Don't Push Boulders Up Those Hills With Sisyphus

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Well, it's time. The madness that happens every four years in the United States of America will reach its climax this year, 2012, as all manner of very well-meaning people, including the lion's share of Catholics, will unwittingly imitate the mythical figure of Sisyphus by pushing boulders up hill after hill after hill before being crushed repeatedly by the weight of those boulders coming down on top of them time and time and time and time and time again.

The biennial and quadrennial farces of naturalism called elections in the United States of America causes all manner of people to lose their minds over the "importance" of the moment, heedless of the reality that almost every American campaign for the presidency has involved such hyperbolic assessments on the part of candidates, campaign spokesmen, party apparatchiks, and partisans among the voters.

Check back in about ten or twenty or fifty years, however, if God gives us that that long, that is, and see if my analyses on this site of how evil has been advancing and institutionalizing itself in civil society as a result of the compromises that we have made with our naturalistic Judeo-Masonic system have not been correct all along, that elections in the United States of America have been naturalist sideshows from the beginning, as Orestes Brownson pointed out in National Greatness in 1846. Little has changed since then, as I think a dispassionate reading of Mr. Brownson's essay, part of which is excerpted here once again (repetition is the mother of learning, you know), will reveal:

 

As of the individual, so of the nation. In like manner as justice and sanctity constitute the greatness of the individual, so do they constitute the greatness of the nation. "Justice exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."  The great nation is the holy nation, rich in true  obedience, and carried away by a divine passion for God and all holy things.

Suppose your nation does increase in wealth, in luxury, in refinement; suppose it does fell the primeval forest and enlarge its borders, multiply its manufactures, extend its commerce, and make all climes pour their riches into its lap; what then?  Does it follow that such a nation is great, is glorious, and has reason to applaud herself for her achievements and to exult over the poor and simple? "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord." Where is it written, Blessed is the nation whose God is Mammon, and whose worship is thrift?  Where are the nations who forgot the Lord, who put their trust in their ships, their traffic, their wealth, and luxuries?  Where is that ancient Tyre, "whose merchants were princes, and her traders the nobles of the earth"? Where are all the nations of the old world, once renowned for their extended commerce, the richness of their stuffs, and the variety of their manufactures?  They have passed away like the morning vapor, and a few solitary ruins alone remain to point the traveller to the seats of their world-renowned idolatry.

Taking the principles we have established, we can easily  answer the question, whether we are or are not a great people, whether the path we are pursuing leads to true nation al greatness, or whether it leads from it. Are we as a people intent on gaining the end for which our Maker de
signed us? Are we remarkable for our humble observance of the precepts of the Gospel? Are we diligent to yield that obedience to which is promised eternal life?  Far, very far, from it. We are a proud, loud-boasting and vain-boasting people. Our god is mammon, and our righteousness is thrift. Is it not so? To what do we point as proofs of our greatness? Is it not to our industrial achievements, our railroads, canals, steamboats, commerce, manufactures, material wealth and splendor?  But where are our moral achievements, the monuments of our enlightened zeal for God, and humble devotion to his will?  Religion we have in name, in form, in many forms and many strange forms; but where is the deep, all-pervading, all-active conviction that this world is not our home, that it is but an inn in which we may lodge for a night, but in which we may not, must not, dwell? Alas! the dominant passion of our country is worldly wealth and worldly distinction. We see it in the general pursuits of the people; we hear it in the almost universal tone of conversation; and we see it distinctly in the general scramble for wealth, in our demoralizing political contentions, and the all-devouring greediness for place and plunder.

If we look at the great political questions which agitate the public mind, we shall perceive that they are all questions concerning wealth, the means of facilitating its acquisition, of making it pass, or preventing it from passing, from the few to the many, or from the many to the few. Such are your bank questions, your tariff questions, your land-distribution questions. If you go beyond these, they are questions of the honors and emoluments of office. Not a pert upstart among us who has made his maiden caucus speech, but regards himself as qualified for any office in the gift of the people, from that of village constable up to that of president of the United States, and feels that he suffers great wrong, and adds another striking example of neglected merit, if not rewarded for his disinterested and patriotic exertions by some snug place with a fat salary. Scarcely a man seems contented to remain in private life, to live in obscurity, unheeded by his countrymen, in all humility and fidelity laboring to discharge his duty to his God, and to win the prize of eternal glory. We love the praise of men more than the praise of God; the low and transitory goods of time more than the high and permanent goods of eternity.

If we are poor, we are discontented, we regard ourselves as most miserable, and rail against Providence, who permits inequalities to obtain among brethren. No one is contented with his lot in life. We are all ill-at-ease. We would all be what we are not,- and have what we have not. And yet, with admirable simplicity, we ask, Are we not a great people? Nearly all the action of the American people, collectively or individually, has reference solely to the affairs of, time. Government sinks with us into a joint-stock concern for the practice of thrift. It has no divine authority, no high and solemn moral mission. In education even, the same low and earthly view obtains. We educate for time. We seek to fit our children for getting on, as we call it, in the world, -to make them sharp, bold, enterprising and successful business men. We teach them, indeed, that knowledge is power,-but power to outstrip their fellows in the pursuit of worldly goods. We teach them, indeed, that sloth is a mortal sin,-but sloth in the affairs of time and sense, not sloth in regard to our spiritual duties. We teach them to respect public opinion, to strive to be respectable, to be honored among men; rarely, and almost always ineffectually, to respect the law of God, to see the honor of God, and to despise that of men. Hence, they grow up timid time-servers, trimmers, moral cowards, afraid to say their souls are their own, to avow their honest convictions, if their convictions chance to be unpopular, or to follow God in the faith and worship he has ordained, if not held in repute, or if embraced only by the poor, the simple, of whom the world makes no account. To make a sacrifice for Christ, to give up all, houses, lands, wife, and children, for God, that we may have treasure in heaven, strikes us as something wholly uncalled for, as folly, as madness, worthy only of the dark ages of monkish ignorance and barbarity. To a worldly end conspire all our education, science, literature, and art.

Whatever cannot be pressed into the service of man as a creature of time and sense is by the immense majority of us condemned as useless and mischievous.

That we measure all things by the standard of this life and this world is evinced by the judgments we pass on other nations. In judging others, we always judge ourselves. Tell us what nation you place highest in the scale of nations, and you tell us what are your own views of what constitutes true national greatness. We, as a people, very generally count highest in the scale of contemporary nations those in which the national energy displays itself most exclusively in an industrial direction, and which are most successful in multiplying wealth and luxury. Since the great events in the sixteenth century, which out of courtesy we must call the reformation, although it was any thing but a reformation, there has sprung up a new social order, not known in the middle ages, and not yet universally adopted in Catholic countries. The whole tendency of this order is in an industrial direction. It places this world before the other, time before eternity, the body before the soul, the praise of men before the praise of God. It esteems the riches of this world more than the riches of divine grace, and bids us strive to live, not in the order of grace, but in the order of nature. Under this order the great aim is to be rich, independent, well off in time; to be distinguished, held in high repute one by another. We reverse the maxim of the Gospel, and say, Be not anxious for the soul, take no need to the worship of God, nor to obedience to his laws; but seek first to get on well in this world, look to the main chance, get rich, honestly, of course, if you can, but get rich, be distinguished, and then the kingdom of God and his justice will be added unto you unto you;--or if not, it will be no great matter.

 

Orestes Brownson wrote this in the year 1846. You tell me how any of this has changed? You tell me how the intervening presidential elections of 1848, 1852, 1856, 1864, 1868, 1872, 1876, 1880, 1884, 1888, 1892, 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1916, 1920, 1924,1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 have changed just one little bit of Orestes Brownson's description of American national life one hundred sixty-five years ago? We have changed for the worse, not the better, as the residual influences of Catholicism have waned--and as the counterfeit church of conciliarism made its own evil "reconciliation" not only with the principles of 1789 but also with those of 1776 and 1787. Indeed, conciliarism's view of the world and Church-State relations is premised upon the very Americanism that has convinced Catholics to believe that it is through interdenominational and/or nondenominational efforts at the ballot box that "change" is effected in society. The one, conciliarism, could not have occurred with the other, Americanism, as will be noted in the book length manuscript that I am now in the process of writing.

Ours has been been a system of "greater" evils from the very beginning, starting with the contention that men do not need the authority of the Catholic Church to direct them, either personally or socially, and that they can be virtuous on their own without belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

Read those passages from Orestes Brownson's "National Greatness" again and judge for yourself if our "electoral process" has changed anything substantively for the "better" other than convincing Catholics to surrender their Faith to the exigencies of career politicians who believe in multiple errors that offend Our Blessed and Saviour Jesus Christ, the very Second Person of the Blessed Trinity Who became Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost, and are thus harmful, yes, even unto eternity, of the salvation of the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Memories fade over the course of time. Those who think naturalistically and who do not understand that the entire structure of the modern civil state is built on the house of sand constructed by the evils of the Protestant Revolution and the rise of Judeo-Masonry will have a veritable "Pavlov's Reaction" to the sound of the "election bell," responding to fund-raising appeals and to petition drives that wind up empowering the naturalists more and more.

Thus it is this year's national elections are said to be (drum roll, please), the "most important election of our lifetime."

Adherents of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" will seek to "energize" their political base support by threatening the apathetic among their number with what will be termed the ugly spectre of a presidency and both houses of Congress in the control of their ever-hapless false opposites of the naturalist "right."

"Control of the Supreme Court of the United States of America," is at stake, some of these lefties will argue. "Antonin Scalia is seventy-five now. His weight has ballooned up so much that he might fit into some of the clothing of the late Orson Welles or the equally dead Marlon Brando. He could go at any time. You don't want another Scalia getting on the Court, do you?"

Other adherents of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" will argue that Barack Hussein Obama's vision for a "more just" America have been stymied by the "Tea Party fanatics who have captured the Republican Party," an argument, from what I have read, that seems to be gaining some traction among so-called "independent" voters. Why not? Demagoguery works more often than not.

The hapless band of in-fighters who belong to the naturalist "right" will, are arguing that Obama and ObamaCare must go, that his profligate spending programs have bankrupted the country for generations as the "mainstream media" will argue that it was the war mongering and tax cuts of the not-so-pro-life George Walker Bush that made Obama's spending programs necessary. And on and on and on the circus will go.

Several things are guaranteed from the results of the 2012 elections:

1) A naturalist will win the presidency.

2) A naturalist will continue be used, unwittingly to him or her, by God as a means to further chastise the United States of America.

3) Innocent preborn children will continue to slaughtered by chemical and surgical means.

4) The size, the scope and the power of the Federal government of the United States of America will increase, either at a fast rate or at a slower rate than is occurring at this time.

5) The State of Israel will continue to control a good deal of American foreign policy.

6) Economic and social problems and international crises will worsen; leading to--

7) The hysteria over the 2014 off-year national elections and the 2016 presidential elections, which will begin in earnest for the naturalists of "left" no matter who wins enough electoral votes on Tuesday, November 6, 2012, as a defeated Barack Hussein Obama will start his own Oprah Winfrey style television program or as a re-elected Barack Hussein Obama enters into his second term of office, being unable to succeed himself. It is my own contention that a re-elected Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus might seek to start the process of repealing the Twenty-second Amendment, making it possible for him to become a modern day Franklin Delano Roosevelt or yet another contemporary worthy of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Those who do not understand the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith wind up spending most of their lives trying to "figure things out" on a daily basis. That is, those who do not accept the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, are lost in a fog of contradiction and confusion and myopia, constantly trying to fight this or that personal or social battle on purely naturalistic grounds without a single thought given over to First and Last Things. The simple answers provided by the Holy Faith as to why problems exist in the world and how they are to be ameliorated on a daily basis by the reform of individual lives in cooperation with the graces won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer and that flow into the hearts and souls of men through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, are rejected as being vestiges of the past beliefs that are not "relevant" to modern men, especially given the "realities" of the pluralism that has been brought into existence by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry

The blindness caused by the rejection of the true Faith permeates all facets of daily living. . . .

Ah, my friends, this is the world in which most people live. Truth (of any kind)? Facts? History? Everything is a matter of "opinion" and "interpretation." Human beings are simply autonomous creatures who must muddle their way through life to "fix" problems on a piecemeal basis without ever understanding root causes, the essence of the late John Dewey's ideology of "pragmatism," one of the many sophistries produced by the naturalist, anti-Incarnational world of Modernity to which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "reconciliation" by abandoning the teaching of the Social Reign of Christ the King and championing the Judeo-Masonic notion of the separation of Church and State. Public and most, although not quite all, conciliar schools produce graduates who are absolutely clueless about First and Last Things, immersed in material success and sensual pleasures as the defining measures of human existence.

Such people believe that government exists to help them "improve" their lives and to "solve" problems that have their proximate cause in Original Sin and fallen human nature and their remote causes in the Actual Sins of men that are never absolved by a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. Disorder, frequently characterized by violence against innocent human life and the legitimate private property rights of others, and sloth become the order of the day in the lives of men and their nations. Cheating is commonplace, if not expected. Lying is a given. Warfare on the international stage is just a regrettable "reality" that must be waged with relentless abandon in the hopes of producing a "peace" that arms-merchants will never permit, an illusory peace that is premised on an abject rejection of the true Faith as the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

The calendar year of 2012 has begun! We must intensify our efforts to change our own souls as make reparation for our sins by living penitentially as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother, especially by the time we spend in prayer in front of His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and by praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. Think about it: how much time do you waste listening or watching to various naturalists discourse about current events? These people know nothing of First and Last Things. Why waste your time on them when you could be praying more Rosaries of reparation?

We must not imitate the Sisyphuses of Modernity as they roll the boulders up hills in one election cycle after another as those boulders keep rolling down upon them time and time again. The population of the United States of America is enthralled with statism, and it is ready to receive a new statist with great enthusiasm. We must do what the Apostles did, that is, to plant the seeds for a new Christendom. We may not see the results with our eyes. The Apostles did not see the results with their own eyes in this passing, mortal vale of tears. So what? What matters to us is to remain faithful to the truths of the Holy Faith, including the sacred truth at Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must reign as the King of all nations as we keep insisting with others until the point of our dying breaths that Catholicism and Catholicism alone is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

 

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.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?