Giving Unto Caesar What Belongs To God Alone
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
The descent into the abyss of a world that has rejected the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Holy Church is nearly complete. Only a few remaining barriers of moral depravity need to be razed before an active, overt state-sponsored persecution of those who dare to oppose the madness of our times begins with the full backing of large numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
The modern civil state is the work of the devil, who has propagandized the "Sovereignty of Man" now as never before.
Most people in what was once termed the "civilized West" live as sentient beasts, devoid of rationality as they seek wealth, luxury, amusements and an endless array of sentient pleasures.
Most people in what was once termed the "civilized West" believe that the principal purpose of human existence is to acqire, retain and expand wealth. Many are convinced that it is duty of the civil state to provide for their every need, especially in times of personal crisis or natural disaster, caring not how their goodies will be paid for over the course of time as that will be a problem for "someone else," not them.
Most people in what was once termed the "civilized" West believe that "one religion is a good as another," being reafffirmed in that conviction by the words of the actions of the men who have been masquerading as "popes" since October 28, 1958.
Most people in what was once the "civilized" West believe that the conception of children may be "planned," whether by artifical or "natural" means, as a matter of personal "right" and that they be disposed of by chemical or surgical means if an "accident" happens.
Large numbers of people in what was once the "civilized" West believe the elderly or the terminally or the chronically ill may be sent to "hospice" or simply euthanized in the name of "mercy" and "compassion."
Increasingly larger numbers of people now believe that it is wrong to deny those who are inclined to the commission of perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments have the "right to marry those they love." And it is this sentimental drivel that has its origin with the devil and leads straight to Hell that has resulted in the abysmal absurdity of two days of arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States of America on "gay marriage."
As noted a week ago today in They Have Heard The People Sing, the first day of hearings on Tuesday, March 26, 2013, Tuesday of Holy Week, dealt with the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, centering on Proposition 8 in California. The second day of hearings on Wednesday, March 27, 2013, Wednesday of Holy Week, centered on the constitutionality of a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by the Congress of the United States of America on September 10, 1996, and signed into law by then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton on September 21, 1996.
The questions asked by the justices during oral arguments in the case of Windsor v. United States, which concerned the "right" of a practitioner of perversity to inherit the benefits due to a surviving "spouse" demonstrate the utter depths to which men must fall absent the Catholic Faith, especially at a time when the world is deprived of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the sacramentally barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that have resulted in men being devoid of the use of even reason and logic on the purely natural level:
On the second day of intense arguments over the volatile issue of same-sex marriage,
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who most likely holds the decisive vote,
returned again and again to the theme that deciding who is married is a
matter for the states. The federal government, he said, should respect
“the historic commitment of marriage, and of questions of the rights of
children, to the states.”
That suggests that he is prepared to vote with the court’s four liberal
members to strike down the part of the 1996 law that recognizes only the
marriages of opposite-sex couples for more than 1,000 federal laws and
programs. Such a ruling would deliver federal benefits to married
same-sex couples in the nine states, and the District of Columbia, that
allow such unions.
If the 1996 law stands, Justice Kennedy said, “you are at real risk with
running in conflict with what has always been thought to be the
essence” of state power, which he said was to regulate marriage, divorce
and custody.
All four members of the court’s liberal wing questioned the
constitutionality of the law, though they largely focused on equal
protection principles rather than on the limits of federal power.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, said the law effectively
created “two kinds of marriage: the full marriage, and then this sort of
skim milk marriage.”
Paul D. Clement, who served as solicitor general under President George
W. Bush and is defending the law on behalf of House Republicans, argued
that the federal government was entitled to use a uniform definition of
marriage across the nation.
Mr. Clement said countless laws over time had been enacted with the
traditional definition of marriage in mind. When Congress approved the
1996 law, he said, it was worried that if one state extended the
definition to include same-sex couples, those laws would effectively be
changed.
“What Congress says is, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” Mr. Clement said of what had
happened in 1996. “ ‘Let’s take a timeout here. This is a redefinition
of an age-old institution.’ ”
Justice Elena Kagan said there was something else at work.
