romney to do "something" to stop such killing sprees:
(CNN) – New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, an outspoken advocate of stricter gun-control laws, said in a
radio interview Friday the two candidates for president needed to take a
firmer line in addressing gun violence.
Bloomberg's comments came as police and the FBI were investigating were investigating a deadly shooting in Colorado that left at least 12 people dead.
"Soothing words are nice, but maybe it's time that the two people who
want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they
are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across
the country," Bloomberg said on WOR Radio's "The John Gambling Show."
Bloomberg continued, saying Friday's tragedy should spark greater focus on how guns reach killers.
"I mean, there are so many murders with guns every day, it's just got
to stop," Bloomberg said. "And instead of the two people – President
Obama and Governor Romney – talking in broad things about they want to
make the world a better place, okay, tell us how."
"In the end, it is really the leadership at a national level, which
is whoever is going to be president of the United States starting next
January 1st – what are they going to do about guns?" Bloomberg asked.
Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney met with Bloomberg in May, but an
aide to the mayor said Bloomberg remained undecided about making an
endorsement in the presidential race. Bloomberg won his last election as
a political independent, but was previously a Democrat, then a
Republican.
In his interview Friday, Bloomberg said guns getting into hands of criminals wasn't solely a problem in cities like New York.
"This is killing people every day, and it's growing and it's not just
an inner-city, east coast, west coast, big city phenomenon. Aurora is
not a big city," Bloomberg said, referring to the suburb of Denver where
Friday's shooting took place. (Bloomberg challenges Obama, Romney to take action on guns.)
Even though Michael Bloomberg is a native of Boston, Massachusetts, he speaks with a decided New York City-style dialect. Thus it is that I will write as I would speak him as a native New Yorker: "Hey, Bloomberg, you moron. You wanna stop massacres such as the one that took place yesterday? Stop supporting the killing of innocent babies. Stop your support of perverse sins. Stop offending the laws of God and then attempting to play Him by controlling what your peasants eat and drink." (Please see Killing Us With Their "Concern".)
Last year, of course, the media pounced all over former Alaska Governor Sarah Health Palin and "right wing" radio talk show hosts for the shooting spree of Jared Lee Loughner, who was not as it turned out, had not political motivations whatsoever when he shot and gravely wounded United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people while wounding eleven others apart from Representative Giffords.
It is always the same. It must ever be the same in a land needless strife engendered by the naturalism that has made the devil king while convincing men that they can do and say whatever they desire and still save their souls if, that is, they even think about their souls, which large numbers of people today do not as they believe the lie of evolutionism that man is simply a different--and not necessarily higher--member of the animal kingdom.
Believe you came from apes? Sooner or later, of course, men will start to act like apes.
Behold the world in which we live, a world which Barack Hussein Obama, who is as complete a pro-abort and pro-perversity public figure as Michael Rubens Bloomberg, will give plenty of air time as the nation's "mourner-in-chief." He will politicize this tragedy beyond the likes of anything done by Brian Ross and Bloomberg.
We live in a figurative Planet of the Apes (and I never saw that motion picture, thank you).
Catholicism, Nothing Else
The only way out of this mess is to embrace the Catholic Faith and to seek to grow in sanctity in cooperation with the graces that are sent to us through the loving hands of Our Lady as we make reparation to God for our sins through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as we pray for the fulfillment of her Fatima Message by a true pope with all of the world's true bishops.
Naturalists are consigned to a hell here on earth of fighting each other as they attempt to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, to create a lasting framework of social order that can only be provided by the standard of the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as It is held high by Holy Mother Church.
It must therefore be clearly admitted that, in the life of a Christian, the intellect must be entirely subject to God's authority. And if, in this submission of reason to authority, our self-love, which is so strong, is restrained and made to suffer, this only proves the necessity to a Christian of long-suffering not only in will but also in intellect. We would remind those persons of this truth who desire a kind of Christianity such as they themselves have devised, whose precepts should be very mild, much more indulgent towards human nature, and requiring little if any hardships to be borne. They do not properly under stand the meaning of faith and Christian precepts. They do not see that the Cross meets us everywhere, the model of our life, the eternal standard of all who wish to follow Christ in reality and not merely in name.
God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)
It is nothing other astounding that any Catholic could read this passage and not see the simple Catholic truths that jump off of the page at him.
Acts of horrible violence such as that perpetrated by James Holmes on Friday, July 20, 2012, get the public's attention for a while then fade into the deeper recesses as some other event or as some "important" "game" is played or television program is shown. Such horrific acts of violence grip the nation's attention for only a while as the images of those killed or wounded and the stories of their lives are told in various ways by various people, understandably shocked and repulsed at the horror that has befallen them. The images will fade. The stories will be mostly forgotten. Most people will go on to "other things."
Even more tragic, of course, is the fact that so few people want to be confronted with the images of those who are killed quietly, invisibly, out of the public eye every day in the United States of America under cover of the civil law. This wholesale rebellion against the Fifth Commandment is but the result of a wholesale rebellion against the entirety of the Deposit of Faith as entrusted by Our Lord to the Catholic Church that was begun with Martin Luther and paved the way for all subsequent revolutions and for the triumph of statism and its thought police.
We cannot, as Silvio Cardinal Antoniano noted in the Sixteenth Century, produce peace and prosperity by things repugnant to eternity:
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. (quoted in Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Our prayers must be with the victims, both the living and the deceased and their families, of the most recent act of public violence here in the United States of America. We pray for the repose of the immortal souls of those who were killed, including the shooter himself, and for the recovery of those who survived James Holmes's horrific shooting spree. We must also pray for the conversion of James Holmes to the true Faith before he dies, that his cold, cold heart be converted by the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as he seeks shelter through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. While he is solely responsible for the horrible crimes that he has committed, he remains a human being for whose salvation is dear to Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother. A man who is so converted will embrace the administration of civil justice upon him to assure that he repays the debt that he owes to civil society, which might very well be his own life.
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, all must continue to fall apart absent Christ the King. The fact that the conciliar revolutionaries, men who have made their own accommodations to the anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity it he world, do not understand this and believe in "religious freedom as the path to peace" only worsens the state of the world-at-large.
How willing are we to get ourselves to a true offering of the Immemorial Mass of the ages on a daily basis?
How willing are we to spend time with Our Beloved, Christ the King, in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament?
How willing are we to enslave ourselves to Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen? How eager are we to carry our daily crosses, recognizing that there is nothing that we can suffer in this passing, mortal vale of tears that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be pierced through and through with Seven Swords of Sorrow?
How willing are we to make time to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permit?
How willing are we to be as generous with God as possible by voluntarily renouncing the world and its pleasures so as to seek first His Kingdom?
How ready are we to meet Him at the moment of our own Particular Judgments, which can occur at any time, especially in this world of neo-barbarism in which we find ourselves?
Our Lady stands ready to shelter us in the storms of the moment. Let us fly unto her patronage now and every moment of our lives so that we can serve her Divine Son, Christ the King and never fear for one moment to proclaim:
Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!
Our Lady of Fatima, 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.
Saint Praxedes, pray for us..
See also: A Litany of Saints
