America's "Debt Clock" Began Ticking on July 4, 1776

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Most of this article is being "cannibalized" from one published on March 3, 2010, Refusing To Champion Christ the King. As so few of you actually complete the "assignments" that I give when requesting readers to read through an earlier article to understand the context of a newer one, your very exhausted writer is doing you the service of including almost the entirety of the text of the article published five hundred six days ago now as there is so little "new" that I could to it. Permit me a brief word of explanation.

There has been much hysteria all across the vast spectrum of the false opposites of naturalism over the matter of the national debt ceiling, which must be raised, we are told, by August 2, 2011, to avoid the government of the United States of America from going into default. Although political economy was a minor cognate field in my doctoral studies at the then named Graduate School of Public Affairs at the the then named State University of New York at Albany (known now as the Rockefeller Center of Public Affairs and Policy of the University at Albany) between January of 1974 and the time that I started work on my dissertation following the passing of comprehensive examinations on May 9, 1975, I make no claims to be a political economist. Whatever minimal professional training in the field I  possess is not enough to prevent me from going into a state of "MEGO" (Mine Eyes Glaze Over) when reading about economics and high finances.

I do know,  this, however, and perhaps it is all that I know: this country's "debt clock" started ticking on July 4, 1776, when a statement of Judeo-Masonic principles that did not once refer to the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, or to the King of all men and nations, Christ the King, made it appear as though men could pursue the common temporal good without subordinating themselves in all that pertains to the good of souls to the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our King has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. That's when the time bomb of America's debt to God began ticking as no country is truly free or can realize the prospect of truly limited government unless its is yoked to the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the Catholic Church.

Although the Declaration of Independence contains passages that some Catholic scholars over the years have attempted to ascribe to the writing of Saint Robert Bellarmine, whatever influences Catholic writers had on the mind of the Protestants and Freemasons and "freethinkers" who composed that "founding document" was attenuated, having been filtered through the prism of the errors of Protestantism and of the naturalist "philosophies" of the so-called Enlightenment. This is a point that Dr. John C. Rao, a professor of history at Saint John's University, Staten Island, New York, made very well in Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers: 666-0, which was published in The Remnant on January 31, 2006. I ask you to read it with great care.

I can just imagine what George Washington, a Freemason whose library at Mount Vernon was filled with works on cement-making and other such devotional topics, would really have thought if he had known that he would one day be incensed as a Catholic icon; a new Constantine; and even a Marian visionary to boot. The belly-laugh he would have enjoyed with his buddies at the Arlington Lodge! And what about Benjamin Franklin, fresh from an illuminist workshop in Paris? Did he realize that he was laboring alongside Augustine to build up a Catholic City of God? Or consider the musings of the "liberal " (and non-Mason) Thomas Jefferson with the "conservative" John Adams, recently cited in The New York Sunday Times: "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594). How astonished would they have been to learn that Founder-intoxicated Americanists would not permit such dreams to interfere with their identification as card-carrying Catholic intellectuals: in fact, more reliable ones than men who actually had the temerity to believe in the Trinity, Original Sin, Redemption, and the Resurrection?

Let’s face it. If any of these Founder characters had lived outside of the United States, American Catholics would send them to hell in a hand basket. Too bad poor Robespierre could not have built a career on our side of the Atlantic. Given his own repeated deist references to God, he would have found himself qualifying as a Catholic candidate for canonization rather than for an eternal roasting as a terrorist Frog.

In any case, each time those sweet hosannas to the Founding Fathers ring, my mind turns to a different fatherly fraternity, this one truly worthy of the name—that of the Church Fathers. How many American Catholics can name them? Or, perhaps more fairly, how many American Catholics honestly take them and their works seriously? I mean, really seriously? Oh, they may be piously remembered for miracles associated with their lives, or for one or two anti-Arian citations, or even a couple of passages from their writings, rendered noteworthy through repeated quotation on EWTN. Nevertheless, insofar as daily practical life are concerned, they are dead, buried, and forgotten, consigned to the doctrinal rubbish bin. There is simply no contest in this battle of the ancestors, fraudulent and echt. The score is always the same: Founding Fathers "666"; Church Fathers "0".

American Catholics thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, are ever more confidently inciting the faithful to desert the army of their true spiritual forebears in order to embrace the "let’s-get-real" Founders of the last, best hope of mankind. They are so flush with Founderology that they promote it as though it were the only valid, practical Patrology. This has made a deeper interest in the old Church Fathers not only superfluous, but even harmful and downright impious. Hasn’t everything really valuable that the Fathers could teach us regarding social life been taught more suitably, and in English, by the American Founders? Some narrow patristic arguments, plucked from out of their overarching spiritual vision, may, of course, still be tolerated--if, that is to say, they can support the truly salvific constitutional and economic dogmas of Founderology. But all else is political and social trash, part of that human side of the Church’s Tradition which can easily be shed when reason and science and the inspired eighteenth century American aristocracy has spoken.

What does doctrine-soaked Cappadocia have to do with common sense Philadelphia anyway? What did Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa have to say about states’ rights? Where were Augustine’s comments on checks and balances? Cyril’s meditations on the pre-Civil War perfection of the dance of the sugar plum executives, legislators, and judges? Or Cyprian’s concerns about the right to bear catapults? What about that unconscionable collectivist John Chrysostom, whose neglect of the scientific laws of free enterprise helped disrupt the imperial GNP? Away with them! And the same worship of the Founder-friendly patristic phrase, accompanied by a dismissal of the Founder-phobic patristic spirit is employed to butcher the global vision of Thomas Aquinas, the late Scholastics, and the Church’s whole counterrevolutionary tradition as well.

Give me a determination to make all things jive with the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, and Adam Smith and I’ll give you back a scriptural exegesis which will reveal the Incarnation to have been a humdrum prelude to the real excitement caused by 1776, 1787, and the daily figures from the New York Stock Exchange. Mutatis mutandis, what shows its face in Founderology is the same methodology familiar to us from the modernists of the turn of the twentieth century: that of restraining Christ’s message within a secular strait jacket. Christianity means the mundane as interpreted by this specific band of exegetes and nothing more. Take it or leave it. Live free according to these secular rules or die.

What most intrigues me as an historian is the sustained assault on Catholic History which such Patricide reflects. War on history has, of course, been declared everywhere in Christendom today. Rome has reduced the world before the1960’s to a house of horrors useful only in providing topics for self-deprecating addresses before frenzied anti-Catholic audiences out for blood. Local dioceses bulldoze their past with a passion matched only by Nicolae Ceausescu in pre-1989 Romania. Many elderly Catholics whom I know will deny on a stack of bibles all memory of doctrines and customs which I heard them piously repeat and saw them fervently practice in my childhood in the 1950’s.

None of this history killing, however, has the long term effect of that which is perpetrated on the school front. Anti-historical warmongering is rampant in Catholic education, and this, sad to say, is as true in conservative and even some traditionalist circles as in liberal centers. Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? Don’t look to Goebbels for the handbook. He was a piker compared to the propagandists at the Sportpalasts of conservative American Catholic instruction. One can easily take stock of the damage by examining certain home schooling programs, whose record of human civilization begins with Virginia and Massachusetts rather than with Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Hebrews, Greece and Rome. Another proof of it is the outright prohibition by some "alternative" Catholic academies or colleges of any substantive presentation of our historical tradition, with its inevitable revelation of radical differences with the pottage served up by the American Dream. Talk about the sin against the Holy Ghost! Disclosure of Catholic History, for all too many conservatives, is the only thing that truly fits the bill. The equation Founders=Fathers=Catholic has more clout in our supposedly countercultural educational camp of the saints than any canon of the Council of Nicaea. Woe to the orthodox teacher who might threaten to weaken it! Would that he had never lived! Would, instead, that a twenty-first century Luca Signorelli might emerge to portray the way this mentality works to smooth the road down which the Antichrist will eventually happily sashay, with our fellow believers pulling his carriage. Once again, Founder Fathers, "666", Church Fathers--along with the rest of Catholic History-- "0".

But why would a believer voluntarily enlist in the ranks of the Catholic heritage killers and happily throw the game to the Founderologists? I have spent my whole adult life trying to explain the answer to that question, and have made my local wine merchant rich while trying to do so. Right now, I should like to approach the issue from the standpoint of one factor alone: the seemingly irresistible influence upon many well-intentioned Catholics of the concept of "American Values". As guides to Catholic morality go, this one is a pure gem. Build your moral life on the foundation of American Values and you will never lack for arguments justifying detours from the Church’s real Tradition again.

What, exactly, are these "American Values"? Presumably, values associated with America or accepted by Americans. Grasping what such values entail is not a terribly difficult enterprise. It merely involves a basic knowledge of the nature and interaction of the two different elements that have gone into forming them: ideas and men.

Ideas are real things, possessing a life and logic of their own, separate from the intentions of those who create or utilize them. No matter what the formulators of ideas might "will" regarding the meaning and development of their principles, these still enjoy their own innate character and direction. The Iron Law of Ideas applies to the labors of the Founders as much as to ordinary human beings who do not inhabit their special Olympus. And no matter how much the assertion may disturb a Founderologist’s breakfast, the Protestant and Enlightenment ideas which have shaped the Founders and America work with relentless logic to destroy all aspects of Catholic culture.

Individual men on their own, however, do not always think and act coherently or completely. They do not necessarily understand all the consequences of what they say and do. Many of the individual heretics and philosophes who created or promoted the ideas informing the United States of America are perfect examples of this phenomenon. There is much that they happily accepted as part of the obvious, unchanging "common sense" structure of the world around them, while nevertheless espousing subversive ideas undermining the very positions they cherished and thought to be unassailable.

The original Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers grew up in an environment that was either dominated by Catholicism or still nurtured numerous residual Catholic influences. Many thus took for granted and worked with familiar Catholic words and themes, even as they gave to them new anti-Catholic meanings. Many also presupposed the continued practice of Catholic ways of behavior even as their own ideas began to create a New Adam who would eventually act in a decidedly anti-Catholic manner. Thus, to note but one example, while using the concepts "freedom" and "nature", both of them themes familiar and friendly to Catholic ears, they brutally perverted their orthodox significance. While assuming that human beings would always act freely and naturally in a Catholic way, they destabilized the support system encouraging such traditional behavior. Doors were opened to the gradual construction of a new style of life for a new kind of man reflecting their changed ideas more accurately. What, exactly, their own New Adam would be like they could not even themselves imagine, precisely because they had no practical experience of him yet. In fact, if they had had a clear picture of this Frankenstein they might have quickly jettisoned him and returned to the bosom of Holy Church.

I am reminded in this regard of the instructive tale about Jeremy Bentham, who sought "the greatest good for the greatest number" on the basis of a materialist definition of what was "useful". Someone supposedly once asked him what would happen if 51% of Englishmen found that their greater good would be achieved by killing the other 49% of their countrymen. "Don’t be ridiculous", he is said to have responded, incredulously, "Englishmen do not act that way". Apocryphal or not, this would have been a valid comment, so long as they continued to behave as Christians, and in gross contradiction to the utilitarian ideas that he was teaching. But once men really understood what the full logic of his vision was; once they started to act in harmony with its precepts, they would begin to pursue what was useful in less scrupulous ways. The Twentieth and budding Twenty-First Centuries are filled with examples of utilitarians of many nations ready to "choose" their version of the good through actions that even Bentham would have had to call murder.

Proponents of so-called "American Values" are in a similar position to Jeremy, the Founders, and the original Protestants and philosophes behind them. These men of values enthusiastically repeat the fundamentally erroneous and radical ideas of the Reformation and the Enlightenment on such matters as freedom and nature, but are often held back from recognizing and accepting the wicked consequences of their false teachings due to the impact upon them of residual traditional presuppositions and "gut feelings". Here are men who are repeatedly horrified by the behavior of people who actually do draw the logical consequences from their formative ideas and radicalize their comportment accordingly. In short, supporters of so-called American Values are a house divided against itself. They wish to maintain a traditional behavior to which they are both non-rationally and irrationally committed, together with rational, radical principles that will make the survival of this traditional behavior absolutely impossible. In the long run, the only honest-to-goodness American Value is actually the incoherent willful desire to have one’s cake and eat it too. A banner should be flown over the American Values camp depicting a whining child banging its head on the floor to protest the nausea caused by the lollipop which it furiously persists in sucking.

Further, rather bizarre complications for the American Values camp emerge from the press of the myriad of different groups seeking to squeeze inside. For, despite paleo-conservative claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the real thing, many others have insisted upon pitching their tents within its precincts. Each faction really has the right to do so, since all can be shown to share the same Protestant and philosophe background, and to differ merely in their various applications of Reformation and Enlightenment ideas regarding freedom and nature with diverging degrees of logic. Each sect arbitrarily limits the import of its ideas to one or two realms, willfully cutting off concern for their effects in all others. Each finds a gaggle of Founders who shared its views or can at least be used as a starting point for promoting them. Liberal proponents of American Values praise the freedom that opens the floodgates to gay marriage and pornography; conservatives, the liberty unleashing that locust plague called unrestrained capitalism; neo-conservatives the license for lying, murderous Machtpolitik. Each then expresses shock at the unnatural distortion of American Values and the will of the Founders perpetrated by the other, just as Luther proclaimed his outrage at the manipulation of his ideas by Anabaptists or Rousseau by atheists. Fists are shaken and tongues stuck out. An incongruous War Between the Heirs erupts.

None of these monotonous battles and mutual recriminations, treated oh so seriously by the earnest warriors of American Values, reflect anything other than the desperate attempts of the members of one big, unhappy libertine family to hide their common spiritual and intellectual bloodline; to escape the inescapable curse that descends with birth into the whole blasted clan. Hiding the family history in order to deny and flee from the family curse has literally become second nature to its members. They have written more glosses on the subject of the differences among them than the most pedantic of late medieval nitpickers, and almost all of these at some point drag in the question of their relationship with the Founders.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to note that the "argument by appeal to the Founders", used by all supporters of American Values, has a long history of rhetorical effectiveness behind it, and one that is much older than the United States. Isocrates used it to batter Plato, who was accused of betraying the will of the Founders of Athens with his non pragmatic pursuit of truth. Ancient Roman patricians defended senatorial prerogatives with reference to the desires of their own ancestors. This same theme was valuable to secularized bishops of the 1300’s and 1400’s, who appealed to an imagined will of Apostles in their efforts to subject the Papacy to General Councils. Venetian statists divinized the passions of those who first waded into the waters of the lagoons when trying to fend off the advance of the Catholic Reformation. The recipe is always the same. Clarify your narrow self-interested goals of wealth, power, and fame. Incense them as the obvious, God-given or Newtonian pillars of order and freedom. Distinguish them from the grubby desires of competitors. Repeat unceasingly the unbreakable connection of your particular longings with those of the most ancient, prestigious dead men who can no longer contradict you, and whose true dicta can be revealed, suppressed, or rehashed ad infinitum. Ridicule your opponents claims to Founder friendship, and, with it, all their ties to the past. So much will you hit the jackpot with this con game, that, after a short while, you will begin to believe your own mythological propaganda yourself.

Still, to emphasize a phrase popular with one of the most prominent representatives of American Values in politics today, the varied supporters of this scam "can run but they can’t hide". Ultimately, they all voluntarily line up together, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, neo-cons and libertarians, to beat their heads on the immovable brick wall called reality. Bit by bit, each faction begins to radicalize its behavior and slips, easily, into an appeal to the natural freedoms of the kind of morality and sort of New Adam praised by its competitors. They badly need one another. Each supplies a gap in the other’s logic and progress. Capitalists have to resort, eventually, to pornographers’ arguments, pornographers to the positions of unrestrained capitalism. Internationalist warmongers can easily become enthusiasts for a temporary isolation of the Western Paradise from corrupting outside influences; isolationists, when necessary, for temporary warmongering. When you board the heretical Protestant-Enlightenment express, you arrive at the same drab and pointless destination, jazzed up though it might be with glitzy banners, and baptized with the patriotic-sounding name of American Values. The American Values train is headed straight to perdition. No dose of Founderology will fend off the day of reckoning with God and with the rest of the world.

The fact that that day of reckoning seems to be rapidly approaching makes Catholic participation in the losing game of Founderology all the more tragic. A strengthening of the Catholic presence in the United States ought to have served not only as an obstacle to the construction of a new morality and a New Adam, but also as an aid for the correction of the rotten teachings shaping them. Unfortunately, Catholics failed to pick through the confusions of homeland culture. They were seduced into accepting the benefits of American Values. Catholics saw that supporters of "American morality" were horrified by varied types of perverse behavior which offended them as well. They heard wickedness attacked and goodness defended in familiar, Catholic-like language. They were taught that the Founders lay behind this homely fight for the right. Liberals assured them that the Enlightenment and Reformation on which those Founders fed were really quite conducive to social justice; conservatives, that they were perfectly tradition-friendly, offering no stimulus whatsoever for the sort of madcap Revolution that silly France had experienced.

Eager to accommodate their new land, Catholics then quite happily drew the conclusion that American Values and the Founders responsible for them could legitimately be cheered on as if they were as Catholic as St. Irenaeus; that the philosophes behind them must all be budding catechists at the school of Alexandria; that their Protestant ancestors would surely have been welcome at the table of St. Hilary of Poitiers. Yes, Protestantism and the Enlightenment were wicked in 1517 and 1750, back in Geneva and Paris, but their effects could definitely be transmuted and become good through the magic of America and the Founders’ Touch. Doctrines foul enough to raise generations of Europeans ready to risk martyrdom to oppose them were perfectly suitable for serving as the unalterable foundations for the good life on the other side of the Atlantic. Ignatius of Antioch might be used to thunder versus Lutheranism in the Old World, but in America he would doubtless have been the bosom buddy of Calvin, John Locke, and James Madison. Fight Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and the Founders? Why, you might as well fight the ante- and post-Nicaean Fathers and Catholicism itself.

Catholics also gradually embraced the notion that Founderology required their active participation in building a new morality and a New Adam. They understood that, radically changed though these would be, they must still be labelled traditional and Catholic. Great progress has been made in recent years in declaring the new morality and the New Adam to be as papist as penance and indulgences. Conservatives supporting the American Empire have completely stripped Catholic ideas involving just wars of any kind of practical clout, dismissing the moral revulsion of people who know that they have been lied to as mere "opinions" that must bend to the will of the omnipotent secular Leader. Torture has come to be taken for granted as the appropriate method for dealing with "terrorists" who would have been labeled freedom fighters and praised for their unorthodox fighting styles if only they had been insurgents in 1776 at Lexington and Concord. Doing good has more and more come to be equated with making big time bucks in capitalist cultural killing and environmental devastation. And even the appropriate kind of ancient Christian leader matching their adulation of George W. as a new Constantine has been located: Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Arian imperial apologist, patron "saint" of Catholic political boot licking.

Finally, Catholics grasped the reality that the society shaped by Founderology rewards its idolators as heroes and punishes its principled enemies as losers, most effectively by economically emarginating them and depriving them of the ever-increasing incomes that basic survival within the Western Paradise demands. They understood that there was no salvation outside the Founderology world, temporal as well as spiritual; that having been baptized into it, they could pick up the works of the real Fathers for information regarding the character of a Christian society only at the risk of kissing influence in the world at large goodbye. Such social and economic suicide they could not bring themselves to commit. Hence, their further support for a recognition of the dicta of the Founders as the sole guide to daily living worth calling Catholic.

In 1989, as the last of the East Bloc regimes tumbled onto the rubbish heap of history, I sat together with an older Catholic friend in a café near my apartment in the Village. "All that I have fought for has triumphed", he mused; "and yet my enemies are stronger than ever". Though obviously troubled by this truth, he made his comment with a certain justified spirit of hope. He was, after all, a sadder but wiser man. He had recognized what I have noted above. That his "friends" were actually his enemies as well, men who shared the same parents and who relied on the same arbitrary willfulness to refuse connecting the dots that would lead them to temporal and divine wisdom.

This, I think, will be my last article for The Remnant directly dealing with the Founders. There is no point saying anything more about them. It simply does not matter. I believe that many American Catholics would continue to appreciate and love them even if all of us were lined up and shot by the whole crew to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Belief in the Founders, along with the Enlightenment and Protestantism that stand behind them, as the source of all that is good is too strongly rooted in our culture to topple with rational arguments. Catholics have become New Adams themselves and would never accept Catholic History and the teachings of the Church Fathers on face value, if for nothing else, because you cannot make a buck out of them. Antichrist, here we come. (Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers: 666-0.)

 

Dr. Rao's analysis is quite sound, although he does not admit, at least not in this article, that the worldview of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, whose "pontificate" he accepts, is shaped entirely by what he calls very smartly as "American Founderology." Ratzinger/Benedict has given his "papal" imprimatur, if you will, to the errors of the modern civil state, believing "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" to be great "advancements" for men and their nations.

Well, behold the "advancements" wrought by the civil state of Modernity that has been embraced by the Modernist named Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Chemical and surgical baby-killing. Usury. Promotion of special "rights" for those engaged in perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. Rampant materialism. Unbridled license of speech and press responsible for the propagating of blasphemies and errors galore, thereby polluting the souls of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Endless wars to spread the "joys" of American "freedom" across the world. The state take-over of the Natural Law rights of parents to be the principal educators of their children. Oh, yes, behold the "advancements" wrought by the anti-Incarnational, naturalist civil state of Modernity born as a result of the Protestant Revolution and the rise of the myriad of naturalist "philosophies" and ideologies that can be termed quite collectively as Judeo-Masonry.

Why do Catholics still pay obeisance to men who hated Our Lord and mocked His Sacred Divinity and His Holy Church? How can such men who had a a founding hatred for Christ the King, men whose hatred of Our Divine Redeemer should make us ashamed to utter their very names?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

There is no stopping the "debt clock" that began with these hideous men. The debt of sin that this nation owes to the Most Blessed Trinity continues to mount with every passing minute. Indeed, we are being chastised without even being aware of it as radiation from the failed Fukushima, Japan, nuclear reactions makes its water into our bodies and into our soil and water and food supplies (see Fukushima in Our Food: Low Levels of Radiation; even though the author of this article is, evidently, a naturalist of the pantheist variety, he does provide useful links to other articles on this radiation). And, even though this will anger some involved in every single detail of the "battle" between the naturalist of the "left" named Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus and his hapless opponents in the false opposite of the naturalist "right," truth be told my good and few readers and very invisible givers of non-tax-deductible financial gifts, are themselves a perpetual chastisement visited upon us by God to help us to realize that they are fools. They are fools precisely because none of their clever policies and accounting tricks and steamy statements and demagoguery can stop this country's debt clock from continuing to tick down to doomsday, whether that doomsday is the result of an implosion from within our borders and attack from without--or a combination of the two.

We are in not in the mess that we find ourselves at this time in spite of the "founding principles." We are in this mess now precisely because of those "founding principles" premised upon a complete indifference to the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of God the Holy Ghost as defining the very existence of each person and each nation.

Our true popes have told us where the lies of naturalism lead us, to the very abyss. Why do we not listen to them?

"Man should use his reason first of all to recognize his Sovereign Maker, honoring Him and admiring Him, and submitting his entire person to Him. For, from his childhood, he should be submissive to those who are superior to him in age; he should be governed and instructed by their lessons, order his life according to their laws of reason, society and religion. This inflated equality and liberty, therefore, are for him, from the moment he is born, no more than imaginary dreams and senseless words." (Pope Pius VI, Brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791; Religious Liberty, a “Monstrous Right").

