Every Error Imaginable

by Thomas A. Droleskey

"We're number one! We're number one! We're number one!"

 

Thus shouted thousands upon thousands of deliriously uproarious fans on Wednesday, August 3, 1986, after the New York Mets had defeated the Montreal Expos at William A. Shea Municipal Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, by a score of 4-3, improving their record at the time to 69-32 (the Metropolitans finished the 1986 regular season with a record of 108-54 before defeating the Houston Astros in the National League Championship Series and defeating, thanks to an important error by William Buckner in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game 6, the Boston Red Sox in the World Series).

"We're number one! We're number one! We're number one!"

 

The fans shouting this mantra were descending the ramps of Shea Stadium to go to the nearby Number 7 elevated train of the Interborough Rapid Transit line of the New York City subway system (which is a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--there'll be a test on all of this soon) or to their cars in the parking lots that lead only to congested streets that take a long time to clear out after a game). One vendor, who would later patrol the Field Level seats near where I sat between 1994 and 2002 as I revived my ball park alter ego that had been initiated in 1976, yelled out, "Pennants, yearbooks, Number One Fingas!" (foam rubber "hands" with an extended "forefinga" for "Number One").

Assaying this situation, I said to a now former friend of mine in the conciliar priesthood who had come with me to the game that day in 1986, "One of the frightening things about our system of government is that these people have the right to vote. And they're not going to vote for the Dillon-Droleskey ticket."

Although Holy Mother Church can adapt herself to any legitimate form of government, including that of a democratic republic, she does insist that right principles be the foundation of social order, starting with a recognition of Catholicism as the true religion and subordinating the common temporal good to the pursuit of man's Last End. As a wise and good mother, though, Holy Mother Church does not expect the impossible of her children, which is why she will make concessions in the practical order of things to the actual reality of the modern civil state without once conceding the legitimacy of the separation of Church and State and without ceasing exhortations to her children to pray and to work for the conversion of their fellow citizens and their nation to the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

A political system founded on the errors of Modernity gives rise to a proliferation of errors. Pope Gregory XVI noted this in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?

 

Pope Leo XIII elaborated on this point in Libertas, June 20, 1888, teaching us that the Church's toleration of various errors in the practical order of things is no way an endorsement of those errors, and that such errors lead the civil state and its people away more and more from perfection:

Yet, with the discernment of a true mother, the Church weighs the great burden of human weakness, and well knows the course down which the minds and actions of men are in this our age being borne. For this reason, while not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest, she does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good. God Himself in His providence, though infinitely good and powerful, permits evil to exist in the world, partly that greater good may not be impeded, and partly that greater evil may not ensue. In the government of States it is not forbidden to imitate the Ruler of the world; and, as the authority of man is powerless to prevent every evil, it has (as St. Augustine says) to overlook and leave unpunished many things which are punished, and rightly, by Divine Providence. But if, in such circumstances, for the sake of the common good (and this is the only legitimate reason), human law may or even should tolerate evil, it may not and should not approve or desire evil for its own sake; for evil of itself, being a privation of good, is opposed to the common welfare which every legislator is bound to desire and defend to the best of his ability. In this, human law must endeavor to imitate God, who, as St. Thomas teaches, in allowing evil to exist in the world, "neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills only to permit it to be done; and this is good.'' This saying of the Angelic Doctor contains briefly the whole doctrine of the permission of evil.

But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.

And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless license of which We have spoken, they exceed all limits, and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty. And because the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, and the unerring teacher of morals, is forced utterly to reprobate and condemn tolerance of such an abandoned and criminal character, they calumniate her as being wanting in patience and gentleness, and thus fail to see that, in so doing, they impute to her as a fault what is in reality a matter for commendation. But, in spite of all this show of tolerance, it very often happens that, while they profess themselves ready to lavish liberty on all in the greatest profusion, they are utterly intolerant toward the Catholic Church, by refusing to allow her the liberty of being herself free.

 

Error must proliferate in a system based on false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles. Just take a listen to the absolute insanity, to coin a phrase, of the people whom we encounter in the midst of any given day. And, as I noted to my now former friend in the conciliar priesthood outside of Shea Stadium on August 3, 1986, these people have the right to vote, basing their vote upon the naturalistic ethos of Judeo-Masonry and all of its variants, including irrationality and sentimentality. And this insanity was on full display in a library in Fairfield County, Connecticut, yesterday, Monday, September 8, 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as I was working on the next installment of the travelogue (yes, for reasons that will be explained in the travelogue, we are indeed back in Connecticut for Lucy's schooling, staying at a campground about an hour's drive from Saint Dominic's Academy; I've made many bonehead decisions in my life, but returning to Connecticut for Lucy's schooling is not one of them as she loves being back at Saint Dominic's Academy, whose Dominican Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary see it all concerning Americanism and the culture wars).

Sharon, who will spend most of today in prayer as Lucy is in school, having had quite enough of trying to read Father Frederick Faber's All for Jesus and Saint Francis de Sales's An Introduction to the Devout Life in the library, amidst the insanity to which both of us were exposed, pointed out to me that she had discovered upon her touring a museum of sorts in the library that there was a sugar cup from which sugar had been taken by George Washington. Upon hearing Sharon tell me this, I continued typing and said impassively, "Oh, a relic." Yes, the naturalists, who eschew the veneration of the saints or their relics, have their own secular, naturalistic saints and their own relics. do they not?

We did have to settle for relics of naturalism, however, during our three hour stay in the library. We saw and heard plenty of the "live" stuff ourselves.

To wit, Sharon saw a mother who was very upset with her son for throwing a Spiderman DVD to the floor of the library. The mother yelled, "Go tell Spiderman you're sorry!" The boy relented, saying to the package, "Sorry, Spiderman." Sorry, Spiderman?

Another woman, a refugee from the 1960s, sporting a tank top and some prominently displayed tattoos, made her way to the weekly book club meeting, which was to discuss a work of fiction dealing with global warming.

Yet another woman arrived at the circulation desk, near where I was sitting, almost breathless, boasting about her just having been to a meeting of the Salvation Army. "It's so wonderful to help others. I just want to let others know about the good work that I am doing.

One man, a board member of the library came in, at one point and was introduced to another man, who had donated a "very important book" to the library years ago. "Are you the Chairman of the Board?" asked the man who had donated the "important" book. "No, but I am a board member." "Both of us do important things" the book donor said. The board member agreed, saying that it is a duty to serve humankind.

Politics came up several times as one woman observed, yes, even cogently, to a fellow library patron that she was "loving" the dilemma that "conservatives" found themselves in with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. "James Dobson [of Focus on the Family] has spent his entire career telling us women to stay at home with our children when they're young, and now he can't utter a word in criticism of Sarah Palin's running for vice president with a four month old baby with special needs."

I should interject that this is sort of the "SP" effect in the fraud that is American electoral politics. Just as Summorum Pontificum has silence most, although not all, traditionally-minded Catholics yet attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism most of the time, another SP, Sarah Palin has muted "conservative" criticism of feminism, contraception and the proper role of a mother with young children. Such is always the short-sightedness of expedient measures that nasty little things like truths and convictions must be jettisoned, or at least shunted aside for the moment to "win" a particular battle that will make other "victories" possible. Unless I have missed something, such an approach is but a delusion as to compromise or be silent on truth at one point to achieve a particular goal results in only one thing: to accustom one to make further compromises and thus to consider silence in the face of the promotion of evil a virtue rather than a vice.

I digress. Back to the narrative of the day. (Yes, I can, at least sometimes, multi-task, that is, I am able to concentrate on my writing while listening to the goings-on around me.)

One library patron was amazed that Barack Hussein Obama referred to "my Muslin faith" when answering a question posed to him by the former Bill Clinton flack turned "objective" journalist George Stephanopoulos, on the American Broadcasting Company television network's This Week interview program on Sunday, September 7, 2008. 

"Do you really think that Obama, my hope for the future, is a Muslim?" the man asked a woman in the library.

"What difference does it make?" the woman responded. "It was probably a slip of the tongue. What difference does it make if he is a Muslim? Is he for real change that we can believe in? Religion is a matter of personal choice. This is a country of true religious freedom."

"Thanks," the man said, "I really needed to hear something like that today. Be well."

A woman came in shortly thereafter, raving about her "yoga" class that she had just had down the street from the library. "You know," the woman said, "I think I'm going to come back in the next life as a ugly person with lots of money. That's what my karma tells me today."

No one screamed in the face of this lunacy. Sharon wanted to. I wanted to. No one screamed. This is madness. Madness.

These people vote. A system based on one naturalistic error after another keeps on producing more and more errors. It is impossible to retard these errors with short-term, expedient "solutions" that make concessions in principle to the prevailing errors of naturalism.

Look, for example, at how Sarah Heath Palin, is getting her "education" in foreign policy from the neoconservatives. A journalist, Dick Polman, who is certainly no friend of a truly just social order, nevertheless posed a series of questions that he would like to ask Governor Palin if he had the opportunity to do so. The first two questions are indeed quite good, and speak to the fact that simply saying one is "pro-life" (while one says she is "100% pro-contraception and who makes the "life of the mother exception" for surgical abortion) can cover a multitude of sins, as noted two days ago, including support for the American imperialism and nationalism that has been displayed with such tragic results in Iraq and elsewhere:

1. Gov. Palin, news reports indicate that you are undergoing intensive foreign policy tutelage from Senator Joe Lieberman and senior members of the McCain team, including Randy Scheunemann and Stephen Biegun. Lieberman and Scheunemann are known for their ties to the neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq. Biegun last worked on George W. Bush's National Security Council. Given your lack of foreign policy expertise, how confident can we be – and how confident are you – that you are being briefed by a sufficiently broad range of people? Is the McCain campaign reaching out to include, as briefers, prominent Republicans who disagree with the neoconservatives and the Bush White House? People like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell, for example? Are you insisting on a broad range of briefers? If the range of advice that you are getting is narrow, how would you know?

2. You recently stated in a church appearance that the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” Imagine that you have been thrust into the presidency, and that you have to decide whether to launch a new military action. If you were to determine, in your prayers, that this new military action also qualified as “a task from God,” how much confidence should the American people have that you would carefully consider all earthly counter-arguments – including any warnings by U.S. intelligence that war was the least defensible option? Is Palin Ready for the Big-Leagues?

 

Those who jumped on the Palin bandwagon rather quickly ought to pause for a bit to consider the fact that the Governor of Alaska is possessed of Protestant notions concerning the State of Israel that feed right into the geopolitical goals of the neoconservatives, which goals are, at least for the most part, almost identical in most instances to those of the Israeli government, which is why Mrs. Palin was ushered before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee the afternoon after her convention speech last week.

It is impossible for a system steeped in the madness of naturalism to retard naturalism by naturalism. Impossible, as I attempted to point out in my speculative piece When Lesser is Greater eight months ago now, which makes, as a prelate who reviewed the article agreed, the necessary qualifications and distinctions about its speculative nature. We have more time to reflect on the influences of Americanism on the civil order--and on the ethos of conciliarism--than in the past. We have seen the systems based on fraudulent premises degenerate time and time again. This is indeed insanity, as Pope Pius IX reminded us in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

 

This "injurious babbling" was on full display in that public library where we spent time yesterday, and where I will return most days, save for those days on which that I must attend to various errands and attempt to find a place to record my video lectures, that our daughter is in school. It is on display in conversations with our relatives, friends, neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances. It is on display in the lunacy of what passes for "debate" during election campaigns, exercises in which each competing set of naturalists pay out millions upon millions of dollars to media consultants to devise advertisements to distort each others' records, a rather sophisticated version of the organized crime family "hits" of yore.

Oh, speaking of organized crime, let me once again cite 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:

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.

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.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

 

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

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 Peter Claver, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't time to pray a Rosary now?