All Falls Apart Absent Christ the King
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Although the tragic shooting that took place in an alcove outside of a Safeway Supermarket in the La Toscana Village section of Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, January 8, 2011, that left six people dead and thirteen injured, including the attacker's principal target, United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), was the work of one very disturbed man, Jared Lee Loughner, the usual suspects of professional naturalist in the "left" are seeking to exploit this tragedy for their own nefarious purposes. Naturalists of the left believe that their "truths" are infallible and that anyone who dares to dissent from their "truths" is employing the language of "hate" and "bigotry" and "intolerance" that wind up inciting men such as Jared Lee Loughner to carefully plan then executive cold-blooded murder with a semi-automatic pistol in broad daylight in a public place.
Without for a moment taking anything away from the profound tragedy that has occurred and the deep sense of shock and grief felt by those who lost loved ones or from the physical suffering that has been visited upon the wounded, I believe that it is important to take a step back from the hysteria of the moment to consider the truth that men must go mad and societies must fall into ruin absent the Social Reign of Christ the King. We have been warned:
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.
So much is unknown about the driven young man, Jared Lee Loughner, who was possessed by a variety of demons to seek to take human lives in cold blood, doing so, all reports indicate, methodically. A mere political assassin is content in dispatching his principal target. Jared Lee Loughner wanted to take the lives of as many people he could, including that of nine-year old Christina Taylor Green, the granddaughter of the larger-than-life former major league pitcher, manager and general manager (who now serves in a consultancy role with the Philadelphia Phillies), Dallas Green. It is very hard to imagine what kind of "political" statement this killer was attempting to make by killing so many innocent human beings, including young Christina Taylor Green.
What is, however, 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. This happened, as noted on the home page of this site, 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 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.)
Much has been made of former Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin's posting of a political map on something called Facebook, whatever that is, last year that showed "cross hairs" superimposed over locations of members of Congress she was targeting for defeat. One of those was Representative Gabrielle Giffords. While I am a critic of Sarah Palin and do not like the constant "reload" references that play to the emotions of crowds, there is no evidence at all that her political map of ten months ago "incited" Jared Lee Loughner to carry out his plan of human annihilation. A naturalist commentator by the name of Howard Kurtz, who is no fan of Palin's or of the naturalist "right," was honest enough to state that the accusations against former Governor Palin are without any foundation at all:
Let's be honest: Journalists often use military terminology in describing campaigns. We talk about the air war, the bombshells, targeting politicians, knocking them off, candidates returning fire or being out of ammunition. So we shouldn't act shocked when politicians do the same thing. Obviously, Palin should have used dots or asterisks on her map. But does anyone seriously believe she was trying to incite violence? (Don't Blame Sarah Palin)
Ah, the fact that military terminology is used at all to refer to partisan politics is symbolic of the fault-lines caused in a world where most people believe that the true religion has no role to play in public life, that "religion" is simply a private matter that must of its nature "divide" people rather than unite them in a perfect unity of beliefs and practices that inform their personal conduct so as to guide their conduct in public life. Error divides engendering needless bitterness and divisions. Catholicism unites, teaching men to treat others as they would treat Our Lord Himself in the very Flesh. It is not the will of the true God of Divine Revelation for His rational creatures not to know His identity or what He has taught. He does not want them confused on His Divine Revelation. He does not want men to "debate" the binding precepts contained in the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. We are witnessing before our very eyes that which Pope Gregory XVI called insanity and that Pope Pius IX called injurious babbling.
In today's circumstances of error, of course, we have an obligation imposed upon us in the baptismal font to bear witness to the truth, to oppose error with firmness and with no degree of compromise. We point out sophisms and illogic and sloganeering. We criticize falsehoods and misrepresentations. We deplore attacks upon the innocent preborn and the chronically or terminally ill. We condemn the advance of indecency and perversity in our culture and under cover of the civil law. We do so without condemning those who promote these evils while we praying fervently for their conversions to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be true social order. We do not hesitate to call error and falsehood by their proper names no matter who might be "offended" in the process. It is not "hate speech" to be faithful to the Sacred Deposit of Faith and to eschew all human respect in the process.
As many others have noted, it is rather curious that commentators on the "left" can wish for the death of those they truly hate--and with a passion--on the "right." Here is one such example, drawn from the time that actor Alec Baldwin, who is a baptized Catholic, appeared on a program hosted by some man named Conan O'Brien on December 12, 1998, as the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives was holding hearings on the impeachment of then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton:
Conan O’Brien: "Before we leave, I gotta ask you. It’s no secret that you are very political. You are a very political person. It’s no secret that you have actually had some associations with the Clintons. That you’re a liberal man and I thought you know today, this is a historic day and you’re one of the most politically active actors out there. What do you think?"
Alec Baldwin: "I was in Africa. I go to Africa. I mean ladies and gentlemen I am in Africa. For three months I am in the bush and I come back. I come back here and I come back to what? I mean what is happening right now as we speak? Right now the Judiciary Committee, the President has an approval rating of 68 percent. The President is very popular and things are going pretty good and they are voting to impeach the President. They voted on one article of impeachment already. And I come back from Africa to stained dresses and cigars and this and impeachment. I am thinking to myself in other countries they are laughing at us twenty four hours a day and I’m thinking to myself if we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together, [starts to shout] all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death! [crowd cheers] Wait! Shut up! Shut up! No shut up! I’m not finished. We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we’d kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families. [stands up screaming] What is happening in this country? What is happening? UGHHH UGHHH!!!!" ("Actor Alec Baldwin: "If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together, all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death!)
No hatred there, huh?
Want a few more examples. Sure, just a few:
There is a sound case to be made for dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on the Cuban section of Miami. The move would be applauded heartily by most Americans. Alas, Operation Good Riddance would require the sort of mature political courage sadly lacking in Washington, D.C., these days.
My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary. I’ll go to Bauer’s campaign office and cough on everything. Phones and pens. Staplers and staffers. I even hatch a plan to infect the candidate himself; I’ll keep a pen in my mouth until Bauer drops by his offices to rally the troops. And when he does, I’ll approach him and ask for his autograph, handing him the pen from my flu-virus-incubating mouth.
That column also appeared on Salon.com. It was a little more than hate “speech” — the guy actually did try to give Gary Bauer the flu. (No Hate Speech by Prominent Leftists?)
These are just some of countless examples of the true hatred and revulsion possessed by many in the naturalist "left" for those who dare to dissent from their "truths," no less to assert that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life as He has revealed Himself to us through His Catholic Church. Indeed, wasn't it the lord of secular toleration, the man who believes that he is the oracle of what he calls the "audacity of hope," Barack Hussein Obama, who said the following in an interview on the Spanish-language Univision channel three months ago?
POTUS (President of the United States): Well, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna see how well we do in this election and I think a lot of it is gonna depend on whether we still have some support not only from Democrats, but also Republicans, but they're gonna be paying attention to this election. And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's gonna be harder and that's why I think it's so important that people focus on voting on November 2. (Transcript of President Barack Obama with Univision.)
Enemies? Richard Nixon, call your office. No, the naturalists of the "leftists" bent who are intent on completing the transformation of this country into a quasi-totalitarian stronghold truly hate those who oppose them. Like the Roman caesars and their minions of yore across the Roman Empire, they believe that they have the duty to use the full power of the civil state to silence their most vocal critics by whatever means are available to them, doing so in the name of "the people" as they, our lords and masters, know much more than us more peasants.
As I have noted before on this site, a woman in Toledo, Ohio, was visited in 1995 by two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) who had been assigned to the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy (VAAPCON) Task Force that was established by the then Attorney General of the United States of America, Janet "Waco/See No Evil About Chinagate" Reno, in the wake of the passage of Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) in 1994. The F.B.I. agents who visited the woman in Toledo warned her that she would be arrest under the provisions of FACE is she ever did again what prompted their visit to her: namely, write to an abortionist to say that she was praying for the abortionist's conversion.
Writing a letter to a baby-killing to state that one is praying for his or her conversion is considered to be an act of "domestic terrorism" according to two agents who were assigned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Violence Against Abortion Providers Task Force. And it was twenty-one months ago that the United States Department of Homeland Security issued a report claiming that those who opposed abortion and large government and gun control were possible sources of "domestic terrorism," an allegation that caused the department's secretary, Janet Napolitano, to be grilled by Congressional committees (All Hail! Caesar Obamus). However, it is clear that this professional statists such as
I know this all too well in my thirty years of college teaching. A veritable book could be written about the "tolerance" of the "left" that I experienced on a first-hand basis, including when the wife of a colleague yelled at me from her car on a street in Normal, Illinois, in the Fall of 1986, "Your mother should have aborted you!" She yelled this pleasant greeting because I was running for lieutenant governor of New York on the Right to Life Party line at that time, driving or flying from Illinois to New York every weekend to teach a graduate course at Saint John's University and to engage in various campaign activities. Such invective was very common throughout my career, save for the time that I spent as an adjunct professor at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, where the colleagues in my department left me alone to teach as I saw fit. While it is true that the senior administrators did not approve the unanimous departmental faculty recommendation made eleven years ago that I be hired for a full-time position, the colleagues in my department were most open even though they disagreed with me, sometimes rather strenuously. That is very rare in the halls of academe.
The professional naturalists of the "left" desire to redistribute our income and regulate what we can eat and what we can say and what we can think in order to increase their own vast bureaucratic control over the functioning of everyday life that choked the Roman Empire in its final decades and that characterized the ossification of the Soviet system, especially under Leonid Brezhnev, that a man who is a committed Communist to this day, Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to "reform" with his program of restructuring (perestroika in order to make the Communist system in the Soviet Union more "efficient," not to end it (and, of course, it hasn't ended). It is that bureaucratic control that has brought various nations in Europe to the point of fiscal bankruptcy. They will accept no criticism of their schemes whatsoever.
Indeed, some professional "leftists" and race-baiters have attempted to claim that opposition to the policies of President Barack Hussein Obama is rooted in racism, in a deep-seated desire to see the nation's first black president fail. Efforts to bring to public light the actual terms of regulations issued behind closed doors by unelected political appointees that have the force of civil law are said to be "disruptive" to the political process. Such efforts are said to be "divisive" and "mean-spirited." Those possessed of statism must think themselves above all criticism and rebuke.
What these "leftists" do not realize is that those who planned a break from King George III in the eighth decade of the Eighteenth Century were considered "traitors" by the king and his minions in the then named United Kingdom of Great Britain.The American founders were dismissed with revulsion by many in England as men who had a revolutionary spirit that had to be nipped in the bud. The American founders were "anti-government." They were daring to accuse their own king of offenses, perhaps even exaggerating those offenses to make their points in the court of world public opinion, especially in France and Spain, each of whose leaders had their own geopolitical concerns about the British. How could such men, English subjects, dare to treat their own king in such a manner?
If it is wrong for naturalists of the "right" to oppose various statist policies that are spending us into bankruptcy and forcing citizens to purchase products to advance the cause of the nanny state, then why was it virtuous of the American founders to have opposed a king whose took a total of an average of about seven percent of personal income in various taxes, duties and imposts? Why should the founders have opposed attempts to censor their pro-independence, anti-colonial speech that was seen as demonstrative of hatred for King George III and his House of Hanover?
As always, of course, the answers to these questions rests in the simple but little accepted truth that men who separate themselves from the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the Catholic Church wind up battling each other in a perpetual contest of false "opposites," believing either that the civil state or "civil liberty" must rule the day for a better tomorrow. The American founders were reacting to what they considered to be the rise of unchecked monarchical power that was itself the result of King Henry VIII's own revolution 1534 that he waged against the Catholic Faith and believing Catholics who remained faithful to the Vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Although everything happens within the Providence of God, the English colonies up and down the Atlantic seaboard would have been settled by Catholics who were subjects of a Catholic king had not Henry Tudor revolted against the Social Reign of Christ the King in England. One revolution begets others. (It is ironic that an Anglican preacher named Jonathan Boucher preached in the 1760s and 1770s against breaking from the British Crown on the grounds that revolutions are designed to overthrow an established under which men must save their souls. What Boucher did not understand was that his own false church itself was created in a revolution against Christ the King. See
On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance.) And there is no way for a "better tomorrow" to be found in any of these revolutions against both God and man.
The only way for a better tomorrow for any of us 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. 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.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, amplified this point far better than I ever will be able to do:
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 Jared Lee Loughlin on Saturday, January 8, 2011, 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. Over four thousand innocent human babies are slaughtered by surgical means each day in this country, countless more die as a result of chemical abortifacients. 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 the Jared Lee Loughner's horrific shooting spree. We must also pray for the conversion of Jared Lee Loughner 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 falls 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.
Pope Saint Hyginus, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
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