The Catholic Church: For how can We tolerate with equanimity that the Catholic religion, which France received in the first ages of the Church, which was confirmed in that very kingdom by the blood of so many most valiant martyrs, which by far the greatest part of the French race professes, and indeed bravely and constantly defended even among the most grave adversities and persecutions and dangers of recent years, and which, finally, that very dynasty to which the designated king belongs both professes and has defended with much zeal - that this Catholic, this most holy religion, We say, should not only not be declared to be the only one in the whole of France supported by the bulwark of the laws and by the authority of the Government, but should even, in the very restoration of the monarchy, be entirely passed over? But a much more grave, and indeed very bitter, sorrow increased in Our heart - a sorrow by which We confess that We were crushed, overwhelmed and torn in two - from the twenty-second article of the constitution in which We saw, not only that "liberty of religion and of conscience" (to use the same words found in the article) were permitted by the force of the constitution, but also that assistance and patronage were promised both to this liberty and also to the ministers of these different forms of "religion". There is certainly no need of many words, in addressing you, to make you fully recognize by how lethal a wound the Catholic religion in France is struck by this article. For when the liberty of all "religions" is indiscriminately asserted, by this very fact truth is confounded with error and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, the Church, outside of which there can be no salvation, is set on a par with the sects of heretics and with Judaic perfidy itself. For when favour and patronage is promised even to the sects of heretics and their ministers, not only their persons, but also their very errors, are tolerated and fostered: a system of errors in which is contained that fatal and never sufficiently to be deplored HERESY which, as St. Augustine says (de Haeresibus, no.72), "asserts that all heretics proceed correctly and tell the truth: which is so absurd that it seems incredible to me." (Pope Pius VII, Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814, POST TAM DIUTURNAS)

"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.

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

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." (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

 

When are we going to "get it"? Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. All attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together again are going to fail:

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact.

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

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.)

This, nevertheless, is what they want to do with human society; they dream of changing its natural and traditional foundations; they dream of a Future City built on different principles, and they dare to proclaim these more fruitful and more beneficial than the principles upon which the present Christian City rests.

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. omnia instaurare in Christo. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

 

Why be drawn into the hysteria of the moment? It is only that, hysteria, and that comes from one source alone, the adversary.

The American Revolution and the French Revolution and the Mexican Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento and the Kulturkampf of Otto von Bismarck and the Bolshevik Revolution and the Cuban Revolution and the Chinese Revolution and the Sandinista Revolution have all had one thing in common: a thorough rejection of Christ the King and His true Church as paramount in the lives of men and their societies. The differences are only in degrees and methods. The American Revolution has coopted Catholics subtly over course of time while the others used violence and/or state coercion to silence Catholics. No matter the differences in degrees and methods, the results are the same: a world where men believe that they can order themselves, both individually and socially, without even praying that Our Lord Himself reign over them and their nations as He has revealed Himself to them through His Catholic Church.

We must be calm in the midst of this hysteria. Perfectly calm. There is no stopping the "debt clock" that this country owes to God. The best that we can do is to make reparation for our own many sins, especially our sins of worshiping at the altars of the men who hated Christ the King and mocked the very means of our salvation, His Holy Cross, and for our own uncritical immersion in the ways of naturalism and materialism and sensuality by offering up to Our King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother whatever merit we might earn by the patient endurance of the chastisements of the moment, each of which we deserve just as much as the nation itself. We need to have the penitential spirit of the Saint whose feast we celebrate today, Saint Mary Magdalen, by hating our sins and growing to love Our Lord as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church and through no other means at all.

Our Lady's Fatima Message is the way out of the mess caused by the marriage of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, which is why the devil has worked mightily against by using the conciliar revolutionaries to deconstruct and thus misrepresent it. We must be as faithful as we can to that Fatima Message, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, embracing the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as we do so, heedless of Its shame before men and their nations. 

This country's "debt clock" to God is indeed ticking to doomsday.

Consecrated to Jesus through Mary, we remember these words that Our Lord Himself spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque:

 

 

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me."  (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of the Church and Protector of the Faithful, 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 Mary Magdalen, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints