Cut From the Same Cloth

Americanism and conciliarism are cut from the same Modernist cloth. The Americanist heresy seeks to subordinate the eternal truths of the Catholic Faith to the false principles of the founding of the United States of America. Conciliarism is an enshrinement of those false principles. Both Americanism and conciliarism reject, for example, this simple, clear, unequivocal and absolute unambiguous reiteration of the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the necessity of the civil state's recognizing Catholicism as its official religion and according her the favor and the protection of the laws:

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not believe that the thesis of the separation of Church and State is absolutely false. He embraces it. So does every single Catholic defender of the American founding, which is premised upon the belief that it is not necessary for men to subordinate themselves, either individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance, to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted exclusively to the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church. The American founding is also premised upon the belief that it is possible for men to pursue what the founders called "civic virtue" without having belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace, a form of semi-Pelagianism, that men are more or less self-redemptive and do not need to the sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church to lead virtuous lives, no less to pursue the rocky road that leads to the narrow Gate of Life Himself, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself to men exclusively through the Catholic Church.

Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is not only a political document that sought to separate colonists in the thirteen English colonies up and down the Atlantic seaboard from the rule of the British crown. It is a statement of political philosophy expressing a manifest spirit of independence from Christ the King and His Catholic Church as it asserts the "rights of man.". All of the references to "God" are generic. Jefferson, a Deist who did not believe in a living God, knew full well that those colonists who supported the move for independence from the United Kingdom would project their own specific creedal beliefs into the generic terms that that he used for "God" in the Declaration (Nature's God, Supreme Judge of the Universe). Pope Pius XI warned us in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1939, not to be impressed with generic invocations of "God" and "Faith:"

Excluding the words "Anno Domini" at the end of the original Constitution, where, exactly, is Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ mentioned anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution of the United States of America? Can men really organize themselves in civil society with an explicit, confessional reliance upon Him as He has revealed Himself through His true Church? Americanists believe this. So do conciliarists, who reject, completely and utterly, the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church, expressed so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, that the civil state must aid us in achieving the possession of Heaven for all eternity by fostering those conditions in society wherein we are better able to sanctify and to thus save our souls as members of the Catholic Church. The American founding, therefore, is built on a whole structure of sophisms that was bound to lead to the conditions we find ourselves in at the present moment. Those who want to "restore" "founding principles," whether their names are Ron Paul or Alan Keyes, do not realize that we are experiencing at present the very perfection of the inherent degeneracy of those founding principles, to reiterate what a priest in a conciliar Motu community explained so cogently in 2001.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884, explained that men are not all equal in abilities and thus do not all have equal rights in civil society:

As has been explained endlessly on this site (and in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos between 1996 and 2003), the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than the words comprising its text. Although the words that comprise the text of the Constitution of the United States of America do indeed have plain meaning in many, although not all, instances, the lack of an ultimate arbiter to guide men as to the fact that human law must be subordinated at all times to the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord Himself has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and must seek the eternal good of souls results in a veritable "free for all" that is bound, inevitably and inexorably, to lead to positivism (the assertion that something is so because it is asserted as being so) and deconstructionism (the emptying of words of their plain meaning, replacing the plain meaning of words with what an interpreter projects into them as meaning).

It is not "judicial activism" that is responsible for the "misinterpretation" of the words in the provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America but the flawed nature of the founding itself that is to blame. How can a written Constitution be any more hallowed or revered by men in future generations when the Bible itself can be rendered into meaninglessness as a result "private interpretation" rendered without any regard for the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, one of very cornerstones of the Protestant Revolt. Reject the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church and you will wind up with chaos in the lives of individuals and chaos in the lives of nations. The "good intentions," if any, of those who believe in the anti-Incarnational lie of Modernity to premise social order on grounds other than those that seek the eternal good of souls and respecting the authority of the Catholic Church can never redeem the false premises upon which those intentions were based. Catholicism is the one and only basis of personal and social order.

Alas, as we know only too well, the devil convinced many, although far from all, of the first Catholics in the United States of America that their Faith was "safe" in the new republic, that it was "good enough" for Catholics to be permitted to have "freedom of worship" and to participate in civil discourse without experiencing the sort of bloody persecution and the suppression of the Faith that had taken place in England and Ireland, as well in other places in Europe, following the Protestant Revolt. A whole heresy was thus born as a consequence: the subordination of the Catholic Faith to the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic principles of the separation of Church and State, endorsed by none other than Martin Luther himself, and the principles of "religious liberty" enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that have served as the foundation of conciliarism's view of Church-State relations. The Potomac does indeed flow into the Tiber.

The subordination of the Catholic Faith to the falsehoods of the American founding was so well-grounded by 1928 that the first Catholic to be nominated by a major political party for the office of President of the United States of America, Alfred E. Smith, the Governor of New York from 1919-1920 and again from 1923-1928, a Democrat who later broke with the Democrat Party over his gubernatorial successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Smith, though an honest man concerned about "good government and devoted to the Faith in his own personal life, was clueless about the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. He had dropped out of parochial school at the age of fourteen to support his family following the death of his father, never receiving any schooling thereafter, not that he would have learned about the Social Reign of Christ the King had he continued in his studies. He was imbued in the Americanist errors of separation of Church and State and of religious liberty from his earliest days, making him oblivious to the fact that a Protestant attorney in the City of New York by the name of Charles C. Marshall, who was very much opposed to Catholic Social Teaching, nevertheless had a better, firmer grasp on it than Smith, who had been so immersed in the Americanist ethos that he believed the words "Catholicism" and "Americanism" were synonymous with each other.

One will see that Charles Marshall's letter to Smith, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in April of 1927, contained an absolutely marvelous understanding of Catholic Social Teaching. Marshall rejected that teaching. He exalted the rights of the civil state over the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Marshall had studied the social encyclical letters and knew their content better than Smith, who had not studied them at all, and better than contemporary Americanist Catholics and the conciliarists who believe that the teaching contained therein has become "obsolete." Here is Charles Marshall's open letter to then Governor of the State of New York, Alfred Emmanuel Smith, Jr., who had unsuccessfully sought the Democrat Party presidential nomination in 1924 and appeared to be the front-runner for the party's 1928 presidential nomination

Ignoring Charles Marshall's contempt for the heroism of John Felton in defending the rights of Christ the King and His Vicar on earth, Pope Saint Pius V, against the hideous Queen of England, Elizabeth I, who presided over the cruel execution and torture of so many faithful Catholics, including Blessed Edmund Campion, S.J., his letter to Governor Alfred E. Smith, Jr., demonstrates that he had "gotten it" insofar as Catholic Social Teaching is concerned: the Constitution of the United States of America is incompatible with the Faith. From a Catholic point of view, of course, a subordination of the Faith to the Constitution winds up producing a situation where ordinary Catholics view through Church and her teaching, which is nothing other than the teaching of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.

Upon hearing of Charles Marshall's article, Governor Alfred E. Smith, Jr., is reported to have said, "What the [place of eternal damnation] is an encyclical." Smith turned to a Jewish judge friend of his, Joseph Proskauer, who suggested that Smith have a reply printed in his own time, although the actual work of the drafting of Smith's response, which ran in the May, 1927, issue of Atlantic Monthly, was done by a Father Francis Duffy, who was decorated by the governments of the United States of America and of France for his service as a military chaplain in World War I. Father Duffy, although certain a hero and a man who worked hard for the salvation of souls, was nevertheless an Americanist who believed that their private opinions on religious liberty and separation of Church and State were what mattered, not the teaching contained in encyclical letters that pertained, he believed, only to purely Catholic states and not as the idea to which all Catholics, no matter where they found themselves and under what conditions they lived, had to strive to plant the seeds to restore.

Indeed, Alfred E. Smith's response to Charles Marshall contained a most telling revelation about the extent to which Catholic Social Teaching on Church-State relations and religious liberty was not preached from the pulpit or taught in most Catholic schools:

Here is the full text of Smith's ghost-written response, which received the approval of Patrick Cardinal Hayes, the Archbishop of New York, and met with the approval of at least one curial cardinal in the Vatican, demonstrating, of course, that those infected with Modernist ideas--or who so wanted to see American Catholics "succeed" that they were willing to suspend rationality in the process--were waiting for the "golden day" to arrive when Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors and the great encyclicals of Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, St. Pius X, and even of the then reigning pontiff, Pius XI, the great apostle of Christ the King, would be wiped away:

DEAR Sir: —

In your open letter to me in the April Atlantic Monthly you 'impute' to American Catholics views which, if held by them, would leave open to question the loyalty and devotion to this country and its Constitution of more than twenty million American Catholic citizens. I am grateful to you for defining this issue in the open and for your courteous expression of the satisfaction it will bring to my fellow citizens for me to give 'a disclaimer of the convictions' thus imputed. Without mental reservation I can and do make that disclaimer. These convictions are held neither by me nor by any other American Catholic, as far as I know. Before answering the argument of your letter, however, I must dispose of one of its implications. You put your questions to me in connection with my candidacy for the office of President of the United States. My attitude with respect to that candidacy was fully stated in my last inaugural address as Governor when, on January 1, 1927, I said: — 'I have no idea what the future has in store for me. Everyone else in the United States has some notion about it except myself. No man could stand before this intelligent gathering and say that he was not receptive to the greatest position the world has to give anyone. But I can say this, that I will do nothing to achieve it except to give to the people of the State the kind and character of service that will make me deserve it.'

I should be a poor American and a poor Catholic alike if I injected religious discussion into a political campaign. Therefore I would ask you to accept this answer from me not as a candidate for any public office but as an American citizen, honored with high elective office, meeting a challenge to his patriotism and his intellectual integrity. Moreover, I call your attention to the fact that I am only a layman. The Atlantic Monthly describes you as 'an experienced attorney' who 'has made himself an authority upon canon law.' I am neither a lawyer nor a theologian. What knowledge of law I have was gained in the course of my long experience in the Legislature and as Chief Executive of New York State. I had no such opportunity to study theology.

My first thought was to answer you with just the faith that is in me. But I knew instinctively that your conclusions could be logically proved false. It seemed right, therefore, to take counsel with someone schooled in the Church law, from whom I learned whatever is hereafter set forth in definite answer to the theological questions you raise. I selected one whose patriotism neither you nor any other man will question. He wears upon his breast the Distinguished Service Cross of our country, its Distinguished Service Medal, the Ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm of the French Republic. He was the Catholic Chaplain of the almost wholly Catholic 165th Regiment in the World War, Father Francis P. Duffy, now in the military service of my own State.

Taking your letter as a whole and reducing it to commonplace English, you imply that there is conflict between religious loyalty to the Catholic faith and patriotic loyalty to the United States. Everything that has actually happened to me during my long public career leads me to know that no such thing as that is true. I have taken an oath of office in this State nineteen times. Each time I swore to defend and maintain the Constitution of the United States. All of. this represents a period of public service in elective office almost continuous since 1903. I have never known any conflict between my official duties and my religious belief. No such conflict could exist. Certainly the people of this State recognize no such conflict. They have testified to my devotion to public duty by electing me to the highest office within their active gift four times. You yourself do me the honor, in addressing me, to refer to 'your fidelity to the morality you have advocated in public and private life and to the religion you have revered; your great record of public trusts successfully and honestly discharged.' During the years I have discharged these trusts I have been a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church. If there were conflict, I, of all men, could not have escaped it, because I have not been a silent man, but a battler for social and political reform. These battles would in their very nature disclose this conflict if there were any.

I regard public education as one of the foremost functions of government and I have supported to the last degree the State Department of Education in every effort to promote our public school system. The largest single item of increased appropriations under my administration appears in the educational group for the support of common schools. Since 1919, when I first became Governor, this item has grown from $9,000,000 to $82,500,000. My aim—and I may say I have succeeded in achieving it—has been legislation for child welfare, the protection of working men, women, and children, the modernization of the State's institutions for the care of helpless or unfortunate wards, the preservation of freedom of speech and opinion against the attack of war-time hysteria, and the complete reorganization of the structure of the government of the State.

I did not struggle for these things for any single element, but in the interest of all of the eleven million people who make up the State. In all of this work I had the support of churches of all denominations. I probably know as many ecclesiastics of my Church as any other layman. During my long and active public career I never received from any of them anything except cooperation and encouragement in the full and complete discharge of my duty to the State. Moreover, I am unable to understand how anything that I was taught to believe as a Catholic could possibly be in conflict with what is good citizenship. The essence of my faith is built upon the Commandments of God. The law of the land is built upon the Commandments of God. There can be no conflict between them. Instead of quarreling among ourselves over dogmatic principles, it would be infinitely better if we joined together in inculcating obedience to these Commandments in the hearts and minds of the youth of the country as the surest and best road to happiness on this earth and to peace in the world to come. This is the common ideal of all religions. What we need is more religion for our young people, not less; and the way to get more religion is to stop the bickering among our sects which can only have for its effect the creation of doubt in the minds of our youth as to whether or not it is necessary to pay attention to religion at all.

Then I know your imputations are false when I recall the long list of other public servants of my faith who have loyally served the State. You as a lawyer will probably agree that the office of Chief Justice of the United States is second not even to that of the President in its influence on the national development and policy. That court by its interpretation of the Federal Constitution is a check not only upon the President himself but upon Congress as well. During one fourth of its history it has been presided over by two Catholics, Roger Brooke Taney and Edward Douglass White. No one has suggested that the official conduct of either of these men was affected by any unwarranted religious influence or that played with them any part other than it should play in the life of every God-fearing man.

And I know your imputations are false when I recall the tens of thousands of young Catholics who have risked and sacrificed their lives in defense of our country. These fundamentals of life could not be true unless your imputations were false.

But, wishing to meet you on your own ground, I address myself to your definite questions, against which I have thus far made only general statements. I must first call attention to the fact that you often divorce sentences from their context in such a way as to give them something other than their real meaning. I will specify. You refer to the Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII as 'declaring to the world that the orders of the Church of England were void, her priests not priests,' and so forth. You say that this was the 'strange fruit' of the toleration of England to the Catholics. You imply that the Pope gratuitously issued an affront to the Anglican Church. In fact, this Apostolic Letter was an answer to a request made at the instance of priests of the Anglican Church for recognition by the Roman Catholic Church of the validity of their priestly orders. The request was based on the ground that they had been ordained in succession from the Roman Catholic priests who became the first priests of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Letter was a mere adverse answer to this request, ruling that Anglican priests were not Roman Catholic priests, and was in no sense the gratuitous insult which you suggest it to be. It was not directed against England or citizens of that Empire.

Again, you quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia that my Church 'regards dogmatic intolerance, not alone as her incontestable right, but as her sacred duty.' And you say that these words show that Catholics are taught to be politically, socially, and intellectually intolerant of all other people. If you had read the whole of that article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, you would know that the real meaning of these words is that for Catholics alone the Church recognizes no deviation from complete acceptance of its dogma. These words are used in a chapter dealing with that subject only. The very same article in another chapter dealing with toleration toward non-Catholics contains these words: 'The intolerant man is avoided as much as possible by every high-minded person.... The man who is tolerant in every emergency is alone lovable. The phrase 'dogmatic intolerance' does not mean that Catholics are to be dogmatically intolerant of other people, but merely that inside the Catholic Church they are to be intolerant of any variance from the dogma of the Church.

Similar criticism can be made of many of your quotations. But, beyond this, by what right do you ask me to assume responsibility for every statement that may be made in any encyclical letter? As you will find in the Catholic Encyclopedia (Vol. V, p. 414), these encyclicals are not articles of our faith. The Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, which you quote on the possible conflict between Church and State, is declared by Cardinal Newman to have 'no dogmatic force.' You seem to think that Catholics must be all alike in mind and in heart, as though they had been poured into and taken out of the same mould. You have no more right to ask me to defend as part of my faith every statement coming from a prelate than I should have to ask you to accept as an article of your religious faith every statement of an Episcopal bishop, or of your political faith every statement of a President of the United States. So little are these matters of the essence of my faith that I, a devout Catholic since childhood, never heard of them until I read your letter. Nor can you quote from the canons of our faith a syllable that would make us less good citizens than non-Catholics. In fact and in truth, I have been taught the spirit of tolerance, and when you, Mr. Marshall, as a Protestant Episcopalian, join with me in saying the Lord's Prayer, we both pray, not to 'My Father,' but to 'Our Father.'

But I go further to demonstrate that the true construction of your quotations by the leaders of Catholic thought is diametrically the opposite of what you suggest it to be.

Your first proposition is that Catholics believe that other religions should, in the United States, be tolerated only as a matter of favor and that there should be an established church. You may find some dream of an ideal of a Catholic State, having no relation whatever to actuality, somewhere described. But, voicing the best Catholic thought on this subject, Dr. John A. Ryan, Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America, writes in The State and the Church of the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, quoted by you:—

'In practice, however, the foregoing propositions have full application only to the completely Catholic State....The propositions of Pope Pius IX condemning the toleration of non-Catholic sects do not now, says Father Pohle, "apply even to Spain or the South American republics, to say nothing of countries possessing a greatly mixed population." He lays down the following general rule: "When several religions have firmly established themselves and taken root in the same territory, nothing else remains for the State than to exercise tolerance towards them all, or, as conditions exist to-day, to complete religious liberty for individual and religious bodies a principle of government."'

That is good Americanism and good Catholicism. And Father Pohle, one of the great writers of the Catholic Church, says further: — 'If religious freedom has been accepted and sworn to as a fundamental law in a constitution, the obligation to show this tolerance is binding in conscience.' The American prelates of our Church stoutly defend our constitutional declaration of equality of all religions before the law. Cardinal O'Connell has said:

'Thus to every American citizen has come the blessed inheritance of civil political, and religious liberty safeguarded by the American Constitution ... the right to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.'

Archbishop Ireland has said: 'The Constitution of the United States reads: "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It was a great leap forward on the part of the new nation towards personal liberty and the consecration of the rights of conscience.'

Archbishop Dowling, referring to any conceivable union of Church and State, says: 'So many conditions for its accomplishment are lacking in every government of the world that the thesis may well be relegated to the limbo of defunct controversies.'

I think you have taken your thesis from this limbo of defunct controversies. Archbishop Ireland again said: 'Religious freedom is the basic life of America, the cement running through all its walls and battlements, the safeguard of its peace and prosperity. Violate religious freedom against Catholics, our swords are at once unsheathed. Violate it in favor of Catholics, against non-Catholics, no less readily do they leap from the scabbard.'

Cardinal Gibbons has said: 'American Catholics rejoice in our separation of Church and State, and I can conceive no combination of circumstances likely to arise which would make a union desirable to either Church or State.... For ourselves we thank God that we live in America, "in this happy country of ours," to quote Mr. Roosevelt, where "religion and liberty are natural allies."'

And referring particularly to your quotation from Pope Pius IX, Dr. Ryan, in The State and the Church, says: 'Pope Pius IX did not intend to declare that separation is always unadvisable, for he had more than once expressed his satisfaction with the arrangement obtaining in the United States.' With these great Catholics I stand squarely in support of the provisions of the Constitution which guarantee religious freedom and equality.

I come now to the speculation with which theorists have played for generations as to the respective functions of Church and State. You claim that the Roman Catholic Church holds that, if conflict arises, the Church must prevail over the State. You write as though there were some Catholic authority or tribunal to decide with respect to such conflict. Of course there is no such thing. As Dr. Ryan writes: 'The Catholic doctrine concedes, nay, maintains, that the State is coordinate with the Church and equally independent and supreme in its own distinct sphere.'

What is the Protestant position? The Articles of Religion of your Protestant Episcopal Church (XXXVII) declare: 'The Power of the Civil Magistrate extendeth to all men, as well Clergy as Laity, in all things temporal; but hath no authority in things purely spiritual.'

Your Church, just as mine, is voicing the injunction of our common Saviour to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

What is this conflict about which you talk? It may exist in some lands which do not guarantee religious freedom. But in the wildest dreams of your imagination you cannot conjure up a possible conflict between religious principle and political duty in the United States, except on the unthinkable hypothesis, that some law were to be passed which violated the common morality of all God-fearing men. And if you can conjure up such a conflict, how would a Protestant resolve it? Obviously by the dictates of his conscience. That is exactly what a Catholic would do. There is no ecclesiastical tribunal which would have the slightest claim upon the obedience of Catholic communicants in the resolution of such a conflict. As Cardinal Gibbons said of the supposition that 'the Pope were to issue commands in purely civil matters':—

'He would be offending not only against civil society, but against God, and violating an authority as truly from God as his own. Any Catholic who clearly recognized this would not be bound to obey the Pope; or rather his conscience would bind him absolutely to disobey, because with Catholics conscience is the supreme law which under no circumstances can we ever lawfully disobey.' Archbishop Ireland said: 'To priest, to Bishop, or to Pope (I am willing to consider the hypothesis) who should attempt to rule in matters civil and political, to influence the citizen beyond the range of their own orbit of jurisdiction that are the things of God, the answer is quickly made: "Back to your own sphere of rights and duties, back to the things of God."'

Bishop England, referring to our Constitution, said: 'Let the Pope and the Cardinals and all the powers of the Catholic world united make the least encroachment on that Constitution, we will protect it with our lives. Summon a General Council—let that Council interfere in the mode of our electing but an assistant to a turnkey of a prison—we deny the right, we reject the usurpation.'

Our Supreme Court has marked out the spheres of influence of Church and State in a case from which you quote copiously, Watson v. Jones, 13 Wall. 729; but you refrain from quoting this statement: —

'The right to organize voluntary religious associations, to assist in the expression and dissemination of any religious doctrine, and to create tribunals for the decision of controverted questions of faith within the association and for the ecclesiastical government of all of the individual members, the congregation an officers within the general association, is, unquestioned.... It is of the essence of these religious unions and of their right to establish tribunals for the decision of questions arising among themselves that those decisions could be binding in all cases of ecclesiastical cognizance, subject only to such appeal as the organism itself provides for.'

That is the State's attitude toward the Church. Archbishop Ireland thus puts the Church's attitude toward the State:—

'To the Catholic obedience to law is a religious obligation, binding in God's name the conscience of the citizen ... Both Americanism and Catholicism bow to the sway of personal conscience."

Under our system of government the electorate entrusts to its officers of' every faith the solemn duty of action according to the dictates of conscience. I may fairly refer once more to my own record to support these truths. No man, cleric or lay, has ever directly or indirectly attempted to exercise Church influence on my administration of any office I have ever held, nor asked me to show special favor to Catholics or exercise discrimination against non-Catholics. It is a well-known fact that I have all of my appointments to public on the basis of merit and have never asked any man about his religious belief. In the first month of this year there gathered in the Capitol at the first Governor's cabinet that ever sat in this State. It was composed, under my appointment, of two Catholics, thirteen Protestants, and one Jew. The man closest to me in the administration of the government of the State of New York is he who bears the title of Assistant to the Governor. He had been connected with the Governor's office for thirty years, in subordinate capacities, until I promoted him to the position which makes him the sharer with me of my thought and hope and ambition in the administration of the State. He is a Protestant, a Republican, and a thirty-second-degree Mason. In my public life I have exemplified that separation of Church from State which is the faith of American Catholics today.

III

I next come to education. You admit that the Supreme Court guaranteed to Catholics the right to maintain their parochial schools; and you ask me whether they would have so ruled if it had been shown that children in parochial schools were taught that the State should show discrimination between religions, that Protestants should be recognized only as a matter of favor, that they should be intolerant to non-Catholics, and that the laws of the State could be flouted on the ground of the imaginary conflict. My summary answer is: I and all my children went to a parochial school. I never heard of any such stuff being taught or of anybody who claimed that it was. That any group of Catholics would teach it is unthinkable.

You next challenge the action of the Rota in annulling the Marlborough marriage. You suggest that the Rota by annulling the marriage (where the civil courts recognized it, but granted only a divorce) is interfering with the jurisdiction. That might be so if anybody claimed that the decree of the Rota had any effect under the laws of America, or any other nation of the world. But you must know that it has no such effect and that nobody claims it has. The decree merely defined the status of the parties as communicants of the Church. Your Church refuses to recognize the ecclesiastical validity of divorces granted by the civil tribunals. Your Church has its tribunals to administer its laws for the government of its members as communicants of your Church. But their decrees have no bearing upon the status of your members as citizens of the United States. There is no difference in that respect between your tribunals and the Rota.

Finally you come to Mexico. By inference from the brief of a distinguished lawyer you intimate that it is the purpose of organized Catholics to seek intervention by the United States. Now I never read Mr. Guthrie's brief. I do not have to read it to reply to you, because the Pastoral Letter of the Catholic Episcopate of the United States in unmistakable words disclaimed any such intention. I do not see how, with complete candor, you could write to me about Mexico without quoting the following from that Pastoral Letter: —

'What, therefore, we have written is no call on the faithful here or elsewhere to purely human action. It is no interposition of our influence either as Bishops or as citizens to reach those who possess political power anywhere on earth, and least of all in our own country, to the end that they should intervene with armed force in the internal affairs of Mexico for the protection of the Church. Our duty is done when, by telling the story, we sound a warning to Christian civilization, that its foundations are again being attacked and undermined. For the rest, God will bring His will to pass in His own good time and in His own good way.'

My personal attitude, wholly consistent with that of my Church, is that I believe in peace on earth, good will to men, and that no country has a right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. I recognize the right of no church to ask armed intervention by this country in the affairs of another merely for the defense of the rights of a church. But I do recognize the propriety of Church action to request the good offices of this country to help the oppressed of any land, as those good offices have been so often used for the protection of Protestant missionaries in the Orient and the persecuted Jews of eastern Europe.

I summarize my creed as an American Catholic. I believe in the worship of God according to the faith and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State and in the strict enforcement of the provisions of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I believe that no tribunal of any church has any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land, other than to establish the status of its own communicants within its own church. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith. I believe in the principled noninterference by this country in the internal affairs of other nations and that we should stand steadfastly against any such interference by whomsoever it may be urged. And I believe in the common brotherhood of man under the common fatherhood of God.

In this spirit I join with fellow Americans of all creeds in a fervent prayer that never again in this land will any public servant be challenged because of the faith in which he has tried to walk humbly with his God.

Very truly yours, Alfred E. Smith

One can see in Alfred Smith's ghost-written letter elements of truth and elements of error, making it a quintessential testimony to the influence of Americanism as a cornerstone of Modernism's view of Church-State relations. The mere fact that conditions at one point in time are not favorable to a restoration of Christendom does not mean that Catholics surrender to the principles of Modernity as an irreversible fact of the modern world. What did the conditions look like for the conversion of the world when the Apostles left the Upper Room in Jerusalem on Pentecost Sunday following the descent of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, upon them and Our Lady in tongues of flame? The surrender of Americanist Catholics and of Modernists and their contemporary progeny, the conciliarists, to the exigencies of the "modern" world and the "needs" of "modern" man is marked by a thorough rejection of the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church concerning Church-State relations and an indignant contention that it would be wrong, if not extremely harmful, even to pray for the happy reunion of Church and State.

"I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty"? The public school has no right to exist. The civil state has no right to impose a curriculum of study and to mandate that children follow it under the compulsion of the civil law. The public school was founded to advance the cause of the Americanist ideology, being particularly aggressive in the arrogation of the Natural Law right of parents to be the principal educators of their children and to inculcate Catholics in the ways of "egalitarianism" and "democracy" and "religious liberty:" One author, evidently not a Catholic, put the matter this way:

The gradual decline of American public schools into secularism was the only logical result that could occur, which Mr. Yates does not seem to understand and Al Smith would fail to recognize as a problem. That which is not founded in the true Faith is bound to decline over time. It was Protestantism's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that has been proximate cause for the descent of the world into madness in the past half of a millennium. The public school had been front and center of Judeo-Masonry's plan to attack the souls of children, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884:

Pope Pius XI, writing two and one-half years after the Marshall-Smith colloquy in Atlantic Monthly, reiterated the Catholic Church's consistent opposition to the "lay school," explaining that a parent could only send his child to such a school as a matter of necessity and after having gotten his pastor's explicit permission to do so:

While Catholics must obey just laws and respect the duly constituted authority of civil governments, working as best as they can within the framework in which they find themselves without exalting the nationalist, naturalist myths of that framework if it be opposed to the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, they can and must work to remind their fellow citizens that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ wants each person and each nation to come under His sway by means of a humble and docile submission to the authority of the true Church He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Alfred Smith and Father Francis Duffy did not understand this at all.

Alfred Smith's ghost-written letter to Charles C. Marshall of eighty years ago contains many errors, one of which involves the rejection of the teaching authority of encyclical letters. Father Duffy, Smith's ghost-writer, wanted to take refuge in the Catholic Encyclopedia, ignoring, however, these plain words that had been written by Pope Pius XI just three years, five months before his response to Charles Marshall was published in Atlantic Monthly:

Yes, Governor Smith and Father Duffy, the social encyclical letters are quite binding, the Catholic Encyclopedia to the contrary notwithstanding. Pope Pius XII reiterated this matter long about Al Smith and Father Francis Duffy had died:

Father Duffy was a good and brave priest who cared deeply about the salvation of souls. Having been raised in an environment of Americanism, however, he sought to reconcile semi-Pelagian principles of self-redemption, which he did see as such, obviously, relying upon the hideous Americanists, John Ireland and James Gibbons to do so. Although Father Duffy contended in the open letter he ghostwrote for Al Smith that the necessity of a Catholic state applied only to purely Catholic states, entities that, for the most part, did not exist by that time because of the adversary's centuries-long revolt against Christendom begun in the Renaissance before makings its open assault during the Protestant Revolt and with the rise of Judeo-Masonry and all other related, naturalist, anti-Incarnational "philosophical" and "revolutionary" movements, Pope Leo XIII had indeed, as Charles Marshall noted, specifically addressed the situation of Chuch-State relations in the United States of America in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895:

Pope Leo XIII was exhorting the Catholic bishops of the United States of America to work for the Catholicization of their country, something that most of them did not consider desirable or even necessary, thus setting the stage so very well for the rise of the likes of Angelo Roncalli and Giovanni Montini and Albino Luciani and Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, each of whom believed in the very separation of Church and State endorsed by Alfred Smith and Father Francis Duffy that had been condemned as a "thesis absolutely false" by Pope Saint Pius X. Meaning no disrespect to the late, courageous Father Duffy, the principle of non-contradiction teaches us that either he was correct or that Pope Saint Pius X, who placed no qualifications or modifications on the use of the words "absolutely false," correct. Just as Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston from 1944 to 1970 who once boasted before he died that he had never made a convert in his entire life, served as the enabler of the career of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, so did Father Francis Duffy serve as enabler of the career of Governor Alfred E. Smith, Jr., and for the cause of the condemned Americanist heresy that helped to spawn some of the very underpinnings of conciliarism itself.

Father Duffy also set up some straw men in the letter he ghostwrote for Governor Al Smith. The Catholic Church has never preached an intolerance for persons. She has indeed preached an intolerance for error and for the nonexistent "rights" of error, understanding that God has revealed the totality of His Divine Revelation solely to the Catholic Church so that men can see themselves and the world clearly through the eyes of the one and only true Faith and thus be better able to cooperate with the graces for them by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and that flow into human souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. Intolerance of error does not apply solely to the "internal" doctrine of the Catholic Church, as the ghostwritten Smith article contends. Oh, no, it applies at all times in all places, admitting that the practical reality of a given situation may require some degree of tolerance but only insofar as is necessary to avoid doing violence to individual conscience, never conceding anything at all to the "rights" of error, as both Pope Gregory XVI and Leo XIII made clear:

Father Francis Duffy, writing for Governor Al Smith, ignored Mirari Vos just as the conciliarists of today ignore it completely as though it was never written or as if Gregory XVI, who approved of the cult of Saint Philomena, the great wonderworker who was taken off of the general calendar of the counterfeit church of conciliarism by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII in 1961, was a veritable antipope. Doing so presaged conciliarism itself, as an article supportive of conciliarism's embrace of the errors contained in the Father Duffy letter ghostwritten for Al Smith published by America magazine indicates very clearly:

Unfortunately for the Americanists and for the conciliarists, religious liberty has been condemned as a heresy by Pope Pius VII:

The Americanism of Governor Al Smith, which derived its intellectual muscle from Father Francis Duffy, helped to pave the way for then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy's address to Greater Houston Ministerial Association in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1960:

Even Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., a supporter of Kennedy's who would be one of the principal progenitors of the "Second" Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae (and the author of many of the interventions made by American cardinals and bishops in its behalf), found Kennedy's strict personal separation of religious belief from the making of public policy decisions to be too stringent. Murray favored the American concept of the separation of Church and State, believing, as the conciliarist Ratzinger does, that such a separation permits Catholics to influence public policy and the direction of debate on it in the "marketplace of ideas." Leaving aside the inconvenient little truth that God and His true Church are owed recognition by the civil state, as summarized so succinctly by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, Father John Courtney Murray could not see that Kennedy's "more stringent" view of "separationism" was but the logical consequence of a religiously indifferentist civil state, as prophesied by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei.

Oh, before I continue, it should be noted that Senator Kennedy gave that address, which was written by Kennedy speech writer Theodore Sorensen, was delivered on the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary, which commemorates the victory King Jan Sobieski of Catholic Poland over the Mohammedan hordes at the Gates of Vienna, Austria, on September 13, 1683, as he, King Jan Sobieski, held the Rosary aloft and urged men to pray this great spiritual weapon that Our Lady gave to Saint Dominic to fight the Albigenses heresy.

One can see the great theological and intellectual "depth" demonstrated by a Catholic, Rudolph William Giuliani, who was born in the year Al Smith, died, 1944, after 231 years of Americanist drivel of over forty years of conciliarist accommodationism with the principles of 1787 and 1789:

How's that for depth, now, folks? Giuliani knows theology "really, really well academically"? All right, all right. Stop laughing. How about "Thou shalt not kill," Rudy. How about adhering to the following clear reminder of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

This all goes to show that making one little bit of accommodation to error results in total corruption of truth. The men who founded the United States of America were happy to have the cooperation of willing Catholics while most, although not all, of them maintained that a free society and Catholicism could never coexist. They were correct about this. That is, the false concept of a society "free" from a submission to the Catholic Church cannot coexist with the Faith: it will either corrupt the faith of individual Catholics or it will be swallowed up by the prayers and good works of faithful Catholics seeking to plant the seeds for the conversion of individuals and of the whole nation to the Church's maternal bosom. One is not "free" if one is not under the mantle of the Catholic Church. One is a slave to one or another of a series of falsehoods if one is not yoked to the Most Sacred Heart of Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen. Justice and order, no less personal salvation, can never be built on falsehoods. One is not free as Our Lord means Him to be free, from the power of sin and eternal death, that is, unless he is a Catholic in a state of Sanctifying Grace.

Americanist Catholics have had to overlook the following empirical evidence of overt anti-Catholicism on the part of its founders as they praise these naturalist scoundrels and as they continue to extol American participation in unjust wars that planted Protestantism and Freemasonry in formerly Catholic lands from which these evils had been theretofore excluded.

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

Consider these remarks of James Madison, considered by many to be the "father" of the Constitution of the United States of America:

How about just two more of many anti-Catholic comments from Thomas Jefferson? Oh, why not?

Article 11 of the Treaty between the United States of America and Tripoli, June 10, 1797, reads as follows:

Although Catholics in the United States of America were able to sanctify and to save their souls in the years leading up to the "Second" Vatican Council, exhibiting wonderful devotion to the Faith in their own personal lives and participating in Corpus Christi and Rosary processions, there was a subtle cancer eating away at the life of the Faith. That cancer was--and remains--Americanism, now enshrined as of the cornerstones of conciliarism. It is no accident that most Catholics today have "attitudes" about matters of Faith and morals that are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. This is all the rotten fruit of a state that is religiously indifferentist and a pluralist culture that is steeped in all of the combined errors of naturalism, kept in its place by the organized forces of naturalism represented by Judeo-Masonry. Anyone who thinks that ecumenism, whether of the political or ecclesiastical variety, is going to retard one little bit of the evils we face today is at odds with Pope Saint Pius X, who wrote:

The great bulwark that kept the faithful on the straight and narrow path to personal sanctity during the pre-conciliar era was the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, which at least reminded Catholics of the fact that there is a God Who judges, a God Whom they had to receive in Holy Communion on their knees, a God Who expected them to go to Confession every week, a God Who was pleased with their outward acts of penance that were signs of an interior disposition to be ready to meet Him at the moment of their Particular Judgments at any time. The replacement of this bulwark with the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo Missae, which enshrines the spirit of Modernity in the name of the "inculturation" of the Gospel, in the lives of over ninety-nine percent of Catholics worldwide, including in the United States of America, took down the strongest single bastion protecting Catholics from plunging headlong into the spirit of the world around them. Is it any wonder that so many Catholics have no problem whatsoever with their brethren who support the taking of innocent preborn lives under cover of law, whether by surgical or chemical means, justifying their doing so by adverting to the "American way"?

Americanism and conciliarism are cut from the same Modernist cloth. We must pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary very fervently to protect ourselves from being influenced into believing that the Catholic social order is a "thing of the past" and that we must make our "accommodation" to the "principles" of 1787 and 1789. Pope Leo XIII, writing in Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892, reminded Catholics in Italy that there can be no such accommodation. This is as true as it was then nearly 115 years ago:

Poor Al Smith never heard this "kind of stuff" because it was not preached in the United States of America. Such "stuff" only elsewhere, maybe only Italy, as in the case of Custodi Di Quella Fede. He would not have had a thirty-second degree Freemason for an aide nor would ever have endorsed the gubernatorial candidacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.if Father Francis Duffy or some other bishop or priest in the United States was not so willing to consider the United States of America exempt from the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the nature of Church-State relations. Al Smith never was forced to consider the simple truth that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ means for all men everywhere to subordinate their own lives and those of their nations to Him through His true Church, understanding the the whole of social order depends upon the sanctification of individual men, as Pope Saint Pius X noted in Notre Charge Apostolique and as Pope Leo XIII had stated so clearly in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

Want to know true liberty, both personal and civil, which the Catholic Church has always promoted, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Libertas, June 20, 1888? Pray and work for the restoration of Christendom, which starts with the building up of the Kingship of Christ in our own immortal souls. We must overcome obstacles to Christ's Kingship in our immortal souls, getting ourselves to the daily offering of the Mass of the ages in the catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to its false shepherds, spending time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, offering up all of our sufferings and sacrifices and penances and mortifications and humiliations to the Most Sacred Heart of Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen.

The devil hates the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. Consider a secular newspaper account, contained in the Workers' Solidarity publication in Barcelona, Spain, of the jubilation that was felt in the murder of so many bishops and priests during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939):

The government of the United States of America under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the darling of so many Catholic bishops and priests, did not help the Catholics who were being persecuted in Spain. The government of the United States of America under the administration of Thomas Woodrow Wilson actually aided the Masonic revolutionaries who were putting Catholics to death by the thousands. The America bishops? As testified to by Alfred Smith's ghostwritten letter itself, they urged non-intervention in behalf of saving the Catholics who were being martyred.

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

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

All to thee, Blessed Mother. All to thy Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we love you. Save souls!

The Longer Version of the Saint Michael the Archangel Prayer, composed by Pope Leo XIII, 1888

O glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Prince of the heavenly host, be our defense in the terrible warfare which we carry on against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, spirits of evil. Come to the aid of man, whom God created immortal, made in His own image and likeness, and redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Fight this day the battle of our Lord, together with the holy angels, as already thou hast fought the leader of the proud angels, Lucifer, and his apostate host, who were powerless to resist thee, nor was there place for them any longer in heaven. That cruel, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil or Satan who seduces the whole world, was cast into the abyss with his angels. Behold this primeval enemy and slayer of men has taken courage. Transformed into an angel of light, he wanders about with all the multitude of wicked spirits, invading the earth in order to blot out the Name of God and of His Christ, to seize upon, slay, and cast into eternal perdition, souls destined for the crown of eternal glory. That wicked dragon pours out. as a most impure flood, the venom of his malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy, and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity. These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on Her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck the sheep may be scattered. Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory. They venerate thee as their protector and patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious powers of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude. Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church. Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations. Amen.

Verse: Let us pray. O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon Thy holy Name, and as suppliants, we implore Thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin, immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of our souls.


© Copyright 2007, Thomas A. Droleskey. All rights reserved.

Cut From the Same Cloth

by Thomas A. Droleskey