“Do we really think that Congress was doing this for uniformity reasons,
or do we think that Congress’s judgment was infected by dislike, by
fear, by animus and so forth?” she asked.
She read a passage from the House record at the time that said the law
had been animated by a “collective moral judgment” to “express moral
disapproval of homosexuality.”
Mr. Clement responded: “Of course, the House report says that. And if
that’s enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the
statute. But that has never been your approach.”
“Just because a couple legislators may have had an improper motive” is
irrelevant, Mr. Clement said, adding that the usual question for the
court was simply whether the challenged law was supported by a rational
justification.
Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said the 1996 law is deeply
unfair and means, for instance, “that the spouse of a soldier killed in
the line of duty cannot receive the dignity and solace of an official
notification of next of kin.”
The arguments came a day after the court heard a challenge to California’s Proposition 8,
which bans same-sex marriages. That argument was murky and muddled, and
many of the justices’ questions suggested they were looking for a way
to duck the central issue.
By comparison, Wednesday’s case was modest, and the arguments were
clear. The court heard a preliminary 50-minute session on whether it had
jurisdiction to hear the case, but those issues did not seem to
threaten to send the case off the rails.
The court appointed Vicki C. Jackson, a law professor at Harvard, to
argue a position not fully supported by any party: that the case’s odd
procedural posture meant the court lacks jurisdiction. (Justices Hear Arguments on Defense of Marriage Act.)
Just consider the absurdity of adult human beings speaking in the manner as quoted above.
Consider the absurdity of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed by President Ronald Wilson Reagan on November 30, 1987, and sworn in on February 18, 1988, stating that "you are at real risk with
running in conflict with what has always been thought to be the
essence” of state power, which he said was to regulate marriage, divorce
and custody." The regulation of marriage, divorce and custody" are "thought to be the essence" of state power?
Well, Anthony Kennedy, here is something you must have missed in your catechism classes when you were growing up in your local parish in Sacramento, California, in the 1940s:
Nevertheless, the naturalists, as well as
all who profess that they worship above all things the divinity of the
State, and strive to disturb whole communities with such wicked
doctrines, cannot escape the charge of delusion. Marriage has
God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of
foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides
in it a something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not
derived from men, but implanted by nature. Innocent III. therefore. and
Honorius III, our predecessors, affirmed not falsely nor rashly that a
sacrament of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and unbelievers.
We call to witness the monuments of antiquity, as also the manners and
customs of those people who, being the most civilized, had the greatest
knowledge of law and equity. In the minds of all of them it was a fixed
and foregone conclusion that, when marriage was thought of, it was
thought of as conjoined with religion and holiness. Hence, among those,
marriages were commonly celebrated with religious ceremonies, under the
authority of pontiffs, and with the ministry of priests. So mighty, even
in the souls ignorant of heavenly doctrine, was the force of nature, of
the remembrance of their origin, and of the conscience of the human
race. As, then, marriage is holy by its own power, in its own nature,
and of itself, it ought not to be regulated and administered by the will
of civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone
in sacred matters professes the office of teaching.
Next, the dignity of the sacrament must be
considered, for through addition of the sacrament the marriages of
Christians have become far the noblest of all matrimonial unions. But to
decree and ordain concerning the sacrament is, by the will of Christ
Himself, so much a part of the power and duty of the Church that it is
plainly absurd to maintain that even the very smallest fraction of such
power has been transferred to the civil ruler.
Lastly should be borne in mind the great weight and
crucial test of history, by which it is plainly proved that the
legislative and judicial authority of which We are speaking has been
freely and constantly used by the Church, even in times when some
foolishly suppose the head of the State either to have consented to it
or connived at it. It would, for instance, be incredible and
altogether absurd to assume that Christ our Lord condemned the
long-standing practice of polygamy and divorce by authority delegated to
Him by the procurator of the province, or the principal ruler of the
Jews. And it would be equally extravagant to think that, when the
Apostle Paul taught that divorces and incestuous marriages were not
lawful, it was because Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero agreed with him or
secretly commanded him so to teach. No man in his senses could ever be
persuaded that the Church made so many laws about the holiness and
indissolubility of marriage, and the marriages of slaves with the
free-born, by power received from Roman emperors, most hostile to the
Christian name, whose strongest desire was to destroy by violence and
murder the rising Church of Christ. Still less could anyone believe this
to be the case, when the law of the Church was sometimes so divergent
from the civil law that Ignatius the Martyr, Justin, Athenagoras, and
Tertullian publicly denounced as unjust and adulterous certain marriages
which had been sanctioned by imperial law.
Furthermore, after all power had devolved upon the
Christian emperors, the supreme pontiffs and bishops assembled in
council persisted with the same independence and consciousness of their
right in commanding or forbidding in regard to marriage whatever they
judged to be profitable or expedient for the time being, however much it
might seem to be at variance with the laws of the State. It is
well known that, with respect to the impediments arising from the
marriage bond, through vow, disparity of worship, blood relationship,
certain forms of crime, and from previously plighted troth, many decrees
were issued by the rulers of the Church at the Councils of Granada,
Arles, Chalcedon, the second of Milevum, and others, which were often
widely different from the decrees sanctioned by the laws of the empire.
Furthermore, so far were Christian princes from arrogating any power in
the matter of Christian marriage that they on the contrary acknowledged
and declared that it belonged exclusively in all its fullness to the
Church. In fact, Honorius, the younger Theodosius, and Justinian, also,
hesitated not to confess that the only power belonging to them in
relation to marriage was that of acting as guardians and defenders of
the holy canons. If at any time they enacted anything by their edicts
concerning impediments of marriage, they voluntarily explained the
reason, affirming that they took it upon themselves so to act, by leave
and authority of the Church, whose judgment they were wont to appeal to
and reverently to accept in all questions that concerned legitimacy and
divorce; as also in all those points which in any way have a necessary
connection with the marriage bond. The Council of Trent, therefore, had
the clearest right to define that it is in the Church's power "to
establish diriment impediments of matrimony," and that "matrimonial
causes pertain to ecclesiastical judges."
Let no one, then, be deceived by the
distinction which some civil jurists have so strongly insisted upon --
the distinction, namely, by virtue of which they sever the matrimonial
contract from the sacrament, with intent to hand over the contract to
the power and will of the rulers of the State, while reserving questions
concerning the sacrament of the Church. A distinction, or rather
severance, of this kind cannot be approved; for certain it is that in
Christian marriage the contract is inseparable from the sacrament, and
that, for this reason, the contract cannot be true and legitimate
without being a sacrament as well. For Christ our Lord added to marriage
the dignity of a sacrament; but marriage is the contract itself,
whenever that contract is lawfully concluded. . . .
Truly, it is hardly possible to describe how great are the evils that flow from divorce. Matrimonial
contracts are by it made variable; mutual kindness is weakened;
deplorable inducements to unfaithfulness are supplied; harm is done to
the education and training of children; occasion is afforded for the
breaking up of homes; the seeds of dissension are sown among families;
the dignity of womanhood is lessened and brought low, and women run the
risk of being deserted after having ministered to the pleasures of men.
Since, then, nothing has such power to lay waste families and destroy
the mainstay of kingdoms as the corruption of morals, it is easily seen
that divorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of
families and States, springing as they do from the depraved morals of
the people, and, as experience shows us, opening out a way to every kind
of evil-doing in public and in private life.
Further still, if the matter be duly pondered, we
shall clearly see these evils to be the more especially dangerous,
because, divorce once being tolerated, there will be no restraint
powerful enough to keep it within the bounds marked out or presurmised. Great
indeed is the force of example, and even greater still the might of
passion. With such incitements it must needs follow that the eagerness
for divorce, daily spreading by devious ways, will seize upon the minds
of many like a virulent contagious disease, or like a flood of water
bursting through every barrier. These are truths that doubtlessly are
all clear in themselves, but they will become clearer yet if we call to
mind the teachings of experience. So soon as the road to divorce began
to be made smooth by law, at once quarrels, jealousies, and judicial
separations largely increased: and such shamelessness of life followed
that men who had been in favor of these divorces repented of what they
had done, and feared that, if they did not carefully seek a remedy by
repealing the law, the State itself might come to ruin. The
Romans of old are said to have shrunk with horror from the first example
of divorce, but ere long all sense of decency was blunted in their
soul; the meager restraint of passion died out, and the marriage vow was
so often broken that what some writers have affirmed would seem to be
true -- namely, women used to reckon years not by the change of consuls,
but of their husbands. In like manner, at the beginning, Protestants
allowed legalized divorces in certain although but few cases, and yet
from the affinity of circumstances of like kind, the number of divorces
increased to such extent in Germany, America, and elsewhere that all
wise thinkers deplored the boundless corruption of morals, and judged
the recklessness of the laws to be simply intolerable.
Even in Catholic States the evil existed. For
whenever at any time divorce was introduced, the abundance of misery
that followed far exceeded all that the framers of the law could have
foreseen. In fact, many lent their minds to contrive all kinds of fraud
and device, and by accusations of cruelty, violence, and adultery to
feign grounds for the dissolution of the matrimonial bond of which they
had grown weary; and all this with so great havoc to morals that an
amendment of the laws was deemed to be urgently needed.
Can anyone, therefore, doubt that laws in favor of
divorce would have a result equally baneful and calamitous were they to
be passed in these our days? There exists not, indeed, in the projects
and enactments of men any power to change the character and tendency
with things have received from nature. Those men, therefore,
show but little wisdom in the idea they have formed of the well-being of
the commonwealth who think that the inherent character of marriage can
be perverted with impunity; and who, disregarding the sanctity of
religion and of the sacrament, seem to wish to degrade and dishonor
marriage more basely than was done even by heathen laws. Indeed, if they
do not change their views, not only private families, but all public
society, will have unceasing cause to fear lest they should be miserably
driven into that general confusion and overthrow of order which is even
now the wicked aim of socialists and communists. Thus we see most
clearly how foolish and senseless it is to expect any public good from
divorce, when, on the contrary, it tends to the certain destruction of
society. (Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum, February 10, 1890.)
So much for the "essence" of state power, Tony Kennedy. Yet it is that Anthony Kennedy remains a "Catholic" in "good standing" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism despite twenty-five years of decisions in favor of contraception, abortion and sodomy, including his infamous opinion, signed by Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ronald Wilson Reagan's first appointee to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert Casey, June 29, 1992:
Although Roe has
engendered opposition, it has in no sense proven unworkable,
representing as it does a simple limitation beyond which a state law is
unenforceable. P. 835.
(e) The
Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without
serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social
developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices
that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in
reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception
should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the
economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their
ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves
human values, and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly
measured, neither can the certain costs of overruling Roe for people who
have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed. Pp. 855-856. (Text of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.)
Anthony Kennedy is just another Catholic sophist in public life, a man who continues to give unto Caesar what belongs to God alone.
There was also the spectacle of Ruth Bader Ginsburg decrying "two kinds of marriage" and Elena Kagan decrying the condemnation of homosexual behavior by some sponsors of the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States House of Representatives that prompted former United Staes Solicitor General Paul Clement, who represented the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of Representatives, to assert that the fact that "a couple legislators may have had an improper motive" was irrelevant to the Act's constitutionality.
Improper motives?
What, Mr. Paul Clement, who now teaches as an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is improper about declaring homosexual behavior to be immoral?
If this is so, Mr. Clement, then you have a problem with God Himself:
And when the men rose up from thence, they turned
their eyes towards Sodom: and Abraham walked with them, bringing them on
the way. And the Lord said: Can I hide from Abraham what I am about to
do: Seeing he shall become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the
nations of the earth shall be blessed? For I know that he will command
his children, and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord,
and do judgment and justice: that for Abraham's sake the Lord may bring
to effect all the things he hath spoken unto him. And the Lord said: The cry of Sodom and Gomorrha is multiplied, and their sin is become exceedingly grievous.
I will go down and see whether they have done
according to the cry that is come to me: or whether it be not so, that I
may know. And they turned themselves from thence, and went their way to
Sodom: but Abraham as yet stood before the Lord. And drawing nigh he
said: Wilt thou destroy the just with the wicked? If there be fifty just
men in the city, shall they perish withal? and wilt thou not spare that
place for the sake of the fifty just, if they be therein? Far be it
from thee to do this thing, and to slay the just with the wicked, and
for the just to be in like case as the wicked, this is not beseeming
thee: thou who judgest all the earth, wilt not make this judgment.
And the Lord said to him: If I find in Sodom fifty
just within the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. And
Abraham answered, and said: Seeing I have once begun, I will speak to my
Lord, whereas I am dust and ashes. What if there be five less than
fifty just persons? wilt thou for five and forty destroy the whole city?
And he said: I will not destroy it, if I find five and forty. And again
he said to him: But if forty be found there, what wilt thou do? He
said: I will not destroy it for the sake of forty. Lord, saith he, be
not angry, I beseech thee, if I speak: What if thirty shall be found
there? He answered: I will not do it, if I find thirty there.
Seeing, saith he, I have once begun, I will speak
to my Lord. What if twenty be found there? He said: I will not destroy
it for the sake of twenty. I beseech thee, saith he, be not angry, Lord,
if I speak yet once more: What if ten should be found there? And he
said: I will not destroy it for the sake of ten. And the Lord departed,
after he had left speaking to Abraham: and Abraham returned to his
place. (Genesis 16: 16-33)
And he said to him: Behold also in this, I have
heard thy prayers, not to destroy the city for which thou hast spoken.
Make haste and be saved there, because I cannot do any thing till thou
go in thither. Therefore the name of that city was called Segor. The sun
was risen upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor. And the
Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire from the Lord out
of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about,
all the inhabitants of the cities, and all things that spring from the
earth.
And his wife looking behind her, was turned into a
statue of salt. And Abraham got up early in the morning and in the
place where he had stood before with the Lord, He looked towards Sodom
and Gomorrha, and the whole land of that country: and he saw the ashes
rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace. (Genesis 19: 21-28.)
Did God have an "improper motive" for raining down brimstone and fire upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, Mr. Clement?
Oh, that never happened, you say? It's just a made-up story?
Well, apart from blaspheming God the Holy Ghost, under whose Divine inspiration Holy Writ was composed, such an assertion would also blaspheme Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Who referred specifically to the just punishment that had been imposed on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha where the sins of homosexual behavior were rampant when He warned that a worse fate than that of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha await
those who live in places where His Apostles and disciples have to shake
the dust off of their feet because His Gospel has not been accepted:
And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, inquire who in it is
worthy, and there abide till you go thence. And when you come into the
house, salute it, saying: Peace be to this house. And if that house be
worthy, your peace shall come upon it; but if it be not worthy, your
peace shall return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear
your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust
from your feet. Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. (Matthew 10: 11-15.)
Undaunted, however, more and more politicians of both major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America are announcing their support for "gay marriage:"
Two more senators, one from each party, announced their support for same-sex marriage on Tuesday. Their shifts appear to mark 50 votes to legalize such unions in the Senate.
Mark Kirk of Illinois joined Rob Portman of Ohio on the small list of Senate Republicans who back legalizing marriage for gay couples.
“When I climbed the Capitol steps in January,” Mr. Kirk said, referring to when he returned to work after spending a year recovering from a stroke, “I promised myself that I would return to the Senate with an open mind and greater respect for others.”
He continued, in a statement: “Same-sex couples should have the right to civil marriage. Our time on this earth is limited; I know that better than most. Life comes down to who you love and who loves you back — government has no place in the middle.”
Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, took to Facebook to announce his support.
“As our society has changed and evolved, so too has the public’s opinion on gay marriage – and so has mine,” he wrote, adding that the Golden Rule had prompted him to believe that “all Americans should be free to marry the people they love and intend to share their lives with, regardless of their sexual orientation.”
More senators have been announcing their support of same-sex marriage almost daily, including Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Monday. (The Caucus: G.O.P. and Democratic Senators Back Gay Marriage.)
Yes, they heard the people sing, "Give us Barrabas! Give us Barrabas! We have no king but Caesar! We gladly give unto Caesar what belongs to Christ the King as Caesar alone is our god and none other."
Nothing will happen to United States Senator Robert "Bob" Casey (D-Pennsylvania) for his recent announcement. He will not be sanctioned in any manner by "Bishop" Joseph C. Bambera of his home Diocese of Scranton. Robert Casey, Jr., will remain in perfectly good standing in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
Why not?
So has Daniel Malloy, Martin O'Malley, Andrew Mark Cuomo, Patrick Quinn, Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and a plethora of others.
After all, the conciliar "bishops," most of whom have been "gay friendly" in actual pastoral praxis (and not a few in their own private lives) and in the very culture they have helped to foster in their chancery offices, parishes, schools, universities, seminaries, convents and religous miseducation programs. They are tripping all over themselves know to demonstrate just how "gay friendly" they are even though they say that they are opposed to "gay marriage":
Still, Dolan has always been viewed as a more pastoral figure than
many hard-line American prelates. He has tried to steer the hierarchy on
a politically realistic course, even when he's eagerly taken on the
White House on issues such as the Obamacare mandate for employers to
provide free contraceptive insurance coverage.
Christopher Hale,
co-founder of the Millennial blog for young Catholics and an adviser for
President Obama's re-election campaign, said he's had constructive
exchanges with Dolan, and said Dolan's office had responded positively
to Hale's March 26 Washington Post column that urged the very kind of pastoral shift on gays that Dolan seemed to adopt.
Hale
also cited a Religion News Service column by Michael O'Loughlin calling
for a shift in emphasis that he said Dolan's office also appreciated.
"I know he listens," Hale said of Dolan. "I know he has his finger to
the wind on this issue" of the church's attitude towards gays and
lesbians.
Other leaders apparently do as well.
Cardinal
Donald Wuerl of Washington, and his predecessor, Cardinal Theodore
McCarrick, were also on Sunday morning news shows addressing the issue
of gay rights and stressing that the Catholic Church needed to be
welcoming. As McCarrick put it, the church could be open to civil unions
as an alternative to gay marriage.
Interestingly, it's the same
approach Francis tried to take in Argentina, voicing support among
Argentine bishops for civil unions against a national bid to allow gay
marriage. He ultimately lost both battles.
Church officials insist
that the Catholic bishops have always taken a "hate the sin, love the
sinner" approach, and that the positive comments by Dolan and other
churchmen are nothing new.
"A disagreement on the definition of
marriage is a serious disagreement. It is not, however, separation from
the love of God," Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the USCCB,
wrote in a blog post.
Yet that's not the message many bishops had
been sending. During the 2012 presidential campaign, a number of bishops
said that those who support civil marriage for gays should be barred
from Communion, and Dolan and other bishops cast the battle over gay
marriage, and against Obama, in almost apocalyptic terms.
Other
church leaders used especially harsh language to describe gays and
lesbians, and some barred children from attending Catholic schools
because their parents are gay. Many also equated support for civil
marriage for gays with support for abortion, an action that is grounds
for automatic excommunication.
As Dolan himself conceded on
Easter, though, the bishops "try our darnedest to make sure we're not an
anti-anybody," but up to now "we haven't been too good at that."
While
gay rights activists in the Catholic Church welcomed the change of tone
as "nothing short of an Easter miracle," in the words of Francis
DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, church leaders also stress that they
aren't softening their opposition to same-sex marriage.
At most,
it appears that some leaders could be open to favoring civil unions or
some alternative to gay marriage — an option that may not even be on the
table anymore. Another strategy: shifting the focus from blistering
opposition to gays and lesbians to ensuring that religious freedom and
conscience rights are respected in future gay rights laws.
That
itself could be significant, though it's not clear whether that will be
enough to alter the dynamic that has built up in recent years. To be
sure, the hierarchy will also face strong calls from its right flank to
take a more vocal stand against gay rights.
"Why aren't their
(Catholic) bishops appearing on the tube with David Gregory and Piers
Morgan to defend the institution of marriage as a union of one man and
one woman?" Michael Reagan wrote in a March 28 column at the
conservative news site, Townhall.com.
"Like the bank executives
that are too chicken to stand up to the federal bullies in Washington,
and like the energy company bosses in California who won't stand up to
the Green Socialists in Sacramento, the churches cower in fear," Reagan
wrote.
Dolan didn't give up the doctrinal ship in his recent appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He spoke to gay men and lesbians saying, in
part, "... we want your happiness... and you're entitled to
friendship.' But the church does not see them as entitled to married
love.
And Wuerl brought that point home in his Fox News Sunday appearance. He told Chris Wallace:
"The
only thing I worry about is someone saying to me, 'You, because you
believe that sex is intended for marriage and because you believe that
marriage is indissoluble and because you believe that marriage is
between a man and a woman that somehow you don't belong here, that
somehow this is bigotry or this is hate speech.' That's what I worry
about. There has to be room enough in a society as large, as free as
pluralistic as America to make space for all of us." (Is Conciliar shift on practioners of moral perversity substance or style?)
Yes, these apostates have "heard the people sing."
Moreover, these apostates, committed sons of the heresy of Americanism that each and every single one of them is, have helped to teach the people to "sing" for their "rights" in a land of religious indifferentism, naturalism, semi-Pelagianism and civil and religious "liberty."
Yes, it is the conciliar "bishops," now aided and abetted by their "popes" and their current Petrine Minister, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who have helped to create an atmsophere so redolent in a celebration of the "diversity" and "pluralism" of the modern civil state that they must now react with sensitivity as the people sing songs that cause them to extol a society that is "large" enough and "free" enough to provide space even to those who might believe, however tenuously, to some concept of objective moral truths. But that's all that these apostates want, some "space."
Well, these apostates have been given "space" enough to ruin souls for far too long, resulting in the inability of Catholics to know right from wrong and to be unwilling even to come to the defense of truth for fear of "offending" some relative or friend steeped in one or more of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and, of course, in the ruination of the domestic cell of the Church, the family, and thus of society-at-large.
Even a thorough-going naturalist, David Stockman, who was the Director of the Office of Management and the Budget under President Ronald Wilson Reagan from January 21, 1981, to August 1, 1985, and who is a complete and total supporter of chemical and surgical baby-killing, understands that the profligate government spending and smoke-and-mirrors budgeting and irresponsible monetary policy of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has brought this country to the point of irreversible fiscal ruin. What he does not realize is that the situation he assesses so accurately has been caused by the moral decay within the souls of men that have been codified in law and accepted widely in society, including by himself, in the name of "freedom" and choice."
A brief look at Stockman's analysis, however, does reveal that the future is bleak for the United States of America, and a believing Catholic knows that it must be bleak because any nation that does not subordinate itself to the Social Reign of Christ of the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church is bound to founder on the rocky shoals of its own false founding premises and subseqent failed public policies:
These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way
out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping
divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a
renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian
economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the
business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and
shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable,
means-tested safety net.
All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and
the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state
and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them
apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give
the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no
re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates;
strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and
prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative
or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United
and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic
sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has
turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean
putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as
at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit
insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial
loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in
all its forms.
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and
restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in
times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage
the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only
way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into
capitalism.
That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of
dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to
the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the
Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally,
morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war
(Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the
German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it.
When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse.
If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in
cash, it is. (Sundown in America.)
What David Stockman does not realize is that his own support for baby-killing and, presumably, "gay marriage" has precipated the rise of statism just as happened as the Romans of anitquity became more and more immersed in sense pleasures, including all manner of perversity, while they eagerly surrendered more and more to the caesars and their minions.
Alas, as Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ prohesied, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha than for those nations that have refused to heed the words of Catholic truth such as contained in the following oft-quoted exhortations of the late Silvio Cardinal Antoniano in the Sixteenth Century and Pope Saint Pius X a mere one hundred three years ago:
The more closely the temporal
power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it
fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to
the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the
ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good
Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in
doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares
them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This
follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic
Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the
same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who
separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce
good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the
formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes
and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal
peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and
happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an
inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of
civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no
true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth,
a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
The Protestant Revolution made
possible the rise of Judeo-Masonry and of the false "philosophers" who
set the stage for the French Revolution, a social revolution founded in
the hatred of God (anti-Theism) that was to influence in its own wake
all subsequent social revolutions, including the Bolshevik Revolution.
Every single political "ideology" of the false opposites of the
naturalist "left" and the naturalist "right" is an attempt to replace
the social order that Catholicism once provided to the Western world. As
alluded to by Pope Leo XIII and Pius XII in the passages provided
above, all secular "'isms" (belief systems) have the proximate causes in
the Protestant Revolution, including the spirit of nationalism, which
is but a counterfeit of ape of true love of one's nation (patria that wills the good of one's nation without exalting a nation over God
and His Church, that was responsible for the needless war of national
pride, ambition and aggression that was World War I, the harbinger of
World II.
Catholicism was once the foundation of all social
order in Europe. It is now relativized to the margins as the people of
once Catholic Europe have abandoned the Faith and as God has withdrawn
His Sanctifying Graces from those lands as a result of the conciliar
revolution, which continues to produce devastating consequences in its
own sordid wake.
Cradle to the grave socialism, replete with
entitlement programs that have corrupted all sense of personal
responsibility, has brought Europe to its knees financially and produced
social chaos and vast disorder.
The counterfeit church of conciliarism has played its own role in helping to worsen the situation caused by the false premises of Modernity. It has made its "reconciliation" with the principles of 1787 as millions upon millions of young Catholics detained in conciliar schools have had their souls spiritually aborted (see
Cardinal Newman Society Survey and my own
Apostasy Has Consequences.)
Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. Only from this perspective can we understand, on the one hand, the ghetto-mentality, of which we have spoken above; only from this perspective can we understand, on the other hand, the meaning of the remarkable meeting of the Church and the world. Basically, the word "world" means the spirit of the modern era, in contrast to which the Church's group-consciousness saw itself as a separate subject that now, after a war that had been in turn both hot and cold, was intent on dialogue and cooperation. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382.)
Pope Leo XIII warned solemnly in Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892, that there can be no "reconciliation" with the principles of the Revolution:
Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God (Pope Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892.)
Future voters, my friends, including those produced by Catholic schools in conciliar captivity, will indeed be singing the songs of angry "modern men," and the "will of the people" tomorrow may well be something quite different than the "will of the people" now.
Alas, it is not the "will of the people" that matters. It is the law of God as He has revealed It to us through His Catholic Church, which is why all of our efforts, including those to try to conform the civil law to His eternal Law, must be must on right principles without any compromises and without any concessions to error whatsoever.
We must have confidence in Our Lady's Fatima Message, consecrating ourselves to her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life. The only election that really matters is the one that took place in the Baptismal font when we were elected to be citizens of Heaven. There is only one judicial verdict that matters: that of Christ the King upon our immortal souls at the moment of our Particular Judgment.
This is our destiny, please God and by the graces that flow forth from the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother we persevere to the points of our dying breaths in states of Sanctifying Grace.
No matter the results of a particular election or the results of a particular plebiscite, we can be assured that our efforts to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King by means of our total consecration to Him through Mary our Immaculate Queen will help to plant a few seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith as we, recidivist sinners that we are, attempt to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, remembering to say each day:
O Jesus, it is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary."
These are the words spoken by the Mother of God in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, ninety-one years ago. They should be on our lips at all times so that there will come a day when the words uttered by the Cristeros in Mexico and the brave Catholics during the Spanish Revolution will be on the lips of all men and heralded on the flags of all nations:
Viva Cristo Rey!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, 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 John Damascene, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints