Caesars Ignoramus

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The United States of America is living proof that it does not take intelligence to serve in public office. As I noted on other occasions, God has shown infinite patience with this country that was founded upon the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity by protecting her from even worse calamities than those than should have occurred given the absolute dunderheads of naturalism who have served as our forty-three presidents (Stephen Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms as president, the first from March 4, 1885, to March 4, 1889, and the second form March 4, 1983, to March 4, 1897) and those who have served as members of the two houses of the United States Congress and as justices of the Supreme Court of the United States and as Cabinet secretaries and as political appointees of the Cabinet departments. That the United States has remained an independent nation up until this point is indeed a great grace given it by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ so that its citizens can repent of their refusal to acknowledge Him as the the King of their nation and to pursue each of their daily actions in light of their Last End.

This point was made abundantly in an article, Not A Mention of Christ the King, published on February 16, 2010. There is not need to repeat the points made there. That article took a long time to compose. Readers who are interested can click on the link above to read the information provided in the article.

The latest Caesar Ignoramus to capture the nation's attention is, of course, the reigning Caesar of the moment, Caesar Obamus, Barack Hussein Obama, who continues to mouth inanity after inanity, especially when he is addressing college commencements (see No "Common Ground" Between Truth and Error) and when attempting to demonstrate to foreign audiences that he is, unlike most of his presidential predecessor, attuned to the "spirit" of the rest of the "global community" (see Kindred Spirits of the New World Order and Believing His Own Stuff). He is particularly attuned on the international stage to completing the task undertaken many of his naturalist predecessors, Republican and Democrat alike, of surrendering what remains of American national sovereignty to various international organizations and agencies.

At home, of course, Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus has sought to increase the size, the scope, and the power of the Federal government with his own "souped up" version of the Trouble Assets Relief Program (TARP, see A Country Full of Boiled Frogs) that was begun his not-so-conservative predecessor, Caesar Georgii Bushus Ignoramus (see Socialism, Straight From Your "Pro-Life" Conservative), in early 2008, and, of course, with ObamaCare (see Front Men For The New World Order).  He is very upset that public opinion polls reveal that a good percentage of the American public is upset, at least for now, with his Power Grab, and he is using friendly venues to attempt to convince Americans that his socialist vision of big government is correct, and that those who oppose his vision are really obstructing the path of social progress.

Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus is clueless about the fact that the actual purpose of civil government is to promote the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, fostering those conditions in civil society that redound to the sanctification and salivation of the souls of those who are subject to the authority of that civil government. Who says so? You mean you don't know by now? Well, one true pope after another has said so, including, of course, the cogent summary provided by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

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. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State.

 

Just incidentally, you understand--and asking you to keep this just between us, how do Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI rank as "Roman Pontiffs" who "have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State?" Not very well, wouldn't you say? They deny this teaching and contradict it by promoting the separation of Church and State that was termed by Pope Saint Pius X as "a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error." Something that is absolutely false in 1906 cannot become "true and "good" and "indispensable" in 2010. Wake up, you doubting Thomases out there, and see the apostasy that is right before your eyes.

I digress. Excusez-moi, si vous plait. (Who says I'm monolingual? I took five years of French. I'm a little rusty. I can turn a phrase now and again, though, courtesy principally of my French-Canadian paternal grandmother, the late Adrienne Delfausse Droleskey. Oh, I digress again.)

Caesar Obamus Ignoramus, being a thorough product of naturalism by means of his atheistic mother and his Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, and by means also of the disciples of the late Saul Alinksy who taught him the principles of community thuggery and extortion (excuse me once again, this time in the English language , er, "community organizing"), knows nothing of all of this. He, our benighted TelePrompTer philosopher-king, knows that the "real" purposes for the existence of the civil government, something he made clear to the members of the graduating classes of the various colleges of the University of Michigan on Saturday, May 1, 2010, in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

First of all, American democracy has thrived because we have recognized the need for a government that, while limited, can still help us adapt to a changing world.  On the fourth panel of the Jefferson Memorial is a quote I remember reading to my daughters during our first visit there. 

It says, “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but...with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”

The democracy designed by Jefferson and the other founders was never intended to solve every problem with a new law or a new program.  Having thrown off the tyranny of the British Empire, the first Americans were understandably skeptical of government. And ever since we’ve held fast to the belief that government doesn’t have all the answers, and we have cherished and fiercely defended our individual freedom.  That’s a strand of our nation’s DNA. 

But the other strand is the belief that there are some things we can only do together, as one nation -– and that our government must keep pace with the times.  When America expanded from a few colonies to an entire continent, and we needed a way to reach the Pacific, our government helped build the railroads. When we transitioned from an economy based on farms to one based on factories, and workers needed new skills and training, our nation set up a system of public high schools.  When the markets crashed during the Depression and people lost their life savings, our government put in place a set of rules and safeguards to make sure that such a crisis never happened again, and then put a safety net in place to make sure that our elders would never be impoverished the way they had been.  And because our markets and financial systems have evolved since then, we’re now putting in place new rules and safeguards to protect the American people.  (Applause.)   

Now, this notion -- this notion, class, hasn’t always been partisan.  It was the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who said the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.  And he’d go on to begin that first intercontinental railroad and set up the first land-grant colleges.  It was another Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “the object of government is the welfare of the people.”  And he’s remembered for using the power of government to break up monopolies, and establish our National Park system.  (Applause.)  Democrat Lyndon Johnson announced the Great Society during a commencement here at Michigan, but it was the Republican President before him, Dwight Eisenhower, who launched the massive government undertaking known as the Interstate Highway System.  

Of course, there have always been those who’ve opposed such efforts.  They argue government intervention is usually inefficient; that it restricts individual freedom and dampens individual initiative.  And in certain instances, that’s been true.  For many years, we had a welfare system that too often discouraged people from taking responsibility for their own upward mobility.  At times, we’ve neglected the role of parents, rather than government, in cultivating a child’s education.  And sometimes regulation fails, and sometimes their benefits don’t justify their costs.

But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad.  One of my favorite signs during the health care debate was somebody who said, “Keep Your Government Hands Out Of My Medicare” -- (laughter) -- which is essentially saying “Keep Government Out Of My Government-Run Health Care Plan.”  (Laughter.) 

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.  We, the people -- (applause.)  We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny. 

Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities, and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad.  (Applause.) 

Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe.  Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.  (Applause.)  Government is this extraordinary public university -– a place that’s doing lifesaving research, and catalyzing economic growth, and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small.  (Applause.)   

The truth is, the debate we’ve had for decades now between more government and less government, it doesn’t really fit the times in which we live.  We know that too much government can stifle competition and deprive us of choice and burden us with debt.  But we’ve also clearly seen the dangers of too little government -– like when a lack of accountability on Wall Street nearly leads to the collapse of our entire economy.  (Applause.)
 
So, class of 2010, what we should be asking is not whether we need “big government” or a “small government,” but how we can create a smarter and better government.  (Applause.)  Because in an era of iPods and Tivo, where we have more choices than ever before -- even though I can't really work a lot of these things  -- (laughter) -- but I have 23-year-olds who do it for me -- (laughter) --  government shouldn’t try to dictate your lives.  But it should give you the tools you need to succeed.  Government shouldn’t try to guarantee results, but it should guarantee a shot at opportunity for every American who’s willing to work hard.  (Applause.)  (Remarks by the President at University of Michigan Spring Commencement)

 

Just a little aside to Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus as a point of historical correction: Listen you, you statist pro-abort: Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with the shaping of the government of the United States of America under the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was not at what we call now the Constitutional Convention, which met between May 25, 1787, and September 17, 1787. He was serving as the American ambassador to the court of King Louis XVI in France. Here's another note of correction for you, former law professor ignoramus: we have a republican form of government, not a democracy.

Alas, the whole debate among competing sets of naturalists about the size and scope of the Federal government is the result (drum roll, please) of the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian nature of the American founding. This is what I wrote in A Catechism of the Social Reign of Christ the King and it bears repeating once again:

Second, Martin Luther believed that the Bible was the sole source of Divine Revelation, rejecting the 1,500 years of belief in Apostolic or Tradition as other source of Divine Revelation, and he believed that each individual was his own "interpreter of the Bible. He thus planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation

Although the Anglicanism strain of Protestantism differs from the Lutheran strain in some areas, Anglicanism is founded on a specific rejection of the role of the Catholic Church in its exercise of the Social Reign of Christ the King, arrogating the "headship" of the "church" to the King (or Queen) of England. This resulted quite specifically in the rise of monarchical absolutism in England. Over 72,000 Catholics who remained faithful to Rome after King Henry VIII's revolt (largely over his own personal lust) against the Catholic Church were executed on Henry's orders between 1534 and his death in 1547. Monarchical absolutism in England has been replaced over the centuries by majoritarian absolutism as exercised by the House of Commons of the United Kingdom's Parliament.

3) How did naturalism and Protestantism influence the founding of the United States of America?

The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.

4) What is the principal defect, therefore, of the Constitution of the United States of America?

As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the Bible for a Protestant (as mentioned above), is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact.

This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians.

In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.

5) Are you saying that the founders of the United States of America had evil intentions?

Intentions are irrelevant. What matters is the truth or the falsity of the ideas that men possess. It is not true that men can organize themselves socially without referencing the true Faith and by permitting false religions to propagate their false beliefs openly.

6) What is wrong with giving each "religion" the ability to speak publicly to win adherents to its cause?

To give false religions the civil "right" to speak publicly, which is different than tolerating their existence and their private practice of their false worship, is to blaspheme God, Who does not want the souls for whom he shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood confused about Who He is and what He has revealed and How they are to be happy here in this life as a prelude to eternal happiness in Heaven. (See also A World of Sisyphuses and It's Still a World of Sisyphuses. Have you noticed that I write about this subject a lot? Newcomers might want to look at the list of articles found in No Christ the King? No Rosary? No Good Cause.)

 

Got it? A constitution that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words will be as defenseless in the hands of men who want to deconstruct the plain meaning of those words as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of those who are intent on deconstructing Its inspired words for their own purposes. Holy Writ needs an ultimate repository and infallible explicator, Holy Mother Church. Civil governments need the Catholic Church to serve as a brake on the unjust use of power if the good of souls demands her mother intervention after--and only after--she has exhausted her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching and exhortation. Absent that, my friends, and it is only a matter of time before those who exercise civil power become as power hungry and morally decadent (in the sense that they are bereft of even the naturalistic sense of morality as possessed by pagans of the past such as Cicero in the First Century before Christ in Rome) as the Caesars of ancient Rome itself. No other result is possible. None.

The Reality of Government Today

While we are indeed to give Caesar what belongs to him, Caesar uses what we give him to sustain bloated, needless bureaucracies at all levels of government and to fund programs that are inimical to the eternal good of souls and thus to the common good of society itself. Needless bureaucracies to regulate a financial industry gone haywire as a result of the abuses engendered by the Calvinist capitalism (see More Wallpaper That Glows in the Dark on Wall Street) need tax monies to continue to operate and to grow in size and power. It is this to which Catholics who know the authentic Social Teaching of the Church object.

We do not object to "government" as the precepts of the Fourth Commandment requires us to recognize to obey all legitimate, properly constituted authority in all that does not pertain to sin. Wasting taxpayers' dollars needlessly, no less to spend them on abject evils, is not a legitimate power granted to any civil government from God as no one has the right, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance, to do that which is contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. And those in civil governments have an obligation to keep precisely those precepts, including "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal," as to kill the innocent and to steal taxpayers' monies for pay such killing (and to pay for the bloated size of government is unjust and violation of the Ten Commandments.

The unjust growth of the civil state and the monstrous level of taxation, the proceeds from which are used principally to fund all manner of immoral projects, that should be denounced by anyone who considers himself to be a Catholic seeking to be faithful to Holy Mother Church's immutable, infallible Social Teaching. And while that Social Teaching must be applied in concrete circumstances, the exact details of which are subject to legitimate discussion and debate and interpretation, the principles contained in that Social Teaching are found in the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the Natural law that have been entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church. The principle of a just level of taxation is derived from the Fourth Commandment, which places limits on the unjust exercise of civil power, and Seventh Commandments, which protects the right of private property, a right of the Natural Law, and guards against its unjust confiscation, as can be seen in this passage from Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum:

These three important benefits, however, can be reckoned on only provided that a man's means be not drained and exhausted by excessive taxation. The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to absorb it altogether. The State would therefore be unjust and cruel if under the name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of more than is fair.

 

No sane human being who understands the reality of the world can assert with a straight face that we are not living at a time in human history when the average taxpayer is indeed oppressed by unjust and cruel levels of taxation, depriving him of far more than is fair. We are indeed living in such a time. So much so that a chap named Caesar Gulielmi Clintonus Ignoramus said in a speech in Buffalo, New York, in 1998 that the leaders of the Federal government knew how to spend taxpayers' money better than the taxpayers themselves. This candid admission from a penultimate statist and collectivist was and remains a simple statement of fact in the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity: that citizens exist to aggrandize the state, which has, in this demonic view, no obligation to recognize the true Faith or to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. This is what Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus believes as well.

Holy Mother Church teaches us that the first portion of whatever we make (whether it be the worthless pieces of paper known as "currency," to which is assigned artificial values by various government and banking officials and agencies, or grain or other crops, "real" goods--property or livestock, for example, precious metals, etc.) belongs to God by means of the support we give to the work of His Holy Church, not to us and not to the civil state. We must set aside about ten percent of what we make for the support of the work of Holy Mother Church (which does not mean, of course, that we support the local conciliar diocese or any other conciliar project in these days of apostasy and betrayal), being mindful of fulfilling the duties imposed by our own states-in-life. Rejecting this teaching and inverting it, the confiscatory taxation policy of the modern civil state is premised upon the belief that we are entitled to keep only a small portion of what we make, that it is to the various of government to which our income must be directed, thereby depriving individuals of the legitimate freedom to provide for the needs of their own families.

As noted above, the fundamental safeguard against the growth of the civil state is the Social Reign of Christ the King. True, there were abuses in the imposition of taxation in the Middle Ages, some of which led to direct disputes between various civil potentates and local bishops, if not the Vicar of Christ Himself. There are no guarantors even in a Catholic world against the vagaries of fallen human nature that result in inspiring civil leaders to forget that they must reign according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and always hold the line of justice in their administration of the affairs of state. Saint Louis IX, King of France, whose feast we celebrate in but four days, was most explicit about this in his letter to his son, the future Philip III:

9. Dear son, have a tender pitiful heart for the poor, and for all those whom you believe to be in misery of heart or body, and, according to your ability, comfort and aid them with some alms.

10. Maintain the good customs of your realm, and put down the bad ones. Do not oppress your people and do not burden them with tolls or tailles, except under very great necessity. . . .

18. Dear son, if you come to the throne, strive to have that which befits a king, that is to say, that in justice and rectitude you hold yourself steadfast and loyal toward your subjects and your vassals, without turning either to the right or to the left, but always straight, whatever may happen. And if a poor man have a quarrel with a rich man, sustain the poor rather than the rich, until the truth is made clear, and when you know the truth, do justice to them.

19. If any one have entered into a suit against you (for any injury or wrong which he may believe that you have done to him), be always for him and against yourself in the presence of your council, without showing that you think much of your case (until the truth be made known concerning it); for those of your council might be backward in speaking against you, and this you should not wish; and command your judges that you be not in any way upheld more than any others, for thus will your councillors judge more boldly according to right and truth.

20. If you have anything belonging to another, either of yourself or through your predecessors, if the matter is certain, give it up without delay, however great it may be, either in land or money or otherwise. If the matter is doubtful, have it inquired into by wise men, promptly and diligently. And if the affair is so obscure that you cannot know the truth, make such a settlement, by the counsel of s of upright men, that your soul, and the soul your predecessors, may be wholly freed from the affair. And even if you hear some one say that your predecessors made restitution, make diligent inquiry to learn if anything remains to be restored; and if you find that such is the case, cause it to be delivered over at once, for the liberation of your soul and the souls of your predecessors.

21. You should seek earnestly how your vassals and your subjects may live in peace and rectitude beneath your sway; likewise, the good towns and the good cities of your kingdom. And preserve them in the estate and the liberty in which your predecessors kept them, redress it, and if there be anything to amend, amend and preserve their favor and their love. For it is by the strength and the riches of your good cities and your good towns that the native and the foreigner, especially your peers and your barons, are deterred from doing ill to you. I will remember that Paris and the good towns of my kingdom aided me against the barons, when I was newly crowned. (Saint Louis IX: Advice to His Son.)

