Having Developed An Immunity To Truth
Part Two
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Most Americans, including most Catholics, no matter where they fall across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, have a congenital immunity to truth when it comes to the anti-Incarnational, naturalistic and semi-Pelagian fables upon which the United States of America was founded by men who had a
founding hatred for Christ the King. Faces turn beat red and veins stick out in the necks of enraged men and women when told that we are suffering today from the inevitable consequences that must befall men and their nations when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is not recognized as King and when His Catholic Church is not permitted to exercise her Divinely-given authority to enforce Our King's Social Reign when the good of the souls demands her motherly intervention.
It is not an exaggeration to state that there is not only an immunity to truth when it comes to the fables of the American founding that have been explored on this site many hundreds of times and were examined in depth in Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism. Sadly, there is a hard-core resistance to the truth expressed in very concise terms by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:
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.)
No, no, no. It is easier to believe that there can be a "solution" to problems that have spiraled out of control precisely because of the falsehoods of the American founding and, of course, by conciliarism's embrace of those false principles as the the means by which the modern civil state should be organized and upon which men of "diverse" religious beliefs can work together amicably for the common good. To believe in this, however, is to be cursed in perpetuity to live out the fate of Sisyphus being crushed by a boulder that he just can't ever seem to push up to the top of that hill. Nationalism, which is the idolization of a nation and is a sin against the First Commandment, thus replaces true patriotism, which wills the good of one's nation, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization in every aspect of her social life and in her very legal structures.
For those who do not have an immunity or a resistance to truth about the falsehoods of the American founding, however, it is easier to recognize the simple fact that would-be, petty-ante tyrants such as Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro are forgettable figures in human history who have come to power solely as a result of the rejection of Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Would-be, penny-ante tyrants such as Obama/Soetoro, convinced of their own infallibility and invincibility, create a culture of such sanctimonious self-righteousness about them that they and their minions come to believe that they must crush all opposition by every means at their disposal.
The scandal revolving around the Internal Revenue Service's targeting the applications for tax-exempt status made by individuals represented advocacy groups of the false opposite of the naturalist "right" is simply an extension in the government of what men such as Obama/Soetoro and his minions have done in the halls of academe. Believe me, folks, I know what it is to be opposed bitterly by colleagues because of one's beliefs that run contrary to the "mainstream" of academic though, and that supposed "main stream" is about as far to the false opposite of the naturalist "left" in vogue at any given time. Academics who are deemed to be "out of the mainstream" by our "leftist" gatekeepers must be denied employment if applying for a vacant position, denied reappointment if serving on a year-to-year contract, denied promotion and/or tenure if one gets that far or face the prospect of student-spies sent into classrooms by the "gatekeepers" to find some reason to break the tenure of those who hold proscribed beliefs.
To wit, I had to walk a real gauntlet when applying for a political science teaching position at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, in the summer of 1980 for the 1980-1981 academic year.
Both professional and student evaluations of my teaching ability placed
my application for that position at Nassau Community College at the
top of over one hundred applications. That quickly changed, however, when I
was asked a question by a female history professor about my “ideology.”
This is the answer I gave: “I subscribe to the salvific power
of no secular political ideology, whether of the left or of the right.
I subscribe completely and totally only to the social teaching of the
Church founded by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ upon the Rock of Peter,
the Pope, and it is upon that rock that I am willing to die.”
She was picking up her teeth one-by-one from the floor after I had given
that answer.
No, I wasn’t a traditional Catholic at the time.
Yes, there was much I had yet to learn from the Church’s social
teaching, especially concerning the incompatibility of the modern state
with the Social Reign of Christ the King. However, I knew minimally
that the Church had the means (Sanctifying Grace) and the teaching (the
Deposit of Faith) to ameliorate the problems caused by fallen human
nature. There was no secular way to deal with the problems of the world.
That answer I gave on August 4, 1980, quickly made me the “number
two” candidate for the position I had been praying for had to
get.
Well, it was God’s Will for me to get the position. A furious
battle, however, broke out among the members of the personnel and budget committee
that interviewed me. Although I was offered the job, two members of the department
told me a month later in a secret meeting off of the campus, solely
because the people who were opposed to my hiring were afraid that I
would bring a lawsuit over the question about “ideology”
if I had been denied the position. I was grateful to Our Lord and Our
Lady for bringing me home to Long Island after a seven-year absence to secure my master's and doctorate and to begin my college teaching career in Albany and Utica, New York, Normal, Illinois, and Center Valley, Pennsylvania. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent
at Nassau Community College, there was certainly a good deal
of friction with my colleagues.
My financial situation would have looked a lot different than it does
at present if I had chosen to fight what would have been a difficult
battle to secure tenure at Nassau Community College. Tenured professors
there are among the highest paid in all of American higher education.
They have excellent health and life insurance policies. A colleague
of mine, though, was in need of a full-time job. He had a disturbed
wife (who later wound up killing herself) and a mentally retarded daughter.
He needed my budgetary line more than I did. Thus, I decided to relinquish up my position,
effective at the end of the 1982-1983 academic year, thus making it impossible for those who opposed me to have any leverage over my teaching during my last year there.
Then there was that group of feminists at Morningside College in Sioux City,
Iowa, who had approached that institution's then president in late-June of 1992
after I had signed a contract to teach there for the following academic
year, 1992-1993. The feminists demanded that my contract be revoked
because they had discovered that I had run for lieutenant governor of
New York on the Right to Life Party line in 1986. Although I enjoyed teaching at Morningside College and made many friends in the Catholic community in Sioux City, one of whom, an obstetrician/gynecologist, donated his services for Lucy's birth at Mercy Medical Center on Wednesday, March 27, 2002, I was pretty
much a non-person in the eyes of many of my colleagues during the year
that I taught at Morningside College. And that was before the internet and the ability that search engines provide to find an academic's "paper trail" when applying for a position.
Yes, one of the reasons the penny-ante thuggery of some in the traditional world amuses more than saddens me is that it pales into insignificance when compared to the extent to which those in the academic world seek to crush out all "dissent" from the "revealed truths" of one "leftist" ideology after another. A person who has been through the academic mill gets a pretty thorough seasoning in being disliked, to use a mild phrase, and in being ostracized, ridiculed and demeaned.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro comes directly out of the cocoon of such Ivy League institutions as Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He insulated himself so much while teaching as an adjunct at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004 that some of his colleagues found him completely disinterested in even conversing with them. He was correct, they were wrong. Why bother even acknowledging their existence? Those convinced of their own supposed superiority cannot bother with mere earthlings who dare to approach them to converse as though they were some kind of intellectual equals or had something of value to say to them that could in any way challenge their deepest convictions.
It is such attitudes that have helped to create the climate of total destruction that has been engineered by a true discipline of the hate-mongering "community organizer" by the name of Saul Alinksy. It is such attitudes that have made possible presidential rule by decree, presidential indifference to the separation of powers, presidential contempt for Congress even though he served in the United States Senate for a little under four years, presidential arrogance in the face of criticism, presidential blame-throwing and covering-up when scandals of his own making arise and presidential appointees who use their positions to bludgeon opponents in a reckless manner of utter lawlessness.
Why not use the Internal Revenue Service to blunt political adversaries?
Why not have the United States Department of Justice investigate reporters from the Associated Press?
Why not have the Internal Revenue Service conduct tax audits on the income tax returns of reporters who do more than fawn over caesar and say "Yes, Mister President" during an interview?
Why not believe that one is above the laws of God and man?
Ladies and gentlemen, any land that does not recognize the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church must perforce become a nation of rank lawlessness while most of its rulers and citizens, including most Catholics, consider it to be "civilized."
Just Continuing An Ancient Tradition of Lawlessness
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and his minions and stooges are, however, just continuing an ancient tradition of lawlessness as it is the heritage of Protestant England and hence of the United States of America itself and many of this country's presidents.
Remember, it was during the Protestant Revolution in England that England's Chancellor of
the Realm, Thomas Cromwell plotted with Richard Rich, the man who later gained
notoriety for himself when he was named the Attorney General of Wales as a
reward for the false testimony he gave in the rump trial of Saint Thomas More in
1535, to find some way to accuse More of committing a crime that could be used
as leverage against him to force him to recognize the lecherous King Henry
VIII's adulterous and bigamous marriage to Anne Boleyn. When one effort to do so
was foiled by Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, who was himself later
imprisoned by Henry on trumped up charges, being freed from London Tower only after
the murderous tyrant's death in 1547, Cromwell pleaded with Lord Norfolk to
serve on the panel that was to interrogate More, eventually make a righteous
declaration that was meant to signify England was a "civilized" nation, a nation
of laws, if you will:
NORFOLK (Between bullying and pleading) Look
here, Cromwell, I want no part of this.
CROMWELL You have no choice.
NORFOLK What's that you say?
CROMWELL The King particularly wishes you to
be active in the matter.
NORFOLK (Winded) He has not told me that.
CROMWELL (Politely) Indeed? He told me.
NORFOLK But why?
CROMWELL We feel that, since you are known to
have been a friend of More's, your participation will show that there is nothing
in the nature of a "persecution," but only the strict processes of law. As
indeed you've just demonstrated. I'll tell the King of your loyalty to your
friend. If you like, I'll tell him that you "want no part of it," too.
NORFOLK (Furious) Are you threatening me,
Cromwell?
CROMWELL My dear Norfolk . . . This isn't
Spain. ( A Man For All Seasons, Act 2)
There was a bit of
irony in this exchange as it was an echo of a exchange between Thomas More and
Thomas Howard earlier in the screenplay:
Norfolk: Why do you insult me with this lawyer's chatter?
More: Because I am afraid.
Norfolk: Man, you're ill. This isn't Spain, you know. This is England.
Yes, "civilized" England could not be compared to the Spain of
the Inquisition in the minds of those who had taken the Oath of Loyalty to Henry
VIII. Lord Norfolk did not believe it to be so, at least not at first. Thomas
Cromwell insisted that it was not.
In actual truth, however, over 72,000 Catholics who remained
faithful to Rome when King Henry VIII had himself declared Supreme Head of the
Church in England were killed between 1534 and the tyrant's death in 1547, a
little over three percent of the population of England at that time. "Civilized"
England could not compare itself to "brutal" Spain while it was systematically
rooting out anyone who would not sell out their baptismal birthright as Roman
Catholics to save their lives and their property. The killing of over 72,000
people, the seizure of the monastery and convent lands and the other
discriminatory measures imposed upon Roman Catholics in the wake of the English
Protestant Revolt were undertaken done quite legally, thank you. Judges
sentenced Catholics to death quite routinely. The England of the Anglican Church
just went about its business as though anyone who resisted the new order of
things was a disloyal extremist.
This lawless desire to crush opposition transcended the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and infected many of those who believed that the English colonies situated upon and down the Atlantic seaboard of the United States of America should break from England. Those arguing against such a break did so frequently at the very threat of their lives.
To wit, Jonathan Boucher, a Anglican preacher in England and in
the Colony of Virginia in the years before the Revolutionary War in the
Eighteenth Century, argued in very eloquent terms against a break of the
thirteen English colonies from the British Crown by reminding his listeners that
true freedom comes only from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour. (See: Jonathan Boucher: On Civil
Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance.) Boucher made
some very fine points in his sermon, which should be studied if for no other
reason that to realize that there was some effort made by "conservative"
colonists to stem the tide of rebellion and to prevent a war for "independence,"
which was, after all, an act of high treason against King George III.
Boucher, who sometimes packed two single-shot pistols and kept
them in his pulpit when he preached so that "patriots" would not attack him,
argued against what could be called "liberation theology," urging Anglicans and
other colonists to accept whatever sufferings were being imposed by King George
III and to offer them up to God, stating that one should not seek to rebel from
the authority which God has seen fit in His Providence to provide for the
governance of men. The "disconnect" of Protestantism was such, however, that
Boucher could not see that his own false "church" was born in a violent, bloody
rebellion against the true authority given by God Himself over men in the form
of the Church that He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. It was
incongruous to argue that a rebellion against civil authority was unjust when
one's very "church" was created as a result of a rebellion against God
Himself.
Similarly, Americans have long fashioned their nation to be one
of laws, not of men. However, this is simply not true. This is a fantasy. This
is delusional.
The laws of God have been broken on these shores by the
proliferation of unbridled error under the false slogans of "freedom of speech"
and "freedom of the press" from the very beginning.
President after president has engaged in activities designed to
suppress legitimate dissent and opposition.
It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first
President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress
controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's
successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding
Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice
President of the United States of America, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were
passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and
malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and
its officials.
The sixteenth President of the United States of America,
Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War
Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down
newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held
opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts
at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of
what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannis!" as he jumped onto
the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good
Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the
head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy
Saturday, April 15, 1865.
Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War
I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive
that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President
Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull
Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as
President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had
defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now
a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of
the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr
Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service to
audit his "enemies." He contravened the law in numerous ways as he used the
legislative powers illicitly given his regulatory agencies by Congress during
the Great Depression to set the stage for Barack Hussein Obama's rule by
decree and presidential fiat. And this is not even the abuse of power in the administrations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and George Walker Bush (can anyone spell "Patriot Act").
Mind you, this is only a partial listing of abuses that have
been committed in this alleged land of "laws and not men," a land where over
fifty-five million innocent babies have been butchered by surgical means
(hundreds of millions more by chemical means) since, most of those having taken
place in the thirty-nine years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the
United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton,
January 22, 1973. That staggering figure does not include those babies who were
killed by surgical means in their mothers' wombs between 1967 and 1973 when
various states, including Colorado, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York,
North Carolina, Alaska, and Washington (and Washington, District of Columbia)
decriminalized surgical baby-killing in some or all cases at various stages of a
baby's development in his mother's womb.
A "civilized" nation of "laws." I don't think so.
The lawless imposition of policies even in violation of
constitutions and civil code or statutory law and the suppression of opposition
to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It
has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the
efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to
their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who
are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape,
pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state
is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the
license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away
from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1,
1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly-held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from
truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.
You see, good readers, those who believe n the false,
naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that
must degenerate into full-blown statists
who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable
doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the
restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a
rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light
of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing
Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church
of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical
principles of Modernity.
This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural
means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America
understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social
Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one
and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall
along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the
United States of America have had their world view shaped by the naturalism of
Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of
Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church
of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to
obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes.
Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus and his minions, however, do not consider it
"good enough" that most of those who belong at least nominally, to what they
know should constitute their principal source of opposition, Catholicism, are
either supportive of their statism or indifferent about it. No, the minions of
Caesar Obamus want to eradicate all opposition by whatever means necessary,
including the use of slogans and labels to disparage anyone who would dare to
raise their voices in opposition to their "magisterial" statements. We must
remember it that those who do violence to reason and truth must first violence
to language. The constant repetition of slogans to discredit opponents by the
use of invectives is meant to create an atmosphere where the relatives,
neighbors, coworkers and other associates of the "oddball" "bigots" who dare to
criticize the policies of government officials are viewed with constant
suspicion.
Yes, Barack Hussein Obama is just carrying on a grand
tradition of the kind of statist thuggery that must occur, sooner or
later, when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is not recognized as the
King of a particular nation and His true Church, the Catholic Church, therefore
is unable to serve as the check, principally by means of her Indirect Power of
teaching, preaching and exhortation and then, only as a last resort, interposing
herself with civil authorities when the good of souls demands her motherly
intervention, on the misuse of civil power that imperils souls.
There is nothing new in what he is doing as mean can only know
true law under the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as civil
rulers seek to undertake the common temporal good in light of man's Last
End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God
the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven.
Those who are immune to this truth or who resist it must choose to accept myths that are of the adversary's making and can only lead to the result prophesied by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832:
This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to
that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of
conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred
and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the
greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,"
as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which
men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already
inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit"
is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and
out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence
comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred
things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the
state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that
cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of
this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free
speech, and desire for novelty.
Here We must include that harmful and never
sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and
disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote
with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines
and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books,
pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very
great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them
over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they
contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is
sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends
religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply
because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man
who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and
even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may
be snatched from death again and again? (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832
We are suffering, of course, from a chastisement not only for
the sins of a lawless land, but for each one of our own sins, which is why we
must be earnest, especially during this Holy Season of Lent, about making
reparation for our sins to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sorrowful and
Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state in life
permits.
Mindful of our need to make reparation of our sins and relying
ever more confidently upon the maternal intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe,
the Empress of the Americas, may we be emboldened to plant the seeds, starting
with the enthronement of our own homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the
Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the conversion of each man and woman and child in
this nation to the Catholic Faith, thereby ushering in a Christendom in that
part of North America located between Canada and Mexico wherein the wonderful
cry of the Cristeros, voiced so proudly by Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J.,
will be on the lips of all men at all times:
