Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail

Part 2

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Well, President Barack Hussein Obama, who continues to dither over the massive spill underneath an oil drilling well British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico that has already polluted shores in Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf coast, has acted "decisively" to deal with the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States of America through Arizona by ordering that 1,200 National Guard troops be sent to "monitor" traffic along Arizona's border with Mexico. These troops will not have any authority to make arrests or to detain those who they see with their own eyes cross the border illegally. They are being sent to "monitor" traffic and report on the trends they observe pertinent to drug trafficking, not to intervene to stop the human trafficking that results every now and again the deaths of Mexicans seeking to enter the country illegally.

Here is an excerpt from a report in The New York Times:

Homeland Security officials said that the troops would provide support to law enforcement officers already working along the border by helping observe and monitor traffic between official crossing points, and would help analyze trafficking patterns in hopes of intercepting illegal drug shipments. They performed similar tasks in an earlier deployment along the border from 2006 to 2008, when they also assisted with road and fence construction. The troops have not been involved directly in intercepting border crossers. (Obama to Send 1,200 Guard Troops to Mexico Border)

 

Barack Hussein Obama is a politician. His natural inclination as a globalist interested rests in surrendering American national sovereignty and catering to the interests he knows will be willing voters for him if they were granted a "path to citizenship" following yet another round of amnesty. Estimates vary. Most estimates place the number of illegal immigrants in the United States of America in the neighborhood of twelve million people. That's a whole lot of votes even if only half of this number of people were of voting age. Obama does, however, have to make some token show of "concern" for the national security, which is why the National Guard troops have been sent to the Arizona-Mexico border.

It remains the case that, despite all of the bluff and bluster and noting some exceptions here and there, almost every politician in the two organized crime families of naturalism, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, lack the political courage to tackle this problem with even a modicum of foresight.

Still Suffering From the After-Effects of the Mexican and Conciliar Revolutions

The people of Our Lady's country, Mexico, are still suffering from the after-effects of the various revolutions that have convulsed their nation at various points since the 1820s. The devil hates Our Lady, and he hates the fact that her apparitions to Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill in December of 1531 put and end to the worship that was offered to him by means of the savage Aztec and Mayan "native religions." The devil hates the fact that Catholicism planted deep roots in the Mexican soul and that the Mexican people were on fire for the Holy Faith, devoted sons and daughters of Holy Mother Church and of the Mother of God.

This is why the devil's minions in the Freemasonic lodges of the nascent United States of America sent money and arms to fund the Mexican War for Independence, which was, much to the consternation of the Catholic bishops in Mexico who believed that the liberators of their country were genuinely concerned about legitimate civil liberties, to presage an en episodic warfare against the Holy Faith that resulted during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and thereafter in the slaughter of Mexican priests and merciless attacks upon innocent Catholics, including, of course, those brave warriors for Christ the King who belong the counter-insurgency force known as the Cristeros. Consider this narrative on the influence of the first American ambassador to Mexico in the 1920s, the Freemason named Joel Poinsett:

Although during this early period, it appears that lodges were used primarily for political purposes, it can also be seen that the principles of Masonry, the principles of liberty, progress, the perfectibility of man as well as strident anticlericalism, have remained constant no matter what the country or age. These principles were introduced by enlightenment thought and adopted by English Masons. They traveled to Spain through English and French influence, arriving in Mexico through various channels, the earliest being French, later through Mexican deputies arriving home from Spain and finally, through Spanish troops arriving to do battle.

Although lodges existed prior to 1825, it was not until that date that a Mexican Grand Lodge was established with authority to organize and control Mexican lodges. There has been a good deal of discussion about the role of the first American ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett. Some have accused him of engineering the idea in order to gain influence for the United States, wresting control from European interests. Members were principally composed of Spaniards and others who sympathized with Spain, favoring centralism and monarchy.

According to José Fuentes Mares, the National archive in Washington, D.C., contains a letter written by Poinset that reads as follows:

…with the object of counteracting the fanatical party in Mexico City and, if it is possible, to encourage the spreading of liberal principles among those who are in a position to govern, I aided and encouraged a number of respectable people, men of high standing, to form a Masonic York Grand Lodge…

Others disagree concerning the centrality of Poinsett’s role and claim that several lodges agreed to introduce the York Rite in Mexico. These lodges hoped to provide a good meeting place to discuss political plans, as well as an alternative for those less inclined to the traditional Spanish way of thinking. All Poinsett did, according to this line of thought, was to enable the York Rite to be founded in Mexico. A founding charter was needed and this he was able to provide.