 

Remove the safeguards provided by the Social Reign of Christ the King, ladies and gentlemen, and the way is left open for the rise of open banditry in the form of the confiscatory taxation policies of the civil state, whether of the "democratic" or "totalitarian" variety, both of which are simply two sides of the same Judeo-Masonic, naturalist coin, which must be re-minted every now and again as Caesar becomes more bloated with increased governmental expenditures and the increased taxation necessary to fund such expenditures.

Indeed, the rise of permanently established political parties in the 1790s produced what many observers call one of the chief curses of Modernity: the professional, career politician, a creature who believes that we exist to enable his career by having him pick our pockets of our money and then telling us how much better off we are now that he has acquired it and is in its control. Government bureaucracies grew in the Nineteenth Century at the state and local levels, first by means of the patronage system, which sought to provide political workers with employment to make them and their families dependent upon the party leaders for their employment.

Government employment was seen in the era of unbridled patronage as a reward for political loyalty, thereby engendering sloth and incompetence as contracts were given to private sector contractors to build government buildings or roads or canals with the understanding that a certain portion of contract must be "kicked back" to the party leaders in power in that jurisdiction. The Democratic political party machine, Tammany Hall, that predominated in the City of New York from 1854 until the overthrow of leader Carmine DeSapio in 1961 (which was engineered in part by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, former New York Governor and United States Senator Herbert Lehman, future U.S. Representative and New York City Mayor Edward Irving Koch and attorney Edward Costikyan) was just one of many such organizations that thrived on the use of taxpayer dollars to keep itself in power.

Pope Leo XIII understood these developments. Consider, if you will, a brief passage from Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

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 Pius XI amplified this point in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

Public life is so enveloped, even at the present hour, by the dense fog of mutual hatreds and grievances that it is almost impossible for the common people so much as freely to breathe therein. If the defeated nations continue to suffer most terribly, no less serious are the evils which afflict their conquerors. Small nations complain that they are being oppressed and exploited by great nations. The great powers, on their side, contend that they are being judged wrongly and circumvented by the smaller. All nations, great and small, suffer acutely from the sad effects of the late War. Neither can those nations which were neutral contend that they have escaped altogether the tremendous sufferings of the War or failed to experience its evil results almost equally with the actual belligerents. These evil results grow in volume from day to day because of the utter impossibility of finding anything like a safe remedy to cure the ills of society, and this in spite of all the efforts of politicians and statesmen whose work has come to naught if it has not unfortunately tended to aggravate the very evils they tried to overcome. Conditions have become increasingly worse because the fears of the people are being constantly played upon by the ever-present menace of new wars, likely to be more frightful and destructive than any which have preceded them. Whence it is that the nations of today live in a state of armed peace which is scarcely better than war itself, a condition which tends to exhaust national finances, to waste the flower of youth, to muddy and poison the very fountainheads of life, physical, intellectual, religious, and moral.

A much more serious and lamentable evil than these threats of external aggression is the internal discord which menaces the welfare not only of nations but of human society itself. In the first place, we must take cognizance of the war between the classes, a chronic and mortal disease of present-day society, which like a cancer is eating away the vital forces of the social fabric, labor, industry, the arts, commerce, agriculture -- everything in fact which contributes to public and private welfare and to national prosperity. This conflict seems to resist every solution and grows worse because those who are never satisfied with the amount of their wealth contend with those who hold on most tenaciously to the riches which they have already acquired, while to both classes there is common the desire to rule the other and to assume control of the other's possessions. From this class war there result frequent interruptions of work, the causes for which most often can be laid to mutual provocations. There result, too, revolutions, riots, and forcible repression of one side or other by the government, all of which cannot but end in general discontent and in grave damage to the common welfare.

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another.

 

Although many factors contributed to the decline of the patronage system, including the rise of the civil service, especially at the Federal level, in the Nineteenth Century, and the influence of the media and money in statewide and national elections, making it possible for political neophytes to run for and to win major elected offices without having "worked their way through the ranks," it is still the case in many local areas around the United States of America where things have been arranged so as to permit the appointment of large numbers of "political appointees," bloating local budgets and circumventing the "hiring by [alleged] merit" of the patronage system.

I did, for example, a line-item analysis of the budget of the Town of Oyster Bay in 1997 when I was running for the position of Town Supervisor, the chief executive of that subdivision of the County of Nassau (which is divided into three towns, Oyster Bay, Hempstead, North Hempstead, and two cities, Glen Cove and Long Beach), discovering one unnecessary position after another. I made the point in a pamphlet produced for the campaign that those who work only for the advancement of their own careers--or for advancement of the careers of those who hired them and upon whom their future livelihood depends--will not work in most instances for the honor and glory of God. (My expertise in this area is not only academic, having taught courses in State and Local Government, one of my major fields of study for the doctorate in political science, but from personal experience gained during a brief period as a government employee in 1987-1988.)

It is no wonder, therefore, that basic services are provided on a minimal level, so much so that what should be a rather basic service in this day of technological advances in the field of traffic planning and engineering, the synchronization of traffic lights on heavily traveled local thoroughfares, is not even considered to be important to improve the quality of daily living and thus to advance the common temporal good. Those who do not think supernaturally at all times, you see, become steeped in the morbidity of careerism and sloth, both of which place fallen men in a stupor of materialism and self-indulgence from which it is impossible to escape, barring the working of the graces won for us on Calvary by the shedding of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood and that flow into our hearts and souls by the working of the Holy Ghost in the sacraments through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces.

There is all manner of waste at the state and local levels of government, replete with political appointees, many of whom are paid hefty salaries, whose positions are totally unnecessary and advance the common good not one whit. The average citizen has been convinced, however, that the bloat of government at all levels, including those closest to him, is irreversible and might even think that the bloat does him such good, although he would be hard-pressed in most instances to name some of the elected officials in his own community. No, the average citizen is too diverted by the bread and circuses to see how the property and sales and income taxes and various "user-fees" imposed at the state and local levels is unjust and goes to enable the political careers of the thieves they have put into office quite willingly.

More than anything else, however, the bloat of the size of the civil state and the scope of its power, especially at the Federal level in the United States of America, has been made possible by the systematic, organized attack against the family by the organized forces of Judeo-Masonic naturalism, which has produced various evils in the world (including removing the father from the home during the work day and taking the family off of the land, a continuation of the process begun after King Henry VIII broke from Rome in the 1530s). The attack on the family, which was part and parcel of the so-called Industrial Revolution, became part of naturalism's cultural agenda in the years following the end of World War I. Immodesty of attire was promoted by Madison Avenue advertising firms and displayed in motion pictures in the 1920s.

As noted several commentaries on this site, the dawn of radio programming began to attack the regularity of prayer in the family and interrupting family patterns of meals, conversation and sleep. Contraception and divorce were promoted with abandon, although there was a bit of resistance to contraception even such a secular source as The Washington Post, which editorialized as follows on March 21, 1931, following a report issued by the so-called Federal Council of Churches in America that called for the use of a certain type of contraceptive between married couples in "hard" cases," a report that following in the wake of the decision of the Anglican Lambeth Committee to endorse contraception in 1930 (a move that promoted Pope Pius XI to issue Casti Connubii on December 31, 1930):

The Federal Council of Churches in America some time ago appointed a committee on "marriage and the home," which has now submitted a report favoring a "careful and restrained" use of contraceptive devices to regulate the size of families. The committee seems to have a serious struggle with itself in adhering to Christian doctrine while at the same time indulging in amateurish excursions in the field of economics, legislation, medicine, and sociology. The resulting report is a mixture of religious obscurantism and modernistic materialism which departs from the ancient standards of religion and yet fails to blaze a path toward something better.

The mischief that would result from an an attempt to place the stamp of church approval upon any scheme for "regulating the size of families" is evidently quite beyond the comprehension of this pseudo-scientific committee. It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would lead to the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous. If the churches are to become organizations for political and 'scientific' propaganda they should be honest and reject the Bible, scoff at Christ as an obsolete and unscientific teacher, and strike out boldly as champions of politics and science as substitutes for the old-time religion. ("Forgetting Religion," Editorial,  The Washington Post, March 22, 1932. I have given you part of this quote in the past. This is the full editorial. I had to purchase the editorial in order to do so. No expense is spared, good and few readers, to bring you these articles.)

 

Would someone like to send this to The Washington Post to remind its editors today, who seem to lack an "institutional memory," of how the residual effects of Catholicism in the world in 1931 were evident in this editorial?

The attack on the integrity of the family would continue throughout the years of the Depression as more and more people began to accept the false belief that government is the first resort, not the last, to resolve social problems, exculpating themselves for the care of their elderly parents and other family members in need. Government bureaucracies grew in number and increased the scope of their regulatory powers as the decades passed, doing so in large measure by the issuance of "rules" (published in The Federal Register) that have the binding force of Federal law and that are enforced by the very agency that writes them, which also has, at least in a great many instances, "administrative law judges" to sit in judgment on the rules written by the agencies that employ them. As bureaucrats do not want to see their programs scaled back or eliminated, which is one of the iron laws of bureaucracy, they actually lobby, sometimes behind the scenes, for the maintenance of their useless programs. Ask yourselves this question: is each of the approximately 2,700,000 civilian employees of the Federal government of the United States of America absolutely essential for the pursuit of the common temporal good?  Bureaucracies have become institutionalized, placing incredible tax and regulatory burdens on families, many of whom are oppressed as well by corporate greed and the usury that makes corporate wealth possible.

The teaching enunciated so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos is not the teaching of the counterfeit church of conciliarism or of the conciliar antipopes, which is one of the principal reasons that I began to investigate the sedevacantist thesis privately in late-2005. The lives of men, both individually and collectively in civil society, must be defined by the Catholic Faith. Although problems existed in the Christendom of the Middle Ages and will exist anew if it is God's will to restore Christendom again before His Second Coming in glory on the Last Day to judge the living and the dead, an adherence to the Catholic Faith leads to peace and order within souls, which are inspired to carry their daily crosses for love of God and in reparation for their own sins, and to limited governments in the civil realm which seek to provide for the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, administering justice fairly and equitably, providing for the good ordering of public safety and morals in the process. Limited government, you see, which taxes citizens fairly and uses the proceeds of tax revenue only for that which is absolutely necessary and just for the common good and public safety and the legitimate defense of a nation, is of the essence of Catholic Social Teaching.

Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus believes none of this. How can he? What he thinks is the Catholic Church but is actually her counterfeit ape has made her "reconciliation" with the principles of Modernity. Many of the "bishops" he has met personally are committed leftists, men who believe in socialism and who have nothing but contempt for authentic Catholic Social Teaching, which they dismiss derisively as Catholic "triumphalism." And thus the likes of the Caesars Ignoramus of both major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America, the Republicans and the Democrats, must trumpet their own ability to produce the "better" world by means of the "market" or by means of big government.

This is why Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus "believes" in the young people he addressed at the University of Michigan three days ago. He--and those of the naturalist "left" who follow him (assuming that the current president actually has successors in the immediate future if he is re-elected in 2012 as I believe that Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus will seek to have the Twenty-second Amendment repealed to make possible his election to a third term in 2016)--need those young people now and well into the future:

If you are willing, as past generations were willing, to contribute part of your life to the life of this country, then I, like President Kennedy, believe we can.  Because I believe in you.  (Applause.)   (Remarks by the President at University of Michigan Spring Commencement)

 

To quote the recent winner of "Who Wants to Resign a Governorship in Midterm to Become a Millionairess," Sarah Heath Palin, "you betcha" that Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus believes in those graduates as he certainly does need their votes. And no matter what political fallout may occur for Barack Hussein Obama and the Democratic Party on November 2, 2010, during the off-year Congressional elections, Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus is counting on the votes of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine to get a second term on November 6, 2012, presuming that the end of the world has not occurred by that time. Although the general public is upset about ObamaCare right now, remember that people tend to have short memories. Caesar Gulielmi Clintonus Ignoramus seemed like a goner for re-election in 1996 after Republicans regained controlled of both houses of Congress in 1994 for the first time since the 1952 elections. Caesar Gulielmi Clintonus Ignoramus was re-elected, courtesy of the Masonic tandem of Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., and Jack Kemp. Never underestimate the ability of Republican naturalists to enable the re-election of Democrat naturalists.

Our Caesars Ignoramus are so ignorant that they blanche when the plain truth, expressed so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order is put right before their eyes (and I'm counting on some of my readers to do precisely that for the good of the souls of our Caesars Ignoramus of today):

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.

 

Our front men for the "brave new world order" of Modernity are as one with the front men for the brave new world of Modernism in the One World Ecumenical Church of conciliarism in rejecting this truth, doing so their own personal detriment, both temporally and eternally.

Moreover, the powerful of this world, the men and women such as our Caesars Ignoramus who flaunt the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they show themselves to be Figures of Antichrist, ought to reckon with these words found in Father Charles Arminjon's The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life as they misuse civil power to commit acts of evil and injustice that undermine the common temporal good and place into jeopardy the eternal salvation of their souls (and those of the general public) and threaten even the existence of their nations:

We are not a prophet, and we should not venture to summon at such short notice all wicked men, the pamphleteers of free-thought, the instigators of unjust laws, those who violate the honor and liberty of the family, and the rights and virtue of children; but that those men who defy god and deride His threats will one day have a minute and rigorous account to render His justice . . . is an absolutely certain truth . . . and, sooner, or later, they will settle that account. On the day of solemn reparation, the wicked who called the just fools, who glutted themselves on their tortures and tears, like starving men devouring bread, will learn to their cost that God does not suffer Himself to be mocked, and that there will be no impunity or license for the benefit of crime and evil.

All wrongs will be strikingly redressed. The blood of Abel, which washed the earth, will gush out over Cain, and raise an accusing voice against him. St. Peter will demand an account of Nero for the torture to which he sentenced him. Mary Stuart will call down the divine vengeance upon the head of Elizabeth of England, her murderer. All the saints will cry out with one voice to God: Usquequo, Domine, non judicas et non vindicas sanguinem nostrum de iis qui habitant in terra.

It will be a great court of appeal, to which an immense number of cases, famous on earth, will be referred, where an infinite number of judgments that fear, ambition, or self-interest have dictated to men, will be irrevocably annulled; where, in a word, Providence, against which fools blasphemed on earth, with accusations that it was harsh, unjust, and blindly partial, will provide complete justification for its ways, as it is written: Ut vincas cum juidcaris. (Father Charles Arminjon, The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. 106-107.)

 

The powerful of this world who support the killing, whether by chemical or surgical means, of even one innocent human being under cover of the civil law as a matter of principle, must also reckon with these words of Pope Pius XI, contained in the aforementioned Casti Connubii:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 30, 1930.)

 

Please send this to those who civil power so that they can't say that they were not warned before the moment of their Particular Judgments that there is no excuse before God for supporting the evils that they do under cover of the civil law.

The precept of filial piety that flows from the Fourth Commandment requires us to pray--and to pray fervently--for everyone who holds civil office. In the United States of America, of course, this means that we have an obligation to pray for President Barack Hussein Obama and wife and their children so that they will respond to the graces being sent to them by Our Lady to convert to the true Faith and to recognize that it is impossible to create a "better world" as men, both individually and collectively in the institutions of civil governance, promote sin, the very thing that caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and that caused the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother to be pierced through and through with those Seven Swords of Sorrow, under cover of the civil law and throughout what passes for popular culture. We must pray for President Obama and Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and for everyone else in civil government who shows himself to be an enemy of the Social Reign of Christ the King and thus of the good of the souls for whom Our King shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

If we are honest with ourselves, my friends, we must recognize that our sins have worsened the state of the Church Militant on earth in this time of apostasy and betrayal and that they have worsened the state of the world-at-large. We must live more penitentially every day as we pray and fast and make every manner of sacrifice possible as the consecrated slaves of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. The prayers of Saint Monica, whose feast we celebrate today, made possible the conversion of her profligate son, Saint Augustine. Our prayers and tears at this time for our beloved Church and our beloved country will be heard if we ask Saint Monica to have her own purity of heart and intention.

We have nothing to fear from the Caesars Ignoramus of today. We should just be about the business honor and glory to the Blessed Trinity through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, the chief weapon after Holy Mass itself against heresy and sin.

Isn't it time right now to pray at least five decades of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary?

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and the hour of our death. Amen.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Monica, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints