Common Core: From Luther To Mann To Bismarck To Obama

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The lawless wonder, Barack Hussein Obama (aka Barry Soetero, the Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Raoul Castro of the United States of America), like the fallen angel who inspires his statist efforts to imprison us all to his every whim, imposed upon us under stiff penalties in order to quell dissent from his "received truth," is at it again. Despite Federal laws prohibiting it, our enslaver wants to impose a national curriculum about elementary and secondary schools and, presumably, home schooling parents in order to institutionalized a national standard of thought-control rather than rely upon the state-by-state method of such thought-control that goes by the Marxist euphemism of "common core:"

 

 

Meanwhile, the Education Department is pretending that three laws do not mean what they clearly say. This is documented in the Pioneer Institute’s report “The Road to a National Curriculum: The Legal Aspects of the Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and Conditional Waivers” by Robert S. Eitel, Kent D. Talbert and Williamson M. Evers, all former senior officials in the Education Department.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) — No Child Left Behind is its ninth iteration — intruded the federal government into this traditionally state and local responsibility. It said that “nothing in this act” shall authorize any federal official to “mandate, direct, or control” a state’s, local educational agency’s or school’s curriculum. The General Education Provisions Act of 1970, which supposedly controls federal education programs, stipulates that “no provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize” any federal agency or official “to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction” or selection of “instructional materials” by “any educational institution or school system.”

The 1979 law establishing the Education Department forbids it from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” or “program of instruction” of any school or school system. The ESEA as amended goes further: No funds provided to the Education Department “may be used . . .. to endorse, approve, or sanction any curriculum designed to be used in” kindergarten through 12th grade.

However . . . .

What authors Eitel, Talbert and Evers call the Education Department’s “incremental march down the road to a national curriculum” begins with the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS). It is an initiative not of any state legislature but of a governors association, state school officials and private foundations. This push advanced when the Race to the Top Fund (RTTT, part of the 2009 stimulus) said that peer reviewers of applications for money should favor those states that join a majority of states in developing and adopting common standards. The 11 states and the District of Columbia that won Race to the Top funding had adopted or indicated an intention to adopt the CCSS, which will require changes in curricula.

An Education Department synopsis of discussions with members of the public about priorities in competition for RTTT money says “the goal of common K-12 standards is to replace the existing patchwork of state standards.” Progressives celebrate diversity in everything but thought.

The Obama administration is granting conditional waivers to states chafing under No Child Left Behind’s unrealistic accountability requirements. The waivers are contingent on each state adopting certain standards “that are common to a significant number of states,” or the state may adopt standards endorsed by its institutions of higher education — if those standards are consistent with the Education Department’s guidelines.

We have been warned. Joseph Califano, secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration, noted that “in its most extreme form, national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.” (George Will, Those Pesky Things Called Laws.)

A very good comment, noting the fact that this, of course, is really nothing new and that the lion's share of American presidents have been lawless men who have sought to put themselves and their schemes before the laws of God and even the specific legal limitations found in the Constitution of the United States of America and in the Federal civil code. After all, as something of a "reality check," there have been only five legally declared wars in the history of the United States of  America (War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II). What did the Constitution mean to those who engaged in undeclared wars? Nothing. Look at how George Walker Bush's efforts to "democratize" Iraq and Afghanistan are going under his successor (see For Iraqis, Fear After ‘Emo Killings' and U.S. Sergeant Is Said to Kill 16 Civilians in Afghanistan). Obama is certainly lawless. Granted. So was George Walker Bush. So was the perjurer and surrender of American national sovereignty, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton. So was George Herbert Walker Bush with his Persian Gulf War. And on and on and on.

Thus it is that a standardized educational curriculum is nothing new as it is the norm at the state level. What is only new is the desire on the part of the statists in the current caesar's administration to finish the job of standardizing those curricula according to a "common core."

The People's Republic of Massachusetts (an entity whose legal name is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) became the first state to mandate curricular standards on a statewide basis, creating the first state Department of Education (thought control) in the United States of America, principally to Americanize the children of Irish immigrants to this country. Horace Mann, who had no initial interest in the subject of education, was recruited to head the new agency. He warmed to to this task with ready abandon, establishing the following guideline over the course of seven years.

1) Fifth Annual Report (1841). Mann argued successfully that economic wealth would increase through an educated public. It was therefore in the self interest of business to pay the taxation for public education.

(2) Seventh Annual Report (1843). Horace Mann inspected and appraised favorably the Prussian school system. This report led to widespread improvement .of education through the educational theories of Pestalozzi, Herbart and eventually Froebel.

(3) Tenth Annual Report (1846). Mann asserted that education was a natural right for every child. It is a necessary responsibility of the State to insure that education was provided for every child. This report led to the adoption of the first State law requiring compulsory attendance in school in 1852.

(4) Twelfth Annual Report (1848). He presented a rationale for the support of public education through taxation. Society improves as a result of an educated p public. He argued for non-sectarian schools, so the taxpayer would not be in the position of supporting any established religion with which he might disagree in conscience. (Educational Contributions of Horace Mann)

 

As noted above, the development of Horace Mann's thought was influenced heavily by the "Prussian Education System" that had its origins in the Eighteenth Century and whose own "evolution" over the course of the decades thereafter convinced him to use it as a model for Massachusetts, which, in turn, could be a model to "standardize" his brainwashing standards for the rest of the nation. Indeed, Mann, who belonged to the extinct species of naturalist organized crime known as the Whig Party, convinced his fellow party adherents to become "true believers" in the "Prussian Education System." Mann even traveled to Prussia in 1843 to see the system for himself. The People's Republic of New York was one of the first to follow the model that Mann established in the neighbor statist stronghold of Massachusetts, and it is absolutely no accident at al that these two states remain two of the most hostile states to home schooling parents in the United States of America at this time (Maryland, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont round out the ranks of the states whose regulations are designed to make home schooling very difficult as parents are monitored at every turn).

One of the keys to the "Prussian Education System" was the passage of laws to compel the attendance of children in state-run institutions of thought-control. The Prussians of the Eighteenth Century, however, were simply implementing the idea of a former Augustinian monk, a man named Martin Luther, who believed that it was necessary to require children to go to school in order that they learn how to read the Protestant version of the Bible  to make sure that all remnants of Catholicism could be eradicated from the German states influenced by his revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church and to organize society under the Social Reign of Christ the King, which, of course, Luther, much like another German, a priest from Bavaria who was ordained on June 29, 1851 (Father Joseph Ratzinger), rejected out of hand.

By the way, the likes of Horace Mann, much like Luther three hundreds years before him, desired compulsory so that those children of Catholic immigrants would be exposed to the "truth" in the blasphemous "King James" version of the Bible. We must remember that each and every Protestant "bible" is worthless it contains false translations and omit Sacred Books contained in the Canon of Sacred Scripture, thereby blaspheming God the Holy Ghost, under whose inspiration each word contained in Holy Writ was written. Do not permit yourselves into believing one of naturalism's greatest lies: that it doesn't matter what version of the Bible one reads. This belief is from the devil himself.

Compulsory attendance in state-run institutions of thought-control was essential to American "educational reformers" such as Horace Mann for many of the same reasons, although the Prussian system that they admired so much had made explicit what was implicit in Luther's call for "compulsory education:" the belief that the civil state has the "right" and thus the "duty" to educate children, not parents, thereby violating the precepts of the Fourth Commandment and denying the graces inherent in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony that equip every father and mother with the graces necessary to fulfill the primary end of their wedded union in Christ the King: the procreation and education of children.

Prussia, the land that gave birth to the Freemason named Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, whose imposition of a mandatory retirement age and of social security under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck also was designed to destroy the Fourth Commandment so as to "relieve" grown children from caring for their elderly parents if the latter could not care for themselves (and thus creating a dependency class that would look to the state, not to family members, for support and sustenance), can thus be seen quite rightly as having been in the vanguard of planting the seeds for the rise of the National Education Association (whose initials are, of course, "N.E.A.," the "Non-Education Association") and of the politicians who have enabled and empowered their fellow ideologues in the industry of professional thought-control so as to create a class of willing citizens who will never question what caesar and his minions tell them to do.

Attacks against the ability of parents to educate their children as they see fit have been waged by Freemasons throughout the country in the past two hundred years.

The State of Oregon, a den of Freemasonry which has championed "physician-assisted suicide" in recent years as a result of a voter initiative enacted into law by means of a popular referendum, became quite a laboratory to see how far the warfare against the Church could be taken. A voter initiative, sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan and the Oregon Scottish Rite Masons, was approved on November 7, 1922, to force all parents to send their children to public schools. A legal battle ensued, prompting the Supreme Court of the United States on June 1, 1925, to issue a decision in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters that invalidated the Oregon law, which would have become effective in 1926 had the Court not ruled against the law.

Writing for the Court, Associate Justice James C. McReynolds, an appointee of President Woodrow Wilson who served on the Court between 1914 and 1941, noted:

 

 

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. (Associate Justice James C. McReynolds, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925, p. 268 U. S. 535.)

 

Although Justice McReynolds said that parents could not be forced to send their children to public schools, he did hold that the states had the right to compel attendance in some school and to establish educational standards, thereby providing the United State Supreme Court's imprimatur on the usurpation of the rights of parents and of the Church that had begun with Horace Mann eighty-eight years before. Consider the language of Justice McReynolds in this regard:

 

 

No question is raised concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare. (Page 268 U. S. 534.

This is quite a loaded passage. What constitutes "good citizenship? Acceptance of American "values," including Calvinistic capitalism and religious indifferentism? Being taught "the history and contributions" of those engaged in sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance? What is "manifestly inimical to the public welfare" if not this? Justice McReynolds, was, however, simply reaffirming what had become by his name an accepted article of the American "faith," that public schooling was the backbone of a "free" people.

Obviously, the very belief that we are a "free" people is itself a gigantic myth. We are not.

We are the slaves of the state and its arbitrary whims.

We are slaves of a Constitution that is indifferent to the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate womb and hostile to the Deposit of Faith the God-Man has entrusted solely to His true Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.

We are the slaves of career politicians who believe that we exist in order to enable them to pick our pockets to enlarge the powers of the state and thus increase their ability to control every aspect of the legitimate exercise of our human free wills.

We are the slaves of the corporate robber barons who contribute mightily to the coffers of these career politicians while they manufacture products to appeal to our greed and our desire to luxury, entrapping us into various snares of endless materialism and hedonism.

We are the slaves of the powerful Judeo-Masonic machinery that controls our banking and our entertainment and our courts and our "educational" system.

We are the slaves of stupid myths about this country being the "guarantor of human liberty worldwide" when the truth is that anyone who points out the absurdity of these myths is denounced fascistically as unpatriotic.

We are the slaves of pharmaceutical companies who produce poisons to addict us to their "cures" for diseases that have been produced by lives of excess and by the very chemical additives placed in our food and our water to make us sick so as to make us dependent upon these poisons.

We are not a "free" people. We are slaves.

Efforts by the administration of the current caesar, Barack Hussein Obama, to further nationalize American thought-control, a process that began in earnest during the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas, November 22, 1963, to January 20, 1969 and was given a great push by another Texan, the "Pro-Life" Statist named George Walker Bush (R-Texas, January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009), are simply a continuation of the degeneration that must occur in a culture premised upon the falsehoods of Judeo-Masonry.

One of the great ironies of naturalism is that those who claim to oppose what they consider to be "harmful" ideas wind up adopting some of those ideas in order to prevent the supposedly more "radical" versions of them from being implemented. This was the "logic," such as it was behind many of Otto von Bismarck's policies as the Freemason and ultra-German nationalist and statist wanted to preempt the ideas of Karl Marx from taking hold of the minds of Germans. By adopting some of Marx's plans, however, Bismarck was simply doing incrementally has to grow exponentially thereafter as it is impossible for any human force to stop the growth of the size, the scope and the power of government if the authority of the Catholic Church to exercise the Social Reign of Christ the King is not accepted and obeyed. 

Worse than laughable, therefore, is the belief that Willard Mitt Romney, who gave the People's Republic of Massachusetts RomneyCare, the prototype of ObamaCare with its "individual mandate," or Richard John Santorum, who voted for "No Child Left Behind" even though it violated his principles as he had "to take one for the team," will stand up for parental rights. They will not. Remember, Santorum has sent his own children to the brain-washing centers of conciliarism known as "schools" run by Opus Dei, which, of course, not the work of God.

Ladies and gentlemen, please don't lose your minds. Obama's election was made possible by the policies of George Walker Bush. No naturalist of the false opposite of the "right" is going to undo Obama's policies, especially when one considers the inconvenient little fact that the Democratic Party will still maintain enough membership in the United States Senate in the term that begins on January 3, 2013, to filibuster any meager efforts even to "tweak" some of Obama's policies, no less reverse them, admitting that a Supreme Court decision ruling any part of ObamaCare--or any part of it--later this year would be an action of the judiciary, not of Congress (and one that would be hotly contested in the general election this year).

Perhaps it would be useful once again to review how the lodge brothers and their fellow travelers in the world of the organized forces of naturalism sought to corrupt the young by seizing control of the education of their minds away from their parents and Holy Mother Church and by disseminating their filth in what passes for "popular culture." Pope Leo XIII noted the Masonic roots of public schooling in his encyclical letter on Freemasonry, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884:

Wherefore we see that men are publicly tempted by the many allurements of pleasure; that there are journals and pamphlets with neither moderation nor shame; that stage-plays are remarkable for license; that designs for works of art are shamelessly sought in the laws of a so-called verism; that the contrivances of a soft and delicate life are most carefully devised; and that all the blandishments of pleasure are diligently sought out by which virtue may be lulled to sleep. Wickedly, also, but at the same time quite consistently, do those act who do away with the expectation of the joys of heaven, and bring down all happiness to the level of mortality, and, as it were, sink it in the earth. Of what We have said the following fact, astonishing not so much in itself as in its open expression, may serve as a confirmation. For, since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring. . . .

With the greatest unanimity the sect of the Freemasons also endeavors to take to itself the education of youth. They think that they can easily mold to their opinions that soft and pliant age, and bend it whither they will; and that nothing can be more fitted than this to enable them to bring up the youth of the State after their own plan. Therefore, in the education and instruction of children they allow no share, either of teaching or of discipline, to the ministers of the Church; and in many places they have procured that the education of youth shall be exclusively in the hands of laymen, and that nothing which treats of the most important and most holy duties of men to God shall be introduced into the instructions on morals. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884)

Cognizant of the enslavement of mankind by the aftermath of the Protestant Revolt and by the rise of ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical letter on the subject of education, Divini Illius Magistri December 31, 1929, to direct the minds of Catholics in the midst of Modernity's savage war against the souls of Catholics in allegedly "free" nations. A few salient points from Divini Illius Magistri will indicate the simple Catholic truth that the state has no role to play in operating of schools, less yet in the mandating of a curriculum of studies on any student at any time.

Writing about the erroneous belief concerning the alleged power of "education" to improve the lot of man, Pope Pius XI noted:

This perfection they seek to acquire by means of education. But many of them with, it would seem, too great insistence on the etymological meaning of the word, pretend to draw education out of human nature itself and evolve it by its own unaided powers. Such easily fall into error, because, instead of fixing their gaze on God, first principle and last end of the whole universe, they fall back upon themselves, becoming attached exclusively to passing things of earth; and thus their restlessness will never cease till they direct their attention and their efforts to God, the goal of all perfection, according to the profound saying of Saint Augustine: "Thou didst create us, O Lord, for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it rest in Thee." (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

 

One of the chief pillars of Freemasonry (and of all aspects of Modernity) is precisely that man can solve all of his problems by the use of his "unaided" powers. That is, man does not need belief in the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord entrusted solely to the Catholic Church. He does not need belief in, access to, and cooperation with sanctifying grace to submit to the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to live fruitfully thereby.

True education, wrote Pope Pius XI, must revolve around Our Lord as He has revealed Himself through His true Church.

It is therefore as important to make no mistake in education, as it is to make no mistake in the pursuit of the last end, with which the whole work of education is intimately and necessarily connected. In fact, since education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created, it is clear that there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man's last end, and that in the present order of Providence, since God has revealed Himself to us in the Person of His Only Begotten Son, who alone is "the way, the truth and the life," there can be no ideally perfect education which is not Christian education.

(As a note of reference, it is important to bear in mind that the Popes of the Catholic Church, as opposed to the "pontiffs" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, used the word "Christian" to refer to the Catholic Faith. The reason for this is simple: although Protestants say that they are Christians, they do not truly know Our Lord since they reject His true Church and dissent from multiple articles He has revealed and deposited in His true Church. They do not represent Christianity at all. Only the Catholic Church represents Christianity. She alone has the right to use the appellation of "Christian.")

Pope Pius XI, the great exponent of the Social Reign of Christ the King, noted in Divini Illius Magistri that the fate of nations depended upon the education of youth in the truths of the Catholic Faith:

From this we see the supreme importance of Christian education, not merely for each individual, but for families and for the whole of human society, whose perfection comes from the perfection of the elements that compose it. From these same principles, the excellence, we may well call it the unsurpassed excellence, of the work of Christian education becomes manifest and clear; for after all it aims at securing the Supreme Good, that is, God, for the souls of those who are being educated, and the maximum of well-being possible here below for human society. And this it does as efficaciously as man is capable of doing it, namely by cooperating with God in the perfecting of individuals and of society, in as much as education makes upon the soul the first, the most powerful and lasting impression for life according to the well-known saying of the Wise Man, "A young man according to his way, even when he is old, he will not depart from it." With good reason therefore did St. John Chrysostom say, "What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?" (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Man must always keep his mind his First Cause and Last End in all of his activities, whether he is acting individually or collectively with others in the pursuit of the common good of his nation. The state of a nation depends upon the state of souls, and the state of souls depends upon the extent to which individual citizens keep themselves in states of Sanctifying Grace and adhere completely to the Deposit of Faith, including the Church's immutable Social Doctrine on the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ, which does not worship at the altar of the false, mythological god of American "civil liberty."

The Church, therefore, must be free to pursue the entirety of the mission, including that of education, entrusted to her by her Divine Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, without any interference from the state. Parents, who form the domestic cell of the Church in their families, must be free to do so in the bosom of their homes.

Pope Pius XI noted this in Divini Illius Magistri:

Hence it is that in this proper object of her mission, that is, "in faith and morals, God Himself has made the Church sharer in the divine magisterium and, by a special privilege, granted her immunity from error; hence she is the mistress of men, supreme and absolutely sure, and she has inherent in herself an inviolable right to freedom in teaching.' By necessary consequence the Church is independent of any sort of earthly power as well in the origin as in the exercise of her mission as educator, not merely in regard to her proper end and object, but also in regard to the means necessary and suitable to attain that end. Hence with regard to every other kind of human learning and instruction, which is the common patrimony of individuals and society, the Church has an independent right to make use of it, and above all to decide what may help or harm Christian education. And this must be so, because the Church as a perfect society has an independent right to the means conducive to its end, and because every form of instruction, no less than every human action, has a necessary connection with man's last end, and therefore cannot be withdrawn from the dictates of the divine law, of which the Church is guardian, interpreter and infallible mistress. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

This truth is clearly set forth by Pius X of saintly memory:

"Whatever a Christian does even in the order of things of earth, he may not overlook the supernatural; indeed he must, according to the teaching of Christian wisdom, direct all things towards the supreme good as to his last end; all his actions, besides, in so far as good or evil in the order of morality, that is, in keeping or not with natural and divine law, fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church." (As quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

 

Only a fool would contend that Pope Saint Pius X was wrong, that there is ever a moment when something we do in the "order of the things of the earth" can overlook the supernatural. Those "conservatives" who believe that they can devise plans to combat liberalism and statism and socialism without seeking to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King are indeed fools, plain and simple. They tilt at windmills as they refuse, for whatever reason, usually involving a dogmatic adherence to a political philosophy that they contend pridefully contains the ability to "resolve" social problems, to state this simple truth: all things must be restored in Christ the King, both individually and collectively.

After delineating the rights of the Church and the family with respect to education--and discussing instances when a state ordered according to Catholic teaching might have to intervene to protect a child whose religious instruction was being ignored by his parents, Pope Pius XI wrote in Divini Illius Magistri about the simple fact that the welfare of the state itself depends entirely upon its submission to the truths of the Catholic Faith:

Whoever refuses to admit these principles, and hence to apply them to education, must necessarily deny that Christ has founded His Church for the eternal salvation of mankind, and maintain instead that civil society and the State are not subject to God and to His law, natural and divine. Such a doctrine is manifestly impious, contrary to right reason, and, especially in this matter of education, extremely harmful to the proper training of youth, and disastrous as well for civil society as for the well-being of all mankind. On the other hand from the application of these principles, there inevitably result immense advantages for the right formation of citizens. This is abundantly proved by the history of every age. Tertullian in his Apologeticus could throw down a challenge to the enemies of the Church in the early days of Christianity, just as St. Augustine did in his; and we today can repeat with him:


"Let those who declare the teaching of Christ to be opposed to the welfare of the State, furnish us with an army of soldiers such as Christ says soldiers ought to be; let them give us subjects, husbands, wives, parents, children, masters, servants, kings, judges, taxpayers and tax gatherers who live up to the teachings of Christ; and then let them dare assert that Christian doctrine is harmful to the State. Rather let them not hesitate one moment to acclaim that doctrine, rightly observed, the greatest safeguard of the State."


While treating of education, it is not out of place to show here how an ecclesiastical writer, who flourished in more recent times, during the Renaissance, the holy and learned Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to whom the cause of Christian education is greatly indebted, has set forth most clearly this well established point of Catholic doctrine. He had been a disciple of that wonderful educator of youth, St. Philip Neri; he was teacher and Latin secretary to St. Charles Borromeo, and it was at the latter's suggestion and under his inspiration that he wrote his splendid treatise on The Christian Education of Youth. In it he argues as follows:


"The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity."((Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

How can produce temporal peace and tranquility as sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance are protected by law, promoted in the culture and taught to school children.

The best citizens are well-informed and well-formed Catholics who are trying to save their immortal souls as Catholics in cooperation with the graces won for them by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood and which flow forth from the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, who has the absolute right to be honored as the Queen of all nations. It is that simple. Catholic truth reflects the simplicity of God Himself.

Penetratingly, Pope Pius XI eviscerated the theories that underlain the work of Horace Mann in the Nineteenth Century and were being promoted in his own day by the likes of the pragmatist John Dewey:

 

Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher's authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or divine, in the work of his education.


If any of these terms are used, less properly, to denote the necessity of a gradually more active cooperation on the part of the pupil in his own education; if the intention is to banish from education despotism and violence, which, by the way, just punishment is not, this would be correct, but in no way new. It would mean only what has been taught and reduced to practice by the Church in traditional Christian education, in imitation of the method employed by God Himself towards His creatures, of whom He demands active cooperation according to the nature of each; for His Wisdom "reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly."


But alas! it is clear from the obvious meaning of the words and from experience, that what is intended by not a few, is the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law. So today we see, strange sight indeed, educators and philosophers who spend their lives in searching for a universal moral code of education, as if there existed no decalogue, no gospel law, no law even of nature stamped by God on the heart of man, promulgated by right reason, and codified in positive revelation by God Himself in the ten commandments. These innovators are wont to refer contemptuously to Christian education as "heteronomous," "passive","obsolete," because founded upon the authority of God and His holy law.


Such men are miserably deluded in their claim to emancipate, as they say, the child, while in reality they are making him the slave of his own blind pride and of his disorderly affections, which, as a logical consequence of this false system, come to be justified as legitimate demands of a so-called autonomous nature. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Ah, what did I say about slavery a while back? Anyone who does not place himself under the sweet yoke of the Divine Redeemer through the Catholic Church is a slave to many people and things, including his own blind pride. Any country which does not place itself under the sweet yoke of the Divine Redeemer's Social Kingship is a slave to the devil and becomes an oppressor of its people. Who desires "pedagogic naturalism?" Who desires "the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law?" Not Our Lord, ladies and gentlemen. It is the adversary himself who desires these things. It is he who has been in control of American popular culture from its very inception. The devil reigns as king if Our Lord does not do so through His true Church. It is that simple. Anyone care to dissent from this plain truth?

Pope Pius XI completely and utterly rejected the whole notion of public schooling, allowing for rare exceptions in certain cases given the actual realities facing Catholics in places like the United States of America. As a matter of principle, however, Pope Pius XI minced no words: public schooling is a menace to souls and harmful to nations because it does not proceed from man's First Cause nor lead man back to his Last End:

From this it follows that the so-called "neutral" or "lay" school, from which religion is excluded, is contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist in practice; it is bound to become irreligious. There is no need to repeat what Our Predecessors have declared on this point, especially Pius IX and Leo XIII, at times when laicism was beginning in a special manner to infest the public school. We renew and confirm their declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions. Neither can Catholics admit that other type of mixed school, (least of all the so-called "école unique," obligatory on all), in which the students are provided with separate religious instruction, but receive other lessons in common with non-Catholic pupils from non-Catholic teachers.


For the mere fact that a school gives some religious instruction (often extremely stinted), does not bring it into accord with the rights of the Church and of the Christian family, or make it a fit place for Catholic students. To be this, it is necessary that all the teaching and the whole organization of the school, and its teachers, syllabus and text-books in every branch, be regulated by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal supervision of the Church; so that Religion may be in very truth the foundation and crown of the youth's entire training; and this in every grade of school, not only the elementary, but the intermediate and the higher institutions of learning as well. To use the words of Leo XIII:


"It is necessary not only that religious instruction be given to the young at certain fixed times, but also that every other subject taught, be permeated with Christian piety. If this is wanting, if this sacred atmosphere does not pervade and warm the hearts of masters and scholars alike, little good can be expected from any kind of learning, and considerable harm will often be the consequence." (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Do I mean to condemn Catholics who teach or serve as administrators in public schools? No. Do I mean to expose my readers to papal condemnations of these schools as illegitimate and thus harmful to the souls of their students and to the good of their nations? Yes.

Moreover, I mean to remind my readers once again that there is no secular, naturalistic, non-denominational or religiously indifferentist way to "resolve" problems associated with public schooling. Just as the abuses witnessed by so many Catholics in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service are the result of the Novus Ordo's s warfare against the Catholic Faith, so is it the case that the problems in public schooling, much like the problems with "judicial activism," are the result of the Protestant Revolt and of Judeo-Masonry. There is no expedient solution to problems that have been created by diabolically-inspired attacks against Our Lord and His Holy Church.

Those of us who are parents, no matter how old (in my case) or young we may be, have the obligation to avoid all contact with public schooling entirely. We have the obligation also to avoid all contact with schools run by the institutions of the counterfeit church of conciliarism (diocesan or religious) given the influence of Modernism and the concomitant conciliarist ethos spawned in its sorry wake. Similarly, we have the obligation to avoid contact with even a seemingly traditional school that makes any concession to the popular culture and/or does not demand a complete refusal on the part of parents and students to participate in any way with a culture that is from the devil and leads souls to Hell for all eternity. This is not Jansenism. This is Catholicism. The saints did not indulge the allurements of the world. They fled from them for love of God and for the love of souls for whom He offered His very life on the wood of the Holy Cross. No "traditional" school that does not inculcate in its students a manifest sense of resistance to the culture and which does not instill in its students an abiding commitment to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King is a fit place to send one's children.

Similarly, schools that purport to be traditional but which do not have teachers qualified to teach the subjects assigned (or who do not have the ability to teach in general) to them and/or who are not called upon by their superiors to challenge their students to pursue the heights of  the rigors of academic excellence as befits redeemed creatures are unworthy of the souls of our children. Mediocrity is not of the Catholic Faith. Anyone who is content with educational mediocrity is content with the Capital Sin of Sloth.

Are there schools that teach children to avoid the culture and promote the Social Reign of Christ the King? Yes. They are few and far between, however.

What, then, should parents do in those instances when a fully traditional Catholic school where no compromises are made with the popular culture is not available to them, admitting that some people's circumstances may not admit of the answer that follows? We home-school our children. No, not in "groups" with children who are still assisting at the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service. Not in "groups" with even our fellow traditional Catholics who believe that it is not necessary to oppose the errors of ecumenism and religious liberty and who refuse to remove themselves from any and all compromising tendencies. We home-school our children in our own homes. The grace-of-state exists in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony to equip parents to teach their children well to pursue academic excellence for the greater honor and glory of God through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart in a highly-structured atmosphere. This is being done consistently well in countless traditional Catholic homes across the nation and the world. Anyone, whether priest or lay man, who denies the good being done in Catholic homes to teach children about the perennial truths of the Faith and to thus seek excellence in all of their studies is denying reality and denigrating the graces, both sanctifying and actual, that flow from the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

Pope Pius XI summarized the essence of Catholic education. These words must shape the efforts of each one of us to teach our children unto their eternal welfare:

The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian, that is, to form Christ Himself in those regenerated by Baptism, according to the emphatic expression of the Apostle: "My little children, of whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed in you."For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ: "Christ who is your life," and display it in all his actions: "That the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh."


For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.


Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current term, the true and finished man of character. For, it is not every kind of consistency and firmness of conduct based on subjective principles that makes true character, but only constancy in following the eternal principles of justice, as is admitted even by the pagan poet when he praises as one and the same "the man who is just and firm of purpose." And on the other hand, there cannot be full justice except in giving to God what is due to God, as the true Christian does. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

We must protect our children from the murderous designs of the agents of Modernity and from the agents of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who worsen the problems extant in the world by offending God by staging the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and blaspheming Him repeatedly by engaging in forbidden acts with "clergymen" of other false sects and propagate "doctrines" that have been condemned solemnly by the teaching authority of Holy Mother Church.

I keep trying to remind the few readers who bother to read these articles (and the fewer still who seem not to have any desire at all to make a modest donation in support of their continuation, a little way of saying that the post office box has been pretty empty in the past week, apart from three non-tax-deductible-financial gifts from readers) that everything must fall apart absent the Faith. What it is happening at this time is no accident. It is all the result of Martin Luther's revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King.

Pope Leo XIII reminded us that public life must be stained by crime when the naturalism prevails in the making and administration of public policy:

 

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.)

To be liberated from the statists sent by the devil to prowl about the world seeking the ruin of our souls, we must renew our pledges as enrollees in the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, intensifying our lives of prayer, penance, fasting, mortification, and almsgiving, giving whatever merit we earn from the these prayers and good works to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state in life permits, praying for the fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message.

We must be Catholic in everything we think, say and do. We must give no quarter to the world, the flesh, and the devil, and those of us who did give such a quarter for far too long in our own lives must seek to live the rest of our lives in such a way as to undo the damage we did when we were too cavalier in our blithe acceptance of things contrary to the good of souls, including our own, and thus the good of our nation. Our efforts to "recover by penance what we have lost by sin" will help us to be better guides as we try to lead our children home to Heaven to gaze upon the glory of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for all eternity.

Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No, I will never tire of reminding you, and that we are doomed to more and more states following the perverse lead of California and Moonbeam Brown as a chastisement for our refusal to live as soldiers in the Army of Christ by fighting against the world, the flesh and the devil without making any concessions to popular culture or to the supposed "impossibility" of changing the world.

Remember, ths is all chastisement. Nothing is going "wake up" people, most of whom are diverted by the insanity of bread and circuses of one sort of another (this is, obviously, "March Madness" month, which itself is an affront to the fact that this month belongs to the Chaste Spouse of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary and the foster-father of her Divine Son, Who was conceived in her Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation, until they come to realize that things are only going to get worse, much, much worse, because of the revolutionary forces set into motion by Martin Luther than have shaped the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity and thus helped to influence and spawn Modernism's own false sect, the counterfeit church of conciliarism, most of whose own school's are infected with the errors of the ideologies to be found in their state-run counterparts.

Catholicism changes souls in the service of Truth Incarnate to surrender everything, including all human respect, for treasures that never fade in Heaven.

Catholicism can thus change the world as the result of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Why believe in any shortcuts that naturalists of any stripe say will work? Why?

Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Nothing else.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints