Just Speak the Truth and Give it to Our Lady In Total Confidence

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Although I have given up television in the home and see it only fleetingly in public places, I am able to follow current events by means of dispatches carried on the internet, which has carried extensive coverage of the United States Senate’s Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Oh, I did catch a glimpse of the hearings (and closed-captioned transcription of the live proceedings) at breakfast at a restaurant in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Thursday, January 12, 2006, watching the ghoul named Arlen Specter and the white whale named Edward Moore Kennedy fire away at Judge Alito. That brief glimpse alone indicated that nothing has really changed in the years since then Judge Robert Bork was grilled by Kennedy and Specter, who were suspicious of Bork’s scathing criticism of the legal “reasoning” in Roe v. Wade, in October of 1987. The guardians of baby-killing under cover of law are still at their dirty work of grilling anyone who is even suspected of being opposed to Roe v. Wade.

That having been noted, however, the Alito hearings are proving to be yet another example of how the American constitutional system, founded in an embrace of religious indifferentism and a rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church, leads believing Catholics into hedging their answers in order to win approval for a particular appointment, in this case a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. The martyrs of the first centuries of the Church never flinched in their defense of the Faith, never conceded anything to the demands of the Roman Emperors and their minions that could be construed as a denial of the Faith. The American system, however, which guarantees the error of no established religion (First Amendment) and requires no “religious test” (Article VI) for the holding of public office, forces believing Catholics into finding some kind of secular, nondenominational way to express themselves in public discourse. This leads quite logically to inconsistency and to the uttering of utterly false statements made gratuitously so as to show one’s “open-mindedness” on controversial issues.

Judge Samuel Alito has done this by saying in his confirmation hearings that Roe v. Wade is a precedent “entitled to respect.” While has been careful to say that that precedent is not irreversible, citing the fact that the doctrine of racial segregation under cover of law established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 was overturned, more accurately eroded, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954, Alito was wrong to state that a decision establishing a nonexistent “right” to butcher innocent preborn babies under cover of law is “entitled to respect.” It is not. It is an abomination, violating both the law of God and the terms of the United States Constitution itself, which protects the rights of liberty, liberty and property in Article V and in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Alito has also embarrassed himself by saying repeatedly in the past three months, including during his confirmation hearings in the last few days, that his 1985 letter of application for a position in the Department of Justice under the administration of President Ronald Wilson Reagan did not reflect his “personal views” about his opposition to Roe v. Wade, that he was only stating the position of the Reagan administration to obtain the position for which he was applying. This is disingenuous. Judge Alito’s ninety-one year-old mother stated on the day that he was nominated by President Bush to serve on the Supreme Court, “Of course he’s pro-life.”

In many ways, you see, Samuel Alito, who would probably vote to reverse Roe v. Wade if the opportunity presented itself during his tenure on the Court, is the victim of both the ethos of the American constitutional system and of Americanism within the Church. That is, American politicians have been encouraged by one prelate after another not to speak openly as Catholics or to oppose evils on the basis of the Catholic Faith. Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote an op-ed commentary in The New York Times on October 22, 2004, in which he noted:

People who support permissive abortion laws have no qualms about imposing their views on society. Often working against popular opinion, they have tried to block any effort to change permissive abortion laws since the Supreme Court"s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. That"s fair. That"s their right. But why should the rules of engagement be different for citizens who oppose those laws?

“That’s fair. That’s their right.” Those two sentences, found in Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput’s op-ed article, “Faith and Patriotism,” in the October 22, 2004, issue of The New York Times are a startlingly revealing insight into the way in which the Americanist heresy continues to undermine the thinking of even those Catholic bishops in the United States of America who take public stands in defense of the inviolability of all innocent human life from the first moment of fertilization to the time of natural death.

“That’s fair. That’s their right.” These two sentences are premised upon the acceptance of one of the principle errors of Modernity, namely, that those who propagate error have the right to do so in a free society. Catholics in such a circumstance, you see, should use the “free” society in which they live to use the public square or the market place of ideas to oppose those who propagate error.

Demonstrating himself to be a firm supporter of the Vatican II novelty of religious liberty, Archbishop Chaput went on to write in 2004:

The founders sought to prevent the establishment of an official state church. Given America"s history of anti-Catholic nativism, Catholics strongly support the Constitution"s approach to religious freedom. But the Constitution does not, nor was it ever intended to, prohibit people or communities of faith from playing an active role in public life. Exiling religion from civic debate separates government from morality and citizens from their consciences. That road leads to politics without character, now a national epidemic.

The Church has taught from time immemorial that she wants more than “politics with character.” She wants social discourse to be informed by the true Faith and for the state to recognize the right of the Church to be recognized confessionally as the sole guide on matters of faith and morals.

Pope Leo XIII noted this in Immortale Dei in 1885:

So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than Nature herself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fulness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth, may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and the protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only passport to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. (Emphases added)

No agency of a government (be it at the state, local, or national levels) has any right to “permit” things that are contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law or the natural law, and the Catholic Church has the right to intervene, after exhausting her Indirect Power of preaching and teaching and exhortation, as a last resort to stop such things from taking place. Numerous popes have reaffirmed this immutable teaching.

Consider, for example, Pope Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos, issued in 1832:

Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood. It is certain that that concord which always was favorable and beneficial for the sacred and the civil order is feared by the shameless lovers of liberty.

Pope Leo XIII specifically rejected the American notion, born of Protestantism and carried on by Judeo-Masonry, of the separation of Church and State. Writing in Longiqua Oceani in 1895, Pope Leo affirmed that:

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.

Pope Leo reiterated the necessity of connecting the good of the state with Our Lord in his 1901 Review of His Pontificate:

Hence in proportion as society separates itself from the Church, which is an important element of its strength, by so much does it decline, or its woes are multiplied for the reason that they are separated whom God wished to join together.

Pope Saint Pius X wrote in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, issued on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on September 8, 1907, that the very ethos praised by Archbishop Chaput was a fundamental tenet of Modernism:

But it is not only within her own household that the Church must come to terms. Besides her relations with those within, she has others with those who are outside. The Church does not occupy the world all by herself; there are other societies in the world., with which she must necessarily have dealings and contact. The rights and duties of the Church towards civil societies must, therefore, be determined, and determined, of course, by her own nature, that, to wit, which the Modernists have already described to us. The rules to be applied in this matter are clearly those which have been laid down for science and faith, though in the latter case the question turned upon the object, while in the present case we have one of ends. In the same way, then, as faith and science are alien to each other by reason of the diversity of their objects, Church and State are strangers by reason of the diversity of their ends, that of the Church being spiritual while that of the State is temporal. Formerly it was possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual and to speak of some questions as mixed, conceding to the Church the position of queen and mistress in all such, because the Church was then regarded as having been instituted immediately by God as the author of the supernatural order. But this doctrine is today repudiated alike by philosophers and historians. The state must, therefore, be separated from the Church, and the Catholic from the citizen. Every Catholic, from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed to its wishes, its counsels, its orders -- nay, even in spite of its rebukes. For the Church to trace out and prescribe for the citizen any line of action, on any pretext whatsoever, is to be guilty of an abuse of authority, against which one is bound to protest with all one"s might. Venerable Brethren, the principles from which these doctrines spring have been solemnly condemned by Our predecessor, Pius VI, in his Apostolic Constitution Auctorem fidei.

Rejecting the Judeo-Masonic notion of “civic virtue” or “character” as the foundation of social discourse, Pope Pius XI wrote in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929:

Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current term, the true and finished man of character. For, it is not every kind of consistency and firmness of conduct based on subjective principles that makes true character, but only constancy in following the eternal principles of justice, as is admitted even by the pagan poet when he praises as one and the same "the man who is just and firm of purpose And on the other hand, there cannot be full justice except in giving to God what is due to God, as the true Christian does.

Pope Leo XIII wrote directly about Judge Alito’s refusal to speak frankly as a Catholic in public discourse, attempting to separate his “private” views from a proper reading of the law, as though the can be understood at all without referencing the Lawgiver and the Deposit of Faith He has entrusted solely to His true Church.

Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Immortale Dei, 1885.)

Samuel Alito does not know these things because he, a man born in 1950, has spent most of his life immersed in the ethos of the Second Vatican Council’s embrace of the Americanist error of “religious liberty” and the popular culture’s deification of the “original intent” of the framers of the United States Constitution. One of the great tragedies of our own day is that a man of able intellect has not been catechized by his shepherds to understand the incompatibility of the American constitutional system with the Social Reign of Christ the King. This is why he refuses to speak plainly about his positions and simply offer up his stalwart defense of Catholicism as the only basis of social and personal order to Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

It has been, though, refreshing to read that Senator Thomas Coburn has taken to task the reprehensible pro-abortion Catholic Senator from Illinois, Richard Durbin, for changing his mind about the inviolability of all innocent human life. Coburn, who is a medical doctor, just ripped into Durbin at the Alito confirmation hearings:

For 45 years, Senator Durbin was adamantly pro-life, and he wrote multiple, multiple letters expressing that up until 1989.

You see, not only has the ethos of Americanism and its embrace under the aegis of “religious liberty,” which error has been praised over and over again by Pope Benedict XVI, produced conflicted men such as Samuel Alito, it has made it possible for out-and-out supporters of one abject evil after another, such as Richard Durbin and Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden and Patrick Leahy, to maintain their “good standing” as Catholics while they grill a man who is afraid to speak out about his beliefs as a Catholic for fear of not being approved for a coveted position. This is all part of the Diabolical Disorientation spoken about so frequently by the late Sister Lucia dos Santos.

We must always speak as Catholics. This example from Father A. J. O’Reilly’s The Martyrs of the Coliseum should inspire us all to be faithful to the fullness of the truth, yes, even when speaking before kings and other potentates:

Yet the Capitol, the triumphal arch of Severus, the Coliseum and Meta Sudans are like fixed stars amid this everchanging mass of ruins. Seventeen hundred years ago they bore the names as the do now, although one of the great old romans raised from the dust in which he has slept for centuries would scarcely recognise, in the remnants that stand, the majestic structures that were familiar to his eyes in the days of their magnificence. Near these monuments many a brave Christian found his crown. Amongst them was the martyr who is connected in history with the Meta Sudans.

“We have found this man powerful and eloquent in speech, teaching the people that the worship of our gods is vain, saying that they have but an imaginary existence; he belongs to some strange sect they call Christians."

Thus spoke some rude soldiers as they presented to the Prefect of the city a young noble citizen, with hands bound behind his back.

“Who are you or whence do you come?" asked the Prefect, Hermogenes, with a menacing frown.

“I am a Roman citizen of noble birth; if you wish my carnal name, I am called Restitutus, but in the profession of my faith I am Christian."

“Have you not heard the orders of the Prince?"

“What have they commanded?" asked Restitutus mildly.

“That all who will not sacrifice to the omnipotent gods should be punished by various and terrible tortures," said the Prefect, becoming excited, and watching the noble youth impatiently, in the hopes he had already terrified him into submission.

“I know the command of my Emperor," boldly replied the Christian, "whoever will deny Him will perish in eternal torments."

“Cease to speak thus," cried the President, "but come hither and sacrifice to the revered deities, that are the guardians of the Empire, and you will be a friend of Caesar; otherwise, you shall feel the weight of our indignation, and shall be tortured with fire."

“I am prepared," Restitutus mildly but bravely replied, "to offer myself in sacrifice to my Lord Jesus Christ."

Father O’Reilly continued the narrative from the Acts of the Martyrs after a brief commentary on Restitutus’s willingness to suffer for the Holy Faith:

The intrepid reply of the martyr roused the tyranny of the Prefect, and he ordered his mouth to be beaten with stones; but he did not feel any pain, God by a miracle had deadened the sense of feeling.

“What do you expect to gain by this obstinacy?" asked the President.

“For the love and fear of my Lord Jesus Christ, I have despised the Court (militiam intra palatium), and now I wish only to serve in an everlasting warfare a celestial King."

“But," rejoined the President, "in consideration of your youth and beauty, approach and sacrifice to the gods, that you may receive the reward of great dignity and power."

Restitutus replied: "In serving the true God of Heaven I have not lost nor demeaned my dignity; the dignities, the honours of the earth, fade like the things of the earth–as are gone the flowers of summer and the snows of winter, so have passed the glory and worldly dignity of our ancestors–but that profession which takes its nobility from an eternal source is like it in its eternal duration."

Truly the martyr spoke with a sublime appreciation of the eternal character of the Christian’s warfare. The Prefect who had made him suffer for his faith has long since passed into oblivion, notwithstanding the wealth and power that shone around him in the giddy hour of his reign. He is not known now except in the infamy of his cruelty, which is recorded by sacred writers in handing to posterity and eternal fame the noble youth who had despised even the splendours of the Pagan Court, and wisely chosen the eternal dignity of the Christian warfare.”

We are not to worship before the false god of the American constitution. We are not to deify the Protestants and Masons who wrote that document. We are not to keep silent about our Catholic Faith when seeking worldly honors and positions. We must have the courage and the eloquence of the martyrs in defending the fullness of the Catholic Faith as the only basis for personal and social order. Our Lord really did mean it when he said:

For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul? (Mt. 16:26)

None of this will end until some pope actually consecrates Russia to Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world’s bishops in fulfillment of her Fatima Message. In the meantime, however, each of us has an obligation to speak as Catholics at all times, being willing for forsake all of the honors of this passing world, including a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States or being elected to serve in the United States Senate, to plant the seeds for the conversion of all men and all nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

Saint Agnes, pray for us.

Saints Perpetua and Felicity, pray for us.

Pope Saint Melchiades, pray for us.

Pope Saint Sylvester, pray for us.

Saint Patrick, pray for us.

Saint Louis IX, pray for us.

Saint Edward the Confessor, pray for us.

Saint Henry, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.

Sister Lucia, pray for us.