Death To Us All
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Although he has claimed repeatedly that he was not quoted correctly, Richard Lamm, the Governor of the State of Colorado from 1975 to 1987, made it clear in a speech to the Colorado Lawyers Health Association, given at Saint Joseph's Hospital in Denver, Colorado, on March 28, 1984, that it is the "duty of the elderly to get out of the way and die." This is how Lamm's speech was reported by the Associated Press as published in The New York Times the next day, March 29, 1984:
Elderly people who are terminally ill have a ''duty to die and get out of the way'' instead of trying to prolong their lives by artificial means, Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado said Tuesday.
People who die without having life artificially extended are similar to ''leaves falling off a tree and forming humus for the other plants to grow up,'' the Governor told a meeting of the Colorado Health Lawyers Association at St. Joseph's Hospital.
''You've got a duty to die and get out of the way,'' said the 48-year-old Governor. ''Let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.''
Some groups of the elderly immediately denounced Mr. Lamm for the statements. Reactions From Elderly
Dorothy Minkel, 75 years old, who has lobbied the Legislature for more than a decade on issues of the elderly, said, ''It is an insult for anyone to suggest we have a duty to die.''.
Another lobbyist who represents elderly groups, Robert Robinson, 68 years old, said, ''To say they have a duty to die and get out of the way brings me back 40 years ago when a person in Germany not only advocated that but carried it through.''
At a Senior Day gathering today, one elderly woman told Mr. Lamm, ''I hate you for what you have said.'' But others at the meeting in the First Baptist Church applauded the Governor after hearing his explanation. At the meeting with representatives of senior citizens groups, part of planned Senior Day activities at the Colorado capital, the Governor said, ''We are really approaching a time of almost technological immortality when the machine and the tubes and the drugs and the heart pacemakers . . . literally force life on us.
''I believe we really should be very careful in terms of our technological miracles that we don't impose life on people who, in fact, are suffering beyond the ability for us to help.'' In Support of Options
A member of the audience, Ferne Taylor of Denver, drew applause when she said, ''When I can't digest my food, when I can't breathe on my own, when my heart can't beat on its own, it could just be that God is trying to tell me something.''
Mr. Lamm, when asked, said he did not have any particular age in mind for the terminally ill to ''get out of the way'' and that the decision should be made by the ill person in consultation with doctors and family members.
The Governor said Tuesday that the costs of treatment that allows some terminally ill people to live longer was ruining the nation's economic health.
Steve Mehlman, a spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons in Washington, D.C., said cutting off treatment to the terminally ill was no way to stem the rising cost of hospital care. ''It is not the elderly's fault,'' Mr. Mehlman said, ''We're the victims of health care inflation, not the cause.''
The Governor's comment was the latest in a series of controversial remarks by Mr. Lamm, who is in his third term as Governor. He recently angered Nevada officials by saying that one in eight women under the age of 45 in Las Vegas was a prostitute. (GOV. LAMM ASSERTS ELDERLY, IF VERY ILL, HAVE 'DUTY TO DIE')
Richard Lamm has said that the actual text of the "get out of the way and die" part of his speech was phrased as follows:
"Like leaves which fall off a tree forming the humus in which other plants can grow, we've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts, so that our kids can build a reasonable life." (LifeTree - timeline part 1)
No human being has a "duty to die." We are going to die. It is not up to us, however, as to when or how we are going to die. God has not created us to enjoy a certain material standard of life that is "threatened" by the longevity of other human beings. He has created us to know, to love, and to serve Him in this passing, mortal vale of tears as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, in order to hat we might die in a state of Sanctifying Grace and thus know the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven.
We are called to perform the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy for other human beings, not to consider them as economic "burdens" who must be dispatched by positive means so as to increase the "quality of live" for the "larger number." The Fifth Commandment means what it is says: "Thou shalt not kill."
Although the full text of Richard Lamm's much quoted "get out of the way and die" remark appears to refer to extraordinary means taken to sustain the life of a person when he is elderly or terminally ill, Lamm, like so many others in public life, believes in "physician-assisted" suicide. It is only logical for a man who believes that a mother can choose to kill her preborn child, whether by chemical or surgical means, to believe that human beings, if they make it out of the womb alive, can make decisions for themselves and/or authorize others to make decisions on their behalves to undertake actions that deliberately seek to kill them by positive means in order to "terminate" their lives.
Contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave are not the arbiters of their own lives or the lives of other innocent human beings. No one can authorize positive measures to be undertaken that can result in only one possible end: his death. Human beings cannot act collectively, whether in the institutions of civil governance or in various "advisory panels," to authorize positive measures to be undertaken that can result in only one possible end: the death of innocent human beings.
As I have written on many occasions, one may not be required to use extraordinary means, such as a ventilator, to sustain his body's involuntary functions. Decisions to use or to continue extraordinary means, which are to be outlined in durable power of attorney forms and not in the death warrants that are called, most euphemistically, as "living wills" (see an article by Miss Mary Therese Helmueller, on the danger of living wills, Are You Being Targeted For Euthanasia?, and Mrs. Randy Engel's interview with Dr. Paul Byrne on Brain Death; although both of these experts make references to the nonexistent legitimacy of the conciliar "hierarchy," they provide readers with excellent factual material concerning what is happening in our medical institutions and how the Federal government has been deeply involved in the matter of "living wills" long before Caesar Obamus came to power), depend upon a variety of circumstances. Such decisions involve what is known as the principle of the "double-fold effect," that is, that a morally licit action is undertaken that might result in a foreseen but intended consequence that is not directly willed as the first end of the morally licit action.
For example, breathing is a involuntary function of the human body. Ventilators provide oxygen to the body to breathe, thus supplying oxygen to the other organs of the body to help them function, sometimes more easily and without taxing the heart of an already weakened person, sometimes affording a person near death the means to be kept alive. The removal of a ventilator permits the body to do what it will or will not do on its own power. There are many instances of people living for years after the removal of a ventilator as they could breathe all on their own power.
A health-care professional has written to me to provide a brief explanation of how the ventilator works:
The ventilator provides enough pressure into the lungs that they inflate in order to receive the oxygen, then it allows passive exhalation via a valve that closes off the inbound air from the ventilator (again, this can be ambient and not even more highly oxygenated). So, it is more than the "assistance of oxygen" - the ventilator actually causes breathing itself, thus supplying some amount of oxygen, be it ambient or increased percentage above ambient (21% oxygen in ambient air). So, the ventilator is not only for increased oxygen but FIRST for breathing.
Increased oxygen can be given through a nasal tube or mask when the patient' involuntary breathing integrity is not challenged, i.e. the patient can inhale and exhale on his own. So, the first purpose of ventilator use is to bring about breathing, and the second assistance could be increased oxygenation if necessary. Only the testing of some arterial blood can show the percentage of oxygen in a patient's blood - and would reveal respiration - poor or satisfactory. We call this a "blood gas" measurement.
If a person dies as a result of the removal of a ventilator, however, that death, although a foreseen possible consequence of removing the ventilator to permit a person's body to perform or not on its own, that death is not directly willed as the first end of the morally licit action of removing a device that has keep an involuntary function of body performing IF the patient has agreed to such a removal (or has delegated someone in a durable power of attorney to do so) and only AFTER he has received the Sacrament of Extreme Unction and is thus prepare to die a good death while wearing the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Pope Pius XII outlined these basic principles in an allocution he gave to anesthesiologists in Italy on November 24, 1957:
1. Does the anesthesiologist have the right, or is he bound, in all cases of deep unconsciousness, even in those that are considered to be completely hopeless in the opinion of the competent doctor, to use modern artificial respiration apparatus, even against the will of the family?
In ordinary cases one will grant that the anesthesiologist has the right to act in this manner, but he is not bound to do so, unless this becomes the only way of fulfilling another certain moral duty.
The rights and duties of the doctor are correlative to those of the patient. The doctor, in fact, has no separate or independent right where the patient is concerned. In general he can take action only if the patient explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, gives him permission. The technique of resuscitation which concerns us here does not contain anything immoral in itself. Therefore the patient, if he were capable of making a personal decision, could lawfully use it and, consequently, give the doctor permission to use it. On the other hand, since these forms of treatment go beyond the ordinary means to which one is bound, it cannot be held that there is an obligation to use them nor, consequently, that one is bound to give the doctor permission to use them.
The rights and duties of the family depend in general upon the presumed will of the unconscious patient if he is of age and sui jurist. Where the proper and independent duty of the family is concerned, they are usually bound only to the use of ordinary means.
Consequently, if it appears that the attempt at resuscitation constitutes in reality such a burden for the family that one cannot in all conscience impose it upon them, they can lawfully insist that the doctor should discontinue these attempts, and the doctor can lawfully comply. There is not involved here a case of direct disposal of the life of the patient, nor of euthanasia in any way: this would never be licit. Even when it causes the arrest of circulation, the interruption of attempts at resuscitation is never more than an indirect cause of the cessation of life, and one must apply in this case the principle of double effect and of "voluntarium in cause."
Extreme Unction
2. We have, therefore, already answered the second question in essence: "Can the doctor remove the artificial respiration apparatus before the blood circulation has come to a complete stop? Can he do this, at least, when the patient has already received Extreme Unction? Is this Extreme Unction valid when it is administered at the moment when circulation ceases, or even after?"
We must give an affirmative answer to the first part of this question, as we have already explained. If Extreme Unction has not yet been administered, one must seek to prolong respiration until this has been done. But as far as concerns the validity of Extreme Unction at the moment when blood circulation stops completely or even after this moment, it is impossible to answer "yes" or "no."
If, as in the opinion of doctors, this complete cessation of circulation means a sure separation of the soul from the body, even if particular organs go on functioning, Extreme Unction would certainly not be valid, for the recipient would certainly not be a man anymore. And this is an indispensable condition for the reception of the sacraments.
If, on the other hand, doctors are of the opinion that the separation of the soul from the body is doubtful, and that this doubt cannot be solved, the validity of Extreme Unction is also doubtful. But, applying her usual rules: "The sacraments are for men" and "In case of extreme measures" the Church allows the sacrament to be administered conditionally in respect to the sacramental sign. (Address to an International Congress of Anesthesiologists, November 24, 1957, right dab on my sixth birthday!)
While some have tried to apply this allocution to the provision of food and water by artificial means, something that is neither costly or burdensome in any way today, such an application is erroneous. Food and water, no matter how administered, do not constitute "medical treatment," whether ordinary or extraordinary. Eating and drinking are voluntary functions of the human body with which need assistance at the beginning of our lives as infants and sometimes at the end of our lives or when we have been the victims of a trauma that renders us incapable of eating on our own. The removal of food and water, no matter how administered, can result in only one possible end: the death of an innocent human being. The principle of the double-fold effect does not apply here as the proposed course of action, the removal of food and water from an incapacitated human being who is no more near death than anyone else but simply needs assistance in eating and drinking, is morally illicit and can not be undertaken so as to cause the death of an innocent human being.
As Father Martin Stepanich, O.F.M., S.T.D., noted last year in a letter that he wrote to me:
As for a feeding tube being an "extraordinary means" of keeping a helpless patient alive, there is not doubt that it is "extraordinary" in the sense that such a tube is not the ordinary means of nourishing anyone, since God equipped us humans with mouths for partaking of food and drink and some of the medications needed. And, when feeding tubes were first introduced they were plainly something "extraordinary." However, in the course of time, they became quite commonly used, so that they could not really be looked upon as "extraordinary" any longer. They became ordinary means of keeping helpless patients alive, and they have saved the lives of countless many.
But whatever may have been the real or pretended reason why Michael Schiavo had Terri's feeding tube removed, it was all done in a very ugly way that it is sickening just to think about it. And it cannot be repeated too often that the merciless termination of Terri cannot possibly be justified before God. If Terri had bene already close to death at the time her feeding tube was removed, the only decent and humane thing to do would have been to continue providing her with what food or drink and medication she could still handle, and as long as it did her any good, and at that the same time to do the best to lessen her suffering until she peacefully expired. But to finish her off with a cruel starvation and dehydration? Never! (Father Martin Stepanich on Terri Schiavo)
The only reason that the case of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo became an issue was because she had relatives, her parents and her siblings, who wanted to save her life. The harsh reality is, of course, that brain-damaged and/or terminally ill people are being starved and dehydrated to death very frequently in "medical institutions," either under the explicit instructions of the person being killed or with the full consent of his relatives. No one can give his consent to undertake any action that has but one result: his death. The provision of food and water is ordinary care, not medical treatment of any type whatsoever.
Although one can choose to initiate and continue some course of truly extraordinary medical treatment, one has the right in many instances to refuse such treatment as dialysis or chemotherapy, admitting that judgments in this case must be made after consulting a true priest and after one's spiritual needs have been fulfilled. One is under no obligation to sustain life as an ultimate end in and of itself by the use of truly extraordinary medical means.
There are qualifications, though, that have to be made in these instances.
A young man with a family to support may have to at least consider such forms of treatment, seeking out the assistance of a solid spiritual director to guide him in the decision he makes. One who is in his sixties or seventies or eighties or beyond certainly has the right to let nature takes its course in cases of chronic or terminal illnesses, offering up his crosses to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary to unite them to the Cross of the Divine Redeemer Himself. God could choose to cure them miraculously. Refusing treatment to let nature take its course or to pray for a miraculous cure is far different morally than taking positive, concrete measures, such as the removal of food and water, that can result in only one outcome: death, which can never be directly willed under any circumstances.
Alas, it is those positive, concrete measures to violate the Fifth Commandment in order to kill innocent human beings whose are considered to be "unworthy" of any further expenditures that are at he heart of ObamaCare. This is, of course, the logical consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as exercised by the Catholic Church that was wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized by the inter-related naturalistic forces of Judeo-Masonry. Nations whose organic documents and whose praxis of jurisprudence do not recognize the authority of the Catholic Church as the infallible explicator of all that is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law must degenerate into tyrannies controlled by various elites, composed of people who believe that they can play God, that they can make life and death decisions for other human beings on the basis of pure, unadulterated utilitarianism.
A nation that does not recognize Christ the King will come to place no value at all in the lives of the rational creatures He redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. A nation that can endorse divorce and contraception and permit, in the name of "free speech" and "free press" and "personal liberty," mind you, pornography because it has no regard for the King of Heaven and Earth in its organic documents and its laws will come to endorse the execution of innocent as a matter of routine. As Dr. Charles E. Rice noted in his groundbreaking book, The Vanishing Right to Live (published by Doubleday Books in 1969), it would be only a matter of time before euthanasia under cover of the civil law would be a reality if baby-killing became the law of the land in the United States of America. That baby-killing and euthanasia and other evils have become the law of the land here and elsewhere, is but the logical result of the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity.
A few naturalists who are opposed to ObamaCare, unaware that the administration of Caesar Obamus is but the logical result of the overthrow of Christendom, are expressing their own alarm at the unjust utilitarian power that is being proposed to be transferred from the medical and insurance industries to government bureaucrats over life and death decisions. One of these is the libertarian columnist Nat Hentoff, a self-professed Jewish atheist, who wrote the following about ObamaCare:
I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) - as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill - decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.
The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to "Dr. Obama," particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).
Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that "allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination." (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing - which is fundamental to Obamacare goals - "the complete lives system." You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks.
No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama's eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a "very difficult democratic conversation" about how "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care" costs.
This end-of-life consultation has been stripped from the Senate Finance Committee bill because of democracy-in-action town-hall outcries but remains in three House bills.
A specific end-of-life proposal is in draft Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, a House Democratic health care bill that is echoed in two others that also call for versions of "advance care planning consultation" every five years - or sooner if the patient is diagnosed with a progressive or terminal illness.
As the Washington Post's Charles Lane penetratingly explains (Undue influence," Aug. 8): the government would pay doctors to discuss with Medicare patients explanations of "living wills and durable powers of attorney ... and (provide) a list of national and state-specific resources to assist consumers and their families" on making advance-care planning (read end-of-life) decisions.
Significantly, Lane adds that, "The doctor 'shall' (that's an order) explain that Medicare pays for hospice care (hint, hint)."
But the Obama administration claims these fateful consultations are "purely voluntary." In response, Lane - who learned a lot about reading between the lines while the Washington Post's Supreme Court reporter - advises us:
"To me, 'purely voluntary' means 'not unless the patient requests one.'"
But Obamas' doctors will initiate these chats. "Patients," notes Lane, "may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority."
And who will these doctors be? What criteria will such Obama advisers as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel set for conductors of end-of-life services?
I was alerted to Lanes' crucial cautionary advice - for those of use who may be influenced to attend the Obamacare twilight consultations - by Wesley J. Smith, a continually invaluable reporter and analyst of, as he calls his most recent book, the "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America" (Encounter Books).
As more Americans became increasingly troubled by this and other fearful elements of Dr. Obama's cost-efficient health care regimen, Smith adds this vital advice, no matter what legislation Obama finally signs into law:
"Remember that legislation itself is only half the problem with Obamacare. Whatever bill passes, hundreds of bureaucrats in the federal agencies will have years to promulgate scores of regulations to govern the details of the law.
"This is where the real mischief could be done because most regulatory actions are effectuated beneath the public radar. It is thus essential, as just one example, that any end-of-life counseling provision in the final bill be specified to be purely voluntary ... and that the counseling be required by law to be neutral as to outcome. Otherwise, even if the legislation doesn't push in a specific direction - for instance, THE GOVERNMENT REFUSING TREATMENT - the regulations could." (Emphasis added.)
Who'll let us know what's really being decided about our lives - and what is set into law? To begin with, Charles Lane, Wesley Smith and others whom I'll cite and add to as this chilling climax of the Obama presidency comes closer.
Condemning the furor at town-hall meetings around the country as "un-American," Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are blind to truly participatory democracy - as many individual Americans believe they are fighting, quite literally, for their lives.
I wonder whether Obama would be so willing to promote such health care initiatives if, say, it were 60 years from now, when his children will - as some of the current bills seem to imply - have lived their fill of life years, and the health care resources will then be going to the younger Americans? (For the First Time, I'm Truly Scared of a White House.)
As is the case with so many other naturalists, Nat Hentoff sees the dangers posed by the Leviathan monster state today. Catholics, however, saw this coming nearly a century ago as a precise and inexorable result of the overthrow of Christendom. That citizens would be--"hint, hint"--"encouraged" to go to hospices, which are death traps staffed by people who, in the name of a false "compassion," use increasingly higher doses of drugs like morphine to put their charges out of their "misery," is the direct result of a world founded on false, naturalistic principles.
Redemptive suffering? Not in our "modern" world. We're too "compassionate" for that, right? And what is happening in hospices now is just an institutionalization of some of the de facto practices at some nursing homes in the 1950s and 1960s whereby grown children of elderly patients made it clear with a wink and a nod (and passels full of loot) that they wouldn't mind seeing papa or mama end their lives with "dignity." (The eleventh episode of the fifth season of Ironside, "Gentle Oaks," which aired on Thursday, November 25, 1971, and guest starred Ruth Roman, a survivor of the Andrea Dorea shipwreck on July 25, 1956, and John Carradine, revolved around a convalescence home where patients checked in, but rarely checked out alive.)
I explained to my students in the early-1980s, when teaching them in an Introduction to Political Science course at Nassau Community College about the horrors of utilitarianism, that the day was coming when a British-style system of socialized medicine would be adopted in this country, telling them that someone at that time, 1983, to be precise, who was sixty years old in the United Kingdom and who did not have his own medical insurance was denied government payment for various services, including heart surgery, as it was believed that the cost of the surgery was not warranted by the patient's future level of economic "productivity." One of the quotes that I liked to use in those classes to demonstrate that Our Lord had indeed given us Catholic writers to warn us most prophetically about the dangers of our own days was this one from Hilaire Belloc:
It is worth noting, by the way, that the most sentimental people, who are loudest against the right to wage a just war, to execute a criminal, are just the people who are most likely to be in favour of ‘putting incurables out of their pain,’ which the commandment against murder most emphatically forbids. (Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the Reformation.)
Recent commentaries on this site have stressed the fact that hospitals in a Catholic world would be staffed by true, believing Catholics who would give the sort of care to the indigent and the elderly and the disabled that was given by the likes of Saint John of God and Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini and Saint Camillus de Lellis and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, to name just a few. Catholic physicians would administer care to patients according to the truths of the Catholic Faith, advising patients--in conjunction with true priests--as to which course of treatment was most advisable according to their particular states-in-law. And those Catholic physicians would not be tied to "Big Pharm" as they would be open to the methods of Saint Hildegard that have, most tragically, been coopted largely by New Agers, thus giving these proven methods a stigma in the eyes of even many learned Catholics that does a disservice to the cause of the temporal and spiritual well-being of Catholics at a time when the pills and vials of "Big Pharm" are being pushed in front of their noses without any thought being given to true alternatives.
As Pope Leo XIII explained in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, a world that is not governed according to Catholic truth will be one that is stained with crime:
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" (1 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.
The final details of Caesar Obamus's health-care bill will give Federal bureaucrats plenty of room to issue regulations in the Federal Register, the official publication of the government of the United States of America to announce the issuance of various Federal regulations that have the binding force of law as though they had been passed by the Congress of the United States of America and signed into law by a President, that will result in giving us the exact scenario faced by the Germans in the Third Reich that were condemned by Bishop Clemens von Galens in 1941 (see
Das Vierte Reich) over the course of time. The net effect of these regulations can be summarized by the title of this article: "Death to us all."
And while many commentators think that the "uprisings" taking place in town hall meetings are a sign that Caesar Obamus is in trouble politically, please remember that 2012 is a long way away and one must also never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to nominate yet another equivalent of former United States Senator Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., or a John Sidney McCain III or a George Walker Bush (who only won the Presidency in 2000 because Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won 95,000 votes in the State of Florida, most of which would have gone to then Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., and given him the presidency as opposed to Bush, who barely won in 2004 against the incompetent pro-abort Catholic twit named John F. Kerry). Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a specialty of the false opposites of the "right" known as the Republicans.
No, as I keep trying to note to the few readers who continue to access this site, the only way out of this mess that has been created, proximately speaking, by the Protestant Revolt and its aftermath us through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose feast we celebrate tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, 2009. As noted a few days ago in Insects Living Under the Rocks, while we must certainly be aware of the threats that are being posed to us by the current administration of naturalists of the leftist bent, we must also keep focused on the fact that the problems we face are the result of forces that have been at work in the world for the better part of half of a millennium. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has given us His Most Blessed Mother's Fatima Message to get us out of this mess. We are, as noted yesterday in Poof, living through a Chastisement for infidelity to the Fatima Message as France--and the world to this very day--has been Chastised for the infidelity of King Louis XIV to Christ the King's request that he consecrate the entirety of France to His Most Sacred Heart.
We must simply do our parts to sanctify our souls as we seek to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, keeping in mind that God has known from all eternity that we would be alive in these challenging times. There is work for us to do as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through His Most Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart. We must consider it our privilege to do this work as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
Do not live in fear. Our Lord told us not to fear those who kill the body, fear only him who can destroy the soul:
And I say to you, my friends: Be not afraid of them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will shew you whom you shall fear: fear ye him, who after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell. Yea, I say to you, fear him.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: you are of more value than many sparrows. And I say to you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God. But he that shall deny me before men, shall be denied before the angels of God. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but to him that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven.
And when they shall bring you into the synagogues, and to magistrates and powers, be not solicitous how or what you shall answer, or what you shall say; For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what you must say. (Luke 12: 4-12.)
We must never deny Christ the King before men. We must always raise the standard of Christ the King as we exhort one and all to recognize that Our King, Who awaits in tabernacles for our acts of love and thanksgiving and reparation and petition, must reign over each man and each nation and that His Most Blessed Mother, Mary our Immaculate Queen, is to be honored publicly by each man and each nation, including by the government of the United States of America, in order to know what it is to be blessed abundantly by the true God of Revelation.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now ?
Viva Cristo Rey!