Poinsett, a well-traveled man, fluent in several languages, was an attractive figure in the early years of the young nation. George Fisher, who was a member of the “Independence” Lodge, one of the first lodges founded, of which Lorenzo de Zavala was Worthy Master, tells how Poinsett held weekly “tertulias” every Thursday at his home. These were very popular with the elite who gathered to dance, converse, and play cards.

Those interested in state affairs often withdrew from the festivities to better discuss matters at hand. He claims that Poinsett himself was not affiliated with any lodge and did not visit them. He only provided the authority from New York. He did, however, “give Masonic instruction to those who called on him as his mansion.” (The Cross and the Compass: Compromise and Conflict; his is a very pro-Masonic treatise)

 

The twin scourges of liberalism and anti-clericalism, both of which were championed by the Masonic "defenders" of the Alamo, a former Catholic mission, mind you, are exalted by apologists of the "American way" as the means of social progress and civil and religious "freedom." Woodrow Wilson appealed to this sense of liberalism to explain to a Father Kelly, representing the American Catholic bishops, why the government of the United States of America was not going to intervene in Mexico to stop the slaughter of Catholics there by the Masonic revolutionaries:

"Wilson replied [to a Father Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries (Robert Leckie, Catholic and American, p. 274.)

Support for the persecution and execution of thousands upon thousands of Catholics continued under the administrations of Presidents Warren Gamaliel Harding and John Calvin Coolidge from 1921 to 1929. Consider this documentary evidence as to the complicity of the government of the United States of America in the slaughter of the thousands upon thousands of Catholics in Mexico in the 1920s:

Two quotes showing American complicity in the Masonic persecution of the Church in Mexico:

1) "Some Americans had tried to help--certain bishops, certain groups of laymen. But these had never been able to convince the bulk of American Catholics that the persecutions in Mexico were worth getting excited about, being angry about, losing their composure about, making nuisances of themselves about. Nor did the Masons of the United States fail to notice this lack of indignation, and to be emboldened by it. One example: Two days after Father Pro's murder, the American Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, went about Calles' private train for a tour of the country; the recognized purpose of this gesture was "to demonstrate to Mexican Catholics that they could look for no help from Washington."--The Point.

2) The day after Fr. Pro's execution, the American Ambassador Dwight Morrow (Charles Lindbergh's future father-in-law) and the humorist Will Rogers, who had become famous as a common-sense mocker of U.S. government foolishness, took a trip with President Calles through Mexico on the presidential train. Calles had deliberately set up the trip as propaganda intended to convince Mexican Catholics that the United States would not help them. Morrow is reported to have known this, but believed he could use the influence thus gained over Calles to turn his government in a different direction. In the next few years, the government killed 250,000 to 300,000 people, many Catholic, even after a compromise had been worked out--The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.

 

Mexico became a country of rampant anti-clericalism controlled by socialists and Freemasons who, of course, did not even have the temporal good of their people at heart, no less their eternal welfare. Poverty rates skyrocketed during much of the Twentieth Century in Mexico as the disparities between rich and poor grew. Salaries for unskilled laborers are low in Mexico, causing many would-be illegal immigrants to be enticed by the relatively higher wages paid by American employers, which are, of course, still very low in comparison to the wages paid to American workers.

Those illegal immigrants who save their money--and many do--are able to wire money back home to their relatives, which happens to be a major source of income for for Mexican economy, giving those relatives themselves incentives to cross the border at the risk of their own lives, sometimes paying human traffickers large sums of money to do so as they are transported in many cases like cattle in locked, windowless vans without proper ventilation, which has killed some illegal immigrations now and again. Others have been transported in horse trailers and left to sleep in them overnight (see 34 Illegal Immigrants Kept in Horse Trailer). Yet others have been held as prisoners until they pay their smugglers for bringing them into the country illegally (Illegal Immigrants Found Imprisoned in House). And there are still others who come here on various visas and then "disappear," so to speak, in our cities and farmlands as the American system of tracking immigrants in this country is almost entirely nonexistent (unless, that is, one gets turned into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency).

These desperate people have fled desperate poverty that has been brought about in very large measure by the statist policies of the Federal government of the United Mexican States, whose officials are more than happy to see "economic burdens" leave their country and then to turn around and accuse the American people of being "racist" when they make demands to secure the American border with Mexico. It is also certainly true that the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was passed by simple majority vote of both Houses of the United States Congress rather than by two-thirds majority vote of the members of the United States Senate on November 17, 1993, has worsened the conditions of poor Mexicans, being perhaps the single most important proximate cause in the dramatic increase in illegal immigration that has occurred in the past sixteen years alone.

These situations would not have developed if the growth of the Catholic Faith in Mexico had not been stunted by the Freemasonic influence that emerged in Mexico following the Mexican War for Independence in 1820 and the various other convulsions that led up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and its bloody aftermath as one petty oligarch after another vied for power--and as the Communist-leaning Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico in a virtual one party dictatorship from 1929 to 2000 prior to the victory of Vicente Fox's National Action Party in Mexico's presidential elections that year, consolidated its own power, camouflaging massive political corruption during the time of Mexico's economic growth from 1940 to 1970. That there social and economic conditions in Mexico that have impelled many Mexicans to risk their very lives to leave their country to enter the United States of America illegally is the result of the decades-long government-sponsored warfare against the Catholic Faith that has served as an agent of social disorder.

It is this simple: God will never reward those who make war upon His Holy Church. It is that simple. Mexico is suffering social convulsions as a result of the warfare its leaders have made upon the Holy Faith. It is no wonder the legislative assembly of Mexico City twenty-five months voted to "permit" the surgical killing of babies up to twelve weeks old in their mothers' wombs (see Abortion legalised in Mexico City). The decriminalization of the killing of the preborn is always one of the signs of the final--not the first--stages of degeneration in a land that has attacked the Catholic Faith and rejected the Social Reign of Christ the King as native religions that Our Lady came to eradicate have been revived, stirring up the devils aplenty throughout Mexico, where many a poor soul has voluntarily sold himself outright to the devil.

Once again, you see, we are witnessing first-hand, whether or not we realize it, the results of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King, this time in Latin America by the Freemasons who knew that, unlike the United States of America, which was able to co-opt Catholics by showing them a toleration that they had not experienced in England and Ireland after the Protestant Revolt, that the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, had to be rooted out of Mexican soil and out of the hearts of the Mexican people by armed force and persecution. That the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions of conciliarism have robbed most of the Mexican people of true bishops and true priests and thus true sacraments as the conciliar revolutionaries have revived interest in the false, diabolical practices of the Aztecs and Mayans in the name of the "inculturation of the Gospel" has only compounded the temporal problems in Mexico by taking away from so many Mexicans, especially among the supposedly "more educated," any true sense of the Faith and has opened them up more and more to chemical and surgical baby-killing and to open perversity under cover of the civil law.

Yes, the true Catholic Faith is indeed very much alive and well in the underground Church in Mexico that is served by various Mexican and American sedevacantist bishops. The overwhelming influence in Our Lady's dear country of Mexico has been diabolical as the wicked "reconciliation" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism to the "principles of the new era inaugurated in 1789" has only served to aid and abet the forces that are arrayed against the Holy Faith in general and Our Lady in particular in the country where she appeared and who left that miraculous image of herself on Juan Diego's tilma that resulted in the conversion of over nine million indigenous peoples to the true Faith.

Yet even though this is all true, it is also the case that there remains, despite the best efforts of some of the revolutionaries to debunk belief in Our Lady of Guadalupe and even the very existence of Juan Diego (!), a deep, deep devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe among the Mexican people, a devotion that some many of them bring to this country as they give honor the Patroness of Mexico and the Empress of the Americas. I will have more to write about this at the conclusion of this reflection.

No Easy Remedies

There are, of course, no easy remedies to the problems that have been created by the synergistic forces of the paralysis of will of most careerist politicians in the United States of American and authorities in Mexico who have refused for decades now to address the poverty that is right in their very midst.

One of the things that must be kept uppermost in our minds is that we dealing with the lives of human beings, some of whom were impelled to break the just laws of the United States of America for what they thought to be good reasons. This is not to exculpate them for violating the just laws of this nation. Of course not. There is a legal path for entry into the United States of America, and it is that legal path for entry that must be followed.

It is, however, to remind us all that, as noted yesterday in Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail, part 1, everyone bears within his immortal soul, which has been redeemed by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Divine impress. We must have true compassion on those who have been afflicted by serious economic problems in their own country while at the same time insisting that the just laws of our own nation be respected and enforced, both at the border and here at home, being willing at all times to perform the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy for all men, no matter their status, whether legal residents or citizens or illegal immigrants.

It is with this in mind that the following recommendations, none of which have much, if any, of a chance of being approved and implemented by American policy-makers, to deal with the immediate and long-term problems caused by the flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America:

1. The American border with Mexico must be made secure.

2. United States armed forces should be withdrawn from those countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, to which they should never have been sent and reassigned to guard the border and to actually intercept those who seek to cross it illegal. The monies being spent at present on needless, unjust and immoral wars, monies that will enslave future generations of Americans to massive amounts of debt that will make the Greek fiscal crisis seem mild by comparison, can be saved and part of those monies can be redirected to proper border defenses.

3. The North American Free Trade Agreement should be abrogated and then repealed. This will force the authorities in the United Mexican States to supervise a restructuring of their economy so that their citizens can be paid a true living wage as defined by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891, as employers in a Catholic nation would understand that it is not the "market" that drives wages but the conditions and abilities of workers commensurate with the reasonable growth of a particular business.

4. As it is impractical and even inhumane to deport all eleven to twelve million human beings, causing massive dislocations to families, many of whom have children who have been born in this country and are themselves American citizens, those illegal immigrants with families who are employed (albeit illegally) should be permitted to stay in the country as permanent residents without being able to apply for citizenship for ten years rather than the normal five year waiting period. There must be some penalty for having entered the country illegally. And those in this country who have sought to exploit the cause of illegal immigrants in this country so that they can profit from their votes once they become citizens should not be rewarded at the ballot box within a short period of time.

5. Those qualifying for such permanent residency will be required to speak and write the English language. Linguistic unity is an important constituent part of good social order in nation. Look at the problems that have been engendered in Canada and other nations because of "bilingualism" or "multilingualism" mandated by the civil law.

6. Those illegal immigrants who are single and do not have family obligations in the United States of America should be processed for deportation back to their native countries subject to a final hearing on their cases without being incarcerated as they are required to be report on a weekly basis to an officer of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They could, after a period of five years, apply to enter the United States of America again legally.

7. Those illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes should be returned to their native countries after having served their sentences without being able to return to the United States of America.

8. Those seeking entry illegally into the United States of America from this point forward will be arrested at the border by American troops and sent back to their native countries.

9. Foreign nationals entering the United States of America on travel and work visas will have to present their passports several times a year in specified locations so that they can be scanned and their whereabouts noted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. This serves as a protection both for the country and for the individual as some people might forget when their visas expire and/or be filled with fear as to what would happen to them thereafter.

10. Foreign nationals applying for visas to the visit the United States of America who come from nations hostile to the interests of the United States of America, such as Mohammedan nations and even Red China, which has many spies among its "exchange scholars" and computer experts, should not be admitted to this country for any length of time as we have seen only too well that that mosques and gasoline stations and convenience stores run by many Mohammedans in this country are conduits of money for those intent on attacking Americans here at home and around the world. This is what I wrote in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and I will not change a single word of what I wrote at that time:

Lax immigration laws. Patrick J. Buchanan has been warning us for over a decade about the laxity of our immigration laws. He has been denounced as a racist and xenophobe. However, Patrick Buchanan has been right all along. One of the terrorists convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center listed his occupation as "terrorist" when he presented his A-95 immigration card to officials at Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, when he entered this country. No one bothered to look at his card. There is a network of terrorists well in place in this country. We've done this to ourselves. Disciples of Osama bin Laden and other terrorist masterminds are everywhere in this country. Alas, a country pledged to pluralism and religious indifferentism lacks the political will to do such politically incorrect things as to say that certain people are in se undesirable and threats to the national security and that they should not be admitted to this country (or deported out of this country if they are already here). (See We've Done This To Ourselves.)

11. Legal protection must be provided to those who have entered the country illegally or who stayed here after the expiration of their visas when they have been the victims of misrepresentation concerning the alleged "help" that a prospective employee offers to provide in regularizing his status and then winds up failing to fulfill that pledge. Similarly, legal protection must be provided to those in this country illegally who have put themselves at risk by exposing wrongdoing in their work places and have been reported to immigration officials in acts of vindictiveness by their former employers. In other words, "whistle blowers" should not be punished for their courage in reporting wrongdoing even though they themselves have broken the law. Witnesses are granted immunity from prosecution in criminal cases all the time despite their having committed a criminal offense themselves. The same should hold true for those who are in this country illegally and have discharged their civic duty by seeking to report and expose wrongdoing.

 

Some might view these recommendations, which have no chance of being enacted or enforced, as draconian or fascistic. They are not. Seeking not for one moment, as noted in part one of this commentary yesterday, to disparage or to discount or to dehumanize the hard, back-breaking done work by the vast majority of illegal immigrants in this country, without which, as I noted yesterday, the restaurant and hotel and even landscaping industries might collapse overnight, it is still nevertheless necessary for a nation to defend itself against an invasion of unprecedented proportions.

The process of legal immigration should be fair and reasonable. I, for one, have absolutely no objection to large numbers of people coming from Mexico and other parts of Latin America if they came here legally as those among their number who are believing Catholics and have a modicum of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe might serve as a counterweight to cultural trends now extant in this nation, recognizing as well that coming here to the land of material plenty might imperil their Faith, as has, of course, happened already with so many Catholics from Latin America who have fallen prey to "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" sects.

That having been noted, however, I am in favor of granting visas and permanent residency and citizenship to as many believing Catholic immigrants (yes, authorities in a Catholic country would indeed assure that those seeking entry would not undermine the Faith of those already here, requiring those who had a need to emigrate but did not believe in the Faith to pledge to abide by civil laws made in conformity with the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law) as possible as this could very well be used by Our Lady to effect the conversion of this nation, and I don't care from whence they come. It is no accident that Proposition Eight in California, as flawed as it was (see Do You Hear The People Sing?), passed on Tuesday, November 5, 2008, as the result of the votes of those who had come from Spanish-speaking countries. While I fully recognize that this could be a passing phenomenon as succeeding generations of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries might become so "Americanized" as to be as indistinguishable in their voting patterns as other Catholics, I do believe, perhaps erroneously, that Our Lady has great plans in store for those who come to this country legally from her own beloved country of Mexico.

Just as Our Lady sought out new members for Holy Mother Church in Mexico after the loss of around nine million of her children in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Protestant Revolutions, replacing those lost to the Faith in Europe almost person for person in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas within a short time of her apparitions to Juan Diego, I believe that Our Lady means to use the hard working people from elsewhere in the Americas to help convert a land that is steeped in one error after another. Our Lady still loves the Americas, and I believe that she wants to use the people from Mexico to be a means convert this land to the true Faith. It matters not to God whether the majority of people in this country are "white" or "brown" or "black" or turquoise. What matters if that whoever is here practices the Holy Faith and seeks, despite their own sins and failings, to know, love, and serve Him as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church.

Sure, this is something that no American policy maker is going to endorse. Only about two hundred people will read this essay. This commentary is merely the reflection of an ordinary Catholic, possessing no degree of "magisterial" authority whatsoever. The point in all of this is that no one has a "right" to enter any country illegally. People are entitled only to fair and reasonable process of seeking entry to a country legally. And once here, obviously, it is important to monitor the whereabouts of immigrants so as to prevent people from falling "into the cracks" and finding themselves imprisoned or facing imminent deportation.

These are only suggestions, nothing more. They may be impractical in the real world even if there was a political climate favorable to their enactment. They are certainly politically incorrect. Too many people are subjecting themselves to the exploitation visited upon them by the smugglers of human trafficking and the to unscrupulous employers once in this country. Whether or not they realize it, the measures proposed above are, I believe, for the protection of those who have sought entry to the country and for the true common good of this nation itself.

What I want to stress at this juncture, however, is that none of this would be necessary if we lived in a Catholic world, a world where men would be united  primarily by the bonds of the Holy Faith. They have been torn asunder by the revolutions of Modernity, something that Pope Pius XI stressed in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

Peace indeed was signed in solemn conclave between the belligerents of the late War. This peace, however, was only written into treaties. It was not received into the hearts of men, who still cherish the desire to fight one another and to continue to menace in a most serious manner the quiet and stability of civil society. Unfortunately the law of violence held sway so long that it has weakened and almost obliterated all traces of those natural feelings of love and mercy which the law of Christian charity has done so much to encourage. Nor has this illusory peace, written only on paper, served as yet to reawaken similar noble sentiments in the souls of men. On the contrary, there has been born a spirit of violence and of hatred which, because it has been indulged in for so long, has become almost second nature in many men. There has followed the blind rule of the inferior parts of the soul over the superior, that rule of the lower elements "fighting against the law of the mind," which St. Paul grieved over. (Rom. vii, 23)

Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)

The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)

Perhaps the advantages to one's family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. "It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch." (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)

There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)

These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law.

 

The ultimate solution rests, as most of you know, in the conversion of men and their nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. Catholicism is indeed the one and only foundation of personal and social order. If you never remember anything else that I write, I ask you to remember that as it is nothing other than simple Catholic truth.

The conversion of our own beloved nation depends in no small measure on our own daily conversion away sin as we seek to grow in holiness with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Every Rosary we pray helps to plant the seeds for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and thus the restoration of Christendom in the world and of the Church Militant on the face of this earth. Never underestimate the power of our simple prayers and the simple performance of our daily duties as members of the Mystical Body of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to plant seeds whose flowering may not occur until many years after we have died and have faced our Particular Judgment.

Let us turn to Our Lady of Guadalupe to ask her intercession for justice to prevail for the sake of those caught up in the vortex of illegal immigration and for security and order to be restored to the borders of the United States of America.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

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

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Philip Neri, pray for us.

Pope Saint Eleutherius, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints