by
Thomas A. Droleskey
One of the consequences of living a world where most people can't see beyond the battles between the naturalists of the "left" and those of the "right" is that even believing Catholics are prone to side with the naturalists of the "right" as the alleged "antidotes" to the extremist positions of the collectivist "left." If the radical envirocommunists and the "mainstream" media express outrage over some environmental disaster, as is happening at the current time with the continuing oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon well that was dug by British Petroleum, then it is usually the case, as it happening now, that "conservatives" attempt to "push back" to minimize what they believe to be the exaggerated claims of the envirocommunists. Such must ever go the cycle of the false "opposites" of naturalism.
It is thus my purpose in this brief commentary to reiterate and expand upon points made two days ago in Deepwater Plague to emphasize the fact that the explosion at Deepwater Horizon oil well on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent continued flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico since that time represent a considerable catastrophe whose human and environmental consequences cannot be overstated. (Please see
Live Video Feed of Oil Gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for yet another view of the source of this catastrophe as it continues. That oil is not simply "going to go away." Even if the more conservative estimates of the equivalent of 35,000 barrels of oil per day emanating from this spill are correct, this leak is going to long term consequences the likes of which we have never seen before. I don't know about how, this sure looks like a chastisement to me. You can come to your own conclusions.)
First, although the extent of the ecological effects of the continued flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico may not be known for months, it is unmistakably the case that there is tremendous human suffering that has been imposed on the fishermen, shrimpers, oystermen and the oil rig workers (and the companies that manufacture and sell supplies to maintain and repair oil rigs) in southern Louisiana.
We know many of these people personally. The fishermen, the shrimpers and the oystermen have to get up early in the morning to get to their boats, which are docked in berths at piers that they must rent. These hard working men, most of whom are Catholic and deeply devoted to Our Lady no matter their unwitting involvement in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, have to pay insurance on their boats. They must purchase fuel for their boats. They work long hours on the waters and then must sell their catches to various local restaurants or wholesalers. Some of the poorer ones must settle for selling their catches along the side of roadways, sitting under umbrellas in hot, humid weather of southern Louisiana next to coolers containing their day's catch. These men are, each and every one of them, now out of business as a result of the oil spill that has befouled the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and made the fish and the oysters and shrimps inedible. This is nothing other than the responsibility of British Petroleum, which has a moral obligation to compensate these people for their losses.
British Petroleum has promised to pay legitimate economic claims for financial losses suffered as a result of the oil spill. It is not going to do so forever. Some of the "true believers" in the "invisible hand" of the "market" will contend that British Petroleum's first responsibility is to its shareholders, who must earn their dividends as a just return for their investments in the company, saying that those who have suffered as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak have to live with the risks of living in the area that they did. This is backward. It is investors who take the risk to invest in a company on the basis of its performance and profitability and the managerial competence of its executives. It is they who must suffer, therefore, when a company's plans or projects go awry, not those innocent human beings who have suffered losses from a man-made disaster that was preventable.
What will happen? Many of the Catholics of Acadiana, over 400,000 of whom are direct descendants of the Catholics of Acadia (now Nova Scotia) who were forcibly expelled by the British in 1755, will be forced to leave their beloved Acadiana to find jobs elsewhere. The vestigial influences of Catholic life in that part of Louisiana will disappear over the course of time. The cohesiveness of the Acadians, who are so friendly and kind and hospitable and gracious and generous, will be broken up yet again.
Those Catholics of Acadia in the Eighteenth Century were given the "choice" of going to the Anglican "service" or being expelled. Most chose to be expelled, becoming victims of what is known in French as Le Grand Derangement, as they refused to reject the Holy Faith in order to preserve their lives and preserve their families intact. They had the Faith of the early martyrs of Holy Mother Church. The terrible tragedy that is afflicting the descendants of the of the Acadians who were expelled from Nova Scotia will serve as the means to destroy a way of Catholic life that has held up over the centuries, despite the creeping influences of Americanism and the cultural influences that have immersed Catholics of all ethnic backgrounds in the indecent ways of Modernity. (Please see the appendix for description of Le Grand Derangement.)
What remains to be seen is whether those who owners and workers of the rice paddies of southwestern Louisiana will be affected as time progresses. Although it would be appear unlikely at this juncture that the oil and toxic chemical dispersants washing ashore in Louisiana at the present time will reach those paddies, such an occurrence is indeed entirely possible if the leaking oil is not stopped soon. Many charter boat operators in southern Louisiana are out of business already.
This is not a matter of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or a tornado. Those who suffer economic losses in natural disasters that are acts of God must accept that there will be times when the forces of nature, which have become more more violent as a result of the proliferation of unrepentant sin in the world, can wipe out their businesses and even their homes. Such are the consequences of Original Sin and Actual Sins even in the rhythms of the natural world.
What has happened in the explosion and leak at the Deepwater Horizon well is a man-made disaster. And those men responsible for this man-made disaster must be required to pay for its consequences to those whose businesses have been affected adversely. This is a matter of simple justice.
Second there is also the matter of the deepwater oil rig workers who are now out of jobs in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere in the country because of the Obama administration's efforts to exploit the crisis caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion and subsequent leak to advance its socialist-fascist agenda of enacting legislation mandating "alternative energy" that will result in government-created shortages of fossil fuel oil and a rise in prices for gasoline and home heating fuel (and jet fuel for airplanes) that will presage a new round of inflation, forcing many people to reduce their travels entirely, placing extraordinary burdens upon the poor who must use their automobiles to get to work.
There is no need for any kind of moratorium on the operation of new deepwater oil wells anywhere in the country simply because of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon well that was made possible a process of cementing around the well that even executives of British Petroleum knew could result in an explosion. The "accident," if it was such (and that will be determined in due course; if not now, certainly to be revealed on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead), is without precedent. Officials of the Obama administration are merely attempting to justify their own ideological agenda by means of the six month moratorium on the issuance of permits for new deepwater oil drilling projects, which punishes needlessly hard-working Americans and their families and the merchants at whose businesses they shop in their local communities. The imposition of this kind of suffering on innocent human beings is one of the worst kinds of social engineering imaginable.
Although reports indicate that Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus (aka President Barack Hussein Obama) is going to mandate that British Petroleum, which established an escrow account to pay for some of the damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil sill, pay the salaries of each of the workers who are unemployed now as a result of his, Obama's, unilateral, arbitrary and thoroughly unjustified six-moth moratorium on off-shore oil drilling, this demand is unjust and ludicrous. Yes, British Petroleum is responsible for the damages caused in the Gulf of Mexico and for the loss of revenue incurred by its own workers and those who have depended upon the fish and shrimp in the Gulf for their livelihood. British Petroleum is not responsible for paying those who have been put out of work by Barack Hussein Obama and his socialist, social-engineering minions. And it is highly doubtful that any president of the United States of America has the legal authority to mandate British Petroleum to cover the costs of his own administration's volitional policy decisions that have cost Americans their livelihoods This is another one of Obama's emotional red herrings.
Have you asked yourselves when this six-month moratorium on new deepwater oil will projects, which was rejected by a panel of experts who offered their recommendations to government officials (see White House Rejects Oil Report Claims) on off-shore oil operations will end? What will happen to the floating rigs? Will their operators be content to wait for the social-engineers to decide that they can resume operations? Or will those floating rigs be shut down and moved to other locations (such as off the western coast of Africa or in the North Atlantic, as noted in the news reported just above)? Will those operators who leave ever return to the United States of America? Are the jobs that have been lost at present solely because of the social-engineering of the Obama administration gone forever? Are we at some point in the future to lose the benefits of all off-shore oil drilling and jobs associated it to other locations just as almost all of our manufacturing jobs have been lost to Red China or the Republic of China or Taiwan or Indonesia or Malaysia or Mexico?
What will happen in the next six months?
Well, there will be an off-year national election. Perhaps the ever-hapless naturalists of the "right" will prevail in spite of themselves, winning a majority in one, if not both, houses of the Congress of the United States of America. Could it be that we will be faced with such a government-manufactured shortage of crude oil by that point that gasoline prices will skyrocket to European levels, going up to something approaching five or six dollars a gallon, causing more unemployment that the ever-unscrupulous son of Karl Marx by way of
Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky, Barack Hussein Obama (aka Barry Sotero), will blame at that time on the new Republican majority in Congress as he challenges to "do something" about the mess that "they" created by way of their own involvement with corporate fat cats? Obama is totally unscrupulous. He has lied repeatedly about ObamaCare. He is not beneath resorting to such tactics to blame others for a crisis he created. And we do have a bit of precedent for this as I seem to recall that there was this chap named Nero who blamed his own burning of the city of Rome in the year 67 A.D., which was an exercise in monstrous social-engineering, on the Christians.
We are in much deeper waters than most people think Don't be focused on the naturalists of the "right" who are discounting the significance of this unprecedented oil spill. The human tragedy involved here cannot be overstated. The "market" is not going to fix this human tragedy. Some businesses will be shuttered forever, meaning that many lives will be changed forever.More people will find themselves dependent upon some kind of government handout to support themselves, which is just fine as far as the social engineers and collectivists are concerned as it means more voters who have a vested interested in helping them remain in office.
I, for one, find it amazing some of the naturalists of the "right," playing their roles quite well as the "foils" of the naturalists of the "left," are as insensitive in many instances to the human suffering caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion and leak as are the envirocommunists, who are showing they aren't even concerned that much about the wildlife that have been killed as a result of the oil spill, no less the economic catastrophe that has been visited upon the good people of southern Louisiana, as they exploit this crisis hand-in-hand with the agents of the Obama administration, many of whom are closely, closely tied to Goldman Sachs, whose oil futures trading division is profiting handsomely from the crisis now in the hopes of making a greater "profit" when gasoline and home heating fuel prices skyrocket later this year (see A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government: Names and http://www.congress.org/soapbox/alert/15124161.)
As noted two days ago in
Deepwater Plague, these man-made disasters, as horrible as they are, pale into insignificance to the sufferings that the most seemingly slight Venial Sins imposed upon Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death and caused Our Lady to suffer in total compassion with her Divine Son as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were plunged deep into her Immaculate Heart. Those who are suffering the consequences of this tragedy must see it as having occurred within the Providence of God, Who sends them the sufficient graces through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, to withstand the difficulties of the present moment and to prosper in their midst as they recognize that every cross we are asked to bear has been perfectly fashioned for us by His loving hand. Every difficulty, every cross is an opportunity praise God for His loving kindness and mercy toward us as He permits us to suffer in this life so as to reduce, if not eliminate, the time of our suffering in Purgatory if, please Him and by Our Lady's graces, we persevere until the end in a state of Sanctifying Grace as members of the Catholic Church.
The tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus are ready to be flooded into the souls of those who accept suffering with joy and with gratitude as the means by which they can satisfy the debt they owe God for their absolved Mortal Sins, if any, and for their Venial Sins and their general attachment to sin. We might never be able to "figure out" to our earthly satisfaction, which is frequently nothing more than mere human curiosity born of our prideful, stubborn refusal to accept the will of God for us in our lives as everything--and I mean absolutely everything--that happens to us in this passing, mortal vale of tears is supposed to be viewed supernaturally as the means to glorify the Most Blessed Trinity through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and the means by which we might be able to sanctify and to thus save our souls. We must pray daily for an increase of the Supernatural Virtue of Faith in our lives so that we can see the world and everything that happens through the supernatural eyes of our immortal souls.
We are not supposed to be able to "'figure out" why certain things happen to us, admitting that we are supposed to learn not to repeat our mistakes and that much of what happens to us is nothing other than our own fault. Those things that happen to us that are out of our control must be used as opportunities to unite ourselves more closely to the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, maintaining always the Supernatural Virtue of Hope as we know that a blessed eternity awaits those who accept suffering with joy and equanimity if they continue walking without complaining on the rocky road that leads to the narrow gate of Life Himself. The ways of God are not our own, and to keep us humble and totally reliant upon Him through His true Church He wants us simply to trust in Him completely and without question. It's called being a Catholic. It's that simple.
Certainly, this is not to minimize the importance of seeking justice and of noting the nefarious deeds of the naturalists who believe that their own ideological agendas are "true" and "just" (it is interesting that those who believe in moral relativism are absolutists when it comes to their own ideological predilections; then again, moral relativists are absolutists as they believe absolutely in their moral relativism). Justice must be sought without vengeance. The light of truth, both supernatural and natural, must be shed on the events of the day, exposing the deeds of malefactors while we pray for their conversion to the true Faith before they die.
We must keep in mind, however, that each of us is a malefactor in the sight of God. We need to rely upon the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as the totally consecrated slaves of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. We are indeed suffering chastisements for our own many sins and those of the whole world, which is why we need to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.
Our Lady has given us the Rosary as the weapon to defeat the devil and his minions in our own lives and to crush the enemies of her Divine Son, Christ the King, at work in the world. She has given us her Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel as her shield to protect us in the battles of the moment.
As we offer our prayers for those who are suffering now in Louisiana, it is important to note that the deep waters of the present time will recede. Let us pray to Our Lady that we are held firmly in her loving arms now and at the hour of our deaths so she may present to her Divine Son as lovers of His Holy Cross upon awakening to our own Particular Judgment.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
What are we waiting for?
Vivat Christus Rex!
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Basil the Great, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
Appendix
Le Grand Derangement
From Acadia and the Acadians, by Robert Chenard
The British "Final Solution" for the Acadians was deportation. It all started at 3 PM on September 5, 1755 at the Catholic Church in Grand Pre. Following the orders and plan of the Lieutenant General, Governor Lawrence, following the decree of the King of England, the British Council at Halifax unanimously decided to begin deporting the Acadians immediately to various British Colonies outside of Canada. The vessels needed for this were to be commandeered in the King's name. By this time, the Acadians numbered some 13,000 on the Acadian peninsula alone. More and more British troops had been arriving and the Acadians were acutely aware that big trouble was brewing.
A proclamation was issued accordingly to "all the inhabitants of the district of Grand Pre, Minas, River Canard, etc. ..... to attend the Church at Grand Pre on Friday the fifth instant, at three of the clock in the afternoon, that we may impart to them what we are ordered to communicate to them; declaring that no excuse will be admitted, on any pretense whatever, on pain of forfeiting goods and chattels, in default of real estate. - Given at Grand Pre 2d September, 1755."
That Friday, 418 of the residents presented themselves at the Church as ordered. Colonel John Winslow, having tricked them into this assembly, announced to them that they were to be immediately deported outside of the Province and that all their properties and goods with the exception of their cash monies and personal belongings were hereby confiscated by and to the benefit of the British Crown. Soldiers surrounded the church to prevent any escapes.
The news of this spread quickly and those who could escaped to the woods, but in vain. Their country was laid to waste. Deported from Grand Pre alone were 2,242 Acadians. The Acadians were lined up and driven to the transport ships. Women and children were loaded on boats as fast as could be provided. As if to deprive the exiles of even the hope of return, the British burned to the ground 255 of their homes, 276 barns, 11 mills, and one church while the transport vessels were still in sight. Despite the promises of Colonel Winslow to keep families together, most families were separated immediately - parents from their children, wives from their husbands, children from their siblings - many to never see each other again. The Acadians were placed under arrest and were loaded on the ships with no choice in the manner. They took only what they were wearing and what little monies they had on their person at the time. Some of the ships used as transports were not seaworthy. Consequently, two of the ships, the Violet and the Duke William, with two groups of 650 Acadians went to a watery grave in the icy mid-Atlantic on December 10 of that year. Only one lifeboat with 27 survivors lived to tell what happened. "I do not know," observes 19th century American historian George Bancroft, " if the annals of the human race keep the record of sorrows so wantonly inflicted, so bitter and so lasting as fell upon the French inhabitants of Acadia."
How ironic it must seem for the living descendants of those expelled Acadians who now live in the town of Winslow - a town so named in honor of the same British officer, General John Winslow, who was directly responsible for carrying out those dastardly deeds in the darkest hour in the history of the Acadians.
About 2,000 Acadians managed to escape arrest and they wandered through the woods like hunted animals, half-clad and half-starved, in ever search of some near relative. Some made it safely into Quebec where they established new lives in such towns as l'Acadie, Becancour, Nicolet, and others. Of those escapees was one of my own 6th generation paternal ancestors, Laurent Doucet, son of Paul Doucet (a direct descendant of Acadia's first governor, Germain Doucet) and Anne LeBrun. How they survived this terrible ordeal is almost miraculous. Today, the direct descendants of these escaped Acadians number over 230,000 souls, including one-third of the present population of New Brunswick.
The deportation continued unabated over a period of 8 years. Between 1755 and 1763, Governor Lawrence kept unloading the Acadians along the American coast - over 2,000 to Boston, where the Bostonians treated them like slaves, 700 from Grand Pre and Port Royal to Connecticut, and about 250 poor, naked, and destitute to New York. New York rid the major part of her Acadian exiles by persuading them to emigrate to Santo Domingo, where most of them perished miserably from the torrid sun. Lawrence exiled 754 to Philadelphia where, being held captive aboard the ships in the harbor for three months, smallpox killed 237 of them. Some 2,000 more were removed to Maryland where several hundred of them escaped to Louisiana, Quebec, and the West Indies. To North Carolina, Lawrence sent 500, and to South Carolina, 1,500 Acadians. The Carolinians cleverly enticed them to leave in some old boats for Acadia. Of these, only 900 arrived at the River St. John. Another 400 were banished to Georgia where, preferring death anywhere in the tropics to slavery with the blacks in the cotton fields and sugar plantations, they fled. Wherever they went, the Acadians were unwanted, shunned, cheated, despised, and heartlessly allowed to die without even the care and affection given to pet animals. Only Connecticut was prepared to receive the exiles sent to her and treated them as a group humanely. In all, nearly 3,700 Acadians were dispersed along the coast in the British colonies of America. There is no doubt that every Acadian would have preferred exile in France to banishment to any other place.
The method of dispersing the Acadians has scarcely an equal in history. Said Edmund Burke, "We did, in my opinion, most inhumanely, and upon the pretenses that, in the eye of an honest man, are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate." How right was his judgement. There were many pitiful separations in families. One case is particularly well-known. Due to the small number of transports, Rene Leblanc, notary-public of Grand Pre, his wife, and their two youngest children were put on one ship and landed in New York, but their eighteen other children and 150 grandchildren were loaded aboard different ships and dispersed among the colonies. There were deliberate separations of husbands from their wives and fathers from their children. Men would come back home from their work in the woods or fishing boats only to find their families gone, their homes burned to the ground, and the British soldiers waiting to arrest them and force them aboard ships for permanent banishment from their lands. Yet others were taken to various ports in England as prisoners of war and placed in concentration camps such as at Liverpool. (Acadia and the Acadians, by Robert Chenard.)
