Bob Dole, part trois
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Somewhere deep in the archives of The Wanderer must be at least one copy of the pamphlet that The Wanderer Press published during the Republican Party presidential nominating process in January of 1996. That pamphlet, entitled "One Man's Assessment of the '96 Presidential Election, reviewed the positions of each of the Republican presidential candidates, indicating support for the candidacy of Patrick Joseph Buchanan as the only no-exceptions pro-life candidate who had a reasonable chance to win the nomination and to at least give then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton a formidable debating partner in the general elections that year. Yes, true, sure. I am a "reformed" man since I wrote that pamphlet, no longer wasting any time on the direct participation in our fake, phony and fraudulent Judeo-Masonic electoral system (see
When Lesser is Greater). However, I do consider the little pamphlet to be a good collection of the facts concerning the positions of the candidates.
As we know, the thirty-third degree Mason named Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., of Russell, Kansas, and the Watergate apartment complex, which is where he lives with his wife, Senator Elizabeth Dole (Republican, North Carolina), won the 1996 Republican Party presidential nomination as he won the votes of the states on Tuesday, March 19, 1996. One of the most memorable scenes of that evening involved the inarticulate and syntax-challenged Dole turning pages of a spiral bond notebook as he thanked the people of the states whose primaries he won that evening. "Thank you, Illinois." Dole stopped, turning the page with his left hand. "Thank you, Texas." Dole stopped, turning the page with his left hand. "Thank you, Michigan." Dole stopped, turning the page with his left hand. Thank you, Wisconsin." Dole stopped, turning the page with his left hand. "Thank you, Ohio." Dole stopped.
What Bob Dole never stopped doing, however, was being what he himself would refer to as "Bob Dole." Dole, who refers to himself frequently in the third person (reminiscent of the retired baseball player named Rickey Henderson, who said the following after a game between the New York Mets, for whom he played in 1999 and part of 2000, and the Philadelphia Phillies at the wreteched and now quite defunct Veterans Memorial Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Friday, September 24, 1999, "Rickey look for Rickey limo"--no, that's not a typographical error), stated repeatedly between the time he clinched the nomination on the night of March 19, 1996, and the time of the Republican National Convention on August 12, 1996, that he wanted to see a "Declaration of Tolerance" inserted into the party's national reform. What was the "Declaration of Tolerance"? I thought that you would never ask.
That "Declaration of Tolerance" was meant to keep alive the spirit of the late Lee Atwater's "big tent" approach to handling the issue of abortion, which was perceived, albeit erroneously, as being an electoral liability for Republican Party candidates in the wake of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, July 3, 1989, which upheld a law in the State of Missouri that placed some restrictions on the butchering of innocent preborn children. The Webster case was used by various pro-abortion organizations to claim that the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, was in jeopardy, which it was not. As advocacy groups exist to raise funds to permit them to "advocate" in behalf of their erroneous positions, the fruit of the madness of civil liberty and pluralism, the Webster case was just tailor-made for these pro-death organizations to send out direct mailing appeals for massive amounts of money to "fight" the "radicals" who were "turning back a woman's right to choose" so as to force women once again to "go into the back alleys and have unsafe abortions."
The reaction by the pro-death advocacy groups to Webster gave careerist Republican activists and the donors associated with them an opportunity to protest that it was essential for the Republican Party to rid itself of the "narrowness" of its pro-life position. Ralph Reed, the smarmy little director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, kept saying over and over again, "A political party is not a church." Others associated with the Republican Party said that there had to room for a "diversity of viewpoints" on such "divisive" issues as abortion. And then President George Herbert Walker Bush's handpicked Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Lee Atwater, who was the elder Bush's campaign manager in the then Vice President of the United States of America's campaign against the Democrat Party nominee for President in 1988, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, explained that it was important for those who support "abortion rights" to be included in the Republican Party as part of a "big tent" able to hold together a group of people with a variety of positions on "difficult" issues. Obviously, President Bush the Elder (or "Bush 41") approved of Atwater's effort.
Lee Atwater's "big tent" movement, which, unfortunately, he did not repudiate before he died from brain cancer at the age of forty on March 29, 1991 (after having become a Catholic at the hands of Father John A. Hardon, S.J., who informed me first-hand of how some Republican goons tried to keep him from visiting Atwater in the hospital room at one point), did make some inroads in Republican Party circles in the early-1990s as pro-abortion Republican candidates Susan Molinari (1990) and Richard Lazio (1992), won election to the United States House of Representatives from the State of New York, becoming among the first Catholics in the post-Ronald Wilson Reagan era of the Republican Party to run as pro-aborts and to get elected. Their success was followed in the year 1993 when the Presbyterian pro-abort named Christine Todd Whitman (Governorship of the State of New Jersey) and two Catholic pro-aborts, Richard Riordan (Mayoralty of the City of Los Angels, California) and Rudolph William Giuliani (Mayoralty of the City of New York, New York) were elected.
