Cultural Liberalism Leads to Death

by Thomas A. Droleskey

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

The tragedy that took place in a matter of minutes yesterday at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Sandy Hook part of Town of Newtown, Connecticut, hits home to all people who have something of a functioning heart.

Who cannot help but be moved to tears over the wanton murder of twenty children in a Kindergarten class, most of them presumably around five years of age, as the twenty year-old man, clad in military camouflage an carrying an assortment of high-powered weaponry, were gunned down so senselessly before seven adults were killed?

About a score of parents are in tears now, just ten days before Christmas Day. There could be as many as forty grandfathers and forty grandmothers who are in tears now. Scores upon scores of children are in tears knowing that they will never again see their brothers or sisters alive in this passing, mortal vale tears. Nearly seven hundred school children, sent off to schools by parents who do not realize that they are the principal educators of their children, not the civil state, have been traumatized by these killings, lacking any framework other than a natural one to recognize that what happened at their school yesterday is the result of the unrestrained flowing of unrepentant sin in a nation awash with every error imaginable.

Only the heartless, and there are a lot of heartless people in a land that does not confess Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as its King and His Most Blessed Mother as its Queen, could possibly be unmoved in the wake of such a terrifically heart-wrenching massacre as took place yesterday at Sandy Hook Elementary School,which is located a little over five miles away from where we had lived in Newtown Village Mobile Home Park from January 15, 2010, to February 9, 2011. As was the case when Superstorm Sandy hit my native Long Island on Monday, October 29, 2012, this tragedy does indeed hit very close to home. We are indeed praying for the souls of those who were killed  and for the consolation of the relatives who have their children or, in the case of the adults killed, their spouses or brothers and sisters.

Given its proximity to my native Long Island and other parts of the northeast where we still have, yes, believe it or not, a few very good friends, we loved living in Newtown. Our house was tiny (six hundred square feet) and jammed pack next other "manufactured homes," some of which were pretty ancient (one adjacent to us burned down in December of 2010 because of an electrical fire). However, we loved the "downtown" part of Newtown and became very friendly with some of the merchants there, especially the proprietor of Bagel Delight on Church Hill Road and the proprietor of Andrea's Pastry Shop since closed, on Queen Street. I gave a number of talks at the Edmond Town Hall and a few at the the Newtown Public Library, at which Sharon and Lucy loved to spend hours upon hours perusing its collections (a few articles for this said were written at the library in September of 2008). Most important of all, of course, we were just three miles away from Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Monroe, Connecticut.

Even though the sixty inches of snow on the ground at the time we left there got to be too much for toes that had suffered a severe case of frostbite from which I have never fully recovered, we still get automated alerts sent out by the First Selectman of the Town of Newtown during emergencies such as the flooding that occurred in the wake of Hurricane Irene in August of 2011and the damage caused by Superstorm Sandy thirty-nine days ago now. We received no such alerts yesterday. It was not until I reviewed some news headlines in the early part of the afternoon that I learned about the tragedy.

The commentary that follows means in no way to denigrate the heinous nature of this crime or to appear at all insensitive to the traumatic grief that has overtaken so many people so suddenly, especially the parents who sent their children off to school yesterday morning without giving a thought as the possibility that they might never see them alive again. One can be very cognizant and sensitive to the human grief of this terrible event while at the same time remind his fellow Catholics of inescapable facts that one will never hear discussed in the so-called "mainstream media."

As I have noted such tragedies in the past, it is useful to seek to remind the relatively few readers of this site of the simple fact that nations will be awash in the blood of the innocent at any time in any location when they are awash with the blood of the innocent preborn and the infirmed and the elderly who are dispatched so methodically and regularly in our supposedly "civilized" nation.

Never Lose Sight of Remote and Proximate Root Causes

As noted at the beginning of this commentary, we have been warned by our true popes as to what happens when nations permit licentiousness in the name of "civil liberty," when their laws not only do not punish but actually and encourage widespread indecency and immorality. Cultural liberalism does indeed lead to death. It leads to the death of souls. Souls that are killed by a total immersion in what are Mortal Sins in the objective order of things are very prone to wind up being desensitized to the killing of innocent human beings for whatever reasons that the devil uses to incite their passions to the point of rage.

Pope Gregory XVI did indeed serve the role of a true Catholic prophet when he issued Mirari Vos one hundred eighty years ago now:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

 

Pope Pius IX added his own prophetic voice by way of explaining what must occur in any nation that is founded upon the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian civil state of Modernity that arose in the wake of the overthrow o the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and the rise of the multifaceted, interrelated naturalist myths of Judeo-Masonry:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

Yes, of course, the remote cause for all human problems, both personal and social, is Original Sin. The proximate cause of human problems, both personal and social, is Actual Sin. Human beings are wounded by Original Sin. Those of us who are baptized suffer from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin (the darkened intellect, the weakened will, a disordering of the balance between our higher rational faculties and lower sensual passions). Those who are unbaptized suffer all of the ravages of Original Sin in their immortal souls that are captive to the devil and his minions. There is no legal, political, constitutional, electoral, interdenominational, nondenominational, secular, philosophical, ideological, naturalistic way to solve problems that are caused by the sin of Adam and the sins of us all. Men will descend into the depth of madness and violence over the course of time as men and their societies move more and more away even from the vestigial influences of Catholicism in the world.

It is indeed true that there were social problems during the era of Christendom in Europe. The difference between then and now is simple: most men understood that they were sinners in need of cooperating more fully with the graces won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, and that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. Men knew that they had to amend their lives, that social order depended upon order within their own souls. Is there any such understanding today?

Consider Pope Pius XII's concise description of the difference between Christendom and Modernity, contained in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939:

It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939.)

The errors of pluralism divide people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order, control public life.

One of the chief ways these competing sets of naturalists have sought to control public life is by way means of the brainwashing and programming centers referred to as "public schools," which have been diabolically-inspired agents of error and sin from the moment that they were formed, particularly so in the past one hundred seventy-five years since Horace Mann in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts spearheaded the effort to establish state control of "local" education. Parents were deemed even then to be too dumb, too ignorant and too illiterate to teach their children about the ways of "progress." Particularly suspect were Catholic parents who had come to this country from Ireland, thus making it imperative for the civil state to compel the attendance of children in public schools so as to divest them of all possible "foreign" (meaning Catholic) influences while filling their immortal souls with a love of theological and cultural pluralism awash in a land where every error imaginable proliferates.

Most parents today "trust" schools, whether conciliar or public, to "educate" their children, where they are subjected to a steady dose of brainwashing in the ways of feminism, environmentalism, globalism (which breaks down one's natural love of country in order to prepare children for an acceptance the concept of one world governance, if not of one world government), "diversity" ("alternative lifestyles" such as "being gay" and "gay marriage" and "gay parents"), moral relativism, legal positivism, socialism, licentiousness (taught to them in the sophisticated programs designed to break down their natural psychological resistance to any discussion of matters contained in the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments) and, of course, evolutionism. The latter is perhaps the most important ideology of all as to believe that one is descended from apes is to program human beings into acting like apes. A belief in the false ideology of evolutionism leads to devolution of behavior that would shame even the apes themselves.

Most of these same parents, having subjected their children to the systematic programming of the public schools which is designed to inculcate them to be good wards of the civil state (to which they are expected to be subservient in all things lest they be accused of being "anti-government"), bring their children to these programming centers after having first immersed them at home in a cesspool of cultural filth ("rock" music, immodest attire, indecent speech, television programs and motion pictures filled with violence and incentives to impurity) and catering to their every need as sentimentality and pure emotionalism that take the place the true Faith and even natural reason and logic. Many parents have seen fit for one reason or another (sometimes economic necessity, other times personal choice) to place their children in day-care programs that are every bit as much dedicated to the propagation of the errors of the day as are the public schools even before they enter Kindergarten.

While I am not familiar with video games as they emerged long after my own childhood and have never held any interest whatsoever in my adult life, a friend of mine who is a retired police lieutenant in the City of New York Police Department (N.Y.P.D.) says that many video games feature the wanton killing of human beings just for the fun of it. This is what he wrote to me last evening:

One such game is "Urban Warfare;" another us "Assassin."  There are also many other games that go on for days and weeks as the "player" advances in the game, he "becomes" the person he has created in the game. 

Sister Marie Janae of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate queen gave a lecture [which is listed at the "Various Topics" link of Traditional Catholic Sermons.org under the 2010 Fatima Conference talks]. In this lecture, which I heard over the past summer, Sister explains how people are getting messed up thinking that they are the characters which the computer has generated for them:  you can be a rapist, a Navy Seal,  a priest, whatever you want to be during the day, and a cold-blooded killer by night.  these games are quite popular nowadays. 

 

The former police lieutenant also provided me links to the video games themselves, which I have not and will use. Suffice it to say that I am sure that Sister Marie Janae's forty-two minute talk is informative enough. And it turns out the shooter, Adam Lanza, who had gone to Saint Rose of Lima School in Newtown, Connecticut, prior to going to Newtown High School was, according to a classmate of his, a "tech-geek" who kept looking at gadgets as he walked down the high school corridors without speaking to others.

I can't even begin to imagine how graphic such "games" might be, although it is probably the case that such "games" are as graphic as some of the motion pictures whose "trailers" I heard as I stood in a movie theater's hallway prior to the showing of For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, which portrayed the heroism of Catholic martyrs during a war for the Faith, not the mindless, gratuitous violence portrayed on television, in the movies and in those video games. The sounds of such trailers were enough to know that the devil has gotten very bold and, being filled with pride, makes no effort to hide the truly horrific nature of his handiwork in contemporary "entertainment." Such graphic displays of violence and mayhem, whether in film or in video games, cannot but help to desensitize the souls of walking dead around the world as it serves as incitements to act them out in real life.

Personal and social disaster cannot must be the result of such a brew of error. Men resort more and more to violence today because they have never been taught to know who they are in light of Who created them, Who redeemed them and Who wants to sanctify them.

Most men today have never been taught to know tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. They do not know that they have a Blessed Mother who made possible their salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the father at the Annunciation. They do not realize that the supernatural helps they need to overcome all sin in their lives and to pray for the conversion of those who are promoting evil in society flow through the loving hands of that same Blessed Mother, who gave the Rosary with her own blessed hands to Saint Dominic de Guzman so that we could be more closely united to her Divine Son, Christ the King, through the mysteries contained in her psalter, the Rosary.

Pope Pius XI noted this Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

20. Peace indeed was signed in solemn conclave between the belligerents of the late War. This peace, however, was only written into treaties. It was not received into the hearts of men, who still cherish the desire to fight one another and to continue to menace in a most serious manner the quiet and stability of civil society. Unfortunately the law of violence held sway so long that it has weakened and almost obliterated all traces of those natural feelings of love and mercy which the law of Christian charity has done so much to encourage. Nor has this illusory peace, written only on paper, served as yet to reawaken similar noble sentiments in the souls of men. On the contrary, there has been born a spirit of violence and of hatred which, because it has been indulged in for so long, has become almost second nature in many men. There has followed the blind rule of the inferior parts of the soul over the superior, that rule of the lower elements "fighting against the law of the mind," which St. Paul grieved over. (Rom. vii, 23)

21. Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)

23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)  (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Behold the misery of men today, caught up as they are in a world where sin is glorified and exalted in the popular culture and protected under cover of the civil law.

Blindness to the Providence of God

As most men in the world today are, at the very least, indifferent to the horror of personal sin, they are blind to the workings of the Providence of God, Who permits evil to occur so that good may be drawn out of it. He is sending us plague after plague today in the form of powerful storms and various bodily infections that resist medical and pharmaceutical treatment. Among these plagues, however, is that of the neo-barbarism that has let loose such a fury of so much wanton violence in our culture that none us is safe at any time or in any place from being the victims of a random assault.

The naturalistic, rationalistic, sentimentally-driven ethos of conciliarism that has created a concept of God alien to what He has revealed to us in the Sacred Deposit of Faith (see Practical Paganism) has led men into such lives of narcissism that they fall into despair when tragedies such as the one that occurred yesterday take place. Blame is affixed on God rather than upon the men who have been trained from their earliest days to have no regard for Him as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church, men who have been immersed into every cultural trend imaginable, men who are not all too infrequently the products of broken homes, itself a by-product of the narcissism of Modernity that is also quite evident in the sacramentally-barren liturgical rites of the One World Ecumenical Church of the Modernism.

Most men today do not realize that there is nothing that any of us can suffer, whether personally or socially, that is equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused those Seven Swords to be thrust through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. They tend, therefore, to dwell on their own pain, whether real or imagined, and to stew in their own juices as they conjure up hatred for their fellow human beings, each of whom is made in the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and for whose salvation we must pray fervently as one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy.

Living in a world that has been deprived of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, most men today are "catechized" by television or the internet or what passes for "entertainment" in popular culture. They are tossed about from one thing to another without having any clear, coherent understanding of they identity as redeemed creatures and that each of us will have to make an accounting of our lives at the moment of our Particular Judgments. Men who lack the Catholic Faith, you see, must descend more and more into a coarseness of life and culture that produces a class of neo-barbarians who are not only at the gates but who are well inside of the fort of the city.

As been noted exhaustively on this site and for more than a decade before that in printed journals (and for decades in my college classrooms), the descent into neo-barbarism just did not happen suddenly. It has been gradual, almost imperceptible at times. Having ridden the shock waves of the Protestant Revolution, which was a violent and very blood revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church as they order their own lives and the laws of their nations in accord with His Deposit of Faith, men descended by steps into theological relativism, religious indifferentism and the worldliness that feeds on a ethos of naturalism and an unbridled licentiousness that passes for what libertarians tell us is "civil liberty."

The libertarian concept of "civil liberty" as the antidote to the totalitarian monster state of the "left" is in and of itself a perversion the true gift of liberty that Our Lord has won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross, freedom from enslavement to Original Sin and the eternal death of the soul if we use our free will to follow Him through His true Church. No one has a "civil right" to sin or to promote sin under cover of the civil law and throughout what passes for popular culture. Men who live in such a flood errors and lies become, whether or not they realize it (and most do not), living poster children of semi-Pelagianism, the heresy that contends men can more or less stir up graces within their own souls to be good and virtuous and thus to save themselves and their societies.

What is easy for a Catholic accept, namely, that a land where four thousand innocent human beings are killed by surgical means under cover of the civil law, albeit out of public view and thus "invisible" to the consciousness of most Americans, is bound to suffer tragedies such as the one that took place yesterday, is impossible for what Saint Paul the Apostle called the "carnal man" to accept. The carnal man, the man of this world and of sentimentality, cannot see, no less accept, the Providence of God and that sin has consequences in the lives of men and their nations.

Corrupt Culture Produces Corrupt Minds

Alas, a culture informed by the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith, a culture that glorifies sin with abandon and protects such glorification under cover of the civil law, must perforce fall completely into the hands of the devil, the master of violence against God and man himself, who wants human beings to wallow in dark, macabre thoughts of bloodshed. As noted before in this commentary, a steady diet of the macabre leads so many who live in a land of materialism and relativism and hedonism to be completely isolated from reality, including the reality of the humanity of fellow human beings.

The gunman who killed himself yesterday after killing his own mother, whose body was found in her home nearby, and twenty little children in a Kindergarten classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School and six, Adam Lanza, was, noted earlier in this commentary, reported to be an introvert at Newtown High School in Newtown, Connecticut. Mr. Lanza, who was twenty years of age when he walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School yesterday morning, graduated from Newtown High School in 2010. Fellow classmates report him to have been an introvert, something that seems to fit the prolife of each of these cold-blooded mass murderers. (For newspaper account from The Hartford Courant, see Horror at Elementary School in Newtown, CT.)

Adam Lanza, however, was far from alone in this regard.

We live in a world where men have become mad. They refuse to see any spark of humanity in others because they do not recognize that they bear within their own immortal souls the very image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity, in Whose image they have been made. Deluded by one naturalist lie after another and harmed immeasurably by the paucity of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the sacramentally barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, men are now suffering the effects of a world that knows not the soothing laver of redemption that is the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, seeking instead to shed as much innocent blood as possible, staring with the innocent preborn.

The world in which we live was described very prophetically by Father Frederick Faber in The Precious Blood one hundred fifty-two years ago now:

The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose.

An earth, from off which all sense of justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes. The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way; and the same is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been just as it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this? All our struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no reason why we should not give ourselves up to that kind of enjoyment which our corruption does substantially find in sin. The gratification of our appetites is something; and that lies on one side, while on the other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser--is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness? Yet it would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world where there was no Precious Blood. Whatever relics of moral good we might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the most miserable; for they would be drawn away from the enjoyment of this world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and shame; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the allurements of sense are so vivid and strong.

What sort of love could there be, when we could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other, what a separation death would be! We should commit our dead to the ground without a hope. Husband and wife would part with the fearfullest certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation. Mothers would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to offend God with their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of our nature would become unnatural, and the most honorable ties be dishonored. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our hearts would have to learn to beat another way, in order to avoid the dismal consequences which our affections would bring upon ourselves and others. But it is needless to go further into these harrowing details. The world of the heart, without the Precious Blood, and with an intellectual knowledge of God, and his punishments of sin, is too fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity.

But how would it fare with the poor in such a world? They are God's chosen portion upon the earth. He chose poverty himself, when he came to us. He has left the poor in his place, and they are never to fail from the earth, but to be his representatives there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood, would any one love them? Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot? If the stream of almsgiving is so insufficient now, what would it be then? There would be no softening of the heart by grace; there would be no admission of of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our incomes; there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large;and yet even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with skilful concentration to different acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. Vocation is a blossom to be found only in the gardens of the Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God. Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining.

Even in countries professing to be Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel, the poor grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be supported by compulsory taxes; and they are in other ways a continual subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due to the Precious Blood that the principle of supporting them is acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history--even the history of nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation, and for literary and artistic refinement--it would not be extravagant for us to conclude that, if the circumstances of a country were such as to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves, so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition.

Such would be the condition of the world without the Precious Blood. As generations succeeded each other, original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to themselves. Every thing which makes life tolerable, which counteracts any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness, which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which consoles any sadness--is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in heathen as well as in Christian lands. It changes the whole position of an offending creation to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such a matter to speak of change, the aspect of God's immutable perfections toward his human children. It does not work merely in a spiritual sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We are all of us every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden, so imperceptible, so unsuspected? Perhaps because it is so universal and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents if it pressed sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of all his attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out?

Men would be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him; but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.

Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which made life unbearable to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)

While Adam Lanza was indeed solely responsible for his act of wanton murder, it is also true that he was a product of Modernity. Adam Lana was a product of the contagion of sin abroad in a world with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "official" reconciliation, a world without the Social Reign of Christ and thus a world where even many traditionally-minded Catholics find nothing wrong with "rock music" and television and "video games."

No responsible, sane human being would let his children spend their significant portions of their waking hours on a given day in isolation on the computer of playing video games that involve violence and mayhem and killing of one sort or another.

Behold the insanity of Modernity, a world where parents, acting of habits born of ignorance, believe that they are doing themselves and their children a favor by letting them indulge themselves with video games, computers, iPads, and the watching of contemporary television programs, listening to the horror of "rock" music and patronizing the latest trash produced by Hollywood at the devil's inspiration. Those among them who are Catholics have no priests to correct them. Indeed, they are as likely to find their local presbyter doing these things himself as not. After all, look at how the Harry Potter franchise of motions has been praised by L'Osservatore Romano (see L'Osservatore Occulto).

Can anyone imagine Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ having His own holy eyes and ears polluted by the degrading images and vile, frightful sounds transmitted in our world today?

Everyone is at risk in a nation where God can be blasphemed with impunity as a "civil right" and where over fifty-four million innocent human beings have been put to death by means of surgical abortion alone in the past forty-five years since Hawaii, Colorado and California began to "liberalize" existing laws that permitted the surgical execution of the preborn in certain "exceptional" cases.

Catholicism, Nothing Else

The only way out of this mess is to embrace the Catholic Faith and to seek to grow in sanctity in cooperation with the graces that are sent to us through the loving hands of Our Lady as we make reparation to God for our sins through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as we pray for the fulfillment of her Fatima Message by a true pope with all of the world's true bishops.

Naturalists are consigned to a hell here on earth of fighting each other as they attempt to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, to create a lasting framework of social order that can only be provided by the standard of the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as It is held high by Holy Mother Church.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, amplified this point far better than I ever will be able to do:

It must therefore be clearly admitted that, in the life of a Christian, the intellect must be entirely subject to God's authority. And if, in this submission of reason to authority, our self-love, which is so strong, is restrained and made to suffer, this only proves the necessity to a Christian of long-suffering not only in will but also in intellect. We would remind those persons of this truth who desire a kind of Christianity such as they themselves have devised, whose precepts should be very mild, much more indulgent towards human nature, and requiring little if any hardships to be borne. They do not properly under stand the meaning of faith and Christian precepts. They do not see that the Cross meets us everywhere, the model of our life, the eternal standard of all who wish to follow Christ in reality and not merely in name.

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

It is nothing other astounding that any Catholic could read this passage and not see the simple Catholic truths that jump off of the page at him.

Acts of horrible violence such as that perpetrated by Adam Lanza yesterday, Friday, December 14, 2012, get the public's attention for a while then fade into the deeper recesses as some other event or as some "important" "game" is played or television program is shown. Such horrific acts of violence grip the nation's attention for only a while as the images of those killed or wounded and the stories of their lives are told in various ways by various people, understandably shocked and repulsed at the horror that has befallen them. The images will fade. The stories will be mostly forgotten. Most people will go on to "other things."

Even more tragic, of course, is the fact that so few people want to be confronted with the images of those who are killed quietly, invisibly, out of the public eye every day in the United States of America under cover of the civil law. This wholesale rebellion against the Fifth Commandment is but the result of a wholesale rebellion against the entirety of the Deposit of Faith as entrusted by Our Lord to the Catholic Church that was begun with Martin Luther and paved the way for all subsequent revolutions and for the triumph of statism and its thought police.

We cannot, as Silvio Cardinal Antoniano noted in the Sixteenth Century, produce peace and prosperity by things repugnant to eternity:

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

 

Our prayers must be with the victims, both the deceased and their families, of the most recent act of public violence here in the United States of America. We pray for the repose of the immortal souls of those who were killed (although it should be noted that the souls of baptized children who die before the age of reason go to Heaven and those who are unbaptized go to Limbo, that is, despite Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's disbelief in it), including Adam Lanza, who took his own life. We must also pray that Americans, including most especially Catholic citizens of the United States of America, will start grieving for the invisible victims of chemical and surgical baby-killing that has become accepted as either a "human right" or a "regrettable fact" of social life about which little can done.

We pray also that at least a few people who had never thought about First and Last Things will be prompted to do so now, recognizing that each moment of our lives might be our last, that we must get ourselves to the Sacrament of Penance on a regular basis, confessing even our Venial Sins to a true priest in the Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds, making sure also to be enrolled in and to wear the mantle of the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and to fulfill its conditions faithfully. We never know when the next breath we take will be the last breath we ever take.

Those who think that a "restoration" of a Judeo-Masonic sense of "civility" to popular discourse can be accomplished while ignoring the teaching authority of the Catholic Church and the whole of mankind's utter dependence upon that teaching authority and upon her sanctifying offices ought to reckon with this dialogue that Saint Gertrude the Great, the great apostle of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, had with Our Lord Himself:

"For what fault have you suffered most?" He replied: "For self-will and self-opinionatedness; for when I did any kindness for others, I would not do as they wished, but as I wished myself; and so much do I suffer for this, that if the mental agonies of all mankind were united in one person, he would not endure more than I do at present." She replied: "And what remedy will be the most efficacious for you?" He answered: "To perform acts of the contrary virtue, and to avoid committing the same fault." "But, in the meantime," inquired Gertrude, "what will afford you the greatest relief?" He replied: "The fidelity which I practiced toward others when on earth consoles me most. The prayers which are offered continually for me by many friends solace me as good news would solace a person in affliction. Each tone of the chant at Mass, or in the vigils which are said for me, seem to me as a most delicious reflection. All that is done for me by others, with a pure intention for God's glory, such as working, and even sleeping or eating, affords me great relief and shortens my sufferings, on account of the fidelity with which I labored for others." (The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude the Great, republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, p. 341.)

 

Yes, cultural liberalism must lead to death in land where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour is not King and His Most Blessed Mother is not its Queen. The fact that the conciliar revolutionaries, men who have made their own accommodations to the anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity it he world, do not understand this and believe in "religious freedom as the path to peace" only worsens the state of the world-at-large.

How willing are we to get ourselves to a true offering of the Immemorial Mass of the ages on a daily basis?

How willing are we to spend time with Our Beloved, Christ the King, in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament?

How willing are we to enslave ourselves to Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen? How eager are we to carry our daily crosses, recognizing that there is nothing that we can suffer in this passing, mortal vale of tears that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be pierced through and through with Seven Swords of Sorrow?

How willing are we to make time to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permit?

How willing are we to be as generous with God as possible by voluntarily renouncing the world and its pleasures so as to seek first His Kingdom?

How ready are we to meet Him at the moment of our own Particular Judgments, which can occur at any time, especially in this world of neo-barbarism in which we find ourselves?

Our Lady stands ready to shelter us in the storms of the moment. Let us fly unto her patronage now and every moment of our lives so that we can serve her Divine Son, Christ the King and never fear for one moment to proclaim:

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints