Dialectical Americanism

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Men may come and men may go, because God has left plenty of room for the to and fro of their free-will; but the substantial lines of nature and the not less substantial lines of Eternal Law have never changed, are not changing and never will change.  There are bounds beyond which one may stray as far as one sees fit, but to do so ends in death; there are limits which empty philosophical fantasizing may have one mock or not take seriously, but they put together an alliance of hard facts and nature to chastise anybody who steps over them.  And history has sufficiently taught, with frightening proof from the life and death of nations, that the reply to all violators of the outline of "humanity" is always, sooner or later, catastrophe.

From the dialectic of Hegel onwards, we have had dinned in our ears what are nothing but fables, and by dint of hearing them so often, many people end up by getting used to them, if only passively.  But the truth of the matter is that Nature and Truth, and the Law bound up in both, go their imperturbable way, and they cut to pieces the simpletons who upon no grounds whatsoever believe in radical and far-reaching changes in the very structure of man.

The consequences of such violations are not a new outline of man, but disorders, hurtful instability of all kinds, the frightening dryness of human souls, the shattering increase in the number of human castaways, driven long since out of people's sight and mind to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and rejection.  Aligned on the wrecking of the eternal norms are to be found the broken families, lives cut short before their time, hearths and homes gone cold, old people cast to one side, youngsters willfully degenerate and -- at the end of the line -- souls in despair and taking their own lives.  All of which human wreckage gives witness to the fact that the "line of God" does not give way, nor does it admit of any adaption to the delirious dreams of the so-called philosophers! (Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, Men's Dress Worn By Women.)

 

Although the late Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, Italy, from May 29, 1946, to July 6, 1987, wrote the words quoted above in an "notification" to his clergy about the harm of women wearing masculine attire, his words have application to the simple truth that false ideas always produce bad consequences. While God does indeed intends to bring good out of the evil done by men, He never positively wills us to commit any evil or positively wills us to believe in false ideas that can lead only to evil consequences. To believe in a falsehood, even if one is sincere in such a belief, is to permit oneself to be led in a thousand different and frequently contradictory directions.

Permit me what I hope will be a brief explanation of this point.

As I have tried to hammer home repeatedly on this site, one of the principal ways in which Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI defects from the Catholic Faith is by holding to a Modernist conception of dogmatic truth that is contrary to right reason logic even on the level of natural reason and has been condemned by the dogmatic authority of the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIII noted in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896, that one falls from the Faith and can no longer be considered a Catholic if he falls from one article of the Faith. Over and above the many other areas that Ratzinger/Benedict defects from the Catholic Faith, the current reigning head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism defects from the nature of dogmatic truth as defined by the Catholic Church. That is enough, in and of itself, to expel him as a member of the Catholic Church.

Although Ratzinger/Benedict, to be fair, may not subscribe completely to the Hegelianism (the absurd belief that truth contains within itself the seeds of its own internal contradiction) of his mentor, the late Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, he does belief that the expression of dogmatic truth is, more or less, the "prisoner" of the circumstances that gave rise to its expression, that dogmatic truth is so vast and has so many nuances that it is never possible to express it adequately and permanently at any one time, which is why it is necessary for there to be occasional "re-examinations" of dogmatic expressions in order to conform them more fully to the "language" of the mythical entity known as "modern man." Ratzinger/Benedict would say that, yes, of course, absolute dogmatic truths exist, but that they can never be fully understood or expressed other than by words that are "contingent" upon the historical circumstances which gave rise to their formulation.

Ratzinger/Benedict, as a disciple and progenitor of the "New Theology," sees no contradiction at all in occasional reformulations of the expressions of certain dogmatic truths. To justify novel formulations of dogmatic truths that run counter to the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church, Ratzinger/Benedict has employed various semantic devices throughout his career, settling upon the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" that he discussed in his infamous address to the conciliar curia on December 22, 2005. Paramount to this novel effort to reconcile conciliarism's apostasies with the teaching of the Catholic Church is, of course, Ratzinger/Benedict's abject rejection of the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, Scholasticism. It is absolutely necessary for him to reject Scholasticism in order to have recourse to the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" to justify such things as his own novel conception of dogmatic truth that has been anathematized by the Catholic Church.

Pope Saint Pius X, writing in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907, and Pope Pius XII, writing in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, each explained the necessity of those who defect from the teaching of the Church to reject Scholasticism:

If we pass on from the moral to the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first and the chief which presents itself is ignorance. Yes, these very Modernists who seek to be esteemed as Doctors of the Church, who speak so loftily of modern philosophy and show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the one with all its false glamour, precisely because their ignorance of the other has left them without the means of being able to recognize confusion of thought and to refute sophistry. Their whole system, containing as it does errors so many and so great, has been born of the union between faith and false philosophy.

Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labor on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavoring to ruin the Church when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed. Their artifices to delude men's minds are of two kinds, the first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose. They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting war. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: "The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science." They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.'' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Hence to neglect, or to reject, or to devalue so many and such great resources which have been conceived, expressed and perfected so often by the age-old work of men endowed with no common talent and holiness, working under the vigilant supervision of the holy magisterium and with the light and leadership of the Holy Ghost in order to state the truths of the faith ever more accurately, to do this so that these things may be replaced by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. The contempt for terms and notions habitually used by scholastic theologians leads of itself to the weakening of what they call speculative theology, a discipline which these men consider devoid of true certitude because it is based on theological reasoning.

Unfortunately these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself, which gives such authoritative approval to scholastic theology. This Teaching Authority is represented by them as a hindrance to progress and an obstacle in the way of science. Some non Catholics consider it as an unjust restraint preventing some more qualified theologians from reforming their subject. And although this sacred Office of Teacher in matters of faith and morals must be the proximate and universal criterion of truth for all theologians, since to it has been entrusted by Christ Our Lord the whole deposit of faith -- Sacred Scripture and divine Tradition -- to be preserved, guarded and interpreted, still the duty that is incumbent on the faithful to flee also those errors which more or less approach heresy, and accordingly "to keep also the constitutions and decrees by which such evil opinions are proscribed and forbidden by the Holy See," is sometimes as little known as if it did not exist. What is expounded in the Encyclical Letters of the Roman Pontiffs concerning the nature and constitution of the Church, is deliberately and habitually neglected by some with the idea of giving force to a certain vague notion which they profess to have found in the ancient Fathers, especially the Greeks. The Popes, they assert, do not wish to pass judgment on what is a matter of dispute among theologians, so recourse must be had to the early sources, and the recent constitutions and decrees of the Teaching Church must be explained from the writings of the ancients. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

 

Popes Saint Pius X and Pius XII described with exactitude the Modernist mind of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict concerning the nature of dogmatic truth, as can be seen from these three statements of his over the years that are absolutely consistent with each other:

In theses 10-12, the difficult problem of the relationship between language and thought is debated, which in post-conciliar discussions was the immediate departure point of the dispute.

The identity of the Christian substance as such, the Christian 'thing' was not directly ... censured, but it was pointed out that no formula, no matter how valid and indispensable it may have been in its time, can fully express the thought mentioned in it and declare it unequivocally forever, since language is constantly in movement and the content of its meaning changes. (Fr. Ratzinger: Dogmatic formulas must always change.)

The text [of the document Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation] also presents the various types of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms - perhaps for the first time with this clarity - that there are decisions of the magisterium that cannot be the last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. The nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times influenced, may need further correction.

In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century [19th century] about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time [on evolutionism]. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from falling into the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they became obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at their proper time.

(Joseph Ratzinger, "Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation," published with the title "Rinnovato dialogo fra Magistero e Teologia," in L'Osservatore Romano, June 27, 1990, p. 6, Card. Ratzinger: The teachings of the Popes against Modernism are obsolete.)

Secondly, it was necessary to give a new definition to the relationship between the Church and the modern State that would make room impartially for citizens of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence among them and for the freedom to practise their own religion.

Thirdly, linked more generally to this was the problem of religious tolerance - a question that required a new definition of the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions. In particular, before the recent crimes of the Nazi regime and, in general, with a retrospective look at a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.

These are all subjects of great importance - they were the great themes of the second part of the Council - on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.

It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.

On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

 

Apart from the critiques of this philosophically absurd approach to dogmatic truth offered by Popes Saint Pius X and Pius XII that have just been cited, the [First] Vatican Council has solemnly anathematized the very few that has been held by Ratzinger/Benedict throughout the course of his priesthood:

Hence, that meaning of the sacred dogmata is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be an abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.... If anyone says that it is possible that at some given time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmata propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has always understood and understands: let him be anathema. [Vatican Council, 1870.]

 

Pope Saint Pius X amplified this condemnation--and cited it--in Pascendi Dominci Gregis:

 

Hence it is quite impossible [the Modernists assert] to maintain that they [dogmatic statements] absolutely contain the truth: for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man; and as instruments, they are the vehicles of truth, and must therefore in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sense. But the object of the religious sense, as something contained in the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes can avail himself of varying conditions. Consequently, the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion.

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: "These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts." On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason"; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth." Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: "Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation." (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

 

It should be noted furthermore that Ratzinger/Benedict's view of the nature of dogmatic truth (that it is expressed merely in contingent terms as a result of the inability of man to express it fully at any one point in time) is an act of blasphemy against the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who has inspired the Fathers of dogmatic councils to express their dogmatic decrees with exactitude and Who has similarly directed true popes to formulate their reiteration of the teaching contained in the Church's Ordinary Magisterium. For Ratzinger/Benedict to be correct, therefore, God Himself would have had to misdirect the Fathers of dogmatic councils and would have to abandon legitimate Successors of Saint Peter as they reiterated articles contained in the Deposit of Faith as they have been understood and taught from time immemorial. This is blasphemous. It is also an absolute impossibility.

Truth is immutable because God, the Author of all truth, is immutable. It is precisely because God does not want his rational creatures, whose intellects have been darkened by the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin and their own Actual Sins, confused about what He has revealed to us through Holy Mother Church and has entrusted to her magisterial authority for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Truth is clear. Truth is certain. Truth is absolute. The expression of truth must remain the same at all times. Truth can never contradict itself. Truth contains within itself no paradoxes. Truth does not give rise to its antithesis.

Those, such as Ratzinger/Benedict, who reject the certainty and permanence of the expression of dogmatic truth believe in a falsehood. They may, as noted at the beginning of this commentary, believe it most sincerely. Sincerity of intention, however, can never make something that is false true. Sincerity of intention and a good motivation can never prevent the evil consequences that must flow from false ideas from occurring. Falsehoods do indeed have a dialectic, if you will, of their very own that cause them to change (or permutate) endlessly over time, causing nothing but one disastrous consequence after another in their wake.

Once again, let me explain.

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) believed that history was a clash of competing ideas. Thus it was that he devised what he called the principle of "dialectical idealism" to explain the history of man. Hegel contended that an original idea--the thesis-- contains within itself the seeds of its own internal contradiction, something we know, of course, to be patently false for true ideas but is indeed quite true for false ideas, something that Hegel did not recognized. This original idea or thesis gives rise immediately to its exact opposite--the antithesis--and the clash between the original idea (thesis) and its direct contradiction (antithesis) produces the new idea (the synthesis). The synthesis becomes the "new thesis," which gives rise with its own antithesis, thus producing a new clash and a new synthesis. The "end" of this dialectical process, according to Hegel, was what he called "Ideal Spirit." In other words, God Himself is in the process of "becoming." Hegel would thus give birth to what is known as "process philosophy" and "process theology," beliefs that were held by the proto-Modernism, the excommunicated Father Alfred Loisy.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) accepted the fact that history was defined by the dialectical concept of clash. As a materialist who rejected the existence of God and thus the fact that man has a rational, immortal soul made in His image and likeness, Marx adapted Hegel's dialectical idealism to his own belief that history is defined by the clash of competing economic classes. Marx's dialectical materialism contended that the struggle or clash between different economic classes and systems would result in the "end" of "ideal communism," a stage at which history itself would "end" and "man would begin." The inequitable distribution of wealth will have been remedied by the death of capitalists around the world and the forcible redistribution of their wealth by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is in this mythical stage of "ideal communism" that the state will "wither away and die" as the need for all human competition will have ceased to exist given the equitable distribution of wealth.

Like Hegel's dialectical idealism, which is premised on the falsehood that God and His truths are ever evolving in a constant clash of ideas, Marx's dialectical materialism is premised on the falsehood of the rejection of God's existence and thus upon a rejection of man's inherently fallen nature and that man can be satisfied only by the possession of God's very inner life in His immortal soul by means of Sanctifying Grace as a necessary precondition to enjoy the everlasting happiness of the possession of His very Beatific Vision in Heaven after death. How many hundreds of millions of lives have been slaughtered in the effort to "expedite" the "realization" of this falsehood?

As alluded to above, the dialectical concept advanced by Hegel and popularized by Marx, both of which played an important role in legitimizing Darwinism (God evolves, truth evolves, man evolves--either spiritually or economically, the species evolve), was near and dear to the hearts of early Modernists and their successors, including the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., who believed that the Church herself had to "evolve" with the times. The proto-ecumenists of the early-Twentieth Century, such as the late Abbe Paul Couturier, cited by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II at footnote fifty of Ut Unum Sint, May 25, 1995, and very openly by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in an address to members of Protestant sects and the Orthodox confessions in Cologne, Germany, on Friday, August 19, 2005, was a firm disciple of Chardin's. The belief that the Sacred Liturgy must "evolve" with the times in order to convey the notion that doctrine itself was mutable was at the heart of the "liturgical movement" that had been hijacked by the Modernists in their bent to use the Mass as the means to promote false ecumenism. We are eyewitnesses to the spiritual wreckage that has been wrought as a result.

Although Hegelianism is false in that truth does not change, does not evolve and cannot contradict itself, Hegelianism's dialectical thesis is true, in a fashion of speaking, as it relates to false ideas. False ideas do change, they do evolve, they do contradict themselves.

Just look at how the falsehoods of Protestantism have "evolved" and mutated over the last nearly five hundred years. From the time of Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., in 1517 to the present day there have arisen over 33,000 different Protestant sects. One cannot keep track of the disparate beliefs that are held by these false sects, many of which do pitched battle with each other, no less the true Faith, on a regular basis.

One can also look at how the falsehoods of conciliarism have "evolved" and mutated over the last forty years. Formerly Catholic parishes in the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are a conglomeration of different "mission statements," some of which state quite frankly that those of perverse "orientations" are "important" members of their "faith communities" as the "journey" of "discovery" unfolds in parish life. Offerings of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service can vary widely--even by the same presbyter--from one time to another even in the same parish, no less from parish to parish. (Believe me, I know. I experienced it for far, far too long, and those experiences became an integral part of the analysis of the Novus Ordo that I provided in G.I.R.M. Warfare.) It is not necessary in most parishes in the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism for those who worship there to be of like point on points of doctrine, which is why Catholics in public life who support the chemical and surgical assassination of innocent preborn children in their mothers' wombs remain in perfectly good standing in these parishes (and not infrequently serve as "lectors" and "extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist").

Here is where the dialectical mutation of the falsehoods of Modernity and Modernism intersect in the lives of ordinary Catholics, many of whom believe that they can indeed call themselves members of the Church in good standing while supporting one abject evil after another or while believing that there is something short of Catholicism that can serve as the basis of personal and social order. Thus it is, you see, that the falsehoods of the condemned heresy of Americanism have played an essential role in helping Catholics all across the ecclesiastical divide accept the false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that are so responsible for the social chaos that is all around us.

Like all other falsehoods, Americanism has its own "dialectic," if you will, as a result of its numerous false premises that most Catholics, including many of those who assist at Masses offered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism in any way at all, accept without realizing for a single moment that they are steeped in one set of contradictions after another, believing that they can be faithful members of the Catholic Church while adhering, perhaps inchoately, to beliefs that are inimical to the Sacred Rights of Christ the King and thus to the common temporal good of nations as that good must be pursued in light of man's Last End.

Let me try, once again, to enumerate the falsehoods of Americanism and to explain how they have mutated in the lives of ordinary Catholics all across the ecclesiastical divide, making advertence, at least in part, to material that I wrote thirteen months ago now, providing a bit of original elaboration in the context of this current article.

Americanism is the exaltation of the spirit of individual human abilities to "build" the "better world" without a complete and humble submission to everything contained in the Deposit of Faith that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the God the Holy Ghost, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. It is thus the exaltation of religious indifferentism (the belief that it doesn't matter what religion one belongs to, if any religion at all, as long as one is a "good" person) over the necessity of belief in the one and only true Faith, Catholicism, as the only means of personal salvation and the only means of social order.

To wit, both "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics in the United States of America believe in the false, naturalistic premises of the American founding, that is, that is possible for men of divergent religious beliefs--or of no religious beliefs at all--to work together as 'brothers" for the common temporal good without regard for man's Last End, the possession of the Beatific Vision for all eternity. Those who subscribe to the "leftist' bent of naturalism believe that the teaching of the Church is of little account in matters of public policy. Those who subscribe to the "rightist" bent of naturalism believe, at least for the most part, that it is not necessary to be confessionally Catholic when discussing matters of public policy, that it is "good enough" to speak of "traditional values" in order to work with Protestants and Jews and others to combat the evils of the day.

Americanism is thus the exaltation of the ability of human beings to be virtuous on their own without belief in, access to or cooperation with the Sanctifying Graces that were won by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and that flow into human hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. It is thus the exaltation of the spirit of the heresy of semi-Pelagianism, which asserts that human beings are more or less self-redemptive as they stir up graces within themselves to accomplish whatever "they" set their minds to doing.

Americanism is the exaltation of the spirit of egalitarianism over the truth of the hierarchy that exists in the Order of Creation and in the Order of Grace, that is, the Order of Redemption, making it necessary for there to a separation of Church and State in order that "free men" can choose for themselves how to live. Americanism is, all of its invocations of a generic "God" notwithstanding, the exaltation of the deification of man over man's due submission to God and the authority of His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls and to matters of fundamental justice in according with the binding precepts of His Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Americanism is the exaltation of the spirit of "civil" and "religious" liberty" over the true sense of liberty that comes only from the Catholic Faith.

Thus it is that a "dialectic," if you will, was born with the American founding that has splintered, much like Protestantism and all other falsehoods, in many different directions, producing competing political "camps" among Catholics in the United States of America. (See my elaborate discussion of these two strains in We're Not in Kansas Any More, a pertinent section of which I have appended below the Litany of Saints at the end of this current article.)

There are Catholics who are committed to the "leftist" strain of naturalism who see in the tenets of egalitarianism and statism the means to improve the lot of the poor and the marginalized. And then there are those of the "rightist" strain who believe that the very false, naturalistic tenets of the American founding can be used to "retard" various evils, including a statism that is but the logical, inevitable consequence of the founders' false belief that the "civic virtue" of the citizenry--combined with a system of checks and balances within the Federal government and a division of power between the Federal government and the state governments--could serve as a check against the "tyranny of the majority" and/or an excessive growth of power of the Federal government.

There is, of course, one and only check, albeit far from an absolute guarantor against the abuse of power by those who hold office in civil governments. This check is the Social Reign of Christ the King as It is exercised by the Catholic Church. Neither those Catholics committed to the "leftist" strain of naturalism or to the "rightist" strain of naturalism accept this fundamental truth. "Leftists" and "rightists" have views of the civil state based upon variations of the falsehoods of the American founding, not upon the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. The fact that there are differences between the "leftist" and "rightist" strains of naturalism amongst Catholics in the United States of America speaks loudly as to the truth that false premises must produce divergences and clashes in the minds of those who believe that they possess the "true" interpretation of those false premises.

The false premises of the American founding have nothing at all to do with the specific institutional arrangements created by the Constitution of the Untied States of America. Holy Mother Church has taught from time immemorial that she can adapt to any legitimate form of government. The false premises of the American founding have everything to to with the practical sovereignty of man over his own affairs to the absolute exclusion of the Sacred Rights of Christ the King as they must be exercised by the Catholic Church.

This is what I wrote in A Catechism of the Social Reign of Christ the King:

8) Are you saying that the Catholic Church condemns the form of government created in the Constitution of the United States of America?

No. As noted above, the Church can adapt to any particular form of government. She does insist, however, that she be recognized by the civil government as the true religion and that her right to intervene with civil officials as a last resort after the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation be acknowledged in a civil state's organic documents and/or a concordat with the Holy See. Everything else is left to the free judgment of men, who are nevertheless bound to pursue their actions in the civil realm in light of their eternal destiny.

 

A failure on the part of a civil government to recognize the true religion leads to the proliferation of one evil after another. Those who do not recognize that the civil state has a necessity to recognize the true religion and to yield to her magisterial authority in all that pertains to the good of souls will wind up considering themselves "independent" of that magisterial authority or they will wind up attempting to use that civil state's false premises to combat the evils of the day, making them modern day versions of the mythical Sisyphus (see A World of Sisyphuses and It's Still a World of Sisyphuses). This is the inevitable "dialectic" produced by Americanism, which has played such a key role in shaping the counterfeit church of conciliarism's embrace of "religious liberty" and the "separation of Church and State," both of which have been condemned by the authority of the Catholic Church from time immemorial.

The falsehoods of the American founding, you see, must lead to social chaos and disorder. The falsehoods of the American founding must lead to the triumph of statism. The falsehoods of the American founding must wind up convincing Catholics all across the ecclesiastical divide that there is some naturalistic or "inter-denominational" means short of Catholicism to "resolve" problems that have their remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in our own Actual Sins and thus can be ameliorated only by a reform of individual lives in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. The falsehoods of the American founding must wind up producing a "dialectic" that is premised upon the necessity of the clash of "competing interests" (see James Madison's The Federalist, Numbers 10 and 51) as the means of "safeguarding" personal liberty.

We see this "dialectic" at work at present with the news of the Wizard of Obama's appointment of the pro-abortion Catholic Governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, who has worked closely with the notorious Wichita, Kansas, late-term baby-killer, George Tiller (see Kansas Gov Kathleen Sebelius Held Secret Event With Late-Term Abortionist George Tiller), as the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Sebelius is an unreconstructed pro-abort, and one who has maintained her "good standing" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism despite the admonition delivered to her last year by the conciliar "archbishop" of Kansas City in Kansas, Joseph Naumann, to refrain from receiving what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service.

"Liberal" Catholics, most of whom support the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, are hailing Sebelius's appointment, believing that one can be privately "opposed" to child-killing" while supporting it publicly as a matter of yielding to "majoritarian" sentiment and the "rule of law."

This "liberal" view of the bifurcation of one's "private" beliefs and one's public positions is pure Americanism: the belief that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to the Catholic Church are of no account in public-policy decision-making, a view that has been condemned repeatedly by the authority of the Catholic Church as an absurdity. This is what Pope Leo XIII wrote on the matter in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue.

 

"Conservative" Catholics are upset with the Sebelius appointment, which was made by the Wizard of Obama after his first nominee to be Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, former United States Senator Thomas Daschle, yet another pro-abortion Catholic in public life who remains in "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, had to withdraw because he had "forgot" to report large amounts of income he had earned as a lobbyist after his defeat for re-election in 2004. The opposition of these "conservative" Catholics is most understandable as no one who supports baby-killing by chemical or surgical means in a single, solitary instance is fit to hold any office, whether elected or appointed, in any government anywhere in the world.

Committed, however, to the falsehoods of Americanism, which teaches us that we are going to "correct" various evils at the ballot box and by our active participation in the Judeo-Masonic fraud that is electoral politics as it is monopolized by the two major organized crime families in the United States of America, the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, many of these "conservative" Catholics have now found their "voices" to protest an appointment as horrific as that as Sebelius's, after eight years of utter silence as their partly "pro-life," partly pro-death "conservative" statist, George Walker Bush, appointed one pro-abort after another to the highest echelons of his administration, including the Catholic pro-abort Tom Ridge to be the first Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security (see an article I wrote in 2001 on Ridge's appointment as "homeland security czar" prior to the creation of the mess of a Cabinet department that has fouled up one disaster relief effort after another, No Homeland Security for the Preborn).

What these "conservative" Catholics forget is that almost none of them uttered word one, shall we say, when the "conservative" statist, George Walker Bush, appointed pro-aborts such as Ridge and Colin Powell and Andrew Card and Christine Todd Whitman and Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey and Condoleeza Rice and Michael Chertoff, Donald Rumsfeld, et al., to top positions in his administration. Why have their now discovered their "voices" after so much silence during the administration of former President George Walker Bush? Why is there so much outrage over Kathleen Sebelius, whose support for abortion and her association with George Tiller is truly egregious, to be sure, when there was next to no outrage over Bush's pro-abortion appointees and for his constant electoral support for pro-abortion Republicans, including Bush's support for the fully pro-abortion Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania in his 2004 primary against partly pro-life and partly pro-abortion United States Representative Patrick Toomey.

Well, there is a reason for the silence, and it is found in the never-ending evil consequences caused by the falsehoods of Americanism, which of themselves owe so much to the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent rise of Judeo-Masonry.

The Protestant Revolt unleashed a violent, blood assault upon the true Church and her members. Although it is certainly the case that the Dutch Calvinists were brutal in the execution of the Martyrs of Gorkhum (see note below) and that the Swiss Calvinists hunted down and killed Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen for daring to contradict their heresies that come from the devil himself, the violent assaults against Catholics that were unleashed during the Protestant Revolt were the most harsh in England and Ireland. Over 72,000 Catholics were killed in England after King Henry VIII had himself declared "supreme head of the Church in England" by an act of the Parliament in 1534 and the time of his death of 1547 (this figure is found in Dr. Warren Carroll's The Cleaving of Christendom). Another violent outburst against Catholics took place during the reign of Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, who employed the notorious "priest-catcher," Richard Topcliffe, who had a private torture rack in the basement of his house that he used to "stretch" priests by as much as a much as a foot!

Weary of the persecutions and the heavy taxation and the suppression of the Mass, those Catholics from England and Ireland who fled to the United States of America in its infancy in the early part of the Nineteenth Century were "relieved" to find that they could practice their Faith openly and without persecution from the Federal government. To be sure, many of these immigrants faced unjust discrimination from Protestant and Masonic nativists. Much violence was done to them and to their persons on occasion. Various state laws discriminated against Catholics. Other state laws were designed to insure the "Americanization" of the Irish immigrants, which is why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the behest of the Unitarian named Horace Mann, created the first state department of education in 1837 as a means of "standardizing" educational standards in public schools so that the children of Catholic immigrants would learn the ways of religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and democracy.

One author, evidently not a Catholic, put the matter this way:

There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.

Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme? One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world. What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.

Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state-sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient. He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them. At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution. (Steven Yates, A Book Review of Bruce Shortt's "The Harsh Truth About Government Schools," The Harsh Truth About Government Schools by Steven Yates.)

 

Despite the persecutions and the attempts to neutralize their Faith, however, most Catholics in the Nineteenth Century , including most bishops and priests, were "grateful" to be able to practice the Faith openly and to have their devotions and processions. Very few saw the inherent dangers of the religiously indifferentist nature of the Constitution of the United States of America and saw it as a "virtue" to be able to live side-by-side with non-Catholics in a country that was said, albeit falsely, to be founded on some generic sense of "Christian" principles. Very few realized that the devil had raised up the bloodthirsty Protestant revolutionaries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries to make the "nice and tolerant" Protestants of the United States of America seem trustworthy by comparison, lulling many Catholics to sleep in the belief that the American Constitution, far from being a threat to the integrity to the Faith and an offense to the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, was a "model" of true "religious liberty" for the rest of the world.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, explained the falsity of this belief. While he recognized that Constitution was not openly hostile to the Faith and that the Church was able to minister to the spiritual needs of her children in the United States of America, he rejected the American system of Church-State relations as the "model" for the rest of the world:

Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.

 

Pope Leo was explaining that the growth of the Church in the United States of America was the result of graces "with which God has endowed His Church," not the result of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Unlike Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who sees the American system of "separation of Church and State" as the prototypical model for the rest of the world, Pope Leo rejected the American system as the "model" for the rest of the world, recognizing that it posed the danger of convincing Catholics to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than the world through the eyes of the true Faith, as he explained in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899:

The underlying principle of these new opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. It does not need many words, beloved son, to prove the falsity of these ideas if the nature and origin of the doctrine which the Church proposes are recalled to mind. The Vatican Council says concerning this point: "For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention to be perfected by human ingenuity, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence that meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother, the Church, has once declared, nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them." -Constitutio de Fide Catholica, Chapter iv.

We cannot consider as altogether blameless the silence which purposely leads to the omission or neglect of some of the principles of Christian doctrine, for all the principles come from the same Author and Master, "the Only Begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father."-John i, I8. They are adapted to all times and all nations, as is clearly seen from the words of our Lord to His apostles: "Going, therefore, teach all nations; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world."-Matt. xxviii, 19. Concerning this point the Vatican Council says: "All those things are to be believed with divine and catholic faith which are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal magisterium, proposes for belief as having been divinely revealed."-Const. de fide, Chapter iii.

Let it be far from anyone's mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ. . . . .

But, beloved son [James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore], in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.

 

Pope Leo XIII was condemning a spirit in the falsehood of Americanism that would lead directly to conciliarism (false ecumenism, religious liberty, separation of Church and State, novelty and innovation). Very few Catholics understood this in 1899. Very few Catholics understand this now, one hundred ten years after Pope Leo wrote these prophetic words in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae.

Indeed, most Catholics in the United States of America in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century saw partisan politics as the means of upward social, political and economic mobility. Leaders of the Democratic Party saw in these immigrants and their children the means to win elections, thus welcoming them with open arms and making it relatively easy for them to advance the ranks of ward politics. There was a price to be paid for this, of course: one could not be confessionally Catholic in his public discourse. One had to speak in generic, inter-denominational or non-denominational terms, thus advancing the agenda of Judeo-Masonry as the Incarnation and Redemptive Act of the God-Man, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, was held to be of no account whatsoever in public life.

The "identification" of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that a story was told in the 1930s of a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, who was praying a Novena to Saint Monica for the return of her son to the Faith. A friend asked her what had happened to her son. The woman praying the Novena said in great distress, "He's become a Republican!" Yes, being a Democrat and being a Catholic were considered to be inseparable by the lion's share of Catholics in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries.

This alliance of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that they overlooked the blatant anti-Catholicism of the likes of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt time and time again. After all, it was the "party" that mattered. Oh, it was too bad that Wilson supported the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico. Catholics just voted for the Democratic Party, which permitted Franklin Roosevelt, who, unlike his statist predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he worked as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, cultivated friendships with Catholic prelates in order to coopt them into supporting his own statist plans, to unleash a veritable campaign team of Catholic bishops and priests to denounce any "conservative" Catholic who dared to criticize his policies. As noted in We're Not in Kansas Any More two months ago now, Roosevelt unleashed the "Right Reverend New Dealer," Monsignor John A. Ryan, to denounce the courageous Father Charles Coughlin for him during his re-election campaign in 1936. And Francis Cardinal Spellman was known as "FDR's errand boy in a miter."

It was, however, after World War II that fissures began to break in the solid Catholic support for the Democratic Party. The threat posed by the spread of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe and the fall of China to the forces of Mao Zedong in 1949 led some Catholics to turn more and more to the Republican Party, convincing themselves that they could purge that stronghold of anti-Catholic Masons and nativists and transform it into a bastion of "conservatism" to turn back the New Deal and to win the Cold War.

The fissures in Catholic support became more pronounced in the years after the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, especially during the years of the administration of President Ronald Wilson Reagan. Having convince themselves that electoral politics was the means to "transform" the country, well-meaning Catholics of the "conservative" bent engaged in what could be termed a Manichean struggle with Catholics of the "leftist" bent, each side armed with "bishops" who supported their own particular brand of Americanism, each convinced that the "other" side was composed of "bad guys" as they represented the '"true" interpretation of the Constitution and the "rights" of Catholics in a pluralistic society.

Just as Democrats and Republicans agree on the basic naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of the American founding, disagreeing on the specifics as to the conduct of public policy in light of those principles, so is it the case that "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics accept those same false principles as they diverge on the specifics of public policy according to the political "camp" which they believe represents the best means of achieving various goals. Both "liberal" and "conservatives" Catholics are as one in rejecting these simple truths of the Catholic Faith as binding upon their consciences and that they apply to the concrete circumstances to be found in the United States of America, believing that their naturalistic or non-denominational ideas and plans and strategies can "win the day" for their respective causes:

. . For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

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

This, nevertheless, is what they want to do with human society; they dream of changing its natural and traditional foundations; they dream of a Future City built on different principles, and they dare to proclaim these more fruitful and more beneficial than the principles upon which the present Christian City rests.

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. omnia instaurare in Christo. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

 

Those who reject the true Faith as the one and only foundation of personal and social order in favor of this or that aspect of naturalism will be involved in an endless series of dialectical "clashes" that are, each and and every one of them, distractions from the devil to deter people from looking at the "larger picture" and coming to recognize that the problems that exist in the world at present have their proximate roots in the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry. 

These dialectical clashes are endless. There is now the controversy caused by the Wizard of Obama's nomination of Kathleen Sebelius. There was the hooey a few months ago about the "Freedom of Choice Act," which even the hideous Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, has said does not have the "votes" to pass (as I explained in Only Themselves to Blame and From Luther to Bush to Obama).

There has also been the rending of garments and the gnashing of teeth that has taken place in the last week as the Wizard of Obama rescinded an Executive Order issued by outgoing President George Walker Bush that was designed to protect health care workers and pharmacists who did not want to participate in the provision of contraceptives or in the surgical dismemberment of innocent human beings. As with almost everything else in the Bush administration, this Executive Order was a farce: it did not take effect until Obama was sworn into office. Bush knew this. He was trying to create an means by which various advocacy groups could raise funds to "oppose" Obama's inevitable rescission when that would take place shortly after his successor's inauguration.

Folks, let's get serious about logic, all right? If George Walker Bush was earnest about protecting the consciences of health-care workers, why did he not issue this Executive Order on January 20, 2001? It's very simple: for the same reason that he did not rescind the Food and Drug Administration's decision, made in September of 2000 during the administration of his own predecessor, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, to permit the marketing of the human pesticide, the French abortion pill, RU-486, during the eight years of his administration, the same reason that Bush did nothing when the Food and Drug Administration permitted over-the-counter sales of the Plan B "emergency contraceptive," which is an abortifacient. Bush did not want to do anything. It's all a perverse game, good readers.

President Obama, on the other hand, is a true believer in the evils he promotes. He desires to use the executive powers he has at his disposal to promote those evils. This should not surprise us. It should not shock us that a pro-abort appoints his fellow pro-abortions to public office and issues executive orders in support of baby-killing and other evils. What should shock and outrage the conscience of a believing Catholic is that those who call themselves "pro-life" give rhetorical lip service to opposing surgical baby-killing while promoting it in certain "hard cases," making them simply less pro-abortion than those who support surgical baby-killing in all instances, and while they promote and fund the chemical assassinations of countless millions of children by means of domestic and international "family planning" programs.

Alas, professional politicians know full well how to "play" their own political base off of their alleged opposition's base. That is, Obama knows full well that his appointment of Kathleen Sebelius will energize Catholics of the "leftist" bent who believe in the nonexistent "right" of women to kill their preborn children under cover of the civil law. He knows also that there will be an inevitable "clash" between his own Catholic supporters and those Catholics who are opposed to the Sebelius nomination. Such a "clash" makes for good political theater. It gives the naturalists who host the various programs on radio and television a "hot topic" to attract viewers and thus boost their ratings. It gives advocacy groups of the "left" and the "right" the opportunity to raise lots of cash to fight "for" or "against" a particular nominee or a particular piece of legislation.

This dialectical "clash," however, is all unnecessary. Human beings are not meant to be divided about matters of Faith and Morals. They are meant to be united as one person in a complete and total submission to the Deposit of Faith as It has been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. The devil knows this, which is why he inspired the Protestant Revolt and has puffed up the pride of those who subscribe to the Judeo-Masonic tenets of Modernity and Modernism. To disbelieve in any tenet of the Catholic Faith is to believe in a lie from the devil, he who is the source of all conflict among men in the world. The Catholic Faith is the one and only means to unite fallen men. To reject the Catholic Faith as the one and only foundation of personal and social order, is to reject God Himself as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church.

Yes, conflicts there will always be as man is indeed a fallen creature and will seek to aggrandize himself at the expense of others, as happened even during during the era of Christendom. It is one thing to sin and to be sorry, to seek out the forgiveness of the Divine Redeemer at the hands of a true alter Christus in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly, worse yet to promote it under cover of the civil law and in every aspect of a nation's popular culture. It is the true Faith alone which gives us the means to see ourselves and the world clearly and which gives us the means to rise form our sins to live more fully in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

We have grown so accustomed to the dialectical clashes caused by the falsehoods of Modernity and Modernism, including that of Americanism (the child, if you will, of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry), that some find it simply amazing to learn that the clashes we are experiencing at the present time have not always existed, that they are the direct result of the diabolically-inspired revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself has instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church.

To wit, the Fifth Commandment's absolute prohibition against the taking of innocent human life is not a matter subject to popular or legislative "debate" or to judicial "rescission." Men are supposed to know, love and serve God as He has revealed Himself to us through the Catholic Church and to obey His Commandments with the help of the graces He won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. It is that simple.

No one, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, has any right from God to repeal the binding nature of His Commandments. Human law must be conformed at all times to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in all that pertains to the good of souls. Civil governments have an obligation to recognize the true Church and to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These are truths that have been revealed to us. They are beyond debate. And those who reject them--or any other of the truths of the Holy Faith--wind up in a world of endless dialectical clashes that corrupt the civil law, promote evil, harden hearts and lead many well-meaning to spend their entire lives spending much time and money and effort to find a "solution" to problems that can be ameliorated only by a faithful adherence to the Catholic Faith

We can plant seeds during this season of Lent for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King and for the eradication of the errors of Modernity that have been embraced so enthusiastically by the Modernists in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, men who believe in falsehoods that have been that are opposed to natural reason and have been condemned most solemnly (and on many occasions) by the authority of the Catholic Church.

Every Rosary we pray can help plant a seed or two to help bring this about. We may not see the fruits of our efforts with our own eyes. We can, however, have confidence in Our Lady's Fatima Message that her Immaculate Heart will triumph in the end and that our own Rosaries of reparation will indeed help to convert sinners as we seek to make reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world.

We must be calm in the storms that beset us, both ecclesiastically and civilly. The words of Our Lady to Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill are as relevant now as they were in 1531:

Know for certain that I am the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God. . . . Here I will show and offer my love, my compassion, my help and my protection to the people. I am your merciful Mother, the Mother of all those who love me, of those who cry to me, of those who have confidence in me. Here I will hear their weeping and their sorrows and will remedy and alleviate their suffering, necessities and misfortunes. . . . Listen and let it penetrate into your heart. . . . Do not be troubled or weighed down with grief. So do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?

 

As we remain calm in the midst of the storms as we enfold ourselves in the crossing of Our Lady's arms, we should also remember this injunction of Pope Pius XI, contained in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925:

We firmly hope, however, that the feast of the Kingship of Christ, which in future will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of society to our loving Savior. It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. Many of these, however, have neither the station in society nor the authority which should belong to those who bear the torch of truth. This state of things may perhaps be attributed to a certain slowness and timidity in good people, who are reluctant to engage in conflict or oppose but a weak resistance; thus the enemies of the Church become bolder in their attacks. But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him, and would valiantly defend his rights.

Moreover, the annual and universal celebration of the feast of the Kingship of Christ will draw attention to the evils which anticlericalism has brought upon society in drawing men away from Christ, and will also do much to remedy them. While nations insult the beloved name of our Redeemer by suppressing all mention of it in their conferences and parliaments, we must all the more loudly proclaim his kingly dignity and power, all the more universally affirm his rights.

 

May we pray to Our Lady for the day when street signs such as the one below, located just east of Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Sunset, Louisiana, will be found in every community and in every country in the whole world:

 

Viva Cristo Rey!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Genevieve, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

 

Material from We're Not in Kansas Any More that is relevant to the text of this current article.

Although it is certainly true that the ethos of the heresy of Americanism had accustomed Catholics in the United States of America to accept and to be influenced by the many, inter-related and insidious influences of naturalism long before the "Second" Vatican Council made its "reconciliation" with the revolutionary principles of 1789, it is also true that the bulwark that kept them from losing their sensus Catholicus entirely was the fact those who belonged to the Roman or Latin Rite worshiped in an atmosphere that was reverent and devout, one that required them to be silent and recollect, one that was, at least for forty-five minutes or an hour or ninety minutes, a refuge from the world rather than an enshrinement of the world and its false values. All such restraints fell away with the introduction of the Novus Ordo service as it denied Sanctifying Grace to unsuspecting Catholics, thus opening them up to be more and more accepting of cultural and political and social trends that deviated from the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and Its infallible explication.

Although the United States of America was founded on false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles and had been set on a path of degeneration thereby (see It's Still a World of Sisyphuses as well as the excerpts from Orestes Brownson's "National Greatness" that are included in Figures of Antichrist), the graces made available by the offerings of Holy Mass by thousands upon thousands of priests in this country retarded this process of degeneration somewhat.

The absence of such graces in the past nearly forty years (I have just realized that this year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Novus Ordo!--oh, can you imagine the elegies of praise that will be offered by the conciliar Vatican!) has permitted the floodgates of the world to overwhelm Catholics and non-Catholics alike in a figurative tsunami. The false premises of the American founding, which so many Catholic moral theologians and Catholic authors of textbooks on American government refused to see and accept, demonstrated themselves to be but prophetic precursors of the counterfeit church of conciliarism's own view of Church-State relations.

Yes, just as many Catholic priests in the United States of America did not see the harm of television or "rock music" or the gradual change of men's and women's fashions as they accepted the truly revolutionary changes of Holy Week without much reflection or study, so is it the case that those who wrote textbooks and moral theology manuals on civics and voting did not see the inherent harm of the American founding and accepted its "political ecumenism," if you will, as perfectly compatible with, if not actually beneficial to, the Catholic Church and its role in a pluralistic society.

You will not find in any of these textbooks the critical and authentically Catholic insights into the falsehoods of the American founding that one can find in Mr. Hugh Akins's recently reprinted No King But Caesar and Monsignor Henri Delassus's Americanism and the Anti-Christian Conspiracy and Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers (each available from Catholic Action Resource Center). None of these textbooks and or manuals in moral theology referenced Pope Saint Pius X's injunction in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906, that the thesis of the separation of Church and State was "absolutely false" or that the Catholic Church had an absolute right to be recognized by the civil state as the true religion. These authors of the 1950s and before accepted uncritically--and to a man--the false premises of the American founding as compatible with the Faith and presented as absolutely obligatory participation in this fraudulent political system without any qualifications or conditions whatsoever. (Even Pope Pius XII's allocutions on voting contained qualifications and conditions that must be judged and assessed in concrete circumstances.)

Obviously, this is nothing new. A book published by the Christian Brothers in 1913 contained the following section after describing the martyrdom of Saint Felicitas and her seven sons:

"In this country of ours we will not be called upon, like these seven noble boys to give up our life for our Faith. The children of American are living in a land of civil and religious liberty, and not in Rome under pagan emperors. There is not here, and there never will be, any law to hinder us from making open profession of what we believe, to prevent us from declaring our belief in God, the Father, Creator, of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord."

 

Never? Ever? At any time? Can you see the influence of the mythology produced by Americanism? Never? Exalting the concepts of "civil and religious liberty" that had been condemned by Popes Pius VII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X, to name just a few. Were the Christian Brothers (whose book, a reader for elementary school students, quoted the thirty-third degree Freemason Theodore Roosevelt, who was speaking in purely naturalistic terms, to amplify a point made by Saint Paul!) responsible for this book ignorant of these words contained in Pope Pius VII's Post Tam Diuturnas, April 28, 1814:

For when the liberty of all "religions" is indiscriminately asserted, by this very fact truth is confounded with error and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, the Church, outside of which there can be no salvation, is set on a par with the sects of heretics and with Judaic perfidy itself. For when favour and patronage is promised even to the sects of heretics and their ministers, not only their persons, but also their very errors, are tolerated and fostered: a system of errors in which is contained that fatal and never sufficiently to be deplored HERESY which, as St. Augustine says (de Haeresibus, no.72), "asserts that all heretics proceed correctly and tell the truth: which is so absurd that it seems incredible to me."

 

One of the "experts" cited by Americanists in in the 1950s behalf of the American governmental and political system was none other than Monsignor John Ryan, an unabashed supporter of the ideology of liberalism who demagogically denounced the courageous and prophetic Father Charles Coughlin in a national radio address on October 8, 1936, entitled "Roosevelt Safeguards America." Yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a thirty-third degree Mason who built upon the statism of his fifth cousin (whom he did not like), Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Clark Hoover to create the modern welfare state and who trust the "good intentions" of Joseph Stalin during World War II, "safeguarded" America. Monsignor Ryan disagreed with some of Roosevelt's population policies. That did not, however, prevent him from supporting him for re-election to a third and fourth term in, respectively, 1940 and 1944 or from giving the invocation at Roosevelt's last inauguration on January 20, 1945. Sort of sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Yes, good readers, Monsignor John Ryan, cited as an "expert" on the morally obligatory nature of participating in the Judeo-Masonic farce that is American electoral politics is a poster-child writ large for the influence of Americanism on the psyche of even learned Catholic priests. The late Monsignor Ryan accepted the American constitutional system, including religious liberty, as perfectly compatible with the Faith and praised statists such as Franklin Roosevelt, going so far as to enable their political careers in the process in the name of "social justice." Monsignor Ryan was, of course, merely carrying on the "tradition" of such past Americanists as John Lancaster Spalding and Richard Kenrick and Francis Purcell and John Ireland and James Gibbons, men who believed that the future upward mobility of Catholic immigrants hinged upon their attached to and voting for the Democrat Party as they championed American "values" such as public education, religious liberty, majoritarianism and "free speech."

The strain of Monsignor Ryan's school of Americanism saw the Democrat Party as the chief, although certainly not entirely perfect, vehicle for the realizing of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891. This was but a delusional projection of the Faith into the minds of career politicians who were hostile to It and desired to increase the size and the scope of the Federal government at the expense of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity, something that Father Coughlin, an early supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's, himself began to realize and then denounced courageously and in no uncertain terms. This strain of Americanism is still at work in the minds of hearts of many Catholics attached to the conciliar structures who see the Democrat Party in general and  President-elect Barack Hussein Obama in particular as the means to realize "social justice" in our own day. Too bad that the Democrat Party and Obama believe in the nonexistent "right" of "privacy" for women to "choose" to kill their children, whether by chemical or surgical means, under cover of law. Too bad. The "party" has the answers. The "ballot box" is how we improve the world. Too bad for the babies. Too bad.

Although it would be unjust to the late Monsignor Ryan to claim that he would support Catholics of either major organized crime family of naturalism in the United States of America, the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, who were in favor of the "legal" right to kill babies under cover of law, he did lay aside his disagreements with Franklin Roosevelt and other New Dealers on population matters to render his full-throated support at election time, which is why Ryan was given the nickname, "The Right Reverend New Dealer." It is certainly just to point out that he was an exemplar of a long tradition among Catholics to see the Democrat Party as their natural electoral "home" It is also just point out that he believed what was taught in parochial schools in this country right up to the "Second" Vatican Council and thereafter, that Catholicism and the American founding were virtually one and the same thing. The fact that some of those who succeeded Ryan, who died in 1945, took up the cause of pro-abortion Catholics in the Democrat Party certainly speaks to the overall harm of pluralism on the Faith and to the specific accommodations that men like Ryan made over and over again as they sought so demagogically to silence the voices of true Catholic Social Teaching that were raised by Father Charles Coughlin and others.

Indeed, like all heresies, Americanism, which was so much in vogue in the 1950s and still has currency in many full traditional Catholic venues, splinters itself over the course of time.

The "social justice" strand supportive of the role of large government in the redistribution of income and of massive bureaucracies to "engineer" the better society that was championed by Monsignor Ryan has had latter day champions such as the late Joseph "Cardinal" Bernardin, the late Francis Mugavero and his "auxiliary" in Brooklyn, Joseph Sullivan, John "Cardinal" Dearden, Roger "Cardinal" Mahony, Raymond Hunthausen, Joseph Imesch, Howard Hubbard, Rembert Weakland, Peter Rosazza, Peter Leo Gerety, Thomas Gumbleton, the late Fathers Robert Drinan, S.J., the late Richard McCormick, S.J., the very much alive Richard McBrien, the late John Courtney Murray, S.J., and the late Monsignor George Higgins, to name just a very few. Some of these individuals were involved in John Dearden's radical "Call to Action" group. Others, especially the anonymous apparatchiks in the organization that was spawned in Monsignor John Ryan's lifetime as the National Catholic Welfare Committee and has become the monstrous United States Conference of "Catholic" "Bishops," have used Catholic Charities and/or the now-named "Catholic" Campaign for Human Development to promote the leftist strand of naturalism that is but a logical consequence of a Constitution that does not recognize and submit to the authority of the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls as the civil government seeks to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End.

As can be seen from an article in yesterday's edition of The Wall Street Journal, the "social justice" strand of Americanism to which Monsignor Ryan, whose work was quoted so widely in the 1950s in various Catholic moral theology texts on such matters of voting, belonged was responsible for helping to craft a strategy for the Kennedy clan to support surgical abortion under cover of law while retaining their fictional claim to be "good" Catholics in their personal lives. Influential in devising this strategy was none other than the writings of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., the father of Dignitatis Humanae, which embraced the Americanist heresy of "religious liberty," thereby directly contradicting Pope Pius VI, Pope Pius VI, Pope Gregory XVI, Pope Leo XIII, Pope Saint Pius X and even Pope Pius XII in Ci Riesce, December 6, 1953. Murray had no intention of restoring the confessionally Catholic civil state. He was intent on propagandizing in behalf of Americanism. So is Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

Here are a few excerpts from that Wall Street Journal article:

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing "cover" for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a "clear conscience."

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book "The Birth of Bioethics" (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that "distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue." It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians "might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order."

Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: "The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion." (WSJ.com - Opinion: How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma.)

 

Behold the rotten fruit of the separation of Church and State and religious liberty in the constitution of a religiously indifferentist state. Catholics, as Pope Leo XIII warned in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, stood the chance of being coopted by pluralism into viewing the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the Faith:

But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.

 

Current Catholic enablers of Barack Hussein Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., a baptized Catholic, such as Douglas Kmiec make arguments quite similar to those related by Father Giles Milhaven in 1984 at the Catholics for "Free Choice" meeting, that a "Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion," thus spitting in the face of Pope Leo XIII's injunction to the contrary in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue.

 

Alas, those who accept the naturalist premises of the American founding become, gee whiz, naturalists who find their "salvation" in the civil state and in whichever political party cleaves to the the leftist strand of naturalism.

The other strand of the Americanist heresy attempts to oppose the evils excused by the social justice strand of leftism by making advertence to, guess what, the "genius" of the American Constitution, placing their hopes time and time again in phony pro-life politicians who are themselves statists and who support the slicing and dicing of the innocent preborn at least in one or more of the "hard" cases and who almost to a man (and woman) support the chemical assassination of children by means of various pills and devices. Some of these individuals, such as Ratzinger/Benedict himself, believe that the pluralist state is "irreversible" (thereby denigrating the efficacy of the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces), and that the "best" the Church can hope for is a "place" at the "table" in the "marketplace of ideas, rejecting in principle the necessity of praying and working for the restoration of the confessionally Catholic state.

Both strands of Americanism lead to social chaos. The leftist strand enables overt enemies of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to obtain elected office and pursue policies inimical to His greater honor and glory and thus to the good of souls for whom He gave up His life on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. Let me see here, Barack Hussein Obama and his apostate Catholic running-mate got fifty-four percent of popular vote on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, is this not correct? Pro-aborts get elected all of the time in states with large Catholic populations (Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, New Mexico, California, Illinois, New Hampshire, Arizona). This is not an accident. This is not an anomaly. This is the result of the leftist strand of Americanist naturalism.

The constitutionalist--or "rightist"--strand of Americanism, on the other hand, convinces well-intentioned Catholics that the evils of the day can be retarded by political ecumenism, which is as abjectly false as theological ecumenism. Nothing except sacrilege and blasphemy and apostasy has emerged from theological ecumenism. Nothing but wasted time and money and effort has resulted from election after election after election after election. What is done by "conservatives" one term can be undone by "liberals" the next term as evils get more and more institutionalized with each passing Congress and each passing presidential administration. And thus it must ever be in a system based upon false premises. This wasn't seen clearly in the 1940s and 1950s. Fine. We see it now. Insanity is defined, after all, as doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.

We're not in Kansas any more, my friends. It's not the 1950s. Not many of the authors in those old Catholic civics books, many of which were emblazoned with "old glory" (whose origins were critiqued superbly by His Excellency Bishop Donald A. Sanborn in The Cult of Liberty), would have agreed that Pope Saint Pius X's simple reiteration of the eternally binding truths of Catholic Social Teaching contained in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906, applied to the United States of America:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error."

 

We are supposed to learn things from the past. And one of the things that a believing Catholic should have learned by now is that Americanism was one of the chief cornerstone of conciliarism, containing within itself some of the most important constituent elements of the apostasies that have been promoted by conciliar "popes" in the past five decades ("religious liberty," "separation of Church and State," ecumenism). One is welcome to live like Sisyphus and attempt to roll boulders up hills as he does the bidding of careerists in our organized crime families of naturalism. Others, however, are invited to use their Catholic reason and to recognize that moral judgments concerning whether to vote or for whom to vote must be made in light of the concrete circumstances of the moment and after a considered judgment of the governing principles concerning the rational good to be accomplished, as I noted one year ago this month in When Lesser is Greater, whose text I stand behind now just as firmly as I did when it was published.

The priests who served as cheerleaders and apologists for the American "way" back in the 1950s have been proved wrong. They did not bring the body of Catholic Social Teaching to bear on a critical examination of the false premises of the American founding. Indeed, some engaged in rank intellectual dishonesty by attempting to "read" Catholicism into the anti-Catholic minds of the founders, something that I have tried to refute over and over again on this site. The founding of this nation was the consequence of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry. Whatever attenuated influences the Faith had in the founding were filtered through the strainer provided by Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry, including, of course, so-called "Enlightenment" thought (please see excerpts of Dr. John C. Rao's "Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers--666-0, found in No Better than the Chicoms).

Others, including Dr. Rao and Mr. Hugh Akins, have studied the entire corpus of the Church's Social Teaching. The work of such disciples of Christ the King has helped to strip the scales of nationalistic pride from our eyes so that we can see more clearly the self-delusional projections that were made by the well-meaning scholars of the past, men who could not foresee the demographic trends that have, along with conciliarism, helped to produce a nation of neo-barbarians who live almost exclusively for various sense-pleasures and who cast their votes accordingly. The writers of the 1940s and the 1950s could not have imagined that the Faith could have been lost as quickly as it was in the souls of so many scores of millions of Catholics. They could not imagine an electorate that is, humanly speaking, absolutely irredeemably lost in the mire of naturalism and that the more the naturalistic agents called political parties are enabled would the more that naturalism would prevail in the minds and the hearts and the souls of Catholics.

Although these priests may have been perfectly orthodox in other areas, it is this area of Church-State relations that has been the weakest link in the life of the Church in the United States of America from the very beginning. Accepting the false premises of the American founding as being perfectly compatible to the Faith, these priests were thus as derelict in their duties to teach the Faith as others were in the 1950s who kept silent about television or "rock music" or the mania of sports (please listen to Father Charles McGuire's Agony and Contention in Sports) or immodesty, especially the wretched phenomenon of women wearing masculine attire. Generations upon generations of Catholics were thus deformed as a result. I was one of them for the first thirty or so years of my life.

The Catholic authors of the 1940s and 1950s who believed in the ability of elections and voting to "change" the course of events for the better (or to prevent a "greater evil' from acquiring power) probably did not think that what Pope Pius XI wrote in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, about the nature of political contests at the beginning of the third decade of the Twentieth Century applied to the "enlightened" United States of America, if, that is, they had read the encyclical letter at all:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another.

What I wrote nearly four months ago in Every Error Imaginable is again relevant:

 

The distraction offered by electoral politics forces many people on both sides of the false opposites of the naturalist spectrum to subordinate their most deeply held naturalistic beliefs in order to achieve some short-term goal. As I have noted before, those who want to believe in the utility of a system based in falsehoods can proceed as they wish. Just check back in another four years to see what kind of hysteria is being whipped up then after social conditions have continued to deteriorate and as babies are being killed by means of chemical and surgical abortions then at the same rate that they are being killed today.

In the meantime, however, it is not being "uninvolved" in civic affairs to seek to help others to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith. It is not doing "nothing" to pray as many Rosaries of reparation each day as our states-in-life permit. It is not doing "nothing" to distributed blessed Green Scapulars and blessed Rosaries with instruction booklets to those whom God's Holy Providence places in our paths every day.

We can plant the seeds for the restoration of Christendom, after, of course, attending to the daily needs of our our immortal souls, staring with assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds, by doing simple things for souls. Saint Peter Claver, whose feast we celebrate today, did the simplest and most profound thing for souls imaginable: he baptized them into the very inner life of the Blessed Trinity. Over 300,000 with his own priestly hands! We can distribute blessed Green Scapulars and Rosaries, can we not?

The first Christendom was not built at the ballot box. A new Christendom will not, contrary to what I myself argued, at least in part, ten years ago, by electoral means. No, Christendom will be restored as the fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which Triumph requires us to fulfill as best we can Our Lady's Fatima Message every day in our own homes and to use the shield of her Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel and the weapon of her Most Holy Rosary without looking for results and without being anxious at all about the difficulties of the present moment.

Perhaps it is useful once again to quote Our Lady's words to Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill in 1531:

Know for certain that I am the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God. . . . Here I will show and offer my love, my compassion, my help and my protection to the people. I am your merciful Mother, the Mother of all those who love me, of those who cry to me, of those who have confidence in me. Here I will hear their weeping and their sorrows and will remedy and alleviate their suffering, necessities and misfortunes. . . . Listen and let it penetrate into your heart. . . . Do not be troubled or weighed down with grief. So not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?

 

Every error imaginable is on display in our daily encounters with people who are clueless about First and Last Things. Every error imaginable will be wiped away when the Triumph of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart is made manifest.

 

Remember these words from Pope Saint Pius X's Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, and remember them well:

This, nevertheless, is what they want to do with human society; they dream of changing its natural and traditional foundations; they dream of a Future City built on different principles, and they dare to proclaim these more fruitful and more beneficial than the principles upon which the present Christian City rests.

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. omnia instaurare in Christo. . . .  For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

 

Turn the clock back to the "good old days" of the 1950s, good readers, and you will wind up back here in the year 2009 sooner or later. We must not revert to the minimalism of the 1950s. We must not revert to the jingoistic, reflexive nationalism of the 1950s that is a perversion of true patriotism. We must not revert to the fashions of the 1950s that began to make their compromises with modesty and decency. We must not revert to a lifestyle of television and diabolical music and sports that shaped so many homes in the 1950s. We must live and breathe and think and, most importantly, pray as Catholics who make no compromises at all with the spirit of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The world is God's enemy, as Father Frederick Faber noted in The Dolors of Mary/The Foot of the Cross. We must give the world no quarter at all as we seek to follow Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother, which Immaculate Heart we honor today, the First Saturday of the year, January 3, 2009, the Octave Day of Saint John the Evangelist and the Commemoration of the patron saint of once-Catholic France, Saint Genevieve.

Saint Genevieve, who embraced a life of great austerity, helped to turn back Attila the Hun by encouraging the people of Paris to pray and to fast. It worked. Maybe we, the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, ought to try this in the United States of America as we flee from conciliarism and its false shepherds and as we pray as man Rosaries each day as our states in life permit.

A Description and Depiction of the Martyrs of Gorkum

A painting of the Catholic martyrs of Gorkum, The Netherlands, who were tortured and executed in 1572 by Dutch Calvinists, the theological soul-mates of the "Pilgrims" who came to North America less than half a century later who were so "grateful" that they had had a bountiful harvest in a land where there was no Catholic Mass. (Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel, Monroe, Connecticut, the Feast of Saint Cecilia, Thursday, November 22, 2007.)

Here is a description of their martyrdom as found at the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia site, which is not always the most reliable source of information (much too much rationalism about the lives of the saints) but does have a decent description of the Martyrs of Gorkhum

The year 1572, Luther and Calvin had already wrested from the Church a great part of Europe. The iconoclastic storm had swept through the Netherlands, and was followed by a struggle between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which the latter was victorious. In 1571 the Calvinists held their first synod, at Embden. On 1 April of the next year the Watergeuzen (Sea-beggars) conquered Briel and later Vlissingen and other places. In June, Dortrecht and Gorkum fell into their hands and at Gorkum they captured nine Franciscans. These were: Nicholas Pieck, guardian of Gorkum, Hieronymns of Weert, vicar, Theodorus van der Eem, of Amersfoort, Nicasius Janssen, of Heeze, Willehad of Denmark, Godefried of Mervel, Antonius Of weert, Antonius of Hoornaer, and Franciseus de Roye, of Brussels. To these were added two lay brothers from the same monastery, Petrus of Assche and Cornelius of Wyk near Duurstede. Almost at the same time the Calvinists laid their hands on the learned parish priest of Gorkum, Leonardus Vechel of Bois-le-Duc, who had made distinguished studies in Louvain, and also has assistant Nicolaas Janssen, surnamed Poppel, of Welde in Belgium. With the above, were also imprisoned Godefried van Duynsen, of Gorkum who was active as a priest in his native city, and Joannes Lenartz of Oisterwljk, an Augustinian and director of the convent of Augustinian nuns in Gorkum. To these fifteen, who from the very first underwent all the sufferings and torments of the persecution, were later added four more companions: Joannes van Hoornaer, a Dominican of the Cologne province and parish priest not far from Gorkum, who, when apprised of the incarceration of the clergy ot Gorkum, hastened to the city in order to administer the sacraments to them and was seized and imprisoned with the rest, Jacobus Lacops of Oudenaar, a Norbertine, who after leading a frivolous life, being disobedient to his order, and neglectful of his religious duties, reformed, became a curate in Monster, Holland and was imprisoned in 1572; Adrianus Janssen of Hilvarenbeek, at one time a Premonstratensian and parish priest in Monster, who was sent to Brielle with Jacobus Lacops; and lastly Andreas Wouters of Heynoord, whose conduct was not edifying up to the time of his arrest, but who made ample amends by his martyrdom.

After enduring much suffering and abuse in the prison at Gorkum (26 June-6 July) the first fifteen martyrs were transferred to Brielle. On their way to Dortrecht they were exhibited for money to the curious and arrived at Brielle 13 July. On the following day, Lumey, the commander of the Watergeuzen, caused the martyrs to be interrogated and ordered a sort of disputation. In the meantime the four other martyrs also arrived. It was exacted of each that he abandon his belief in the Blessed Sacrament and in papal supremacy. All remained firm in their faith. Meanwhile there came a letter from William of Orange which enjoined all those in authority to leave priests and religious unmolested. Nevertheless Lumey caused the martyrs to be hanged in the night of 9 July, in a turfshed amid cruel mutilations. Their beatification took place on 14 Nov., 1675, and their canonization on 29 June, 1865. For many years the place of their martyrdom in Brielle has been the scene of numerous pilgrimages and processions. The Martyrs of Gorkum

One will notice that the Calvinists, ever eager to make a buck--or the Dutch equivalent thereof, charged admission for the curious to see the martyrs, who would not renounce their belief in the Blessed Sacrament and in papal supremacy. It is that very truth of papal supremacy that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is prepared to "discuss" with the heretical and schismatic Orthodox on the basis of The Ravenna Document. Today the Orthodox and tomorrow the descendants of the Dutch Calvinists and all other Protestants.

Remember this and remember it well: where there is no Mass there is no Christianity. We must seek to plant the seeds for the Catholicization of the United States of America, never ever seeking to lionize people who rejected the true Faith and whose heresies helped to pave the way for the social problems we face today.

 

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Isn't time to pray a Rosary now?