John Carroll Opened The Door To Today's Persecution

by Thomas A. Droleskey

If any man can be regarded as the Father of the American Church, it is John Carroll of Maryland. Bearer of a respected American name, ordained in a Society which had planted the faith on the shores of the Chesapeake, he took charge of the infant Church as naturally and firmly as a man bringing order to his own household. To the handful of ex-Jesuits demoralized by the suppression of their order he brought inspiration and direction, while guiding the Church from the Penal Age and into the sunlight of religious freedom. John Carroll organized the American Church. Under him, its diverse and disparate elements were unified, and by his establishment of a seminary and schools, its future was assured.

Although his administrative ability was indeed great, coming at a time when it was most needed, his insights into the American character may have been even of more value to the Church. He realized that in the matter of religion the genius of the new American political system was the separation of church and state. His writings and his speeches are full of encomiums not on behalf of toleration, for that presumes an established church, but for complete religious freedom. It may be that, like the Calverts before him, this attitude was born of expediency; that Catholicism had more to gain from religious freedom than any other American creed. True enough, but so also did the Founding Fathers of the United States have the most to gain from independence.

So it was John Carroll who gave the American Church, this congeries of European races forever in conflict over tastes and customs, yet joined together in the unity of the One Faith, its peculiar American stamp. Most astonishing, he foresaw its future, "To dissipate justice," he said in 1785, "time will be our best aid, as also will divine Providence and the experience of our fellow citizens in our devotion to our country and its independence." (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday and Company, pp. 88-89.)

 

There is a lot of truth contained in the three paragraphs cited above from the late Robert Leckie's American and Catholic, but not that intended by Mr. Leckie or by the man he praised so much, Archbishop John Carroll, who became the first bishop of the United States of America when he was consecrated on August 15, 1790, by Bishop Charles Walmseley, O.S.B., in Lulworth Castle, Dorsetshire, England. There is, I should say (apologies to Ralph McPherson Kiner for using this phrase that he repeated so much in the early days of broadcasting games for the New York Mets in the 1960s), a lot of unintended truth in the three paragraphs cited above.

Archbishop John Carroll did assure the future of the Catholic Church in the United States of America by his embrace of "religious freedom." Carroll's embrace of "religious freedom" in the belief that the civil rights of individual Catholics and the institutional rights of Holy Mother Church was erroneous as "religious freedom" for one is "religious freedom" for all. Lacking an ultimate arbiter ordained by God to resolve disputes between Church and State that were bound to emerge over the course of time as such disputes occurred frequently even during the period of Christendom itself (see today's republished article, A Martyr for the Church's Les, which serves as a perfect companion to this brief articles). Carroll, presaging the giddy optimism of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII concerning the need for an "opening to the world" (Roncalli/John XXIII's much vaunted "updating" or, in Italian, aggiornamento), could not foresee areas of conflict between Church and State in the framework of the "genius" of Constitution of the United States of America. Archbishop Carroll truly believed that the Catholic Church, though she might have suffer persecution from individual Protestants and unbelievers and in states where the roots of "religious liberty" had not yet taken root, would be respected by officials of the Federal government to carry out her apostolic duties without interference.

Quite instead, of course, religious liberty and separation of Church and State, both of which Carroll thought were guarantees of the life of the Church in the United States of America, opened the doors wide to the persecution that the current administration of Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus is waging against what he thinks are the true officials and institutions and agencies of the Catholic Church. Carroll's naive trust and full-throated endorsement of these twin errors came despite the fact that it was within his own lifetime that the first two of the papal condemnations of them were pronounced. Those pronouncements did not matter to him. The United States of America was "different." It was "special." It was "exceptional." The "good" and "tolerant" Protestants and Freemasons and others who just wanted to "live together" as Americans would never seek to the double-edged sword of "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" against the Catholic Church, right? Wrong:

 

 

"Man should use his reason first of all to recognize his Sovereign Maker, honoring Him and admiring Him, and submitting his entire person to Him. For, from his childhood, he should be submissive to those who are superior to him in age; he should be governed and instructed by their lessons, order his life according to their laws of reason, society and religion. This inflated equality and liberty, therefore, are for him, from the moment he is born, no more than imaginary dreams and senseless words." (Pope Pius VI, Brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791; Religious Liberty, a “Monstrous Right").

The Catholic Church: For how can We tolerate with equanimity that the Catholic religion, which France received in the first ages of the Church, which was confirmed in that very kingdom by the blood of so many most valiant martyrs, which by far the greatest part of the French race professes, and indeed bravely and constantly defended even among the most grave adversities and persecutions and dangers of recent years, and which, finally, that very dynasty to which the designated king belongs both professes and has defended with much zeal - that this Catholic, this most holy religion, We say, should not only not be declared to be the only one in the whole of France supported by the bulwark of the laws and by the authority of the Government, but should even, in the very restoration of the monarchy, be entirely passed over? But a much more grave, and indeed very bitter, sorrow increased in Our heart - a sorrow by which We confess that We were crushed, overwhelmed and torn in two - from the twenty-second article of the constitution in which We saw, not only that "liberty of religion and of conscience" (to use the same words found in the article) were permitted by the force of the constitution, but also that assistance and patronage were promised both to this liberty and also to the ministers of these different forms of "religion". There is certainly no need of many words, in addressing you, to make you fully recognize by how lethal a wound the Catholic religion in France is struck by this article. For when the liberty of all "religions" is indiscriminately asserted, by this very fact truth is confounded with error and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, the Church, outside of which there can be no salvation, is set on a par with the sects of heretics and with Judaic perfidy itself. For when favour and patronage is promised even to the sects of heretics and their ministers, not only their persons, but also their very errors, are tolerated and fostered: a system of errors in which is contained that fatal and never sufficiently to be deplored HERESY which, as St. Augustine says (de Haeresibus, no.72), "asserts that all heretics proceed correctly and tell the truth: which is so absurd that it seems incredible to me." (Pope Pius VII, Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814, POST TAM DIUTURNAS)

"This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again? (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling." (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

Archbishop John Carroll believed that, far from being a threat to the life of the Catholic Church and the rights of her children, "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" were novel legal protections that should serve as the model for all nations in the "civilized" world. This is also, of course, the oft-stated belief of the fatigued and fatiguing apostate in Rome, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI:

 

In the 19th century under Pius IX, the clash between the Church's faith and a radical liberalism and the natural sciences, which also claimed to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make the "hypothesis of God" superfluous, had elicited from the Church a bitter and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age. Thus, it seemed that there was no longer any milieu open to a positive and fruitful understanding, and the rejection by those who felt they were the representatives of the modern era was also drastic.

In the meantime, however, the modern age had also experienced developments. People came to realize that the American Revolution was offering a model of a modern State that differed from the theoretical model with radical tendencies that had emerged during the second phase of the French Revolution. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

 

John Carroll also believed that the American Revolution provided  for the "modern" civil state that was indeed different from that of the French Revolution even though the truth of the matter is that both "models" were premised upon the rejection of the belief that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. The consequences of the American Revolution ate away at the integrity of the Catholic Faith over the course of time, producing an insidious, heresy, Americanism, that became the foundation of the false conciliar church's world view. The French Revolution was a direct and violent assault upon the Faith as the Cross of the Divine Redeemer had been implanted deeply into the soil of France for nearly sixteen hundred years. The devil had to attack the Faith in France directly, whereas it was not necessary to do so in the United States of America as he knew that Catholics would be lured into a false sense of "security" and "acceptance" over the course of time that would lead them to view the Church through the eyes of "democracy" and "rights" and "liberty" and "equality" rather than through the supernatural eyes provided by the Holy Faith.

Alas, it was only a matter of time before the Jacobins and Bolsheviks gained elected office in a land such complete "liberty" that error is considered to have more "rights" than the immutable truths of the true Faith. It was only a matter of time before civil rulers would say, "Our desire to protect the 'rights' of a 'persecuted minority' trumps religious freedom." It was only a matter of time before the men who all but a handful of warring Catholics, many of whom project their so-called "traditional movement" to be something big and consequential when it is so microscopically small and inconsequential that almost no one but no one outside of the rubber room of traditionalism knows anything about the "movement," believe are the Catholic bishops of the United States of America would be faced with one rear-guard effort after another to defend what little of Faith and Morals remain in the conciliar church. Here is but one contemporary case-in-point:

 

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

The bishops have followed colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts who had jettisoned their adoption services rather than comply with nondiscrimination laws.

For the nation’s Catholic bishops, the Illinois requirement is a prime example of what they see as an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom while expanding the rights of gay people. The idea that religious Americans are the victims of government-backed persecution is now a frequent theme not just for Catholic bishops, but also for Republican presidential candidates and conservative evangelicals.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

The Illinois experience indicates that the bishops face formidable opponents who also claim to have justice and the Constitution on their side. They include not only gay rights advocates, but also many religious believers and churches that support gay equality (some Catholic legislators among them). They frame the issue as a matter of civil rights, saying that Catholic Charities was using taxpayer money to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Tim Kee, a teacher in Marion, Ill., who was turned away by Catholic Charities three years ago when he and his longtime partner, Rick Wade, tried to adopt a child, said: “We’re both Catholic, we love our church, but Catholic Charities closed the door to us. To add insult to injury, my tax dollars went to provide discrimination against me.”

The bishops are engaged in the religious liberty battle on several fronts. They have asked the Obama administration to lift a new requirement that Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and charity groups cover contraception in their employees’ health plans. A decision has been expected for weeks now.

At the same time, the bishops are protesting the recent denial of a federal contract to provide care for victims of sex trafficking, saying the decision was anti-Catholic. An official with the Department of Health and Human Services recently told a hearing on Capitol Hill that the bishops’ program was rejected because it did not provide the survivors of sex trafficking, some of whom are rape victims, with referrals for abortions or contraceptives.

Critics of the church argue that no group has a constitutional right to a government contract, especially if it refuses to provide required services.

But Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel and associate general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, disagreed. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” he said, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

The controversy in Illinois began when the state legislature voted in November 2010 to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples, which the state’s Catholic bishops lobbied against. The legislation was titled “The Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act,” and Bishop Paprocki said he was given the impression that it would not affect state contracts for Catholic Charities and other religious social services.

In New York State, religious groups lobbied for specific exemption language in the same-sex marriage bill. But bishops in Illinois did not negotiate, Bishop Paprocki said.

“It would have been seen as, ‘We’re going to compromise on the principle as long as we get our exception.’ We didn’t want it to be seen as buying our support,” he said.

Catholic Charities is one of the nation’s most extensive social service networks, serving more than 10 million poor adults and children of many faiths across the country. It is made up of local affiliates that answer to local bishops and dioceses, but much of its revenue comes from the government. Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).

In Illinois, Catholic Charities in five of the six state dioceses had grown dependent on foster care contracts, receiving 60 percent to 92 percent of their revenues from the state, according to affidavits by the charities’ directors. (Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Chicago pulled out of foster care services in 2007 over problems with its insurance provider.)

When the contracts came up for renewal in June, the state attorney general, along with the legal staff in the governor’s office and the Department of Children and Family Services, decided that the religious providers on state contracts would no longer be able to reject same-sex couples, said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the department.

The Catholic providers offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but that was not acceptable to the state, Mr. Marlowe said. “Separate but equal was not a sufficient solution on other civil rights issues in the past either,” he said.

Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Rockford decided at that point to get out of the foster care business. But the bishops in Springfield, Peoria, Joliet and Belleville decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against the state.

Taking a completely different tack was the agency affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which, like the Catholic Church, does not sanction same-sex relationships. Gene Svebakken, president and chief executive of the agency, Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois, visited all seven pastoral conferences in his state and explained that the best option was to compromise and continue caring for the children.

“We’ve been around 140 years, and if we didn’t follow the law we’d go out of business,” Mr. Svebakken said. “We believe it’s God-pleasing to serve these kids, and we know we do a good job.”

In August, Judge John Schmidt, a circuit judge in Sangamon County, ruled against Catholic Charities, saying, “No citizen has a recognized legal right to a contract with the government.” He did not address the religious liberty claims, ruling only that the state did not violate the church’s property rights.

Three of the dioceses filed an appeal, but in November filed a motion to dismiss their lawsuit. The Dioceses of Peoria and Belleville are spinning off their state-financed social services, with the caseworkers, top executives and foster children all moving to new nonprofits that will no longer be affiliated with either diocese.

Gary Huelsmann, executive director of Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois, in the Belleville Diocese, said the decision was excruciating for everyone. “We have 600 children abused and neglected in an area where there are hardly any providers,” he said. “Us going out of business would have been detrimental to these children, and that’s a sin, too.”

The work will be carried on, but the Catholic Church’s seminal, historic connection with it has been severed, noted Mr. Marlowe, the child welfare agency spokesman. “The child welfare system that Catholic Charities helped build,” he said, “is now strong enough to survive their departure.” (Alleged Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents Limit Freedom of Religion.)

 This is the "future" that was "assured" by Archbishop John Carroll's embrace of "religious freedom" and "separation of Church and State." "Time" has been the best aid of the adversary and his heresy of Americanism, Archbishop Carroll, not of "justice" and the rights of Holy Mother Church. What is happening in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States of America is the direct consequence of the false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist, anti-Incarnational and semi-Pelagian principles upon which the United States of America was founded, and there is no "electoral" way out of this mess, ladies and gentlemen. None. 

One need only look at the welter of various errors to be found on the first page of the report quoted above from The New York Times, including the willingness of some representing these allegedly "Catholic" agencies to refer so-called "couples" to secular agencies in order to adopt children that they have right according to the law of God to adopt as they are "couples," no matter what the civil law says, only in that they are coupled, objectively speaking, on the path to eternal perdition if they do not repent of their sins and seek to make a good, integral Confession to a true priest before they die.

At no time have conciliar officials had the Catholic sense to point out the following truths about efforts of "couples" engaged in perverse acts against nature in violation of the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments:

1) God's love for us is an act of His divine will, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of our immortal souls.

2) Our love for others must be premised on willing for them what God wills for us: their salvation as members of the Catholic Church.

3) We love no one authentically if we do or say anything, either by omission or commission, which reaffirms him in a life of unrepentant sin.

4) Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ hates sin. He wills the sinner to repent of his sins by cooperating with the graces He won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into his heart and soul through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

5) One of the Spiritual Works of Mercy is to admonish the sinner. We have an obligation to admonish those who are in lives on unrepentant sin to turn away from their lives of sin and to strive to pursue the heights of sanctity.

6) God has compassion on all erring sinners, meaning each one of us. He understands our weakness. He exhorts us, as He exhorted the woman caught in adultery, to "Go, and commit this sin no more."

7) It is not an act of "love" for people to persist in unrepentant sins with others.

8) It is not an act of "judgmentalness" or "intolerance" to exhort people who are living lives of unrepentant sin to reform their lives lest their souls wind up in Hell for eternity.

9) Mortal Sins cast out Sanctifying Grace from the soul. Those steeped in unrepentant mortal sin are the captives of the devil until they make a good and sincere Confession to a true priest.

9) Certain sins cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Sodomy is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

10) Those engaged in natural or unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments do not "love" the individuals with whom they are sinning. Authentic love cannot exist in a soul committed to a life against the Commandments of God and the eternal welfare of one's own soul, no less the souls of others.

11) Those engaged in natural  or unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are not fit to adopt children.

12) Those engaged in natural or unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are not fit to adopt children because their very sinful lives put into jeopardy the eternal of the souls of the children they seek to adopt. It is not possible for people who are sinning unrepentantly to teach children to hate sin as God hates sin. They are immersed in sin. Pope Pius XI put it this way in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930:

 

But Christian parents must also understand that they are destined not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshippers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God's household, that the worshippers of God and Our Savior may daily increase.

 

13) Those engaged in unnatural, perverse acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are further unfit to adopt children because they have no right in the Divine Positive Law or the natural law to live together as a "couple."  Once again, Pope Pius XI's Casti Connubii:

 

Nor must We omit to remark, in fine, that since the duty entrusted to parents for the good of their children is of such high dignity and of such great importance, every use of the faculty given by God for the procreation of new life is the right and the privilege of the married state alone, by the law of God and of nature, and must be confined absolutely within the sacred limits of that state.

 

14) Those engaged in unnatural, perverse acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandment have no right in the Divine Positive Law or the Natural Law to present a "model" of parenthood that is from the devil himself. The words that Saint Paul wrote about perversity in Rome in his own day are quite apropos of our own:

 

Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use against which is their nature.

And in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.

And as they liked not to  have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.

Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.  (Romans 1: 24-32)

15) Matrimony was elevated to a Sacrament by Our Lord at the wedding feast in Cana. The Holy Sacrament of Matrimony is entered into by one man and by one woman to achieve these ends: the procreation and education of children, the mutual good of the spouses, a remedy for concupiscence. Pope Pius XI noted this in Casti Connubii:

 

This conjugal faith, however, which is most aptly called by St. Augustine the "faith of chastity" blooms more freely, more beautifully and more nobly, when it is rooted in that more excellent soil, the love of husband and wife which pervades all the duties of married life and holds pride of place in Christian marriage. For matrimonial faith demands that husband and wife be joined in an especially holy and pure love, not as adulterers love each other, but as Christ loved the Church. This precept the Apostle laid down when he said: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church," that Church which of a truth He embraced with a boundless love not for the sake of His own advantage, but seeking only the good of His Spouse. The love, then, of which We are speaking is not that based on the passing lust of the moment nor does it consist in pleasing words only, but in the deep attachment of the heart which is expressed in action, since love is proved by deeds. This outward expression of love in the home demands not only mutual help but must go further; must have as its primary purpose that man and wife help each other day by day in forming and perfecting themselves in the interior life, so that through their partnership in life they may advance ever more and more in virtue, and above all that they may grow in true love toward God and their neighbor, on which indeed "dependeth the whole Law and the Prophets." For all men of every condition, in whatever honorable walk of life they may be, can and ought to imitate that most perfect example of holiness placed before man by God, namely Christ Our Lord, and by God's grace to arrive at the summit of perfection, as is proved by the example set us of many saints.

This mutual molding of husband and wife, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 29, 1930.)

16) It is never permissible to put even one child into spiritual, if not physical, jeopardy by claiming that so many others would be helped if the Church did not cooperate with an unjust law. Our Lord said that it would be better for one to have a millstone thrown around his neck and thrown into a lake than to lead one of his little ones astray. He was not joking.

17) The civil state has no authority from God to sanction illicit relationships, whether between a man or a woman (such as Andrew Cuomo's relationship with his current girlfriend, which he is publicly flaunting) or between those of the same gender who are committing sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. What Pope Pius XI wrote in Casti Connubii about "civil unions" between unmarried men and women applies just as equally to those who are committed the sin of Sodom:

To begin at the very source of these evils, their basic principle lies in this, that matrimony is repeatedly declared to be not instituted by the Author of nature nor raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a true sacrament, but invented by man. Some confidently assert that they have found no evidence of the existence of matrimony in nature or in her laws, but regard it merely as the means of producing life and of gratifying in one way or another a vehement impulse; on the other hand, others recognize that certain beginnings or, as it were, seeds of true wedlock are found in the nature of man since, unless men were bound together by some form of permanent tie, the dignity of husband and wife or the natural end of propagating and rearing the offspring would not receive satisfactory provision. At the same time they maintain that in all beyond this germinal idea matrimony, through various concurrent causes, is invented solely by the mind of man, established solely by his will.

How grievously all these err and how shamelessly they leave the ways of honesty is already evident from what we have set forth here regarding the origin and nature of wedlock, its purposes and the good inherent in it. The evil of this teaching is plainly seen from the consequences which its advocates deduce from it, namely, that the laws, institutions and customs by which wedlock is governed, since they take their origin solely from the will of man, are subject entirely to him, hence can and must be founded, changed and abrogated according to human caprice and the shifting circumstances of human affairs; that the generative power which is grounded in nature itself is more sacred and has wider range than matrimony -- hence it may be exercised both outside as well as within the confines of wedlock, and though the purpose of matrimony be set aside, as though to suggest that the license of a base fornicating woman should enjoy the same rights as the chaste motherhood of a lawfully wedded wife.

Armed with these principles, some men go so far as to concoct new species of unions, suited, as they say, to the present temper of men and the times, which various new forms of matrimony they presume to label "temporary," "experimental," and "companionate." These offer all the indulgence of matrimony and its rights without, however, the indissoluble bond, and without offspring, unless later the parties alter their cohabitation into a matrimony in the full sense of the law.

Indeed there are some who desire and insist that these practices be legitimatized by the law or, at least, excused by their general acceptance among the people. They do not seem even to suspect that these proposals partake of nothing of the modern "culture" in which they glory so much, but are simply hateful abominations which beyond all question reduce our truly cultured nations to the barbarous standards of savage peoples. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 29, 1930.)

 

There is no such understanding of these simple truths today in many quarters of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, where pastors of some parishes and heads of many religious communities are completely supportive of "marriage equality" while maintaining their "good standing" in the conciliar structures. Although proposals to legitimize such things as "adoption" by couples engaged in perversity by making advertence to the Natural Law, such advertence cannot withstand the pressures brought by the tide of sentimentality and emotionalism that are bound to prevail absent a reliance upon the Ten Commandments and thus of what is pleasing God and good for souls as taught by Holy Mother Church. The pressures brought to bear as direct consequence of the "glories" of "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" praised by John Carroll are too strong for those who lack Sanctifying Grace and who are steeped in one error after another to resist effectively.

The lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism  have embraced and celebrated the very errors of Modernity that are being used against them by civil potentates in one country after another, opening themselves up, of course, to the mockery of the forces of the anti-Incarnational world of Modernity with which it desires so earnestly to enter into what is called "inter-cultural dialogue" that is premised upon not only not asserting the Sacred Rights of Christ the King over men and their nations but upon an abject denial that nations have any obligation whatsoever to recognize the Catholic Church as the true religion and to accord her the favor and patronage of the civil laws.

The great defender of the Social Reign of Christ the King, Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie the Bishop of Poitiers from May 23, 1849, to May 18, 1880, condemned the American system in the following words (as found in a commentary Father de St. Just that is included in the book cited at the end of the passage):

"Accordingly, the Bishop of Poitiers had always fought against THE SEPARATION OF Church and State. Moreover, he opposed all separations, that of reason and faith, of nature and grace, of natural religion and revealed religion, the separation of the philosopher and the Christian, of private man and public man. He saw in all these [separations] a resurgence of Manichean dualism and he had fought all these with, the supreme argument, the law formed by Christ. Therefore, it is in all truth, writing to [Minister of the Interior] the Count of Presigny, that he could render this testimony:

'We have nothing in common with the theorists of disunion and opposition of two orders, temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural. We struggle, on the contrary, with all our strength against these doctrines of separation which is leading to the denial of religion itself and of revealed religion.'"

Fr. de St. Just returns at this point and introduces us to what is perhaps Msgr. Pie's strongest language, with regard to this entire subject:

"To this doctrine of the Church, which Msgr. Pie brought to the mind of the rulers of nations, the liberals would oppose acts favoring separation.

"Certain countries, Belgium and America, for example, haven't they proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and doesn't the Church enjoy a more complete liberty under such a system?"

Cardinal Pie responded firmly to this question:

'THE AMERICAN AND BELGIUM SYSTEM, this system of philosophical-political indifference, shall eternally be a bastard system" (pp. 122-124 in Fr. de St. Just's book) (Selected Writings of Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October, 2007, pp. 21-23.)

 

Behold your "more complete liberty" at work in America now, John Carroll and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Behold it. It is everything you have prayed for without realizing the unintended consequences of false ideals that you wind up attack you and your false church and its false doctrines and its hideous, invalid liturgical rites.

Obviously, we must, as always, spend time in prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, using the shield of Our Lady's Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel and the weapon of her Rosary to protect us from the contagion of apostasy and betrayal that is all around us. We must also, of course, make reparation for our own many sins by offering up all of our prayers and sufferings and sacrifices and humiliations and penances and mortifications and fastings to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

This will all pass. The triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will be made manifest, and it will be a triumph beyond all telling.

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, on this your feast day!

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Thomas a Becket, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?