It's Still A World of Sisyphuses

by Thomas A. Droleskey

It was a a year ago this very day that A World of Sisyphuses was posted. Nothing much at all has changed in the past year since I wrote the following:

Those who do not understand the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith wind up spending most of their lives trying to "figure things out" on a daily basis. That is, those who do not accept the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, are lost in a fog of contradiction and confusion and myopia, constantly trying to fight this or that personal or social battle on purely naturalistic grounds without a single thought given over to First and Last Things. The simple answers provided by the Holy Faith as to why problems exist in the world and how they are to be ameliorated on a daily basis by the reform of individual lives in cooperation with the graces won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer and that flow into the hearts and souls of men through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, are rejected as being vestiges of the past beliefs that are not "relevant" to modern men, especially given the "realities" of the pluralism that has been brought into existence by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry

The blindness caused by the rejection of the true Faith permeates all facets of daily living. . . .

Ah, my friends, this is the world in which most people live. Truth (of any kind)? Facts? History? Everything is a matter of "opinion" and "interpretation." Human beings are simply autonomous creatures who must muddle their way through life to "fix" problems on a piecemeal basis without ever understanding root causes, the essence of the late John Dewey's ideology of "pragmatism," one of the many sophistries produced by the naturalist, anti-Incarnational world of Modernity to which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "reconciliation" by abandoning the teaching of the Social Reign of Christ the King and championing the Judeo-Masonic notion of the separation of Church and State. Public and most, although not quite all, conciliar schools produce graduates who are absolutely clueless about First and Last Things, immersed in material success and sensual pleasures as the defining measures of human existence.

Such people believe that government exists to help them "improve" their lives and to "solve" problems that have their proximate cause in Original Sin and fallen human nature and their remote causes in the Actual Sins of men that are never absolved by a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. Disorder, frequently characterized by violence against innocent human life and the legitimate private property rights of others, and sloth become the order of the day in the lives of men and their nations. Cheating is commonplace, if not expected. Lying is a given. Warfare on the international stage is just a regrettable "reality" that must be waged with relentless abandon in the hopes of producing a "peace" that arms-merchants will never permit, an illusory peace that is premised on an abject rejection of the true Faith as the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Forget about a knowledge of First and Last Things as they have been entrusted to and taught by the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church. Most people don't even have a basic knowledge of current events. It was one year ago today that I began teaching a ten day intersession course at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. As had been the case when last I taught in a formal classroom setting in the 2002-2003 academic year, most of the students knew nothing about current events. None could name the United States Secretary of Defense. One out of fifteen could name the newly-elected Governor of the State of New York. None could not their own local governmental officials. They lived in a perpetual fog. Most of them will actually vote in the 2008 presidential election as this is what is done in a "democratic republic." And it is to precisely such people that those who devise campaign "strategies" for careerists seeking elected offices at various levels (state, local, national), including the presidency of the United States of America, spend such time trying to identify a "theme" that will resonate with the various constituencies whom it is believed are most inclined to support the candidates for whom they work.

Trying to identify a "theme" is a complicated process for people who are themselves immersed in the relativism and materialism and pragmatism and careerism of Judeo-Masonic naturalism. Polling companies must be employed to conduct random-sample surveys of voters in various locations or groups. The results of these surveys must be analyzed. Media consultants must then devise television and radio and internet advertising designed to communicate the "theme" that will reach voters in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina or Florida. While there are candidates who are exceptions to this, adhering to their own sets of beliefs, no matter how mistakenly-based in Protestantism or libertarianism or other naturalist concepts, most candidates for public office simply run to "win." Reflecting the quintessential American aversion to ideas, what former President George Herbert Walker Bush derided so contemptuously as the "vision thing," most candidates are an amazing collection of contradictions and "feelings" who possess no "core" beliefs even on the naturalistic level other than a desire to "win" in order to acquire and then exercise political power in such a way so as to retain it for as long as the law on term limits, if any, of a particular office permits.

These are the facts of life in our so terribly contorted and disfigured naturalist world of pluralism, a world where over four thousand innocent preborn babies each and every day are put to death in the United States of America by surgical means alone. Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., the founder of Human Life International, estimated in a talk he gave in Willimantic, Connecticut, in June of 1997 that over 20,000 babies a day worldwide are killed by surgical abortions. Thousands upon thousands more are killed by means of chemical abortifacients. Anyone who thinks that there is some naturalistic way out of this contorted and disfigured world is fooling himself. The Apostles did not "build for the future" by means of naturalism. They planted the seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the Catholic Faith, trusting that Our Lord would bring the seeds that they planted in His Holy Name and by His ineffable graces to fruition in His own good time. In other words, the Apostles did not look for "results" with the sort of frantic mania that possesses (and that is the absolutely correct word to use, by the way) so many who are hell bent in the tragically false belief that this or that  political candidate is going to "change" things in the future, if not here and now.

The Apostles knew that fidelity to the Divine Redeemer was what mattered, not tangible "results." Men and their nations need to be converted to the true Faith. The Catholic City, not some inter-denominational, Masonic play land of naturalistic "common ground," needed to be established and then maintained. Pope Saint Pius X pointed this out in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

But, on the contrary, by ignoring the laws governing human nature and by breaking the bounds within which they operate, the human person is lead, not toward progress, but towards death. This, nevertheless, is what they want to do with human society; they dream of changing its natural and traditional foundations; they dream of a Future City built on different principles, and they [the Sillonists] dare to proclaim these more fruitful and more beneficial than the principles upon which the present Christian City rests.

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. omnia instaurare in Christo.

 

Restoring the Catholic City is the furthest thing from the minds of the careerist politicians and their sycophantic advisers. The New York Times ran a story a short while ago which described various "strategy sessions" held by the chief advisers to former City of New York Mayor Rudolph William Giuliani, a thoroughly pro-abortion and pro-perversion renegade Catholic. These sessions sound out "themes" that could be used by Giuliani, who usually speaks off-the-cuff and has little to say except for the fact that he would be "tough" on "terrorism" (while permitting the daily terrorism against innocent preborn children under cover of law, of course), in different states. Giuliani may be discovering that "being there" on September 11, 2001, just might not be enough to catapult himself to the Republican presidential nomination, although the stupidity of the American electorate is never to be underestimated. Those perceived to be the "electable" (such as the inarticulate, ever-mercurial, content-less thirty-third degree Mason named Robert Joseph Dole, Jr.) candidates frequently acquire support even though they are absolutely vapid and have not a blessed clue even on the natural level how to give a coherent set of remarks that have not been prepared for them in advance and that do not contradict something that they might have said earlier on the same day in a different location.

Anyone who thinks that "progress" can be made in the Judeo-Masonic world of naturalism without speaking confessionally as a Catholic will be condemned to the fate of the mythical Sisyphus, who had to spend eternity perpetually trying to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down on him time and time again. Each new election cycle brings its own "burst of energy" from the activists, each of whom seems to latch on to some new secular "saviour" that occupies his time and energies that could be spent much better educating people about the authentic Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. Half-answers and half-measures, no less those that actually reaffirm people in the falsehoods of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of press" and "freedom of religion," are not what men need. They need Catholic truth. Nothing else.

Oh, please don't tell me that people aren't ready for Catholic truth just now. Were the Jews who listened to Saint Peter on Pentecost Sunday "ready" for what he had to say to them? Were the Druids who were preached to by Saint Patrick "ready" for what he had to say to them? Were the pagans in Goa, India, "ready" for what Saint Francis Xavier had to say to them? Time is short. Eternity is forever. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ told us that we should never be ashamed of Him and His doctrine before men lest He is ashamed of us at the moment of our Particular Judgments:

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For he that shall be ashamed of me, and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation: the Son of man also will be ashamed of him, when he shall come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. (Mark 8: 26-38.)

As one who was actively involved in volunteering my time to speak in behalf of the candidacy of Patrick Joseph Buchanan for the Republican presidential nomination twelve years ago at this time, driving all over Iowa for a space of nine weeks before I spoke in Pat's behalf as his surrogate at the Dubuque County caucuses on February 12, 1996, I can ask one and all how the 3,184,943 votes he received in the primaries and caucuses in 1996 "built" for the future? [2008 note. The same question can be asked in the wake of the 2008 presidential primary process. Take a look at the results in State by State Summary and ask how future voters, most of whom will emerge from the ranks of the concentration camps known as "public schools."] How have the votes given to "conservative" third party candidates over the past sixteen years done so? Wasted time, money and effort designed to convince well-meaning people that they have "done" "something" "good" for the future. They have not. They have, certainly without realizing it, reaffirmed others, including the candidates whom they have supported, in a whole host of naturalist lies, assuring that the "future" will be populated by more and more naturalistic "saviours" who believe in anything other than the authentic Social Teaching of the Catholic Church.

It is advisable once again to quote from Pope Leo XIII's Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, to reiterate the utter futility of naturalism to "improve" man and his world:

Those who go astray from the road wander far from the goal they aim at. Similarly, if the pure and true light of truth be rejected, men's minds must necessarily be darkened and their souls deceived by deplorably false ideas. What hope of salvation can they have who abandon the very principle and fountain of life? Christ alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life (John xiv., 6). If He be abandoned the three necessary conditions of salvation are removed.

It is surely unnecessary to prove, what experience constantly shows and what each individual feels in himself, even in the very midst of all temporal prosperity-that in God alone can the human will find absolute and perfect peace. God is the only end of man. All our life on earth is the truthful and exact image of a pilgrimage. Now Christ is the "Way," for we can never reach God, the supreme and ultimate good, by this toilsome and doubtful road of mortal life, except with Christ as our leader and guide. How so? Firstly and chiefly by His grace; but this would remain "void" in man if the precepts of His law were neglected. For, as was necessarily the case after Jesus Christ had won our salvation, He left behind Him His Law for the protection and welfare of the human race, under the guidance of which men, converted from evil life, might safely tend towards God. "Going, teach ye all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matthew xxviii., 19-20). "Keep my commandments" john xiv., 15). Hence it will be understood that in the Christian religion the first and most necessary condition is docility to the precepts of Jesus Christ, absolute loyalty of will towards Him as Lord and King. A serious duty, and one which oftentimes calls for strenuous labour, earnest endeavour, and perseverance! For although by Our Redeemer's grace human nature hath been regenerated, still there remains in each individual a certain debility and tendency to evil. Various natural appetites attract man on one side and the other; the allurements of the material world impel his soul to follow after what is pleasant rather than the law of Christ. Still we must strive our best and resist our natural inclinations with all our strength "unto the obedience of Christ." For unless they obey reason they become our masters, and carrying the whole man away from Christ, make him their slave. "Men of corrupt mind, who have made shipwreck of the faith, cannot help being slaves. . . They are slaves to a threefold concupiscence: of will, of pride, or of outward show" (St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, 37). In this contest every man must be prepared to undergo hard ships and troubles for Christ's sake. It is difficult to reject what so powerfully entices and delights. It is hard and painful to despise the supposed goods of the senses and of fortune for the will and precepts of Christ our Lord. But the Christian is absolutely obliged to be firm, and patient in suffering, if he wish to lead a Christian life. Have we forgotten of what Body and of what Head we are the members? "Having joy set before Him, He endured the Cross," and He bade us deny ourselves. The very dignity of human nature depends upon this disposition of mind. For, as even the ancient Pagan philosophy perceived, to be master of oneself and to make the lower part of the soul, obey the superior part, is so far from being a weakness of will that it is really a noble power, in consonance with right reason and most worthy of a man. Moreover, to bear and to suffer is the ordinary condition of man. Man can no more create for himself a life free from suffering and filled with all happiness that he can abrogate the decrees of his Divine Maker, who has willed that the consequences of original sin should be perpetual. It is reasonable, therefore, not to expect an end to troubles in this world, but rather to steel one's soul to bear troubles, by which we are taught to look forward with certainty to supreme happiness. Christ has not promised eternal bliss in heaven to riches, nor to a life of ease, to honours or to power, but to longsuffering and to tears, to the love of justice and to cleanness of heart.

From this it may clearly be seen what consequences are to be expected from that false pride which, rejecting our Saviour's Kingship, places man at the summit of all things and declares that human nature must rule supreme. And yet, this supreme rule can neither be attained nor even defined. The rule of Jesus Christ derives its form and its power from Divine Love: a holy and orderly charity is both its foundation and its crown. Its necessary consequences are the strict fulfilment of duty, respect of mutual rights, the estimation of the things of heaven above those of earth, the preference of the love of God to all things. But this supremacy of man, which openly rejects Christ, or at least ignores Him, is entirely founded upon selfishness, knowing neither charity nor selfdevotion. Man may indeed be king, through Jesus Christ: but only on condition that he first of all obey God, and diligently seek his rule of life in God's law. By the law of Christ we mean not only the natural precepts of morality and the Ancient Law, all of which Jesus Christ has perfected and crowned by His declaration, explanation and sanction; but also the rest of His doctrine and His own peculiar institutions. Of these the chief is His Church. Indeed whatsoever things Christ has instituted are most fully contained in His Church. Moreover, He willed to perpetuate the office assigned to Him by His Father by means of the ministry of the Church so gloriously founded by Himself. On the one hand He confided to her all the means of men's salvation, on the other He most solemnly commanded men to be subject to her and to obey her diligently, and to follow her even as Himself: "He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth Me" (Luke x, 16). Wherefore the law of Christ must be sought in the Church. Christ is man's "Way"; the Church also is his "Way"-Christ of Himself and by His very nature, the Church by His commission and the communication of His power. Hence all who would find salvation apart from the Church, are led astray and strive in vain.

As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must necessarily tend to ruin if they go astray from "The Way." The Son of God, the Creator and Redeemer of mankind, is King and Lord of the earth, and holds supreme dominion over men, both individually and collectively. "And He gave Him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve Him" (Daniel vii., 14). "I am appointed King by Him . . . I will give Thee the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession" (Psalm ii., 6, 8). Therefore the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil thing for the common weal wherever Christianity does not hold the place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very end is lost sight of, for which, under God's providence, human society has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature. But when men's minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at.

 

Alas, why should the careerists and naturalists of Modernity and the Sisyphuses who support them understand or accept any of this when the counterfeit church conciliarism that is seen by most people in the world, albeit erroneously, as the Catholic Church, teaches that it is "good enough" for men to work in an inter-denominational way so as to combat the "tyranny of relativism" in the modern world? The irony here is inescapable: the tyranny of relativism, which is certainly quite real, cannot be fought by those who believe in a Hegelian notion of truth itself, believing that what was thought to be true at one time may not be true at another because of subjective factors of historical circumstances and the clouded judgments thereby produced. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has been a champion throughout his entire priesthood of the condemned Modernist propositions concerning the evolutionary nature of dogmatic truths (as has been documented any number of times in articles on this website). One must understand conciliarism's dogged attack on the nature of truth, especially dogmatic truth, in order to understand that its propositions are in conflict with simple logic, no less defiant of propositions condemned by the [First] Vatican Council, Pope Saint Pius X and Pope Pius XII.

Ratzinger has been a particular champion of conciliarism's rejection of the irreformable Catholic teaching that the civil state must recognize the true Church and accord her the favor and protection of the laws, which is far, far different than a mere concession to existing realities while nevertheless continuing to preach and to work for the realization of the Catholic City. Ratzinger rejects the confessionally Catholic state completely, thereby consigning otherwise well-meaning Catholics to a blithe, uncritical acceptance of the very pluralism that has produced the tyranny of relativism that he says he wants to eradicate by means of a "healthy secularity" and "religious freedom."

 

Nothing has changed in the past year. All manner of well-meaning Catholics continued to push boulders up hills as those boulders came back down on top of them over and over and over again. Some even believe that they are "building for the future" by supporting this or that naturalist in the political realm, including one, Sarah Heath Palin, who belongs at home with her family and who is an apostate who supports the evil of contraception and the undermining of the innocence and purity of the young by means of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments as well as the surgical slicing and dicing of babies in one of the "hard" cases, and another. Dr. Ron Paul, who has prescribed contraceptives in his medical practice and who believes that state legislatures can either "permit" or "prohibit" surgical baby-killing according to the "will" of the people in a particular state.

Alas, one can never "build for the future" on the basis of lies that defy the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted to the Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. The very fact that we have a Federal government that has grown so monstrously as it curbs the legitimate liberty of its citizens and engages in needless, unauthorized and immoral foreign wars while nationalizing major segments of the nation's economy is the result of the the lies that were propagated by the Protestants and Masons and Deists who wrote the Constitution of the United States of America, premising that document on the belief that it is possible for men of divergent religious and philosophical beliefs to work together for the common temporal good as long as its citizenry displayed "civic virtue."

As has been explained endlessly on this site, social order depends upon order in the souls of the human beings who make up a polity (be it a village or a city or a town or a borough or a hamlet or a county or a state or a province or a nation). Human beings suffer from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sins and their own Actual Sins, producing all of the problems that exist in the world. The one and only way by which the problems caused by fallen human nature can ameliorated is the daily cooperation of the souls of men with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. The one and only path to "limited" government in the civil realm is the right ordering of individual souls in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace as they seek to subordinate their daily actions to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church.

The path to social order is not be found in Barack Hussein Obama's Marxism. It is not to be found in liberalism. It is not be found in socialism. It is not to be found in conservatism. It is not to be found in "compassionate conservatism." It is not to be found in any form of racialism, the belief that one race or ethnicity is inherently superior to others. It is not to be found in "constitutionalism." It is not to be found in libertarianism. Catholicism is the one and only path to social order. None other.

Once again, good readers, as so many people get lost in the "trees" of particular issues and thus permit themselves to live in a sea of naturalism as they view these issues in purely naturalistic terms, it is necessary to explain why the Constitution of the United States of America was dead-on-arrival, killed by its own framers, most of whom hated the Catholic Faith and mocked the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. No one who mocks the Word Who was made Flesh in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation, the very Son of God Who redeemed us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, is worthy of any kind of respect or admiration whatsoever.

A man (such as James Madison or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams) who get First Things wrong is no guide whatsoever to the establishment or maintenance of social order. Take a look once again at the statements made by these anti-Catholics at Reference Resource: A Founding Hatred for Christ the King. Take a good look. These men are enemies of the Divine Redeemer and thus enemies of your soul and of mine, enemies of all social order as a consequence. You cannot hate the God-Man and mock Him and then believe yourself possessed to have any "philosophy" or "program" to pursue the common temporal good as you ignore the simple truth that the civil government has an obligation to help man pursue his Last End, namely, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church.

Although the naturalists who have learned none of the lessons from all of their concerted energies to "build for the future" by means of electoral campaigns and Movements to a Dead End, Now and for All Eternity, Catholics must keep their Catholic wits about them as the two currently reigning Herods (George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney) leave the two new Herods (Barack Hussein Obama and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.) enter to continue a process of degeneration that began when the anti-Catholics who wrote the American Constitution asserted that man could pursue the common good in a Judeo-Masonic sense of "brotherhood" without referencing publicly the one and only true religion. We must keep in mind these fundamental facts (listed in a slightly different form in A Catechism of the Social Reign of Christ the King) and never forget them:

1. Original Sin and our own Actual Sins are the sources of all social problems bar none.

2. Even the souls of the Baptized suffer from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin, the darkened intellect and the weakened will and a general inclination to sin as a result of the overthrowing of our higher, rational faculties in favor of our lower, sensual passions), and Actual sins, which incline the soul all the more to sin absent a good, integral Confession to a true bishop or a true priest and earnest efforts to make reparation for those sins to the Most Holy Trinity through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

3. All of human activity without any exception whatsoever is to be defined by the Incarnation, Nativity, Hidden Years, Public Ministry and Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

4. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded one Church, the Catholic Church, to be the sole repository of His Deposit of Faith and the sole dispenser of the Treasury of Graces that He won for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem us from our sins.

5. The civil state has a positive obligation found in the binding precepts of the Deposit of Faith to recognize the true Church and to accord her the favor and the protection of laws, yielding to her solemn authority (exercise judiciously and only as a last resort following the discharge of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation) when the good of souls demands her intervention.

6. The Protestant Revolt was a rebellion against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His true Church and to order society according to the truths contained in the Deposit Faith.

7. The Protestant Revolt popularized anticlericalism and radical egalitarian individualism, convincing those who had the misfortune of following its diabolically-inspired leaders that the Divine Redeemer did not establish a visible, hierarchical church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and that it is the individual "believer," not the Catholic Church," that is the "interpreter" of Sacred Scripture, which is said to be, albeit falsely, the sole source of Divine Revelation.

8. Rationalists of the so-called "Enlightenment" or "Age of Reason" rejected the influence of any religion, true or false, on public life, using the Protestant Revolution's rejection of the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for their own nefarious ends as the lodges of Freemasonry popularized the falsehood that men of divergent religious beliefs (or no religious belief at all) could live together in "peace" as they pursued the common temporal good.

9. The radical anticlericalism and radical egalitarian individualism of the Protestant Revolt, itself an exercise in rationalism, and of the open rationalists of the "Enlightenment" and the lodges convinced men that it was possible for construct a purely secular or naturalistic civil government that made no reference to the fact of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Incarnation and His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross.

10. A written constitution, therefore, that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words for its interpretation and enforcement is as defenseless in the hands of power-hungry presidents and "activist" judges and reckless legislators as the Bible itself is in the hands of Protestants and the open rationalists of naturalism. If the authority of the true Church established by God Himself and which He protects and vivifies is rejected as the basis of understanding Sacred Scripture, leading to a variety of mutually contradictory "interpretations" and a never-ending mutation of sects based upon these "interpretations, why should the "authority" of the framers of a written constitution, including that of the United States of America, matter? Are but mere men deserving of more respect than God Himself? A nation that refuses to recognize the true Church as having the absolute last say on those things that pertain to the good of souls is at the mercy of whoever happens to hold the levers of power in the various branches of government and/or whatever the sentiments happen to be of a majority of citizens at any point in time. There can never be a "fixed" standard of constitutional interpretation when there is no recognition of and submission to the authority fixed by God Himself in His Catholic Church. Who killed the Constitution? The men who wrote it, that's who. Very simple for a believing Catholic to understand.

11. Human beings do not have, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance, any authority to defy the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law or the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the authority of the Catholic for their infallible explication. Sovereignty (ultimate governing authority) resides not with the people or with any level of government (state, local, nation) but with Christ the King. No national or state legislature has any authority to pass legislation contrary to God's eternal laws no matter what percentage of the "people" in a nation or state desire such legislation. We do not believe in states' rights. We believe in the rights of Christ the King.

12. Limited government is not the product of "libertarianism" or any other "philosophy" or ideology. Limited government is the natural consequence of the state that is ordered properly according to the eternal principles of Catholic Social Teaching, principles that can be adapted to any legitimate form of government (presidential-congressional, parliamentary-ministerial, monarchical, Federal, unitary, confederal, inquisitorial, adversarial--or any combination thereof). Those who would rule in a civil state constituted according to the eternal principles of Catholic Social Teaching would recognize their obligation to rule justly according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer, keeping in mind that the salvation of their own immortal souls depends in large measure on the just discharge of the civil powers entrusted to them as they seek to foster those conditions in civil society conducive to the honor and glory of the Most Blessed Trinity and thus to salvation of the souls of their fellow citizens. We do not turn to "libertarians," whether they be Catholic or Jewish agnostics, for "guidance" on the proper role of the civil state. We turn to the true popes, who have condemned religious liberty and the separation of Church and State, and we keep in mind the saintly example of such rulers as Saint Louis IX, King of France ( Letter to His Son Philip).

13. Every nation must acknowledge not only Christ the King as it submits to the exercise of His Social Kingship by the Catholic Church but it must give public honor to the Mother of God, she who made possible our salvation by her perfect fiat to the Will of the Father at the Annunciation and through whose hands flow the Sanctifying Graces won for us by her Divine Son. Governments must organize pilgrimages and Rosary processions in honor of the Mother of God. Monarchs themselves humbled themselves by walking barefoot in such processions in the Middle Ages. Are we more "enlightened" and "sophisticated" than they? I hope for our own sakes that we are not!

 

Obviously, these simple truths are not taught by the counterfeit church of conciliarism, which has made its "reconciliation" with the anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferent, naturalist and semi-Pelagian principles of the modern civil state. Once we lose sight of these simple truths, however, we are plunged into the darkness of the trees of the forest of naturalism, unable to accept the simple fact that the individual problems that arise from time to time have the remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in our Actual Sins and the consequences of the Protestant Revolution's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that has been championed by the forces of Judeo-Masonry and by the counterfeit church of conciliarism itself.

The calendar year of 2009 will begin in less than three days. We must intensify our efforts to change our own souls as make reparation for our sins by living penitentially as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother, especially by the time we spend in prayer in front of His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and by praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. Think about it: how much time do you waste listening or watching to various naturalists discourse about current events? These people know nothing of First and Last Things. Why waste your time on them when you could be praying more Rosaries of reparation?

We must not imitate the Sisyphuses of Modernity as they roll the boulders up hills in one election cycle after another as those boulders keep rolling down upon them time and time again. The population of the United States of America is enthralled with statism, and it is ready to receive a new statist with great enthusiasm. We must do what the Apostles did, that is, to plant the seeds for a new Christendom. We may not see the results with our eyes. The Apostles did not see the results with their own eyes in this passing, mortal vale of tears. So what? What matters to us is to remain faithful to the truths of the Holy Faith, including the sacred truth at Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must reign as the King of all nations as we keep insisting with others until the point of our dying breaths that Catholicism and Catholicism alone is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

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

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

The Holy Innocents, pray for us.

Saint Thomas a Becket, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?