"I Feel Sorry for the Earth"
by Thomas A. Droleskey
America must always remain, as it has always been, the hope of the Earth. (Mitt Romney, Conservative Political Action Conference, Washington, D.C., Thursday, February 8, 2008,
(Text of Mitt Romney's C-PAC Address)
The Mormon Mitt Romney spoke those words on Thursday as he "suspended" his campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination of the Republican Party. Mormonism is, as was pointed out in
Pure, Unadulterated Americanism sixty-three days ago now, a quintessentially Americanist mythology, going so far as to claim that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri but that the Great Flood swept Noah and his family over to the Middle East. Closely tied into the the Masonry of its confidence-man founder, Joseph Smith, Mormonism feeds off of and into the belief that the United States of America is the "hope of the Earth," an utterly blasphemous assertion that arrogates unto a mere nation, which is but dust and will perish at the end of time, the role of the Catholic Church.
A careful distinction needs to be made here before reflexive Americanist nationalists jump up and down like Yosemite Sam.
The people of the United States of America have proven themselves to be very generous in coming to the humanitarian assistance of those in other nations around the world after times of war and/or natural or man-made disasters. This is certainly to their credit. Pope Pius XII himself expressed his belief after World War II, at the height of the Cold War as Soviet Communism as threatening the world, that "The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind." This is undoubtedly true. Americans have proven over and over again that they are willing to donate time and money to help their neighbors, whether at home or abroad, in time of need. There has been a spiritual of natural goodness and generosity demonstrated by the American people that is certainly worthy of all praise. This does not mean, however, that the United States of America is the "hope of the earth," that her governmental system is the model for the rest of the world, that her political "ideals" are in accord with Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the infallible teaching authority of the Church He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.
Whatever goodness is found in the people of any particular nation is the result of the Actual Graces that flow out from each valid offering of the Holy Sacrifice at the hands of a true bishop or a true priest. While each nation does indeed have its own national "character," and the American character includes good attributes such as selflessness and generosity in addition to its bad attributes of the toleration of errors and blasphemies and a rampant materialism and relativism that is at the core of the modern civil state, such character needs to be refined over the course of time as its people grow in holiness. There is a direct correlation between order in the soul and order in society, as Silvio Cardinal Antoniano noted in 1583:
The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Pope Leo XIII made a similar point in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, when reminding the American bishops that the growth of the Church in the United States of America was the result of the working of God the Holy Ghost, not the result of a separation of Church and State that could he not approve as the "model" for the rest of the world:
That your Republic is .progressing and developing by giant strides is patent to all; and this holds good in religious matters also. For even as your cities, in the course of one century, have made a marvellous increase in wealth and power, so do we behold the Church, from scant and slender beginnings, grown with rapidity to be great and exceedingly flourishing. Now if, on the one hand, the increased riches and resources of your cities are justly attributed to the talents and active industry of the American people, on the other hand, the prosperous condition of Catholicity must be ascribed, first indeed, to the virtue, the ability, and the prudence of the bishops and clergy; but in so slight measure also, to the faith and generosity of the Catholic laity. Thus, while the different classes exerted their best energies, you were enabled to erect unnumbered religious and useful institutions, sacred edifices, schools for the instruction of youth, colleges for the higher branches, homes for the poor, hospitals for the sick, and convents and monasteries. As for what more closely touches spiritual interests, which are based upon the exercise of Christian virtues, many facts have been brought to Our notice, whereby We are animated with hope and filled with joy, namely, that the numbers of the secular and regular clergy are steadily augmenting, that pious sodalities and confraternities are held in esteem, that the Catholic parochial schools, the Sunday-schools for imparting Christian doctrine, and summer schools are in a flourishing condition; moreover, associations for mutual aid, for the relief of the indigent, for the promotion of temperate living, add to all this the many evidences of popular piety.
The main factor, no doubt, in bringing things into this happy state were the ordinances and decrees of your synods, especially of those which in more recent times were convened and confirmed by the authority of the Apostolic See. But, moreover (a fact which it gives pleasure to acknowledge), thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.
It would be within a few short years of this encyclical letter, however, that the government of the United States of America would engage in a needless and unjust war with the Spanish Empire, acquiring an empire for itself in the process. Protestant "churches" and Masonic lodges were introduced in Cuba and Puerto Rico and The Philippines, taking countless numbers of souls out of the true Church. This is part of the tragic legacy of the United States of America as it has sought to spread with a true missionary zeal--and a wanton disregard in many instances for the inviolability of the lives of innocent noncombatants--l its false, naturalistic principles of pluralism and religious liberty and "democracy."
A country that does not recognize Christ as King as He has revealed Himself though His true Church is bound to decay over the course of time, just as a soul must degenerate over the course of time more and more into sin if it has fallen into unrepentant Mortal Sin. It is not impossible for the person who is unrepentant about his Mortal Sins to commit acts of natural virtue of goodness. It is not impossible for a nation that is founded on false premises and does much evil to demonstrate a natural spirit of generosity to other peoples. It is, however, as impossible for such a nation to please God as it is for a soul in state of Mortal Sin to be saved absent a sincere and full Confession made in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance to an alter Christus acting in persona Christi.
As is noted in the
Catholic Action Resource Center's Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers:
The social reign of the Heart of Jesus is God in His place in the reason, in the conscience, in the heart and in the public life of man; the social reign of Satan, is God excluded from religion, from the conscience, from the heart and from the public life of man; it is humanity laicized and adoring itself.
"There is no middle ground; one must choose. The liberals, the liberals who say to themselves that they are and believe themselves to be Catholic, do not want to choose; they repudiate the social reign of the Heart of Jesus, they accept the social reign of Satan. Despite their verbal protestations, their work is founded on Freemasonry; they are of the party of Satan against the Heart of Jesus" (Canon Gaudeau, La Maison actuelle de Sainte Marguerite Marie, p. 25, de St. Just, pg. 201.) [Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October, 2007, pp. 5-8.]
"So much as Christ does not reign over societies, that much does His influence over individuals remain superficial and precarious. If it is true that the work of the apostolate is, by definition, to bring about the conversion of individuals, and that it is not nations which will go to heaven, but souls, one by one, it must not, meanwhile, be forgotten that the individual lives profoundly joined in a social organization that has influence over him. If you attempt to convert individuals without wishing to Christianize their social institutions, your work remains frail. What you have built in the morning, others will reverse in the evening. Is it not this tact of God's enemies instructive to us? In seeking everyday to tear away the heart of the individual, they employ more effort in the pursuit of destroying social institutions. One single defeat for God in this area, is the disturbance of the faith, if not the ruin, in a great number of souls." (Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie, back side of the title page.)
The great Catholic leaders of Christendom recognized that the always fragile, precarious nature of peace among kingdoms was premised upon the spread of the Social Kingship of Christ the King, which gave individuals more of an opportunity to live at peace with God by means of being in states of Sanctifying Grace and thus being more inclined to live in true peace with others, both domestically and internationally, in whose persons they recognized the very image and likeness of the Divine Redeemer Himself. Fallen human nature, as Pope Pius XII noted in Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939, and as Father Denis Fahey noted in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, manifested itself very clearly in the various epochs of Christendom. Nevertheless as Pope Pius XII wrote:
The denial of the fundamentals of morality had its origin, in Europe, in the abandonment of that Christian teaching of which the Chair of Peter is the depository and exponent. That teaching had once given spiritual cohesion to a Europe which, educated, ennobled and civilized by the Cross, had reached such a degree of civil progress as to become the teacher of other peoples, of other continents. But, cut off from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, not a few separated brethren have gone so far as to overthrow the central dogma of Christianity, the Divinity of the Savior, and have hastened thereby the progress of spiritual decay.
The Holy Gospel narrates that when Jesus was crucified "there was darkness over the whole earth" (Matthew xxvii. 45); a terrifying symbol of what happened and what still happens spiritually wherever incredulity, blind and proud of itself, has succeeded in excluding Christ from modern life, especially from public life, and has undermined faith in God as well as faith in Christ. The consequence is that the moral values by which in other times public and private conduct was gauged have fallen into disuse; and the much vaunted civilization of society, which has made ever more rapid progress, withdrawing man, the family and the State from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear, in regions in which for many centuries shone the splendors of Christian civilization, in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, the signs of a corrupt and corrupting paganism: "There was darkness when they crucified Jesus" (Roman Breviary, Good Friday, Response Five).
Many perhaps, while abandoning the teaching of Christ, were not fully conscious of being led astray by a mirage of glittering phrases, which proclaimed such estrangement as an escape from the slavery in which they were before held; nor did they then foresee the bitter consequences of bartering the truth that sets free, for error which enslaves. They did not realize that, in renouncing the infinitely wise and paternal laws of God, and the unifying and elevating doctrines of Christ's love, they were resigning themselves to the whim of a poor, fickle human wisdom; they spoke of progress, when they were going back; of being raised, when they groveled; of arriving at man's estate, when they stooped to servility. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it; "they became vain in their thoughts" (Romans i. 21).
With the weakening of faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the darkening in men's minds of the light of moral principles, there disappeared the indispensable foundation of the stability and quiet of that internal and external, private and public order, which alone can support and safeguard the prosperity of States.
It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality.
The Catholic Church is the only hope for mankind, not any nation, certainly not any nation that has exported music and motion pictures and television programs and books and magazines that have led many millions of people into sin, certainly not any nation that has exported contraceptives of various kinds that have killed hundreds of millions of innocent preborn babies. A nation that rejects the Social Reign of Christ the King, no manner how many acts of selflessness and generosity that its people may perform, is no source of "hope for the earth." As my dear wife Sharon noted when I told hear what Romney, echoing the late Ronald Wilson Reagan in his first address at the Conservative Political Action Conference on January 25, 1974 (wherein he called, in the presence of his invited guest, Lieutenant Commander John McCain, U.S.N, the United States of America
"the last best hope of man on earth"), had said, "I feel sorry for the earth."
While we are called by virtue of the Natural Law to love the nation in which we were born or have acquired citizenship, that love of nation is subordinate to the love of God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church. Authentic love of one's nation wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization in every single one of her aspects without any exception whatsoever. To idolize one's nation is to demonstrate a spirit of nationalism, which is a sin against the First Commandment, which requires us to love God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church above all created things, including parents and spouses and children and country.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, warned Catholics not to put love of country above love of God:
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.
Pope Pius XI, writing in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, reiterated the point that had been made by Pope Leo XIII forty-seven years beforehand:
This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.
None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah xI, 15).
There is a true Faith. It is Catholicism, not Mormonism, not Americanism, not Judeo-Masonry. Every country has a positive obligation to recognize the true Church and to concede that she has the authority, which is to be used judiciously and only after the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to intervene with civil authorities when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention. The United States of America is not an exception to this immutable teaching.
Mitt Romney, ever the Americanist, said the following in his address on his Mormon religion delivered at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, on December 7, 2007:
There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people.'
As I commented in Pure, Unadulterated Americanism a day after Romney's College Station speech:
The nation's founders "discovered" the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom? Well, the Protestant and Masonic and Deist founders of the United States of America, aided and abetted by some prominent Catholics who presaged conciliarism by about 186 years, did indeed "protect" the heresy of "religious freedom," enshrining this slap in the face to the Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church in an Article VI of the Constitution of the United States of America, which forbids any religious test for one to hold office in the Federal government, and in the Constitution's First Amendment. This has made it possible for adherents of false religions and false philosophies and even atheism itself to publicly propagate their errors, which blaspheme God by daring to assert that He has not revealed His truths definitively and exclusively to the Catholic Church and which thus deceives the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. God does not want human beings steeped in an abyss of confusion as to what He has revealed. He wants all men in all places at all times and in all circumstances to submit themselves unhesitatingly to the Deposit of Faith that He has entrusted to the Church that He Himself founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.
It is useful once again to point that the first Vice President and second President of the United States of America, John Adams, did not know anything about "morality" and "religion" as he hated the true Faith and despised the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:
Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)
I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)
Yes, Americanists must always make advertence to their false idols who hated the Catholic Church. Here's a newsflash for you, Governor Romney: anyone who hates the Catholic Church and disparages the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, hates God Himself. One who hates God shows himself to be incapable of serving the temporal good of man as he does not understand man's Last End, which must direct all of his activities on earth.
Mitt Romney's ignorance of the fundamentals of civil law as a result of the Americanism that is at the epicenter of his Mormonism was on full display in his Conservative Political Action Conference speech on Thursday, February 7, 2008, that "Islamo-fascists" believed that God made the law, not human beings. Well, Mr. Romney, the "Islamo-fascists" share a belief in a false religion, albeit a different one, with you. They do understand in their own disordered way, however, that God is indeed the author of all law, although they, just like you, do not understand Who God is: the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as revealed by the God-Man and taught infallibly by His Catholic Church.
Yes, Mr. Romney, God is the author of all law. Civil law must be conformed at all times to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted to the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church. There would be no need for the proliferation of written laws as has taken place in the United States of America and elsewhere in the Western world if nations recognized the Social Reign of Christ the King. Government would be limited as the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity would be observed, thus producing a situation whereby there would be little need for massive entitlement programs (problems would be resolved in the institution closest to people in need, the family, which would be able to maintain its integrity and stability in a Catholic country without being assaulted by the forces of statism and of naturalism in the popular culture). The average citizen would understand that the problems of the world are caused by Original Sin and our own Actual Sins and can be remedied only by a reform of individual lives in cooperation with the graces for them by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. People would look to the reform, the change, if you will, of their own souls, not to "government" for the solution of their problems.
Pope Saint Pius X stressed this exact truth in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact.
Pope Pius XI reiterated this simple truth in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937:
Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.
Human beings need to submit themselves to the teaching authority and to the sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church to know order within their own souls, which interior order within souls is the precondition for order within society. The rejection of this simple truth by Modernity--and by the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism--is one of the fatal flaws in the whole enterprise of the modern civil state, including the United States of America. Each human being needs to be a Catholic who assents completely to everything contained in the Deposit of Faith without one iota of dissent. Each human being needs to make a fervent effort, especially by supplicating the Immaculate Mother of God, who must be honored publicly by men and their civil institutions, to cooperate with Sanctifying and Actual Graces in order to fulfill his state-in-life in the temporal realm, including that of being a good citizen of his nation, in light of the pursuit of his Last End, the possession of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for all eternity in an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.
A nation founded on right principles is one where there would be an organic unity to a society. Perfection? Never. Fallen human nature will wreak havoc with weak vessels of clay until the end of time. However, a nation founded on right principles, that is, those of Catholic Social Teaching, would seek to advance the common temporal good in light of the eternal good of the souls of its citizens, enacting just laws to enforce the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and Natural Law--and to provide for the maintenance of public safety and the national defense--while at the same time keeping the costs of government at a minimum, affording citizens an opportunity to live without being taxed and regulated by the state unto death in order to "solve" problems that have arisen as a result of the breakdown of the family and rise of multinational corporations whose executives treat communities and nations and the very people who work for and shop from them as chattel to be viewed solely as a means of corporate and personal profit.
In such a world, Governor Romney, there would be no such thing as "public" schools. Parents would be viewed as the primary educators of their children. The civil state would have no authority to establish curricula or to conspire with pharmaceutical companies to use our children as guinea pigs in order to test whichever vaccine of the day these companies desire to market as means of making lots of money. And nation-states, as they have come to exist in the world of modernity, would not go to war as a first resort, not seek to advance ideological goals contrary to the true Faith, not seek to impose various nationalist "ideals" as the infallible norms by which all other nations must be judged.
Pope Pius XI explained in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, what a justly ordered world would like:
Since the Church is the safe and sure guide to conscience, for to her safe-keeping alone there has been confided the doctrines and the promise of the assistance of Christ, she is able not only to bring about at the present hour a peace that is truly the peace of Christ, but can, better than any other agency which We know of, contribute greatly to the securing of the same peace for the future, to the making impossible of war in the future. For the Church teaches (she alone has been given by God the mandate and the right to teach with authority) that not only our acts as individuals but also as groups and as nations must conform to the eternal law of God. In fact, it is much more important that the acts of a nation follow God's law, since on the nation rests a much greater responsibility for the consequences of its acts than on the individual.
When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.
There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.
It is apparent from these considerations that true peace, the peace of Christ, is impossible unless we are willing and ready to accept the fundamental principles of Christianity, unless we are willing to observe the teachings and obey the law of Christ, both in public and private life. If this were done, then society being placed at last on a sound foundation, the Church would be able, in the exercise of its divinely given ministry and by means of the teaching authority which results therefrom, to protect all the rights of God over men and nations.
The Social Reign of Christ the King does not involve a theocracy. Ecclesiastical officials are not to hold civil offices. Those who hold civil offices have an autonomy of competency to act in those areas where men of good will can indeed disagree (the particular rate of taxation, the type of taxation, whether a particular bridge or highway should be built, the specific penalties to be imposed upon malefactors who violate grievously the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law), keeping in mind at all times the fact that they will be judged by Christ the King on the basis of whether even these actions in the realm of "Caesar" were necessary and just, whether they were undertaken in light of man's Last End, including that of themselves. The Social Reign of Christ the King that must be exercised by the Catholic Church does not threaten this autonomy. It merely protects against the unjust, arbitrary abuse of civil power, whether by a monarch or by those serving in institutions of representative (republican) government, that puts in jeopardy in a grave manner the good of souls.
When my dear wife said that "I feel sorry for the earth" when she heard what former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had said at the close of his address to the Conservative Political Action Committee two days ago, she was not being "disloyal" to the United States of America, only pointing out that the false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles upon which the United States was founded have wreaked havoc with the world and resulted in the loss of millions of souls to the Catholic Faith (and have been responsible for fueling the anti-Catholic bigotry of various administrations, including that of the late President Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Warren Gamaliel Harding and John Calvin Coolidge as support was given to the Masons killing over a quarter of a million Catholics in Mexico in the second and third decades of the Twentieth Century) and have been the vessels of introducing spiritual and moral disorder around the globe. To criticize the false foundations of the United States of America is not to "hate" one's country or to express a wish to live elsewhere. It is merely to point out that no nation, especially one founded on false principles that deny the Social Reign of Christ the King, provides any "hope" for the rest of the world.
Can the United States of America be at least a beacon of hope at some point in the future? Yes, if she were converted to the true Faith and lived up to her noble calling as a country that has been consecrated to the Our Lady under the title of her Immaculate Conception. She could become the Catholic States of America, honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Patroness and Empress of the Americas, as her good attributes are ennobled and her vices eclipsed. Nothing is impossible with God, is it? How likely was it that the Roman Empire in the West would collapse and that Holy Mother Church, persecuted by emperors periodically between 67 A.D. and 313 A.D., would arise to take its place in the world? With God, my friends, all things are possible.
The hour may be too late for this, I understand. The sins of this nation are vast. The Red Chinese and the Soviets--oh, I meant to write "Russians, excuse me--may take preemptive action of their own one day, thereby being used by God as instruments of chastisement for all of the millions upon millions of innocent human lives that have been taken under cover of law, both by surgical and chemical means, in the past forty-three years or so now. We must be prepared at all times for whatever disasters, whether natural or man-made, that may come our way as a means of purifying us and of attaching us more fully to the things of Heaven. The worst thing that can happen to us is not to die in a terrible, devastating series of tornadoes or to die as a result of a nuclear war The worst thing that can happen to us is to die in state of final impenitence, that is, a state of Mortal Sin.
We do not know the future. Therefore, we must build up the Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen in our own homes, enthroned as they should be to the twin Hearts of matchless love--the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, making a special effort this Lent to accept our daily penances with greater joy and to see in each and every cross that comes our way an opportunity to help make reparation for our sins and those of the whole word. We must remember that there is nothing we can suffer in this life that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Passion and Death and as Seven Swords of Sorrow were pierced through and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. God has fashioned each cross in our daily lives for us perfectly from all eternity. Should we not lift up each cross with joy as the consecrated slaves of His Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.
We must never betray the cause of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen as the petty politicians who take positions according to the latest polling results and/or the perceived "slant" of the audiences they are addressing at any given moment, or as the conciliarists do. We must raise high the banner of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen at all times, fulfilling Our Lady's Fatima Message faithfully in our own lives, praying as many Rosaries as we can each day as the consecrated slaves of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
There is one and only one hope for the earth: the Catholic Church, which truth has been rejected by the scions of Modernity and Modernism alike.
The petty politicians of today will pass. Their ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, positivism, relativism, materialism, etc.) will pass, each and every one of them. What will replace them? Who will replace these petty politicians?
Consider these words spoken to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, Himself:
"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)
May we never stand in opposition to the Social Reign of Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
