Justice Denied is Only Justice Delayed

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The holocaust of the innocent preborn has been used by the devil in many ways to deflect attention from his infiltration of the highest quarters of the true Church. As necessary as our efforts have been in the past forty years to defend the primacy of the Divine positive law and the natural law as they are explicated by Holy Mother Church as the foundation of the just civil order, the very fact that we are focused on this grave evil is the result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as the rotten fruit of the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Freemasonry. That is, as horrible as abortion is as one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, it is merely the symptom of the larger sickness of a world that has rejected the authority of the Catholic Church to guide men both personally and societally. We would not have abortion on demand under cover of law if we lived in a world in which civil leaders recognized that there are limits that exist in the nature of things that they may never transgress legitimately and that is the duty of the true Church to interpose herself if those leaders attempt to do (or have done) things contrary to the administration of justice and/or the salvation of souls.

Alas, we live in a world of utter chaos and confusion. The errors of Modernity, including those of Protestantism (and its permutations) and Freemasonry (and the variants of political ideology that have arisen in its own perverse wake), have infected the Church herself. The multifaceted and inter-related errors of Modernity, founded as they are in the rejection of the Deposit of Faith Our Lord entrusted to His true Church and/or an outright rejection of the Incarnation entirely, have so blinded most Catholics that they are unable to see the truth of our situation clearly and thus become bogged down in this or that manifestation of evil without understanding its remote and proximate causes. The remote cause for all evil in the world is Original Sin. The proximate cause is Actual Sin, which encompasses all of the intellectual errors born of pride and lust and greed and envy and anger and sloth and gluttony. The only way to ameliorate the evils of any particular epoch in salvation history, including our own, is for individual human beings to cooperate more fully on a daily basis with the graces won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as they are administered to them by the working of the Holy Ghost in the sacraments administered by the Catholic Church. There is no other way to lessen or mitigate the evils of any time in human history other than by seeking to be holy as members of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. There is a direct connection between personal holiness and social order. It is not possible for people to be holy by the pursuit of natural virtue unaided by sanctifying grace. It is thus not possible for social problems to be ameliorated absent the supernatural helps and the Divinely received teaching offered by the Catholic Church.

Sadly, many within the Church's hierarchy do not understand this clearly any longer. Some simply reject it, preferring to speak in naturalistic ways that are meant to appeal to people in a non-denominational or "ecumenical" (read: religiously indifferentist) manner that wind up betraying the mission Our Lord entrusted to the Eleven before He ascended to the Father's right hand in glory on Ascension Thursday. The Holy Father has, as I have noted in other commentaries on this site, contributed to this confusion by writing and speaking about the evils of the day in accord with his phenomenological personalist philosophy, which emphasizes "human dignity," "solidarity," "brotherhood," "the global community," "the civilization of love," "freedom," "rights" and other such naturalistic slogans that leave no room at all for any mention of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

To be sure, the infiltration of Modernist ideas into the Church did not occur overnight as a result of the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae. The Second Vatican Council and the synthetic concoction that is the new Mass are both the result of the gradual seepage into the Church of the various permutations of ideas and forces that have their origin in certain aspects of the Renaissance and expedited, as noted above, during and after the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Freemasonry. The infiltration of Modernist ideas was quite on display in the Church in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. A review of the correspondence between Orestes Brownson, who came to see how the Faith was being undermined in the life of ordinary Catholics as a result of the religiously indifferentist and culturally pluralistic environment in which they lived, and Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, who is credited as one of the chief proponents of the heresy of Americanism, reveals that the desire to "update" the Faith in accord with the currents of the moment was taking hold in at least some Catholic intellectual circles at that time. Many, although certainly not all, of the American hierarchy in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries did not see at all any necessity of preaching on the Social Reign of Christ the King as they believed that the founding of this nation was perfectly compatible with the Faith. James Cardinal Gibbons, the long time Archbishop of Baltimore, extolled Archbishop John Carroll, this nation's first Catholic bishops, for his desire to conform the Faith as much as possible to the exigencies of the American Constitution. Thus, many prelates could not accept Pope Leo XIII's prophetic apostolical letter to Gibbons, Testem Benevolentiae, issued on January 22, 1899, as at all relevant to the future decay of the Church in the States. Poor Pope Leo was misinformed by malevolent Romans in the curia who had "misrepresented" the writings of Father Hecker.

Pope Leo XIII, however, knew that the Church in the United States, although vibrant in most respects, was headed for trouble precisely because the errors of Protestantism and Freemasonry were the foundational forces of popular culture and law. Protestantism is no foundation for either personal sanctity or social order. Freemasonry, among other of its evil goals, seeks to create social chaos by the promotion of various evils contrary to God's laws so as to arrogate unto the State almost all domestic responsibilities. Pope Leo saw that the very foundation of the practice of the Catholic Faith was going to be undermined if Catholics continued to permit themselves to be informed by the culture in which they lived and did not seek to plant the seeds for the conversion of the nature to the true Faith. As a cradle Catholic born in 1951 who knew personally and well blue collar, cradle Catholics born in the Nineteenth Century, I can attest to the fact that the average American Catholic who came of age at the turn of the Twentieth Century, although pious and devout in his personal life, was not taught to take the Faith into the world and to make this country confessionally Catholic.

All of this gave rise to the myth that the underpinnings of our nation were essentially solid even though they were not founded on the sure foundation of the true Faith. This myth is what made it difficult for many believing, practicing Catholics to believe their eyes when the culture started to degenerate in the 1950s and the 1960s, still more difficult to accept the codification in law of the slaughter of the preborn. There had to be some legal, political, constitutional, inter-denominational or non-denominational way to join forces with others of like mind to stop these evils from advancing further. It could not possibly have been the case that the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles had began to become manifest. No, the problems of pornography and contraception and abortion and the promotion of sodomy could be finessed by the conservative version of social engineering, by an emphasis on "traditional values" and by insisting on a return to "true" conservatism. Thus deceived the myths of this nation's founding, so many well-meaning Catholics could not believe that things actually got worse and worse over the course of time. Worse yet, though, they received little or no help from their pastors or bishops to remove the blinders from their eyes and to work for the conversion of this nation to the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen. Indeed, many of their pastors and bishops did not say a word about contraception or abortion; some were actually enablers of pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Many of these pastors and bishops coddled dissent from the Deposit of Faith or promoted such dissent and/or confusion themselves, thus helping to affirm the merchants of death, both physical and eternal. A considerable percentage of the sheep of Christ's true Sheepfold were lost in the wilderness as their shepherds refused to use their pastoral staffs to gently prod them to walk on the rocky road that leads to the narrow gate of Life Himself by planting seeds for the conversion of all people to the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation.

This was not true of all of bishops and priests, to be sure. The late Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, refused to let Father Charles Curran, a dissenter from Humanae Vitae, speak in the Newman Center of Louisiana State University in 1979. Joseph Cardinal O'Boyle, then the Archbishop of Washington, tried to get Curran fired from his position as a theology professor at The Catholic University of America in 1968 when he had signed a newspaper advertisement attacking Humanae Vitae, only to be overruled by the other cardinals who served on the university's board and not upheld by Pope Paul VI. It took another eighteen years for the Vatican to declare that Curran could not teach theology in any Catholic college or university. Eighteen long years. And there were the four cardinals (John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros of Boston, Massachusetts, John Cardinal Cody of Chicago, Illinois, and Timothy Cardinal Manning of Los Angeles, California) who opposed a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, introduced by then Senator James Buckley (C-NY), because it contained a life of the mother exception. This sort of episcopal leadership was the exception, not the rule, in the early days after Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade.

Many earnest pro-life Americans believed that the election of former California Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan to the presidency of the United States in 1980 augured good things for the babies. I was one of those people, as I related in "We Have Learned Nothing" in The Remnant a few months ago. Reagan's first appointee to the United States Supreme Court was Sandra Day O'Connor, whose pro-abortion position was made quite clear in her days as the Majority Leader of the Arizona State Senate. None of the supposedly "pro-life" senators, each of whom supported abortion in some cases, on the Senate Judiciary Committee cared to take seriously the testimony about O'Connor's pro-abortion stance given by the American Life League's Judie Brown and the Conservative Caucus Foundation's Howard Phillips. Although the late President Reagan did issue a proclamation about the personhood of all preborn children in January of 1988, babies were still being killed in the same monstrous numbers each year by surgical abortion in the 1980s, to say nothing of those killed by chemical abortifacients, as they had been before Reagan took office in 1981. A lot of anxious Americans believed that "something" had to be done to remind their fellow citizens that a silent holocaust was taking place in a country they considered "civilized."

The "something" that simultaneously galvanized and polarized the pro-life community was Operation Rescue. Rescue galvanized many in the pro-life community as it held out the hope that massive sit-ins and blockages of abortuaries might singe the conscience of the nation. It polarized others in that same community, especially those who believed that we had been making "progress" in the 1980s and that we had to work through the electoral system to effect change incrementally, pragmatically. Some Catholics were critical of the whole concept of Rescue, arguing that it was wrong to adopt the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, worse yet to entrust the leadership of such an enterprise to evangelical Protestants who believed that they had the responsibility to take Catholics out of the Church to "save" them. Despite the polarizing aspects of Rescue, however, many thousands of Catholics were among those who were arrested at rescues between late 1987 and 1994, the time that Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Bill (FACE), with the help, it should be noted, of a few supposedly "pro-life" senators and representatives (could you imagine them voting for a "Freedom of Access to a Concentration Camp Bill"). A lot of Catholics were involved in the high-level leadership of local rescues. Indeed, it can be argued that Operation Rescue itself was an outgrowth of the solitary actions of Catholics such as Joan Andrews Bell, who had spent a considerable amount of time in prison for attempting to rescue the preborn in the 1980s, and the late John Arena, a fierce fighter for the inviolability of innocent human life in the Utica, New York, area. Mention must be made also of Joe Wall, a pro-life advocate from the Philadelphia area who had placed himself on the front lines for a long time.

That Catholics participated in an effort that was largely, although not exclusively, under the direction of evangelical Protestants was very ironic. The very evil attempting to be addressed by Operation Rescue, abortion, was the ultimate, natural, inexorable result of the division of Christendom wrought by Martin Luther and John Calvin and Henry VIII and John Knox and John Wesley and scores upon scores of others. The Novus Ordo Missae, which made so many Catholics comfortable in their embrace of the world, was an effort to empty the Sacred Liturgy of the Roman Rite of its distinctly Catholic features in order to appeal to Protestants, which is why some of the Masses offered in venues on the evenings before a rescue took place bore great similarities to Protestant revival meetings, replete with "witnessing" and the like. As noble and well-intentioned as Rescue was, it demonstrated, albeit unwittingly, the inherent flaws of all inter-denominational or nondenominational efforts as well as the flaws of the conciliarist religion that had convinced so many Catholics that denominational differences did not matter at all if one of their Christian "brothers" was pro-life. (And though the subject of a piece I wrote about seven years ago now, it should be noted at this juncture that the abortion issue in general helped to perpetuate the myth that a particular bishop was wonderful and beyond criticism if he showed up once a month to pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary at an abortuary even though that bishop permitted sex-instruction, coddled dissent or was blind to liturgical abuse, to say nothing of disrespectful of the right of Catholics to the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.)

Despite the irony of the origins of Operation Rescue and that its efforts were bound to be circumscribed by the limits that exist in a nation that does not subordinate itself to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it should be exercised by the Catholic Church, the courage and the love of those who participated in it must never be overlooked or minimized. Many thousands upon thousands of ordinary Americans, most them Catholics, mind you, prayed Rosaries and offered up the sufferings and indignities of arrest and fingerprinting in order to bear a visible, tangible witness to the binding nature of the Fifth Commandment. All right, some participants boasted a little too much now and then about how often and in how many different locales they had been arrested. Most of the participants, though, simply wanted to do something quite tangible to try to make a difference in public attitudes and to offer up their prayers to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

As a counterpoint to the indifference to the plight of the unborn on the part of so many bishops and priest, the late Bishops Austin Vaughan and George Lynch participated in rescues regularly. Bishop Paul Dudley, now the retired Bishop of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was dragged away by the police in one rescue. Hundreds of priests, from those with international reputations, such as Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., the founder of Human Life International, and Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., to the ordinary pastors and curates and seminarians who prayed the Rosary as they were handcuffed and hauled off to jail. There were conscious efforts to unite all of these sufferings to the Our Lord's Holy Cross through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who uses everything we give to her in ways that may not be made manifest to us until eternity. And this is not even to discuss the fact that lives of babies were saved and that more than a few converts to Catholicism were made along the way. Those who did not want to participate in a particular rescue but wanted to be spiritually present with those who did place themselves on the line physically spent time before Our Lord's Real Presence in prayer, nothing to be sneezed at as inconsequential, to be sure.

Apart from the spiritual bouquets that were given to Our Lord through Our Lady by Catholics during rescues, Operation Rescue was useful in that it showed the full fury of demonic hatred for the innocent preborn and their defenders on the part of police officers and court officers and prosecutors and judges. Police brutality was visited upon rescuers as a matter of routine. One of the few journalists to write about this brutality was Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, who noted that there would be all manner of sanctimonious outcries from left-leaning columnists if the same sort of brutality was used by police officers against black Americans or "peace" demonstrators. The rescuers who were brutalized included bishops and priests and elderly men and women. (The demonic fury of pro-abortion activists was displayed throughout the counter-demonstrations during rescues. Some of those activists used the courts to try to break the back of the entire pro-life movement, including those who did not participate in rescues, by using the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act to bring costly lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in damages from key rescue leaders. This led directly to the aforementioned F.A.C.E. Act, which was accompanied by sloganeering rhetoric that termed all opposition to abortion as "violent" and "intolerant.")

One of the worst incidents of police brutality occurred in West Hartford, Connecticut, on June 17, 1989. A videotape taken by a rescuer who had hidden a camera after having trespassed into an abortuary showed the police barging into a room in the abortuary without wearing their badges and name-plates, which were turn backwards in some instances. The force used was quite plain. I was told by people who experienced it first-hand that the force was used in a corridor of a courtroom of a judge who must have heard the screams of those being assaulted. The subject of what some have called a "police riot" in West Hartford, Connecticut, became a topic of some interest in the mainstream media for a while, including being Patrick J. Buchanan's "Outrage of the Week" on The Capitol Gang, a program he originated on Cable News Network (CNN) in 1989. Pat would later have an entire Crossfire devoted to the matter, during which program the videotape referred to above was shown on international satellite television. The images shown were simply unforgettable.

Alas, the same courts that gave us child-killing on demand proved to be of little avail to those who were assaulted in West Hartford in 1989. After fifteen years and all manner of legal wrangling and debates about legal strategy, the following press release was issued on June 25, 2004, by John Kladde of the Connecticut Pro-Life Action Network:

On June 1, rescuers from the infamous 1989 West Hartford pro-life rescues took the Town of West Hartford to task for police brutality in the case of Waugh v. West Hartford . The plaintiffs were arrested on April 1, 1989, and June 17, 1989, at the Summit Women's Center where abortions are performed.

They sued the Town contending that it had a de facto policy of using excessive force in the arrest, transport and custody of the rescuers. The relief sought was compensatory damages for inflicting unreasonable force upon the plaintiffs in violation of their rights under the Fourth Amendment.

The jury voted unanimously Monday, June 14, in 2 hours that there was no excessive force used by the WHPD against any of the plaintiffs at either rescue.

Details can be found at www.geocities.com/connplan [The website gives the full history of what took place during the past fifteen years, including the legal wrangling.]

The images on the videotape taken on June 17, 1989, are quite clear.  A jury decided that excessive force was not used. Although an appeal will not be filed by the plaintiffs, they should take heart nevertheless. Justice denied in this case is only justice delayed. That is, those responsible for using such a level of force to arrest trespassers engaged in a non-violent demonstration who did not in any way threaten the bodily safety of the arresting officers will have to answer to God Himself at the moment of their Particular Judgments if they do not repent of their actions. The same Judgment, from which there is no appeal, awaits all judges and prosecutors who participate in the perpetuation of the American Holocaust. And those who were assaulted in 1989 and denied justice in 2004 must, I am sure, appreciate the fact that their efforts, if united to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, will bear much fruit for them when they face their own Particular Judgments if they have persevered in states of sanctifying grace to the moment of their dying breaths. Justice denied in this life is only justice delayed in the next. The injustice of unjust jury findings in this vale of tears will be unveiled on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Dead. And there will be no attorneys or other spin-doctors to finesse the truth of the finality of that moment.

In the meantime, though, we pray for the conversion of those who have visited injustice upon those seeking to do something in the midst of a holocaust that has its proximate origins in the events of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. And we pray that Holy Mother Church will recognize that the only way to retard and to turn back this holocaust (and the other evils of modernity) is to reject the regime of novelty of the past forty years, including the Novus Ordo Missae that has led to a loss of belief in the Real Presence and thus a further coarsening of the culture at large and the reaffirmation of Catholics in the culture of death in which they live and work. We pray that our Holy Father will find the voice of tradition to proclaim once more the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen as the twin pillars of a world that subordinates itself to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law as they have been entrusted to the Church to explicate to all men in all nations until the end of time. The advance of evil in the world cannot be retarded by naturalism and/or ecumenism. It can only be retarded by the firm proclamation of the truths of Catholicism and by the restoration of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition that best expresses and protects the entirety of the Deposit of Faith.

Importantly, we must pray also for the proper consecration of Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. If Russia has been converted, then why are there 3,000,000 abortions annually in the country which was the first in the modern era to permit child-killing under cover of law following the Bolshevik Revolution? The proper consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary will result in a true conversion on the scale of what took place after Our Lady appeared to Saint Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. Child-killing under cover of law around the world will then belong to the history books if Russia is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary just as surely as the human sacrifices of the Aztecs did following the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.