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February 16, 2008

House of Terror

by Thomas A. Droleskey

So much talk abounds about "terrorism." There is the "global war on terror." There are alerts from the United States Department of Homeland Security about this or that alleged terrorist threat, the latest said to involve Mohammedans recruiting "mentally challenged" women and then fitting them unsuspectingly with bombs that make them appear to be expecting a child. The general election for the office of President of the United States of America, which is well underway as far as United States Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, is concerned, will feature endless discussions about "terrorism" and how many legitimate liberties must be surrendered to the statists so that they can keep us "safe" from "terrorists."

The sad truth of the matter is, however, that the United States of America is itself a house of terror.

Certainly, this is true of most other countries in the world today, liberated as they are from the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen, a "liberation" that has enslaved them to the chief terrorist of them all, Lucifer, accompanied by all of his minions from Hell itself. These commentaries are written by native of the United States of America, whose constitution and politics have been the focus of my professional work. It is as an American who loves his country and who wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization in all aspects of her existence, that these commentaries are written as a means of providing readers a means to understand current events more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith. Our true patriotism as citizens of any particular country, including the United States of America, is subordinated first to love of God and His true Church, something that Pope Leo XIII explained very clearly in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

From day to day it becomes more and more evident how needful it is that the principles of Christian wisdom should ever be borne in mind, and that the life, the morals, and the institutions of nations should be wholly conformed to them. For, when these principles have been disregarded, evils so vast have accrued that no right-minded man can face the trials of the time being without grave anxiety or consider the future without alarm. Progress, not inconsiderable indeed, has been made towards securing the well-being of the body and of material things, but the material world, with the possession of wealth, power, and resources, although it may well procure comforts and increase the enjoyment of life, is incapable of satisfying our soul created for higher and more glorious things. To contemplate God, and to tend to Him, is the supreme law of the life of man. For we were created in the divine image and likeness, and are impelled, by our very nature, to the enjoyment of our Creator. But not by bodily motion or effort do we make advance toward God, but through acts of the soul, that is, through knowledge and love. For, indeed, God is the first and supreme truth, and the mind alone feeds on truth. God is perfect holiness and the sovereign good, to which only the will can desire and attain, when virtue is its guide.

But what applies to individual men applies equally to society -- domestic alike and civil. Nature did not form society in order that man should seek in it his last end, but in order that in it and through it he should find suitable aids whereby to attain to his own perfection. If, then, a political government strives after external advantages only, and the achievement of a cultured and prosperous life; if, in administering public affairs, it is wont to put God aside, and show no solicitude for the upholding of moral law, it deflects woefully from its right course and from the injunctions of nature; nor should it be accounted as a society or a community of men, but only as the deceitful imitation or appearance of a society.

As to what We have called the goods of the soul, which consist chiefly in the practice of the true religion and in the unswerving observance of the Christian precepts, We see them daily losing esteem among men, either by reason of forgetfulness or disregard, in such wise that all that is gained for the well-being of the body seems to be lost for that of the soul. A striking proof of the lessening and weakening of the Christian faith is seen in the insults too often done to the Catholic Church, openly and publicly -- insults, indeed, which an age cherishing religion would not have tolerated. For these reasons, an incredible multitude of men is in danger of not achieving salvation; and even nations and empires themselves cannot long remain unharmed, since, when Christian institutions and morality decline, the main foundation of human society goes together with them. Force alone will remain to preserve public tranquillity and order. But force is very feeble when the bulwark of religion has been removed, and, being more apt to beget slavery than obedience, it bears within itself the germs of ever-increasing troubles. The present century has encountered memorable disasters, and it is not certain that some equally terrible are not impending.

The very times in which we live are warning us to seek remedies there where alone they are to be found -- namely, by re-establishing in the family circle and throughout the whole range of society the doctrines and practices of the Christian religion. In this lies the sole means of freeing us from the ills now weighing us down, of forestalling the dangers now threatening the world. For the accomplishment of this end, venerable brethren, We must bring to bear all the activity and diligence that lie within Our power. Although we have already, under other circumstances, and whenever occasion required, treated of these matters, We deem it expedient in this letter to define more in detail the duties of the Catholics, inasmuch as these would, if strictly observed, wonderfully contribute to the good of the commonwealth. We have fallen upon times when a violent and well-nigh daily battle is being fought about matters of highest moment, a battle in which it is hard not to be sometimes deceived, not to go astray and, for many, not to lose heart. It behooves us, venerable brethren, to warn, instruct, and exhort each of the faithful with an earnestness befitting the occasion: that none may abandon the way of truth.

It cannot be doubted that duties more numerous and of greater moment devolve on Catholics than upon such as are either not sufficiently enlightened in relation to the Catholic faith, or who are entirely unacquainted with its doctrines. Considering that forthwith upon salvation being brought out for mankind, Jesus Christ laid upon His Apostles the injunction to "preach the Gospel to every creature," He imposed, it is evident, upon all men the duty of learning thoroughly and believing what they were taught. This duty is intimately bound up with the gaining of eternal salvation: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be condemned." But the man who has embraced the Christian faith, as in duty bound, is by that very fact a subject of the Church as one of the children born of her, and becomes a member of that greatest and holiest body, which it is the special charge of the Roman Pontiff to rule with supreme power, under its invisible head, Jesus Christ .

Now, if the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings toward the Church. For the Church is the holy City of the living God, born of God Himself, and by Him built up and established. Upon this earth, indeed, she accomplishes her pilgrimage, but by instructing and guiding men she summons them to eternal happiness. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever. For fitting it is to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties toward God are of a far more hallowed character than those toward men.

Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause. Consequently, it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other. We can, certainly, and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the State and the governing powers; but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the Church a feeling of filial piety, and love God with the deepest love of which we are capable. The order of precedence of these duties is, however, at times, either under stress of public calamities, or through the perverse will of men, inverted. For, instances occur where the State seems to require from men as subjects one thing, and religion, from men as Christians, quite another; and this in reality without any other ground, than that the rulers of the State either hold the sacred power of the Church of no account, or endeavor to subject it to their own will. Hence arises a conflict, and an occasion, through such conflict, of virtue being put to the proof. The two powers are confronted and urge their behests in a contrary sense; to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters, for to please the one amounts to contemning the other.

As to which should be preferred no one ought to balance for an instant. It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men, an act of consummate wickedness to break the laws of Jesus Christ, in order to yield obedience to earthly rulers, or, under pretext of keeping the civil law, to ignore the rights of the Church; "we ought to obey God rather than men." This answer, which of old Peter and the other Apostles were used to give the civil authorities who enjoined unrighteous things, we must, in like circumstances, give always and without hesitation. No better citizen is there, whether in time of peace or war, than the Christian who is mindful of his duty; but such a one should be ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church.

 

A Catholic must recognize that his country is not to be idolized. The reality of its situation must be assessed honestly in light of the truths of the Holy Faith. An honest, frank assessment of the United States of America at this time is that it is a house of terror that permits under cover of law every kind of moral evil imaginable, including each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance (willful murder, the sin of Sodom, withholding the day laborer's wages, defrauding a widow and oppressing the poor). There can be no expectation that foreign nations will have any respect for the inviolability of the lives of American citizens when most of those citizens have no respect for the absolute and unconditional inviolability of all innocent human life in the womb. To attack innocent human life in the womb with legal impunity is to make it more and more likely that completely random acts of violence will be committed as a matter of routine. If men do not live for First and Last Things, that is, if they have no love of God as He has revealed Himself, if they do not fear the moment of their Particular Judgements, if they are not directed by the Deposit of Faith and sanctified by Sanctifying Grace, then they will spend their lives in utter emotionality and irrationality, living as beasts in such of food and various other pleasures.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

It must therefore be clearly admitted that, in the life of a Christian, the intellect must be entirely subject to God's authority. And if, in this submission of reason to authority, our self-love, which is so strong, is restrained and made to suffer, this only proves the necessity to a Christian of long-suffering not only in will but also in intellect. We would remind those persons of this truth who desire a kind of Christianity such as they themselves have devised, whose precepts should be very mild, much more indulgent towards human nature, and requiring little if any hardships to be borne. They do not properly under stand the meaning of faith and Christian precepts. They do not see that the Cross meets us everywhere, the model of our life, the eternal standard of all who wish to follow Christ in reality and not merely in name.

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

 

It is nothing other astounding that any Catholic could read this passage and not see the simple Catholic truths that jump off of the page at him. Sadly, however, there are those Catholics who do not believe that social order is dependent upon the true Faith, that men must look to some kind of naturalistic philosophy or ideology or economic system to guide in in the "practicalities" of the "real" world. What these people do not realize is that the Catholic Church is the real world. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded her upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and entrusted her with the mission to teach and to baptize all men until the end of time. Our Lord did NOT anoint John Adams or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or Raymond Danton or Francois Arouet (Voltaire) or Niccolo Machiavelli or Immanuel Kant or John Locke or Thomas Hobbes or Martin Luther or John Knox or John Wesley or Thomas Cranmer or John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell or Adam Smith or David Ricardo or Maximilian Robespierre or Georg Hegel or Karl Marx or Frederic Engels or Vladimir Lenin or Mao Tse-Tung or Joseph Stalin or Mikhail Gorbachev or John Dewey or Auguste Comte or Segundo Freud or Murray Rothbard or Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater or any one else to the means by which human life was to be directed. He gave us a mother (mater) and a teacher (magister) to nourish and to guide us so we can so order our lives here in this mortal, vale of tears that would be able to enjoy an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Heaven.

The overthrow of the Social Reign wrought by the violent and most bloody Protestant Revolution against the Catholic Faith in the Sixteenth Century and then cemented into place by all of the naturalistic forces of the "Enlightenment" and Judeo-Masonry has resulted in a world where most human beings have no idea as why they were created and how it is that God expects them to live. The lies of Modernity and the apostasy of Modernism have robbed non-Catholics and Catholics alike of the ability to see clearly with the eyes of their immortal souls. Most people have no idea that true happiness here on earth comes from having souls that are in states of Sanctifying Grace, from doing God's Holy Will with every breath they take, from embracing their daily crosses in reparation for their own sins and those of the whole world as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Most people are lost in a naturalistic fog of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and nihilism and religious indifferentism to such an extent that they aren't even aware that they are in any kind of fog at all, no matter that they are lost now and heading to be lost for all eternity.

So what if over four thousand human beings whose immortal souls are made in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity are killed each day in the United States of America by surgical abortion alone? So what? So what if thousands more die each day as a result of chemical abortifacients and in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell "research"? So what if all manner of disordered images (violence, immorality--whether natural or perverse--in violation of the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments) and sounds pierce our immortal souls on a daily basis? We are "free," right? We have the "civil right" to do what we want, right? We have the "right" to look at pornography and to blaspheme God and to even propagandize if favor of chemical and surgical baby-killing. After all, we are "free," right?

Pope Gregory XVI warned us in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, what happened to nations whose citizens believed in the madness of the false concept of civil liberty that had been embraced by the modern civil state:

We come to you grieving and sorrowful because We know that you are concerned for the faith in these difficult times. Now is truly the time in which the powers of darkness winnow the elect like wheat."The earth mourns and fades away....And the earth is infected by the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, they have changed the ordinances, they have broken the everlasting covenant."

We speak of the things which you see with your own eyes, which We both bemoan. Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline -- none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil. Our Roman See is harassed violently and the bonds of unity are daily loosened and severed. The divine authority of the Church is opposed and her rights shorn off. She is subjected to human reason and with the greatest injustice exposed to the hatred of the people and reduced to vile servitude. The obedience due bishops is denied and their rights are trampled underfoot. Furthermore, academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions, which openly attack the Catholic faith; this horrible and nefarious war is openly and even publicly waged. Thus, by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted and a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the perversion of morals is spread. So the restraints of religion are thrown off, by which alone kingdoms stand. We see the destruction of public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all legitimate power approaching. Indeed this great mass of calamities had its inception in the heretical societies and sects in which all that is sacrilegious, infamous, and blasphemous has gathered as bilge water in a ship's hold, a congealed mass of all filth.

These and many other serious things, which at present would take too long to list, but which you know well, cause Our intense grief. It is not enough for Us to deplore these innumerable evils unless We strive to uproot them. We take refuge in your faith and call upon your concern for the salvation of the Catholic flock. Your singular prudence and diligent spirit give Us courage and console Us, afflicted as We are with so many trials. We must raise Our voice and attempt all things lest a wild boar from the woods should destroy the vineyard or wolves kill the flock. It is Our duty to lead the flock only to the food which is healthful. In these evil and dangerous times, the shepherds must never neglect their duty; they must never be so overcome by fear that they abandon the sheep. Let them never neglect the flock and become sluggish from idleness and apathy. Therefore, united in spirit, let us promote our common cause, or more truly the cause of God; let our vigilance be one and our effort united against the common enemies. . . .

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?

 

Yes, the worst sort of terrorism is Mortal Sin, which kills the life of Sanctifying Grace in a human soul. The worst kind of slavery is slavery to Original Sin, wherein one's soul is captive to the devil and thus blinded from seeing the world clearly and whose disorderly passions are even more inclined to act in accord with the spur of the moment rather than in accord with even natural reason. Fallen human nature is such, however, that men vie with each in acts of terrorism by means of their unrepentant Mortal Sins, blinding themselves voluntarily as they seek after everything but the Catholic Faith as the means to guide their lives, being content to remain in slavery to devil, whether by means Original Sin or Mortal Sin, as they heap up riches in this life in the belief that this is the singular and all-defining purpose of human existence justifying whatever means are employed to obtained monetary wealth and/or worldly power.

The insanity and madness of Modernity that is supposed to produce "happiness" in this mortal vale of tears winds up producing anxiety and fear and misery and sadness. People do not know how to cope in the midst of their small crosses, no less the greater tragedies that might strike them or one of their loved ones without notice. All of the accumulated wealth and technology and other supposed "advancements" in daily living have provided no substitute for the love of the true God has He has revealed Himself to men exclusively through the true Church, the Catholic Church. Although fallen human nature has worked its vagaries throughout human history, including during the era of Christendom in the Middle Ages, it is far easier for people to "snap" when they live in a house of terror, that is, a country where "everything goes," where every kind of vile image is displayed, where every manner of "opinion" is considered to contain within itself the possibility of being true, where most people have become so accustomed to the daily carnage of the preborn that it is considered "disordered" to give the matter any thought at all.

The terrible tragedy that took place on Thursday, February 14, 2008, at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois (which is located some 120 miles north of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where I taught from 1977-1979 and again from 1986-1987), is but the sad consequence of a country that has become a house of terror, a country that is awash in the blood of the innocent each and every day, a country where the elderly and the infirm and the useless are dispatched in hospitals and hospitals by a variety of means (the removal of food and water, increasingly higher doses of morphine that are designed to stop the heart from beating, a diagnosis of "brain death" that makes it possible for body organs to be harvested), a country where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not reign as King and His Most Blessed Mother is not honored publicly as our Immaculate Queen. Killing grown human beings becomes a matter of routine when innocent preborn human beings are killed with such legal impunity--and when absolute Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marital relations is violated so egregiously by the manufacture, prescription and usage of any type of contraception, whether abortifacient or not.

A world that is not reliant upon Christ the King and tenderly to devoted to His Most Blessed Mother, the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, is one that must become dependent upon all manner of the naturalistic, if not atheistic, ideologies listed above and upon the new "high priests" of psychology and psychiatry and sociology and social work for "guidance" and "support." Many people who are sad about their lives are treated with one or more of a variety of psychotropic drugs designed to "alter" behavior and moods. Well, this has worked very well. Some people become so dependent upon these psychotropic drugs that the imbalance produced when a dosage is missed can result in a fit of violence as is claimed by some press reports that might have played a role in what happened in Illinois two days ago. Whether or not such psychotropic drugs played a role in the Illinois killings, these drugs themselves have been proven in some instances to be inducements to suicide and thoughts of violence upon others. These drugs are certainly "mind-altering," all right. To question the "wisdom" of psychoanalysts or psychotherapists or psychologists or psychiatrists is almost apostasy in the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian world in which we live.

Admitting that there are some genuine cases of mental illness that might need the assistance of good Catholic professionals, most cases of sadness or depression of maladjustment are the result of unrepentant Mortal Sins. It must be remembered that even though many people suffer from the objective effects of Mortal Sin even though they may not be subjectively aware that they are committing such sins and thus not fully morally culpable for their actions. Just as a person with an undiagnosed case of diabetes, however, suffers the effects in his body of his diabetes even though he is unaware that he is harming his body by what he eats and drinks, so does a person who commits Mortal Sins without realizing that he is doing so harms his immortal soul, making it more and more captive to the devil. What most maladjusted people need is not drugs or psychotherapy. These people need to make a good Confession. We need to make a good Confession regularly. They need Sanctifying Grace. So do we. We must think supernaturally, not naturalistically. A good spiritual director or confessor can discern whether a directee/penitent has a physiological condition that is need of assistance from a Catholic professional in the medical field. We simply cannot permit ourselves to be held hostage to the pharmaceutical industry, which seeks to experiment with our very lives, and to the "high secular priesthood" of psychology or psychiatry.

The "high secular priesthood" of psychology and psychiatry has been assaulting children in Western countries, including the United States of America, for many decades now by means of carefully designed programs to break down their natural psychological resistance to information that would rob them of their innocence and their purity. Some of these explicit propaganda programs that provide "information" about matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments is imparted to children when they are as young as Kindergarten age, if not sooner in day care or pre-school programs. This is an act of spiritual and moral violence upon the the souls of these children, most of whose parents permit them to watch indecent television programming and to listen to "music" with the most vile lyrics. This is all from the devil.

The "high secular priesthood" of psychology and psychiatry has "counseled" people in distress because of their sins or some disappointment in life to abandon the practice of the true Faith, which is said to "shackle" or inhibit them, and to engage in sinful acts with perfect impunity, thereby causing even more violence to souls and quite frequently to the very physical lives of the ones counseled and those around them. Indeed, many court-appointed social workers and psychologists have termed mothers or fathers involved in custody battles as "imbalanced" or "fanatical" if they require their children to pray the family Rosary with them or to assist at Mass, especially the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. Oh, yes, the devil hates the Mass and the Rosary and uses the "high secular priesthood" of psychology and psychiatry to destroy the integrity families by fanning the flames of divorce and custody-battles in which the secular, if not pagan, parent gets to control the education and upbringing of children.

The "high secular priesthood of psychology and psychiatry plays with the eternal and temporal lives of the people who look to its practitioners for "direction" and "guidance." Although there are, as noted above, truly believing Catholics in these fields who are trained to help people with genuine emotional problems that might have a physiological foundation, there is no exaggerating the harm done to souls and thus to nations by the caste of naturalists who play havoc with people's emotions and never once urge them to convert to the true Faith and/or to make a good Confession. Once again, it is the devil, who wants to disturb and agitate souls, who is the chief director of all naturalistic forces, including those in the "mental health" and in much of contemporary medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry itself.

We should keep in mind that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ expelled demons during His Public Ministry. Many Modernist Scripture scholars disparage such demonic exorcisms and have concluded that the demoniacs were not possessed, that they were "mentally ill." Such self-serving deconstructionism diminishes the role of the devil, who prowls around the world like a roaring lion seeking the destruction of souls, in the destruction of souls. Indeed, many Modernists do not believe in the devil at all, giving the adversary one his greatest triumphs. The belief that he does not exist gives him all the more room to attempt to ruin souls--and thus societies--and to take them with him into Hell for all eternity.

There are, however, the times when random violence committed in the United States of America is the result of carefully calculated plans to exterminate other human beings for one reason or another. This was the case with the cold-blooded killings that took place at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, ten months ago tomorrow, that is, on April 17, 2007. (See: Cold Blooded Killers Walk Amongst Us Every Day.) This is the case with so many carefully calculated "revenge" killings (husbands and spouses, friends with friends, coworkers with coworkers, neighbors with neighbors, etc.) that have proliferated significantly in the years since state legislatures, thank you very much, began to "permit" baby-killing under cover of law in the 1960s prior to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973. There is no stopping any of this with psychology or psychiatry or social work or "gun control." The only way to stop the shedding of blood after birth is to stop its shedding before birth. And the only way to do that is to pray and to work for the conversion of men and their nations to the Catholic Faith.

Such a conversion is not a guarantor of social order, as Pope Pius XII noted in Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939. However, it is the necessary precondition for social order. It is only when men are informed by the Deposit of Faith and sanctified by Sanctifying Grace that they have a true chance to see themselves and the world clearly and to try, despite their sins and shortcomings, to scale the heights of sanctity on a daily basis. This is why the counterfeit church of conciliarism's refusal to seek with urgency the conversion of all men to the true Faith--and its demonic "reconciliation" with the very revolutionary principles of the modern civil state--has helped to exacerbate the state of souls (leaving aside the matter of the lack of graces that flow forth from its Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service). Men are even more lost than ever before because they cannot go to a local Catholic parish and get the unchanging truths of the true Faith taught to them, noting, of course, that there are believers in the conciliar structures who, much as I did for decades, are trying their best to teach the true Faith as it has been handed down to us over the centuries by Holy Mother Church under the infallible guidance and eternal protection of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost.

Our prayers must be with the victims of the most recent act of violence at a major university in the United States of America. We pray for the repose of the immortal souls of those who were killed, including the shooter himself, and for the recovery of those who survived the shooting spree. And we pray that at least a few people who had never thought about First and Last Things will be prompted to do so now, recognizing that each moment of our lives might be our last, that we must get ourselves to the Sacrament of Penance on a regular basis, confessing even our Venial Sins to a true priest in the Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds, making sure also to be enrolled in and to wear the mantle of the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and to fulfill its conditions faithfully. We never know when the next breath we take will be the last breath we ever take.

No Catholic can remain indifferent to the plight of the shedding of innocent blood in the United States of America (and elsewhere in the world) each and every day. Each surgical abortion is a tragedy of epic proportions that has direct and indirect consequences that are incalculable to imagine. Each surgical abortion is a tragedy for the souls of everyone involved (the baby-killers, the nurses, the schedulers, the receptionists, the office managers, the security guards, the "escorts," the boyfriends, the husbands, the parents, the grandparents, the teachers, the social workers, the psychologists, the friends) who participated in and/or gave active support (or sinned by omission by not seeking to counsel a woman they knew into not killing her child) to this offense against both God and man. Each chemical abortion is itself a crime against souls, one that is driven in large measure by the relativism in the world wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the naturalistic forces of Judeo-Masonry. Crimes against souls, my friends, take their toll on men and their nations. There is no naturalistic method by which the trajectory of the madness of Modernity can be stopped.

We cannot, as Silvio Cardinal Antoniano noted in the Sixteenth Century, produce peace and prosperity by things repugnant to eternity:

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. (quoted in Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

 

Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. It is the one and only path to Heaven. When are Catholics going to give up their adherence to false programs and philosophies in order to become champions of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen as they seek to plant the seeds for each country to be Catholic, including what we hope and pray will be called one day the Catholic States of America?

Those who think that they can ignore the teaching authority of the Catholic Church and the whole of mankind's utter dependence upon that teaching authority and upon her sanctifying offices ought to reckon with this dialogue that Saint Gertrude the Great, the great apostle of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, had with Our Lord Himself:

"For what fault have you suffered most?" He replied: "For self-will and self-opinionatedness; for when I did any kindness for others, I would not do as they wished, but as I wished myself; and so much do I suffer for this, that if the mental agonies of all mankind were united in one person, he would not endure more than I do at present." She replied: "And what remedy will be the most efficacious for you?" He answered: "To perform acts of the contrary virtue, and to avoid committing the same fault." "But, in the meantime," inquired Gertrude, "what will afford you the greatest relief?" He replied: "The fidelity which I practiced toward others when on earth consoles me most. The prayers which are offered continually for me by many friends solace me as good news would solace a person in affliction. Each tone of the chant at Mass, or in the vigils which are said for me, seem to me as a most delicious reflection. All that is done for me by others, with a pure intention for God's glory, such as working, and even sleeping or eating, affords me great relief and shortens my sufferings, on account of the fidelity with which I labored for others." (The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude the Great, republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, p. 341.)

 

We are called to be faithful to the entirety of the Deposit of Faith, including the binding precepts of Catholic Social Teaching. The entirety of personal and social order depends upon such fidelity. A house of terror can be transformed into a house of holiness. It has happened before in salvation history. It can happen again.

Whether or not the house of terror that is the modern civil state is transformed into a house of holiness depends upon us. How willing are we to get ourselves to a true offering of the Immemorial Mass of the ages on a daily basis? How willing are we to spend time with Our Beloved, Christ the King, in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament? How willing are we to enslave ourselves to Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen? How eager are we to carry our daily crosses, recognizing that there is nothing that we can suffer in this passing, mortal vale of tears that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be pierced through and through with Seven Swords of Sorrow? How willing are we to make time to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit? How willing are we to be as generous with God as possible by voluntarily renouncing the world and its pleasures so as to seek first His Kingdom? How ready are we to meet Him at the moment of our own Particular Judgments?

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

 

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

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.

See also: A Litany of Saints

 





© Copyright 2008, Thomas A. Droleskey. All rights reserved.