Fortnight of Fraud Update

by Thomas A. Droleskey

He huffed.

He puffed.

He threatened to blow the house down.

In the end, however, Timothy Michael Dolan and his band of apostates and moral cowards who populate the hierarchy of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in the United States of America have been knuckling under to the threats leveled against them by the caesars of Modernity.

Yes, despite all of the posturing for public consumption that has characterized the token opposition of the American "bishops" to the mandate issued by the pro-abortion, pro-perversity Catholic, Kathleen Sebelius, who serves as the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. and approved by the reigning caesar ignoramus, President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, many of them have been quietly providing health insurance coverage to pay for the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn. Their so-called "fortnight for freedom" last year was and remains a fraud (see Timmy's In The Well (Of Americanism, That Is), Making Everyone Happy Except God, Unhappy Is The "Happy" "Bishop", Whatever You Want,   Ominous Offenders Offending Ominously, Memo To David Axelrod And Other Social Engineers, John Carroll's Caesar, Victims of Compromise, Taking A Figure Of Antichrist At His Worthless Words, Prisoners Of Their Own Apostasy, Timothy Dolan, Meet Timothy Dolan (And Friends), Still Celebrating Half A Century Of Apostasy, Candidate For Man Of The Year?, From John Carroll To James Gibbons To Timothy Dolan, To Help The Children, Fake, Phony, Sanctimonious Fraud, Happy As A Stuffed Clam With Himself, Impossible To Fight Moral Evils With Blasphemy And Error, Still Trying to Make Everyone Happy Except God Himself, Just Another Ordinary Outrage Permitted by a Conciliar "Ordinary" and  Forty Years of Emboldening, Appeasing, and Enabling Killers, part two.)

Chief among these conciliar hypocrites, each of whom is a murderer of souls by means of promoting conciliarism's blasphemies, apostasies and sacrileges and by subject children to the rot of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments in complete violation of Pope Pius XI's absolute prohibition against such instruction as stated in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929,  is none other than the President of the United States Conference of Catholic "Bishops." Timothy Michael Dolan, whose Archdiocese of New York has indeed been providing health insurance coverage for its unionized employees.

Here is the story as published in The New York Times, whose anti-Catholic editorial relishes the opportunity to point out the hypocrisy of the men they think are officials of the Catholic Church:

As the nation’s leading Roman Catholic bishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York has been spearheading the fight against a provision of the new health care law that requires employers, including some that are religiously affiliated, to cover birth control in employee health plans.

But even as Cardinal Dolan insists that requiring some religiously affiliated employers to pay for contraception services would be an unprecedented, and intolerable, government intrusion on religious liberty, the archdiocese he heads has quietly been paying for such coverage, albeit reluctantly and indirectly, for thousands of its unionized employees for over a decade.

The Archdiocese of New York has previously acknowledged that some local Catholic institutions offer health insurance plans that include contraceptive drugs to comply with state law; now, it is also acknowledging that the archdiocese’s own money is used to pay for a union health plan that covers contraception and even abortion for workers at its affiliated nursing homes and clinics.

“We provide the services under protest,” said Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York.

As president of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Dolan has consistently rejected similar arm’s-length compromises offered by the Obama administration, which has agreed to exempt many religious institutions from the provision, but not religiously affiliated employers like schools and hospitals that employ people of many faiths and do not exist primarily to inculcate religious values.

In February, the bishops opposed a proposal that would have allowed employees of those nonexempt religious institutions to receive contraceptive coverage through policies paid for directly by insurance companies. The New York Archdiocese is also suing the federal government to stop the mandate.

“There remains the possibility that ministries may yet be forced to fund and facilitate such morally illicit activities,” Cardinal Dolan said at the time.

The archdiocese agreed to cover its own health workers long before Cardinal Dolan became archbishop of New York, and even today insists that it has no choice. As a result, about 3,000 full-time workers at ArchCare, also known as the Catholic Health Care System, receive coverage for contraception and voluntary pregnancy termination through their membership in 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, a powerful health care workers union, according to Dave Bates, a spokesman for the union.

ArchCare, which operates seven nursing homes and a variety of other health facilities, gives its 1199 union employees the same coverage they would get at over 100 other nonprofit hospitals or nursing homes in the New York area, because ArchCare voluntarily belongs to the League of Voluntary Hospitals and Homes, a multi-employer organization that negotiates with the union every few years for a joint labor contract.

Bruce McIver, the president of the league since 1991, said he recalled that some Catholic organizations had expressed concern about paying for the contraception benefits in the mid- to late 1990s. But in recent years, as the number of Catholic hospitals in the city dwindled, “they just kind of stopped, from my perspective, paying attention to this issue,” he said.

“Eventually, the Catholics just said, you know, we are going to ignore the issue and pay into the fund and people are going to make their own choices about contraception and so forth,” Mr. McIver said.

During union negotiations, “I don’t remember it coming up in the last dozen years or so, ever,” he said. “In a place like New York, their employees, not all of whom are Catholic, would react pretty badly.”

ArchCare, like other employers in the league, does not directly pay for the coverage. Instead, employers contribute to the union’s National Benefits Fund, in amounts equal to roughly 25 percent of each employee’s base pay; that money is used to pay for the insurance coverage. It is not known how many ArchCare workers actually use the disputed services.

Mr. Zwilling, the spokesman for the New York archdiocese, said that Cardinal John J. O’Connor and the archdiocese “objected to these services’ being included in the National Benefit Fund’s health insurance plan” when joining the league in the 1990s. But the cardinal then decided “there was no other option if the Catholic Church was to continue to provide health care to these union-affiliated employees in the city of New York,” Mr. Zwilling said.

Since 2002, other New York Catholic agencies with standard commercial insurance have been subject to a state mandate to provide contraceptive services, Mr. Zwilling added. Fordham University, for example, covers contraception for employees and students. But rather than nullify the issue, “in fact, these rare exceptional concessions have made the bishops even more aware of the gravity of the situation and lead to the attempt to remedy the matter on a national level,” he said.

In theory, ArchCare could have negotiated independently with the union to avoid providing its 1199 employees — health support staff members ranging from physician assistants to orderlies — abortion and contraception coverage. The archdiocese avoids providing those services for 1,100 other ArchCare employees, for example, by insuring them through a special self-insurance plan that is exempt from the mandate. But in reality, “it would be very difficult,” Mr. McIver said. “It’s hard to go backwards.”

Similar skepticism was expressed by Scott LaRue, the chief executive of ArchCare. “It doesn’t matter whether you join the league or you don’t join; the league determines the contract, and then the union goes and forces the same arrangement on the other homes whether you are in the league or not,” he said.

Religious employers nationally have often grudgingly covered contraception, whether to comply with state health care mandates or because they simply did not realize they were doing so, said Stephen S. Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America, in Washington.

“It’s surprising, but a good number of employers don’t really get into the weeds that much with their insurance plans to know” if they are covering contraception and sterilization, Mr. Schneck said.

Even among the more than two dozen for-profit companies suing the Health and Human Services Department over the mandate, some were paying for contraception and other objectionable coverage until recently. They included the American Manufacturing Corporation, a mud pumping company in Minnesota whose owner, Gregory Hall, a Catholic deacon, played a pivotal role in helping to free trapped Chilean miners in 2010.

Mr. Hall’s lawyer, Tom Matthews, said his client realized that he was covering contraception for his employees only in December, when reviewing what the government would require in his next health care contract. More recently, he was “very upset” to find the plan had also been covering abortion, Mr. Matthews said. A federal court granted the company an injunction that will allow it to stop the coverage until the courts settle the matter.

Another company, Korte & Luitjohan Contractors in Illinois, found out in August that its insurance was covering abortion, contraception and sterilization “as a mistake,” according to Edward L. White, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice in Washington. Korte is one of seven companies represented by the American Center in a challenge to the mandate.

Federal courts have dismissed most of the roughly 30 lawsuits already filed against the mandate by Catholic dioceses and other nonprofit corporations, because the government is not enforcing the mandate for religiously affiliated nonprofits until this August. The case brought by the New York Archdiocese, however, is moving forward. The mandate already applies to for-profit companies, but many of those suing have been granted reprieves until the end of their legal cases.

In courtrooms, government lawyers have pointed out to judges that some of the employers challenging the mandate have already been providing similar coverage. But Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is also representing companies suing against the mandate, said so far “the courts have not bought the argument that, aha, you must not really mean it if you haven’t caught it before now.”

Sarah Lipton-Lubet, an analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports the contraception mandate, sees the matter differently.

“I can’t begin to understand the argument that coverage that has been part of the plan for however many years is suddenly anathema,” she said. (New York Archdiocese Reluctantly Paying for Birth Control.)

 

No other choice?

No other choice?

Behold the rotten fruit of Americanism and the universal apostasy it played a role in spawning, conciliarism.

No other choice?

Yes, there would have been plenty of choices if vocations of women to the consecrated religious life had not shriveled as a result of the "springtime" ushered in the "Second" Vatican Council and religious sisters had not, at least for the most part, advocates of feminism and practitioners of witchcraft whose basic mission is to advance what they call "eco-justice."

Religious sisters used to staff Catholic hospitals and nursing homes. The Catholic Church thus did not have to be held hostage to the thuggish demands of corrupt labor unions whose leaders believe that it is their solemn duty to provide their employees with all manner of goodies to do things that are proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. And what ever happened to the concept that even lay employees of what presents itself to be the Catholic Church have an obligation to abide by her teaching and that they are not expect from her agencies any sort of subsidy to commit grave moral evils no matter what is required by "state law" of others in their field?

Apostasy does have consequences, and in this instance the sanguine acceptance by the Americanist bishops in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries prior to the "Second" Vatican Council of the "pluralist paradigm" as the means by which their "religious liberty" would be respected and maintained has come back of its own false premises to force their conciliar progeny to knuckle under to the demands of all manner of petty little caesars, whether in or out of the government, while still recoiling at any mention of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the necessity of converting men and their nations to the Catholic Church, she that is the one and only means of personal sanctification and thus of social order. An embrace of the false principles of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism leads eventually to a blase, ho-hum attitude of, "Oh well, there's nothing we can do about this. Let's just move along. We've got other fish to fry."

What can be done?

Consider the words of Pope Leo XIII in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890

10. But, if the laws of the State are manifestly at variance with the divine law, containing enactments hurtful to the Church, or conveying injunctions adverse to the duties imposed by religion, or if they violate in the person of the supreme Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then, truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime; a crime, moreover, combined with misdemeanor against the State itself, inasmuch as every offense leveled against religion is also a sin against the State. Here anew it becomes evident how unjust is the reproach of sedition; for the obedience due to rulers and legislators is not refused, but there is a deviation from their will in those precepts only which they have no power to enjoin. Commands that are issued adversely to the honor due to God, and hence are beyond the scope of justice, must be looked upon as anything rather than laws. You are fully aware, venerable brothers, that this is the very contention of the Apostle St. Paul, who, in writing to Titus, after reminding Christians that they are "to be subject to princes and powers, and to obey at a word," at once adds: "And to be ready to every good work."Thereby he openly declares that, if laws of men contain injunctions contrary to the eternal law of God, it is right not to obey them. In like manner, the Prince of the Apostles gave this courageous and sublime answer to those who would have deprived him of the liberty of preaching the Gospel: "If it be just in the sight of God to hear you rather than God, judge ye, for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

 

How did the unjust laws in the State of New York get passed in the New York State Legislature?

With the votes of numerous Catholics, mostly members of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" who remained in perfectly good standing in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, that's how.

With the approval of no less than five pro-abortion Governors of the State of New York: the late Hugh Leo Carey (D-Brooklyn), Mario Matthew Cuomo (D-Queens, well, at least at the time of his election in 1982), George Elmer Pataki (R-Peekskill), David Paterson (D-Manhattan) and Andrew Mark Cuomo (D-Westchester County).

The pro-death George Elmer Pataki, whose major booster within the Republican Party of the State of New York in the early-1990s was none other than then United States Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-Island Park, New York), was championed the health insurance coverage for contraception and abortion law that went into effect in 2002, a law to which the then conciliar "archbishop" of New York, Edward "Cardinal" Egan, gave only token opposition, something he evidenced in 2001 after summarizing a meeting he had with Pataki on the matter, prompting me, still in my indulterer days, at the time to write the following:

The state of things in our civil government is pretty grim. Babies continue to be killed under cover of law in their mothers’ womb at the same rate now as they were being killed during the Clinton administration. Inspired by the fact that pro-abortion Catholics in the Democratic Party have not been excommunicated, a whole generation of Republican Catholic pro-aborts has arisen — New York Governor George Pataki, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former U.S. Representatives Rick Lazio and Susan Molinari, Maine Senator Susan Collins, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. They, too, have largely gone unchallenged by ecclesiastical authorities. (Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa., has barred Ridge from speaking in any diocesan facilities. However, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua of Philadelphia has not issued any such edict. Indeed, in recent years Ridge has spoken in at least one Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.) The net effect upon the average Catholic is quite clear: support for the mystical destruction of Our Lord in the persons of unborn babies is no impediment to being considered a Catholic in good standing. And support for such killing by Catholics in public life of either major political party is no impediment to being treated with warmth by the very princes of Holy Mother Church.

Enter Edward Cardinal Egan. The Archbishop of New York has had two good opportunities recently to admonish the pro-abortion Governor Pataki and the pro-abortion Mayor Giuliani. He dropped the ball on both occasions, thereby distinguishing himself from the early days of his predecessor, the late John Cardinal O’Connor, who picked some very public fights in 1984 with Governor Mario Cuomo and Rep. Geraldine Ferraro. (Yes, Cardinal O’Connor did apologize to Ferraro, saying that he did not mean to criticize his “good friend.” Well, she wasn’t his friend, good or otherwise. And he was absolutely right to criticize her. The late cardinal had a penchant for a Hamlet-like angst over his public comments about elected officials. And he himself gave Pataki and Giuliani a free pass on their pro-abortion stands.) Recently Cardinal Egan met privately with Pataki in Albany and came out saying that he had not discussed the issue of abortion with the governor. His Eminence said he looked forward to the “happy day” when Pataki would review his pro-abortion position. However, he stressed that Pataki was exercising his right as an American to be “pro-choice.” Only a few days later, Cardinal Egan warmly embraced Giuliani at New York’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, whose grand marshal was a pro-abortion Catholic politician from Staten Island.

“His right as an American?” The heresy of Americanism thus continues to influence the minds of highly intelligent princes of the Church. No one has the right to do evil. Human beings have the free will to choose between good and evil. However, we are only morally free to choose the good. No one has the “right” to choose to do that which is wrong. There is a distinction between having the authority to do something and having the ability to do it.

As I noted in “Get a Grip on Reality” in January, words have meaning. A Catholic — especially one who is a cardinal and is known to be a serious man of the mind — has the obligation to make all of the necessary distinctions required by Catholic moral theology. It is a grave dereliction of duty to speak in sloppy, Americanist terms that reaffirm the belief of ignorant people (Catholic and non-Catholic alike) that one really does have a “right” to support abortion. No one has the right to sin. And abortion is one of the four crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. (The other three are the sin of Sodom, defrauding a widow, and withholding the wages from a day laborer.)

Words and actions speak very loudly. The average Catholic sees the warm reception accorded Giuliani, who doesn’t even make a pretense of opposing partial-birth abortion, and the affirmation that Pataki has a “right” to support baby-killing. Why should a pro-abortion Catholic in the pew reassess his uncritical acceptance of our culture of death when a Cardinal Archbishop of a major metropolitan see fails to communicate the fact that abortion is a grave crime against both the Church and the State? Why should a woman who is suffering the effects of post-abortion syndrome consider reconciling herself to God the Father through the Son in Spirit and in Truth in the Sacrament of Penance when a Cardinal Archbishop speaks of support for abortion as being an exercise of an American “right”? Does not Cardinal Egan see that a woman can easily come to the conclusion that she was (or is) justified in seeking an abortion, if it is a matter of American rights? How can it not be a “right” for a woman to choose to have an abortion if Pataki has the “right” to choose to support it? ("Nothing But An American Right," Christ or Chaos, June, 2001.)

 

Obviously, Edward Egan was and remains in retirement hip-deep in the throes of conciliarism and has been exposed as a protector of predatory clergy during his years as the conciliar "bishop" of Bridgeport, Connecticut, from 1998 to 2000. His opposition to nefarious legislation in the State of New York was very token, thus further enabling pro-aborts and creating the climate that has made it possible for Catholics in public life to support legislation granting individuals engaged in perverse actions against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments the civil "right" to marry. Catholics in public life know that the toothless tigers in the hierarchy of the counterfeit church of conciliarism may rant and rave on occasion. In the end, however, they can always be counted upon to fold up and go home, a phenomenon that is even more pronounced now as a result of the scandals involving their complicity in the promotion and protection of predatory clergymen that have robbed them of what little moral authority on the natural level that they might otherwise have had.

Egan, though, was preceded in his own cowardice by the aforementioned John "Cardinal" O'Connor, who was the conciliar "archbishop" of New York from March 19, 1984, to May 3, 2000. Despite his strong "pro-life" rhetoric, O'Connor made numerous compromises that undermined both the temporal and eternal good of souls, including the time in the 1980s that he huffed and puffed and threaten to blow the house down over providing "educational materials" about contraception and contraceptive pills and devices themselves to children who had been placed in homes under the foster care program of the Archdiocese of New York.

"Cardinal" O'Connor had promised to withstand pressure from the administration of his buddy, the then Mayor of the City of New York, Edward Irving Koch, to provide information on contraceptives to children in the foster-care program administered by the Archdiocese of New York. "Cardinal" O'Connor huffed and puffed. In the final analysis, however, he, too, caved into the pressure exerted upon him by the Koch administration, agreeing to a "compromise" whereby children in the archdiocese's foster-care program were to be sent to a "third party," who would provide them with information about contraceptives (and with the contraceptives themselves).

Over and above the provision of health care insurance coverage for the chemical and surgical assassination of the preborn by agencies either run by or affiliated with the conciliar authorities, he actual truth of the matter on the level of medical praxis is that administrators of and medical practitioners in Catholic hospitals in conciliar captivity find all manner of creative ways to circumvent the Fifth Commandment's absolute prohibition against any participation, direct or indirect, in facilitating surgical abortions and are equally creative in ways to circumvent the Sixth Commandment's prohibition against any participation in the frustration of the first end of marriage, the procreation of children. Formerly Catholic hospitals in conciliar captivity are no more "Catholic" than former Catholic schools and universities and colleges and seminaries and chancery offices and parishes that are now in conciliar captivity.

A large percentage of Catholics who work in the corrupt, apostate bureaucratic support contraception and abortion and the entire panoply of the agenda of those who are steeped in unrepentant acts of perversity against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. Fidelity to the Marxist-trained Barack Hussein Obama is what defines their lives, not fidelity to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Indeed, these Catholics have a hatred for the Deposit of Faith. They believe in statism and moral relativism and utilitarianism, content not only to participate in the slaughter of the preborn but to justify the removal of food and water from living human beings whose only "crime" consists of being images of the suffering Christ who are in need of our caring for them as we would care for Our Lord Himself. The back alley butchers who gave us abortion on demand by butchering the truth as well as babies made allies in the ranks of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. They are still hard at work butchering the truth now as they were four and one-half decades ago.

What is true of the conciliar "bishops'" token opposition that has been provided to the ObamaCare mandate to provide health-care insurance coverage for contraception and abortion is true as well of their almost nonexistent efforts to lobby against legislation making the absurdity of "same gender marriage" a reality in state after state.

To wit, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis did not even issue a statement following the passages of the "marriage equality" bill by the Minnesota State Legislature. Not a peep was heard out of the conciliar "archbishop" of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, John C. Nienstedt, after Governor Mark Dayton (D) signed the bill into law on on May 14, 2013. That's right, not a word out of "Archbishop" John C. Nienstedt. Not a word, although he had supported a referendum to the Minnesota State Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman (polygamy is on the march in The Netherlands at present--

The best that that Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis could do was to post on its website a statement by the conciliar "archbishop" of San Francisco, California, Salvatore Cordileone, who has, following the sterling example of predecessors John Quinn, William Levada and George Niederauer, kept Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi in perfectly good standing under since his installation, on behalf of the United States Conference of "Catholic Bishops'" Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage that he, Cordileone, chairs:

WASHINGTON—“It is the height of irony that the Minnesota legislature decided, and the governor signed into law, the redefinition of marriage just after we celebrated the unique gifts of mothers and women on Mother’s Day,” said Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. Archbishop Cordileone chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage. He said further, “It is all the more so given the fact that in the last election Minnesotans were led to believe that there was no need to define marriage in the constitution, that nothing would change if the marriage amendment didn’t pass.”

“It also renders senseless the very idea of President Obama’s National Fatherhood Initiative, in that a bill now becomes law in Minnesota that effectively claims that a mother and a father together are superfluous and can be replaced by two men or two women,” he added.

Archbishop Cordileone noted that Minnesota is the third state in just over a week to redefine marriage in the law.

“There are many of us Americans, including many Minnesotans, who stand for the natural and true meaning of marriage. They know that men and women are important; their complementary difference matters, their union matters, and it matters to kids. Mothers and fathers are simply irreplaceable,” he said. “Instead of strengthening, the Minnesota legislature’s decision to redefine marriage weakens motherhood and fatherhood, and so strikes a blow to all children who deserve both a mother and father.”

“Some wish to believe that sexual relationships outside of the marital context of husband and wife are innocuous, choosing to ignore the fact that they are actually harmful to individuals and to society as a whole,” he added.

“We know that now is the time to redouble our prayers, efforts and witness. The truth of marriage is not going away,” Archbishop Cordileone said. “We know what it takes to work toward a culture of life even in the midst of laws that work against us. The same is true for rebuilding a culture of marriage. No matter what the horizon may bring, we will continue in charity and truth to stand for justice and for the most vulnerable among us.”

The Minnesota law highlights further implications of marriage redefinition in the law. For example, the law states that terms such as “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” and “father” that denote spousal and familial relationships in Minnesota law are to apply equally to persons in an opposite-sex or same-sex relationship. The law also states that “parentage presumptions based on civil marriage” will also apply, thus allowing for children to have two mothers or two fathers. (USCCB subcommittee chair: MN lawmakers’ post-Mother's Day marriage redefinition ‘height of irony' | Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.)

 

The first thing that should stand out in the minds of those who have been longtime readers of this site upon reading "Archbishop" Cordileone's statement is that it is a purely Judeo-Masonic work of naturalism as there is not a mention of God's immutable laws and the simple fact that all men at all times are bound to observe these laws or suffer the deleterious consequences for themselves and their nations that come from defying them. And to the Catholic Church has been entrusted by Christ the King Himself as being the sole authoritative voice for teaching men what is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

In other words, as I have said so many times in the past, one cannot fight secularism with secularism. One can only fight secularism, which is the logical product of the naturalistic, Judeo-Masonic civil state of Modernity, with Catholicism. The conciliar "bishops" are thus trapped in a vortex, if you will, of the very naturalism and religious indifferentism that have been celebrated by their Americanist predecessors in the Catholic Church under the aegis of "religious liberty" from the very founding of this nation upon one false premise after another.

Other than the documentation provided in Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism, here is yet another proof of this point as made by Americanist Archbishop of Saint Paul from 1884 to 1918, John Ireland. who delivered a lecture entitled "American Citizenship" in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 2, 1895, just about four months after Pope Leo XIII had issued Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, and warned the American bishops that they were not teaching his own encyclical letters on the true relationship between Church and State:

American citizenship is American manhood, the manhood of all born or adopted into the American nation.

Abraham Lincoln defines the government established by George Washington and his colaborers: "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people." America is the highest form of organized democracy.

American is the country of human dignity. The essence of the American Republic is manhood suffrage, a recognition of the dignity of manhood in all men and of his capability as a factor of government. It is a government by the people. There is universal suffrage; the people are trusted and deemed able to care for their public interests, and, while the immediate and direct gestion of affairs by the whole people is not possible in a large and important country, yet the officials delegated by the people for this gestion are so named for limited periods of time that, as a matter of fact, the people remain the governing authority.

"The foundation of the republic," says James Bryce [and English political philosopher], "is confidence in the multitude, in its honest and good sense, in the certainty of its arriving at right conclusions." Mr. Lincoln's political faith is that of the republic. "A part of the people may be wrong the whole time; the whole people may be wrong a part of the time; but the whole people will not be wrong the whole time." America is the country of human liberty. Liberty is the exemption from all restraint save that of the laws of justice and order, the exemption from submission to other men, except as they represent and enforce those laws. The divine gift of liberty to man is God's recognition of his greatness and dignity. The sweetness of life and power of growth lie in liberty. The loss of liberty is the loss of light and sunshine, the loss of life's best portion. Humanity, under the spell of heavenly memories, never ceased to dream of liberty and to aspire to its possession. Now and then during history, there and there,. its refreshing breezes caressed humanity's brow. But not until the Republic of the West was born, not until the Star-Spangled banner rose toward the skies, was Liberty caught up in humanity's embrace, and embodied in a great and abiding nation.

In American the Government takes from the liberty of the citizens only so much as is necessary for the weal of the nation, which the citizen by his own act freely concedes. In America there are not masters who govern in their own right, for their own interest, or at their own will. We have over us no Louis XIV, saying: L'etat c'est moi;" no Hohenzollern announcing that in his acts as sovereign he is responsibly only to his conscience and to God. Our is the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The government is our organized will. There is no State above or apart from the people. Rights begin and go upward from the people. In other countries, even those apparently the most free, rights begin with and come downward from the State. The rights of citizens, the rights of the people, are concessions which were painfully wrenched from the governing powers. With Americans, whenever the organize does not prove its grant, the liberty of the individual citizen is sacred and inviolable.

The republic of America was a supreme act of confidence in man--a confession such as never before had been heard of human dignity and human ability. Its creation was the boldest political act recorded in history. Even at this day, Mr. Bryce writes: "They (the Americans) are trying, and that on the largest scale, the most remarkable experiment in government the world has yet witnessed." The French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote that democracy is a government fit for gods, but unfit for man. As our patriot sires uplifted the starry flag, permitted with the hopes of the new spirit in humanity, the nations declared them foolish, and foretold  for the republic a brief period of years. "The American republic!" wrote a French publicist of established fame, Joseph de Maistre, "it is only in swathing clothes; let it grow, let a century pass over it., and we shall see what it is." Its existence was thought that of a passing illusion, and no attention was allowed it in the calculations of the future political possibilities of the world. (Archbishop John Ireland, "American Citizenship, full text found in The Voice of the Church, a book published by the Bishops of the United States of America in 1899, pp. 120-121. The rest of the speech was even worse than these initial passages. Time simply does not permit the full text to be transcribed at this time. Perhaps on another occasion.)

 

The great Joseph de Maistre has had the last word. Yes, let's take a look and see what has become of the United States of America. We know what it looks like, and it bears no resemblance to the mythological portrait pained by an Americanist nationalist, John Ireland, in the slightest.

 

Liberty was "unknown" prior the raising of the Star-Spangled Banner that is the American flag?

The "people remain the governing authority"?

"The government is our organized will"?

"There is no State above or apart from the people"?

"Rights begin and go upward from the people"?

How is your "confidence" in "man" looking now, Archbishop Ireland?

Yes, there is a direct path from John Ireland to James Gibbons and his contemporary, John Ireland, to the likes of Timothy Michael Dolan, John C. Nienstedt and Salvatore Cordileone, among so others.

Archbishop John Ireland would have made a perfect candidate to be the counterfeit church of conciliarism's universal public face of apostasy two months ago as the spirit of Americanism is that of conciliarism.

The amount of sheer mythology that came out of the lips of Archbishop John Ireland is staggering.

Yet it is that it is this mythology that perdures to this day in the minds, hearts and souls of the the conciliar "bishops" of the United States of America, men who are staging a second straight "fortnight of freedom" even though the very thing they celebrate and seek to defend, the heresy of religious liberty, is what gave us the likes of the Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and the monster civil state of Modernity. It was the celebration of "religious liberty" by the likes of John Carroll John Ireland and James Gibbons that convinced Catholics in the United States of America to view the Catholic Church and their solemn duties to her through the eyes of the Americanist concepts of "democracy," "equality," "freedom" and "individualism," which is why the odious laws that the conciliar "bishops" have sought oppose so tepidly can be passed and enforced as the means to pave the way to even greater evils to follow in their wake.

Pope Leo XIII explained what the future holds for men who do believe that civil society can know social order over the course of the long term when the state gives "equal rights" to all religions, an absurdity that leads to the triumph of practical atheism, of which Barack Hussein Obama is a prime example:

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

To think, as the conciliar "bishops: do, that one is going to fight the assaults of Barack Hussein Obama and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Kathleen Sebelius, Andrew Mark Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, Daniel Malloy and Company against the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law with the very poison, religious liberty, that made their rise to public prominence possible is insanity.

Summarizing the totality of Catholic teaching on human liberty, Pope Leo XIII had refuted John Ireland's delusional claims that "rights come from the people" throughout the course of his nearly twenty-five year pontificate, explaining in Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888, human liberty is a faculty given us by God to choose the good that is conformity with His eternal laws and that, therefore, human beings do not have an unfettered "right" to believe, think and say however it is they believe is best in the name of the sort of "civil liberty" exalted by Ireland:

9. What has been said of the liberty of individuals is no less applicable to them when considered as bound together in civil society. For, what reason and the natural law do for individuals. that human law promulgated for their good, does for the citizens of States. Of the laws enacted by men, some are concerned with what is good or bad by its very nature; and they command men to follow after what is right and to shun what is wrong, adding at the same time a suitable sanction. But such laws by no means derive their origin from civil society, because, just as civil society did not create human nature, so neither can it be said to be the author of the good which befits human nature, or of the evil which is contrary to it. Laws come before men live together in society, and have their origin in the natural, and consequently in the eternal, law. The precepts, therefore, of the natural law, contained bodily in the laws of men, have not merely the force of human law, but they possess that higher and more august sanction which belongs to the law of nature and the eternal law. And within the sphere of this kind of laws the duty of the civil legislator is, mainly, to keep the community in obedience by the adoption of a common discipline and by putting restraint upon refractory and viciously inclined men, so that, deterred from evil, they may turn to what is good, or at any rate may avoid causing trouble and disturbance to the State. Now, there are other enactments of the civil authority, which do not follow directly, but somewhat remotely, from the natural law, and decide many points which the law of nature treats only in a general and indefinite way. For instance, though nature commands all to contribute to the public peace and prosperity, whatever belongs to the manner, and circumstances, and conditions under which such service is to be rendered must be determined by the wisdom of men and not by nature herself. It is in the constitution of these particular rules of life, suggested by reason and prudence, and put forth by competent authority, that human law, properly so called, consists, binding all citizens to work together for the attainment of the common end proposed to the community, and forbidding them to depart from this end, and, in so far as human law is in conformity with the dictates of nature, leading to what is good, and deterring from evil.

10. From this it is manifest that the eternal law of God is the sole standard and rule of human liberty, not only in each individual man, but also in the community and civil society which men constitute when united. Therefore, the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State; but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law. Likewise, the liberty of those who are in authority does not consist in the power to lay unreasonable and capricious commands upon their subjects, which would equally be criminal and would lead to the ruin of the commonwealth; but the binding force of human laws is in this, that they are to be regarded as applications of the eternal law, and incapable of sanctioning anything which is not contained in the eternal law, as in the principle of all law. Thus, St. Augustine most wisely says: "I think that you can see, at the same time, that there is nothing just and lawful in that temporal law, unless what men have gathered from this eternal law."[5] If, then, by anyone in authority, something be sanctioned out of conformity with the principles of right reason, and consequently hurtful to the commonwealth, such an enactment can have no binding force of law, as being no rule of justice, but certain to lead men away from that good which is the very end of civil society.

11. Therefore, the nature of human liberty, however it be considered, whether in individuals or in society, whether in those who command or in those who obey, supposes the necessity of obedience to some supreme and eternal law, which is no other than the authority of God, commanding good and forbidding evil. And, so far from this most just authority of God over men diminishing, or even destroying their liberty, it protects and perfects it, for the real perfection of all creatures is found in the prosecution and attainment of their respective ends; but the supreme end to which human liberty must aspire is God.

12. These precepts of the truest and highest teaching, made known to us by the light of reason itself, the Church, instructed by the example and doctrine of her divine Author, has ever propagated and asserted; for she has ever made them the measure of her office and of her teaching to the Christian nations. As to morals, the laws of the Gospel not only immeasurably surpass the wisdom of the heathen, but are an invitation and an introduction to a state of holiness unknown to the ancients; and, bringing man nearer to God, they make him at once the possessor of a more perfect liberty. Thus, the powerful influence of the Church has ever been manifested in the custody and protection of the civil and political liberty of the people. The enumeration of its merits in this respect does not belong to our present purpose. It is sufficient to recall the fact that slavery, that old reproach of the heathen nations, was mainly abolished by the beneficent efforts of the Church. The impartiality of law and the true brotherhood of man were first asserted by Jesus Christ; and His apostles re-echoed His voice when they declared that in future there was to be neither Jew, nor Gentile, nor barbarian, nor Scythian, but all were brothers in Christ. So powerful, so conspicuous, in this respect is the influence of the Church that experience abundantly testifies how savage customs are no longer possible in any land where she has once set her foot; but that gentleness speedily takes the place of cruelty, and the light of truth quickly dispels the darkness of barbarism. Nor has the Church been less lavish in the benefits she has conferred on civilized nations in every age, either by resisting the tyranny of the wicked, or by protecting the innocent and helpless from injury, or, finally, by using her influence in the support of any form of government which commended itself to the citizens at home, because of its justice, or was feared by their enemies without, because of its power. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)

 

Conversely, of course, nations who have known the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King will return to the ways of their pagan or barbarian ancestors once they choose that they will have not king but their own bellies, their own pride, their own materialism, their own lusts, their own whims. After all, John Ireland said that "organized society is the collective will," right? Wrong.

Additionally, nations such as the United States of America that have been founded on the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity are bound to degenerate over the course of time. We are, as has been noted on this site endlessly, merely witnessing the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles, a phrase that  a presbyter in the Priestly Fraternity of Sant Peter used after one of my "Living in the Shadow of the Cross" lectures and that describes very succinctly why things have deteriorated so rapidly in recent decades, especially as the wellsprings of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces have dried up as a result of the sacramental barrenness of the counterfeit church of conciliarism's liturgical rites and the apostate nature of its doctrines and pastoral practices.

Pope Leo XIII explained in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, that a knowledge of the Natural Law is not sufficient in and of itself to provide the safeguards against the ravages of fallen human nature. We need the assistance of Sanctifying Grace to have our intellects enlightened and our wills strengthened in order to choose the good in according with right reason and Divine Revelation as explicated infallibly by Holy Mother Church. Absent a reliance upon Sanctifying Grace, men must perforce fall into lives of materialism and public life itself will be stained with crime:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (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.)

 

Ultimately, you see, the likes of Timothy Michael Dolan and his brother "bishops" in the American hierarchy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis's counterfeit church of conciliarism, are themselves "false opposites" of the likes of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Andrew Mark Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, Daniel Malloy, Mark Dayton, Patrick Quinn, Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi and the whole roster of characters, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who promote evil after in the name of "human rights" and "civil liberty."

That is why Dolan's second, mind you, "fortnight of freedom," which runs from June 21, 2013, to July 4, 2013, is just as much as fraud as last year's crusade in behalf of the very poison, religious liberty, that has brought us to the abyss at present. There can be no true liberty in a land that does not recognize the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the Catholic Church as she lifts high the one and only true standard of human liberty, Our King's Most Holy Cross, not the Star-Spangled Banner.

The errors of pluralism divide people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order, control public life.

The conciliar revolutionaries have celebrated Modernity and its errors while they have deconstructed and misrepresented Our Lady's Fatima Message. Yet it is that the darkness of these times will end when a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter consecrates collegially with all of the world's bishops to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Every Rosary we pray helps to plant the seeds for an end to the current chastisement, which we well deserve for our our sins, and for the conversion of the souls of those who are steeped in the contagion of error and hatred that destroying what is left of the so-called "civilized" West.

Conscious of our need to make reparation for our own many sins that have worsened both the state of the Church Militant on earth and the world-at-large as we offer up whatever it is we suffer in this time of chastisement to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, may the following words of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori on the Particular Judgment help us always to put Last Things first and never to get bogged down in the "trees" of various crises that have proliferated because of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by Judeo-Masonry:

Worldlings now regard as fools the saints, who led mortified and humble lives; but then they shall confess their own folly, and say: "We fools esteemed their life madness, and their end without honor. Behold how they they are numbered among the children of God, and their lot is among the saints"--Wis., v. 4, 5. In this world, the rich and the noble are called happy; but true happiness consists in a life of sanctity. Rejoice, ye souls who live in tribulation; "your sorrow shall be turned into joy"--John, xvi. 20. In the valley of Josaphat you shall be seated on thrones of glory.

But the reprobate, like goats destined for the slaughter, shall be placed on the left, to await their last condemnation "Judici tempus", says Saint Chrysostom, "misericordiam non recipit". On the day of judgment, there is no hope of mercy for poor sinners. "Magna", says St. Augustine, "jam est poena peccati metum et memoriam divini perdidisse judicii"--serm. xx, de Temp. The greatest punishment of sin in those who live in enmity with God, is to lose the fear and remembrance of the divine judgment. Continue, continue. says the Apostle, to live obstinately in sin; but in proportion to your obstinacy, you shall have accumulated for the day of judgment a treasure of the wrath of God. "But according to thy hardness and impenitent heart, thou treasurest  up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath"--Rom., ii. 5.

Then sinners will not be able to hide themselves; but, with insufferable pain, they shall be compelled to appear in judgment. "To lie hid", says St. Anselm, "will be impossible--to appear will be intolerable." The devils will perform their office of accusers, and as St. Augustine says, will say to the Judge: "Most just God, declare him to be mine, who was unwilling to be yours". The witnesses against the wicked shall be, first, their own conscience--"Their conscience bearing witness to them"--Rom., ii. 15; secondly, the very walls of the house in which they sinned shall cry out against them--"The stone shall cry out of the wall"--Hab., ii. 11; thirdly, the Judge himself will say--"I am the judge and the witness, saith the Lord:--Jer., xxix. 23. Hence, according to St. Augustine, "He who is now the witness of your life, shall be the judge of your cause"--lib. x. de Chrod., c. ii. To Christians particularly he will say: "Wo to thee Corazain, wo to thee Bethsaida; for if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth and ashes"--Matt., xi. 21. Christians, he will say, if the graces which I have bestowed upon you had been given to the Turks or to the Pagans, they would have done penance for their sins; but you have ceased to sin only with your death. He shall then manifest to all men their most hidden crimes. "I will discover thy shame to thy face"--Nahum., iii. 5. He will expose to view all their secret impurities, injustices, and cruelties. "I will set all thy abominations against thee"--Ezech., vii. 3. Each of the damned shall carry his sins written on his forehead.

What excuses can save the wicked on that day? Ah! they can offer no excuses. "All iniquity shall stop her mouth"--Ps., cvi. 42. Their very sins shall close the mouth of the reprobate, so that they will have not courage to excuse themselves. They shall pronounce their own condemnation. (Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, First Sunday In Advent: On The General Judgment.)

This applies to us!

Our Lady is our only hope now and for all eternity.

O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine.

O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine.

O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us, on this your feast day!

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Pope Saint Felix I, pray for us.

Saint Joan of Arc, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?