The "big tent" may have been thwarted in the 1992 Republican Party National Platform. The effect of the "big tent" lived on after Lee Atwater's death as Catholic pro-aborts Thomas Joseph Ridge and George Elmer Pataki were elected in 1994 to the offices, respectively, of the Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Governor of the State of New York. Pataki succeeded in defeating the Catholic pro-abortion incumbent Governor of the State of New York, Mario Matthew Cuomo, a Democrat, using his "bully pulpit" of the Governorship of the State of New York to promote P his belief that there should be a "diversity of views" about abortion in the Republican Party. Pataki was one of the most vocal opponents of Patrick Joseph Buchanan's campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1995 and 1996.
Thus it is, my friends, that the hapless, inarticulate and mercurial thirty-third degree Mason named Bob Dole was pushing for his "Declaration of Tolerance" to be inserted into the Republican Party National Platform in 1996, an effort that was blunted by political pressure brought to bear by Angela "Bay" Buchanan, a former Treasurer of the Untied States of America and her brother Patrick's campaign manager, the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, and defeated presidential candidate Dr. Alan Keyes. The "Declaration of Tolerance" may have been defeated. Its spirit lived on, however, especially when one considers that prominent roles were given at at the Republican National Convention in San Diego from August 12 to 15, 1996, to pro-abort speakers such as Colin Powell and United States Representative Susan Molinari, who delivered the keynote address at that convention on August 13, 1996, as Patrick Buchanan was given no role to play at the convention whatsoever. The message was clear: being "moderate," meaning being at least somewhat open to a "diversity of views" on abortion," was considered by Republican Party professionals and fund-raisers and donors to be politically advantageous.
Dole, who supported the surgical dismemberment of children in three supposedly "hard" cases, and who voted consistently to fund domestic and international "family planning" programs that assassinate children by means of chemical abortifacients, was always tongue-tied when discussing abortion during the general election campaign in 1996, managing to utter the words "partial-birth," without including the word "abortion," just once in the second and last debate with then President Bill Clinton at the University of San Diego on October 16, 1996, a remark that was mumbled and fumbled and wound up not even being recorded in the transcript of the debate! (I commented on the mumbled remark in an article than ran in The Wanderer a week after the debate.) Dole also said that he could understand how abortion was a "divisive" issue.
Well, surprise, surprise, the "pro-life" Governor of Texas, George Walker Bush, took the same basic line in 1999, saying that abortion was a "divisive" and/or a "difficult" issue about which people of "good will" could disagree legitimately. Oh, really? Really? Truly? A difficult or a divisive issue?
It is tiring just thinking about the number of articles that I wrote in 1999 and 2000, most of them published in the old printed journal Christ or Chaos, the predecessor to this website, to state this obvious fact: There is nothing "difficult" about the Fifth Commandment, which forbids the direct, intentional taking of the life of any innocent human being as the first object of a moral action. The Fifth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is clear and it admits of no exceptions. Innocent human life is always to be held inviolable. Period.
"Divisive"? There is nothing divisive about adhering to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted to the Catholic Church by their Author and her Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Such precepts have only become "divisive" as a result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and cemented in place by the various naturalistic and semi-Pelagian and anti-Incarnational "philosophies" and ideologies and revolution of the Judeo-Masonic era known as Modernity, with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its most telling "reconciliation."
The likes of Bob Dole in 1996 or George W. Bush (Bob Dole, part deux) in 1999 and 2000 would have the average voter believe one's support for surgical abortion, although possibly regrettable, is certainly not something that disqualifies anyone from the holding of public office, whether elected or appointed. As horrible as abortion is, it is, after all, just "one" out of many issues facing the United States of America today and voters and candidates and office-holders should be "free" in a "free country" that values "freedom of speech" and "freedom of press" and 'freedom of religion" to believe as they want. Sure, it's terrible that over a million children are killed in their mothers' wombs by surgical means each year in the United States of America alone. That's just the way it is. Surgical abortion is here to stay and those who support it should be reaffirmed in their "right" to believe in it as they desire to do so.
Well, Bob Dole, part trois, is here in the person of United States Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona), the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party this year, 2008. McCain is doing his best to impersonate Dole, as can be seen in a report on the Politico website yesterday, August 14, 2008:
McCain’s comments Wednesday to the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes that former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge’s pro-abortion rights views wouldn’t necessarily rule him out quickly found their way into the in-boxes of Christian conservatives. For those who have been anxiously awaiting McCain’s pick as a signal of his ideological intentions, there was deep concern that their worst fears about the Arizona senator may be realized.
In the interview, McCain said “the pro-life position is one of the important aspects or fundamentals of the Republican Party.”
“And I also feel that — and I'm not trying to equivocate here — that Americans want us to work together. You know, Tom Ridge is one of the great leaders and he happens to be pro-choice. And I don't think that that would necessarily rule Tom Ridge out [for vice-president].”
He added: “I think it's a fundamental tenet of our party to be pro-life, but that does not mean we exclude people from our party that are pro-choice. We just have a — albeit strong — but just it's a disagreement. And I think Ridge is a great example of that.” (McCain alarms base with abortion comment.)
Just a disagreement, eh, Johnny, boy? Just a disagreement?
Well, let me repeat, more or less (computer crashes have eaten hundreds of my articles over the past twenty years), what I have written so many times before:
Would Bob Dole or George W. Bush or John McCain say that anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews (and Arabs, it should be pointed out), is just a "difficult" or "divisive" issue that is just a "matter of opinion," as Bush termed abortion in 1999 and 2000, or, in McCain's words, "just a disagreement"? Would a virulent, anti-Semite who wills physical harm, perhaps even under cover of law, to adherents of the Talmud and Arabs, one who might even express views sympathetic to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, be "welcomed" in the Republican Party? Would an open, rabid anti-Semite be considered as a potential Vice Presidential running mate or as an appointee to the White House staff or the Cabinet or to the Federal judiciary?
Would Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III say that racialism, the hatred of any one of the races of people on the face of this earth, is just a "difficult" or "divisive" issue that is just a "matter of opinion," as Bush termed abortion in 1999 and 2000, or, in McCain's words, "just a disagreement"? Would a virulent racialist who hated people of a different skin color (white, brown, black, red, yellow, turquoise) who wills physical harm, perhaps even under cover of law, to those with black or white or yellow or red or turquoise skin be "welcomed" in the Republican Party? Would an open, rabid anti-Semite be considered as a potential Vice Presidential running mate or as an appointee to the White House staff or the Cabinet or to the Federal judiciary?
Why, then, is it that one who believes that little babies, who have committed no crimes whatsoever, can be poisoned and/or butchered in their mothers' wombs under cover of law is deemed qualified to serve in public office, whether elected or appointed? Although the hatred of anyone on the basis of his race or religion is evil, the killing of an innocent human being, no matter the means (abortifacient pills, the various butcheries used by surgical baby-killers, guns, knives, bombs, etc.) used in the killing or the age of the victim (preborn, newborn, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, young adult, middle-aged, elderly), is one of the Four Sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, and is thus higher in the hierarchy of evils than racial or religious or ethnic hatred.
Sure, this is clear to those of us who are believing Catholics. This is not clear to apostate Catholics and to almost every other category of people, albeit with a few exceptions here and there as the light of natural reason does equip men to see and to accept and even to defend certain basic moral truths even though they do not accept the Catholic Church as the divinely-instituted guardian and infallible explicator of those truths, because of the triumph of the naturalistic ethos of Judeo-Masonry that makes of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man by the power of God the Holy Ghost in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order. It is, you see, a relatively easy thing to consider abortion, whether chemical or surgical in nature, as merely a matter of "opinion" about which one is free to disagree when one considers the Incarnation of God as Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of the woman who was assumed body and soul into Heaven on this very day, August 15, to be a matter of complete indifference to order within souls and justice within nations and peace among nations.
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ sanctified the womb of every mother by becoming the Prisoner of His own Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb for nine months before His Nativity in Bethlehem?
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand that every abortion is mystical attack upon Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who is in solidarity with every child in every mother's womb, no matter the condition of the child conceived or the circumstances of the conception?
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III realize that God wills there to be many children born to parents so that they can give him honor and glory here in this passing, mortal vale of tears as members of the true Church He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, so as to be ready at all times to die in states of Sanctifying Grace and thus enjoy the glory of His own Beatific Vision for all eternity with His Most Blessed Mother, assumed into Heaven this very day?
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand or accept the truth that no level of government--be it local, state or nation--can ever pass any piece of positive civil legislation that puts into question the inviolability of innocent human life or of God's absolute Sovereignty over the sanctity and the fecundity of marriage?
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand or accept the truth that the civil government has an obligation to help to foster those conditions in civil society wherein its citizens can better sanctify and save their souls as members of the Catholic Church?
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand or accept the truth that the civil law can never sanction sin, the very thing that caused the God-Man, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart through and through with Seven Swords of Sorrow, under cover of law and in every aspect of popular culture.
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand or accept the simple truth that Catholicism and Catholicism alone is the sole foundation of personal and social order?
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III understand that the United States and other parts of the developed world are undergoing profound economic and demographic and sociological changes as a result of contraception and abortion?
This one passage from Pope Leo XIII's Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1 1900, explains the trajectory of a world that is content with the framework of the world of naturalism that has arisen in the wake of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King:
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.
Modernity's anti-Incarnational world of naturalism has promoted one falsehood after another, being enabled in its efforts in the past five decades now by the scions of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Adherents of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism recoil whenever they are confronted with Pope Gregory XVI's clear reiteration of God's Revealed Truth concerning so-called "modern liberties:"
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?
The Church has always taken action to destroy the plague of bad books. This was true even in apostolic times for we read that the apostles themselves burned a large number of books. It may be enough to consult the laws of the fifth Council of the Lateran on this matter and the Constitution which Leo X published afterwards lest "that which has been discovered advantageous for the increase of the faith and the spread of useful arts be converted to the contrary use and work harm for the salvation of the faithful." This also was of great concern to the fathers of Trent, who applied a remedy against this great evil by publishing that wholesome decree concerning the Index of books which contain false doctrine."We must fight valiantly," Clement XIII says in an encyclical letter about the banning of bad books, "as much as the matter itself demands and must exterminate the deadly poison of so many books; for never will the material for error be withdrawn, unless the criminal sources of depravity perish in flames." Thus it is evident that this Holy See has always striven, throughout the ages, to condemn and to remove suspect and harmful books. The teaching of those who reject the censure of books as too heavy and onerous a burden causes immense harm to the Catholic people and to this See. They are even so depraved as to affirm that it is contrary to the principles of law, and they deny the Church the right to decree and to maintain it. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)
Does anyone who is a rational, sane human being believe for one moment that Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III agree that "the death of the soul is worse than the freedom of error" or that the temporal wealth and dominion and the glory of the United States of America is indeed perishing as a result of "this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech and desire for novelty"?
No, Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or George Walker Bush or John Sidney McCain III do not understand the truths of the Catholic Faith, which bind the consciences of all men in all nations at all times until the end of time. They speak and act as what they are, naturalists who like to say that they are opposed to various evils while they enable the career of men in their own political parties who support these same evils--and who themselves actually support only a slightly lesser degree of these evils than those who support them without qualification or exception.
Perhaps those of you who are "lost in the trees" of the emotions of the presidential race ought to re-read When Lesser is Greater to consider what a farce the Judeo-Masonic system and how it might be a good thing not to continue to enable it with our time and attention and money and, yes, our votes. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when people have to make the "case against Barack Hussein Obama," whose support for chemical and surgical abortion on demand disqualifies him ipso facto from holding any office of public trust, whether elected or appointed, in order to "make the case" for a man, John Sidney McCain III, who believes that men who agree with Obama's support for chemical and surgical abortion on demand are fully qualified to hold public office, whether elected or appointed.
Our recourse? Of course, Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary. Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary has crushed the Albgiensians and turned back the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto and the Gates of Vienna and in the Battle of Belgrade, turning back ships carrying the hateful breed of men known as Dutch Calvinists as they menaced the shores Peru and The Philippines. Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary prompted the forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to leave their zone of occupation in Austria in 1955 when it appeared as though another Soviet puppet regime was gong to created in that zone of occupation. And Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary only recently prevented a war from breaking out among the countries of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
Praying the Rosary, good readers, is not doing "nothing." Indeed, it is the most valuable use of our time to convert our nation and the world to the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen, and no Catholic, especially those who have access to the forums provided by the mass media, who refuses to exhort one and all to pray the Rosary for such a conversion of men and their nations to true Faith is a true patriot of his nation or a true friend to his fellow citizens.
Each part of our social life should help us to get home to Heaven as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation. Each part of our popular culture should redound to our sanctification and salvation. There can never be a time when First and Last Things are not first and foremost in our minds, in our hearts, on our lips and attested to by our actions, especially as we perform the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Remember this and remember it well: The only antidote to secularism and naturalism and all of the evils that flow wherefrom is Catholicism, and nothing else. We must be professedly and avowedly Catholics from the top of our heads to the tip of our toes, never shrinking from our willingness to live in accord with this exhortation made to us by Pope Leo XIII in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:
The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent.
What Pope Leo XIII said to Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini applies to us:
"Let us work, Cabrini, let us work, for after there is a beautiful paradise."
"I like to work, Your Holiness, but will paradise be ours?"
"Certainly, paradise is for those who work like you. Courage, Cabrini, on with your work...onward until death." The Holy Father pronounced those last words with such ardor that all who heard him were deeply impressed. When he reached the entrance to his apartments he turned and repeated: "Let us work, Cabrini, let us work." Mother Cabrini followed him with her eyes until he was out of sight; she was radiant with joy, for the Supreme Pontiff had promised her heaven if she continued her work." (Mother Cabrini, pp. 91-92.)
On with our work! Onward until death! Isn't time for you to pray a Rosary now on this Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary?
Vivat Christus Rex!
Our Lady, Assumed into Heaven, pray for us.
