by
Thomas A. Droleskey
We are nine days away from the annual observance of Independence Day in the United States of America, which falls on a Sunday this year, meaning that Americans will able able to celebrate the two hundred thirty-fourth anniversary of the nation's independence from the "tyrannical" King George III of England over the course of yet another three-day weekend (the Federal holiday is Monday, July 5, 2010). There will be hooting and hollering and all manner of fireworks celebration as people celebrate American "liberty" without noticing the nasty, inconvenient little fact that we have never been quite as "free" as our national mythology teaches us, to say nothing of what has been a logical descent into a form of what can be called "invisible tyranny" that has been dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant or even "necessary" by so many fun-loving, beer-chortling Americans eager to enjoy their bread and circuses
As noted in King George III Is Owed An Apology last year and in endless other articles over the years, including
From The Potomac to the Tiber and Back four days ago, the gradual triumph of statism here in the United States of America, as well as elsewhere in the Western world, is the inevitable result, proximately speaking, of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized by the complex inter-related, multifaceted forces of naturalistic ideologies and philosophies that can be termed properly as Judeo-Masonry as it is the goal of both Talmudic Judaism and its close ally, Freemasonry, to eliminate belief in the simple fact that human life, both individually and collectively, must be centered in a recognition of the fact that the Word, the very Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, became Incarnate in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. There is no need, according to the lords of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, to subordinate all human activity to the binding precepts of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. It is "enough," according to the these enemies of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Queenship of Our Lady for men of "good will" to work together as "brothers" as they put aside denominational differences that should never get in the way of the pursuit of the common temporal good.
No, it is not enough for the true God of Divine Revelation for men to put aside any article of His Deposit of Faith as irrelevant to personal and social order as Catholicism is the one and only foundation of such order. Our Lord did not become Incarnate and die on the wood of the Holy Cross and rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday so that men could be content in a fuzzy belief in some generic concept of God or in a belief that mere natural virtue is enough to provide for the common temporal good. Our Lord did not become Incarnate and die on the wood of the Holy Cross and rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday so that men could organize themselves collectively without referencing First and Last Things, without acknowledging the authority that He has vested to Holy Mother Church to sanctify and to teach men in all that pertains to the good of their immortal souls.
No, it is not enough for the the God of Divine Revelation for men to seek to promote the common temporal good without recognizing that Holy Mother Church, judiciously and in measured ways that are proportionate to the gravity of the matters at hand following the discharge of her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching and exhortation, interpose herself directly with civil authorities when the good of souls demands her mother intervention. Tyranny--whether of one person or a political party or military junta or some other kind of junta or even of the "majority"--must result over the course of time when the ability of Holy Mother Church to serve as a check upon the unrestrained exercise of civil power is rejected as either imprudent or entirely unnecessary. It is one of the most telling tragedies of Modernity that naturalists all across the ideological divide have been joined by Catholics all across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide into believing that Catholicism is not the one and only foundation of personal order, that men can "solve" seemingly intractable social problems that have their remote causes in Original Sin and their proximate causes in the revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King and the rise of economic systems and methods of world governance that are in direct opposition to the Holy Faith and thus to the good of souls.
One of the chief goals of the naturalists has been to attack the integrity of the family, knowing that by doing so more and more people would be thrown into confusion and look to the civil state for assistance and direction. This is what the Freemason Otto von Bismarck did in the newly unified Germany during the years of his Kulturkampf as he had the Reichstag impose a law mandating a retirement age and creating a social security system that would alleviate grown children of the responsibility they have under the Fourth Commandment to care for their parents as their grow older, providing them with the same kind of support and generosity that they, the children, received from their parents when they came into the world as helpless, completely dependent infants. Contraception and abortion have attacked the stability and the integrity of the family. So have the gradual introduction of more and more immodest clothing designs and the gradual acceptance of the most vile, vulgar, coarse forms of speech
The family has been further undermined by the feminist revolution, spawned in contemporary terms by the French Revolutionaries and spread internationally by the agents of Bolshevism, whose "egalitarianism" has convinced even Catholic women to dress like men and to seek to "compete" with men for "glass ceiling" positions to prove that they are as "good" as men. This has contributed to infidelity and divorce as men and women have been thrust together into work places where, especially today given the lack of almost all sense of propriety and decency, conversations descend, to put it mildly, into the realm of the suggestive and when both men and women are forced to be away from their families for long periods of time for various "projects" or "seminars," thereby providing occasions of sin and putting a strain on family relations. And this is to say nothing of the fact that the competition of women with men, who are supposed to be the principal bread winners of their families as they paid a "living wage" that is enough to support their families without forcing their wives to seek to go to work needlessly to provide additional income for the family, has made it more difficult for many men to find employment in their own fields. Parents are forced in many cases to work two and three jobs as their children become virtual wards of the state as they grow up in the care of relatives of day-care and after-school programs. No demonic plot here, huh?
"Modern man" does more however than passively rejecting the influence of Christ the King and of His Holy Church in society. "Modern man" has been busy promoting one abject evil after another under cover of the civil law and in the midst of what passes for "popular culture." Naturalists of the "left" do so under the aegis of "human rights." Libertarians do so under the aegis of "liberty," believing that the "people" have the "right" to choose, for example, whether to permit or restrict surgical and chemical baby-killing or pornography or the use of mind-altering substances whose use dulls rational faculties and incline people to lead lives of wanton self-indulgence. "Constitutionalists" do so under the "aegis" of "getting back to founding principles," which are of themselves a perfect expression of the anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity. Each is wrong.
"Modern man" thus believes that it is possible to defy these expressions of simple Catholic truth and to know material prosperity and personal happiness at the same time. Some you believe that you can defy Catholic truth by the promotion of abject evil in society under one or another ideological slogan and get home to Heaven. Such men believe in madness:
The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Although we should be concerned about what appears to be a sudden manifestation of statism upon us and seek to intensify our prayers to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, we should not be surprised that we find ourselves in the grip of leftist tyrants as we have long been under more subtle forms of tyranny right from July 4, 1776.
It is thus useful to include a few passages from an article published fourteen months ago now:
Efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress all opposition, whether emanating from believers in the true Faith, Catholicism, or from a complete group (or groups) or naturalists have much precedent right here in the United States of America. The twenty percent or so of the colonists in the thirteen English colonies who remained loyal to United Kingdom of Great Britain were harassed and hounded by self-styled "patriots" in the decade or so prior to the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This harassment was even more pronounced during the Revolutionary War.
It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of America, that Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials.
The sixteenth President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannous!" as he jumped onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.
Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)
Suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly-held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.
You see, good readers, those who believe n the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists (see Welcome to the U.S.S.A ) who cannot ever "co-exist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.
As I have noted many times on this site, one of the reasons I am not employable in my chosen field of political science despite stellar evaluations of teaching effectiveness from peer evaluators is because of my long record of teaching political science as a Catholic and my work in defense of the Faith outside of the Catholic, including my campaigns for public office on the Right to Life Party line. The open and undisguised hostility that met me in some of the places where I taught was indicative, of course, that the very people who claim that they are "tolerant" and "open-minded" are actually the most bigoted, intolerant people imaginable. Numerous are the instances of organized bands of leftist thugs attempting to disrupt lectures that have been given by naturalists of the "conservative" bent on college and universities campuses so as to prevent any "dissenting" voices from interfering with the transmission of "leftist truth."
This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their worldview shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes.
The minions of Caesar Obamus, however, do not consider it "good enough" that most of those who belong at least nominally, to what they know should constitute their principal source of opposition, Catholicism, are either supportive of their statism or indifferent about it. No, the minions of Caesar Obamus want to eradicate all opposition by whatever means necessary, including the use of slogans and labels to disparage anyone who would dare to raise their voices in opposition to their "magisterial" statements. We must remember it that those who do violence to reason and truth must first violence to language. The constant repetition of slogans to discredit opponents by the use of invectives is meant to create an atmosphere where the relatives, neighbors, coworkers and other associates of the "oddball" "bigots" who dare to criticize the policies of government officials are viewed with constant suspicion.
Why are we surprised, therefore, that the minions of unelected political ideologues who work deep in the recesses under the rocks of the administration of Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus are seeking ways to curb public expressions of "opposition to the government" on the radio and television and the internet. Some reports given to me yesterday, which I have yet to verify without having to subscribe to access on an already gazillionaire naturalists's "premium" website, indicate that there is an instruction that has been sent to Federal employees to refer to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the "BP-caused" oil spill and to the reigning caesar's golf outings in the midst of this crisis as exercises in "clearing his mind," which would be a perfectly fine thing if he was intent on clearing his mind of his statist ideologies and his antipathy to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural law as they have been entrusted to His Catholic Church. This is the same administration that refers to use the phrase "Islamic terrorism" to refer to attacks perpetrated on this country by Mohammedans.
We should be not be surprised that common sense efforts sought by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal are being stopped by Federal apparatchiks as he, Jindal, is denounced for not "doing enough:"
Last night, the United States Department of the Interior shut down operations by the State of Louisiana to build a series of sand berms to protect the Louisiana coastline from the massive oil slick that continues to drench unabated the fragile marshes, wetlands and beaches along the Louisiana coastline.
The Feds say dredging the sand to build the protective barriers might hurt the environment. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wants to lose precious time and delay the dredging until new pipe can be delivered that would allow dredging in another area that Salazar feels may be less damaging to the ecosystem.
You can't make this stuff up. No one would believe you.
Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) says the Feds is detrimentally micromanaging Louisiana's plan, but they aren’t implementing a strategy of their own.
“Louisiana developed a plan to help save our coast from this oil, but the president and his administration continue to put up red tape without any plan of their own,” said Boustany. “The administration should work with the state to implement a responsible strategy to protect the coast. If the administration opposes the sand berms, what’s their better solution?”
Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), the man responsible for the sand berm strategy last night had a few choice things to say about Salazar shutting down the coastal protection efforts.
(Courtesy of The Hayride, for more extensive local coverage of the Gulf Oil disaster check out their website.) Jindal not only challenged the wisdom of the Interior Department’s order to stop the dredging, he noted that the management of the
Chandeleur’s by the federal Department of Fish and Wildlife has been an exercise in abject failure.
“We got word yesterday that federal officials were going to shut down our dredging operations on the North Chandeleur Islands and those operations were indeed stopped under the federal government’s command at 6 p.m. last night.
“Our request here today is simple,” said the governor. “We are again calling on the federal government to allow us to continue these dredging operations as we mobilize pipe for another two miles -- which will take around just seven more days. Getting this pipe in place without stopping the dredging operations will allow us a seamless transition as we move the dredge to a new borrow site. After this pipe is in place, our dredger can disconnect and move to the next site where it can then resume dredging operations in just one day.
“We have told Col. Lee of the Army Corps of Engineers and every federal agency that we are in an emergency situation here. This is a disaster for our state. Days count. Hours count. We cannot wait for more conference calls and meetings for discussions. We need to adapt to the situation on the ground and continue our dredging operations for as long as possible until we can move to the next borrow site and continue to create sand boom.”
…
“On May 11th, we submitted a proposal to the regulatory agencies, BP and the Coast Guard to approve our sand berms. It took almost a month for the federal government to approve the plan and make BP pay for the work. Meanwhile, we had millions of gallons of oil covering our wetlands, killing our wildlife and forcing our people out of work.”
Jindal then took aim at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which controls the Chandeleurs as a wildlife refuge. He showed a map of the erosion of the chain from 2001 to 2005 and delved into a short history of the disappearing islands.
“People used to live on these islands,” he noted. “It was a fishing community and even had some farming. From the mid-90’s until recently, the islands lost up to 300 feet per year under U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management.”
…
Jindal then answered the concern that dredging where the state has dredged is a hazard to the islands due to currents and tides.
“We have said from the beginning that we would backfill any dredging that would adversely affect these islands. That commitment still stands. Shutting down dredging operations while oil continues to hit our shores and the oil continues to flow into the Gulf is absolutely absurd. We need to act now. (Connie Hair, Human Events.)
Truth must be twisted in the midst of a crisis to exploit for statist ends when the truth of the Social Reign of Christ the King, which produced the abusive rule of English monarchs against which colonists in the thirteen original states rebelled, a little fact that colonists in favor of a break with England could bring themselves to understand and accept as they stood on the precipice of "civil liberty," is rejected by most men in the world and by what appears to them to be the Catholic Church but is in fact her counterfeit ape.
We should be not surprised that the statists around the world exploit crises, whether real, such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico, or imagined, such as "global warming," to impose tyranny upon citizens. The Environment Ministry of Japan is now "recommending" that families go to bed an hour earlier in order to leave less of a "carbon footprint" behind them. I kid you not:
The Japanese government has launched a campaign encouraging people to go to bed and get up extra early in order to reduce household carbon dioxide emissions.
The Morning Challenge campaign, unveiled by the Environment Ministry, is based on the premise that swapping late night electricity for an extra hour of morning sunlight could significantly cut the nation's carbon footprint.
A typical family can reduce its carbon dioxide footprint by 85kg a year if everyone goes to bed and gets up one hour earlier, according to the campaign.
The amount of carbon dioxide emissions potentially saved from going to bed an hour early was the equivalent of 20 per cent of annual emissions from household lights, "Many Japanese people waste electric power at night time, for example by watching TV until very late," a ministry spokesperson told The Daily Telegraph.
"But going to bed early and getting up early can avoid wasting electrical power which causes carbon dioxide emissions. If people change their lifestyle, we can save energy and reduce emissions." The campaign also proposes that people take advantage of an extra hour of morning sunlight by improve their lifestyles in general by running, doing yoga and eating a nutritious breakfast.
It is the latest initiative tackling climate change by the Japanese environment ministry, which is faced with the challenge of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 25 per cent from 1990 levels within the next decade.
It was the same government department that launched the high profile Cool Biz campaign five years ago, which encourages workers to wear short-sleeved shirts and offices not to turn air con lower than 28 degrees during the summer. (Japanese told to go to bed an hour early to cut carbon emissions .)
Do you doubt that such "recommendations" might be made at some point soon by officials of the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama?
Do you doubt that the gradual implementation of the statist power grab known as ObamaCare, if upheld as constitutional, won't include "recommendations" to limit our purchase of various food products considered to be harmful to our physical health and thus cause more of a "strain" on the health care system as a result? Look at the fascism of the militantly pro-abortion, pro-perversity Michael Bloomberg, now in his third term as Mayor of the City of New York, New York, who has sought to mandate the ban the use of trans fats in commercial restaurants and even wants to ban table salt from use in those restaurants (New York city's mayor Michael Bloomberg leads fight against salt).
It is no accident that men such as the late Edward Moore Kennedy and former President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and his compatriot, it appears, in violations of his marriage vows, former Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., and former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer and his successor, David Paterson, waxed repeatedly about their concern for "women's rights," including baby-killing. It is no accident that these men, among so many others in the past and at the present time, including Obama and Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Michael Bloomberg, have waxed repeatedly about the poor and health-care "reform" and the environment even though they are supporters of evils that undermine order within the souls of men thus cannot have any other effect than producing social disorder.
As men are made to know, love, and to serve God, our human nature, disordered by the effects of Original Sin, if not captive to it by virtue of not having been baptized, and by the effects of our own Actual Sins are inclined to "prove" that we are doing "good" when we are actually, objectively speaking, rebelling against our First Cause and Last End. Men who lack the true Faith and/or who have lost the true Faith--must seek to display their "charity" for the less fortunate and for human rights even though they help to foster and promote the very conditions that produce social injustice and chaos. Such men must present themselves and the civil state as, if you will, the means of "secular salvation," which is nothing other than a contemporary expression of the deification of man that was one of the chief goals of the so-called Enlightenment.
This so-called "care" for the poor and for the environment and for "social justice" is demonstrated as the civil state uses its confiscatory taxing and its regulatory powers to deprive us of our property and our legitimate human liberties. It is really not philanthropy at all to steal from others in order to boast later about one's "accomplishments" when they have achieved by theft and fraud and the usurpation by the government of what is the responsibility of the individual. Father Frederick Faber made this point his The Precious Blood, published one hundred fifty years ago this year.
Men would be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him; but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.
Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which mae life unbearable to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)
That pretty much says it all, wouldn't you say?
Most Americans, content to chortle their beer and chow down on their burgers and hot dogs as they celebrate a notion of "liberty" that has always been an illusion, happy surrender to the concept of government monitoring of their daily activities if this can help them to "make more money" and to say to the auditor, "Come on in, Mr. Federal Official. Please tell me how I can 'improve' my life to make my house more 'green.'" These are, after all, the same people who say the following every day of their lives:
"Come on in, Mr. Devil. Take your place in my house. Make yourself right at home.
"I watch your television programming every night.
"Most of what I 'feel' about current events is shaped by your naturalists, whether of the false opposite of the 'left' or of the false opposite of 'right,' who blather at me on television and the radio.
"I waste my time watching competitive sports, which, of course, takes my time away from prayer and makes of my favorite team a secular 'religion' that demands my every attention.
"I dress immodestly and according to the latest fashions, and I just love listening to your 'music' as I plunge myself merrily into a culture that worships you at every turn. My speech? Well, it's just as you want it, Mr. Devil, a little profane and a little blasphemous now and again.
"I use contraception and I believe that it is permissible, at in some instances, perhaps 'just' the 'hard cases,' for a woman to kill her preborn baby under cover of the civil law.
"I give my children all of the material goodies that they want and I let them associate with whomever they want regardless of the threat that their friends pose to their own immortal souls.
"It's just great to live in a country where I am 'free' to sin all of the time without being reminded that I might lose my soul for all eternity by doing your bidding."
A country where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is not recognized as King must be in the service of the devil. There is no middle ground at all.
The late Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie, as can be see in this passage from Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers (which is available from Mr. Hugh Akins's Catholic Action Resource Center), explained in the most basic terms the simple truth that Americanists, including Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, reject so boldly:
"If Jesus Christ," proclaims Msgr. Pie in a magnificent pastoral instruction, "if Jesus Christ Who is our light whereby we are drawn out of the seat of darkness and from the shadow of death, and Who has given to the world the treasure of truth and grace, if He has not enriched the world, I mean to say the social and political world itself, from the great evils which prevail in the heart of paganism, then it is to say that the work of Jesus Christ is not a divine work. Even more so: if the Gospel which would save men is incapable of procuring the actual progress of peoples, if the revealed light which is profitable to individuals is detrimental to society at large, if the scepter of Christ, sweet and beneficial to souls, and perhaps to families, is harmful and unacceptable for cities and empires; in other words, if Jesus Christ to whom the Prophets had promised and to Whom His Father had given the nations as a heritage, is not able to exercise His authority over them for it would be to their detriment and temporal disadvantage, it would have to be concluded that Jesus Christ is not God".
"To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say that the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing "to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine."
In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:
"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies."
Fr. de St. Just asks, in conclusion:
"Could it be proven in clearer terms that social atheism conduces to individualistic atheism?"
King George III of the House of Hanover is looking pretty good these days. He had nothing on the violation of legitimate personal liberties that has been wrought by the statists of the "left" and of the "right" who have expanded the size and the scope and the power of the Federal government (and of governments at the state and local levels as well) as the direct result of the fact that the men who founded this nation rejected the simple truth that each civil government in the world has the obligation to recognize the religion as it pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End and according to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the teaching authority and guardianship of the Catholic Church. Statism must result whenever men believe that they provide a means of social order without adhering to this simple reiteration of Catholic Social Teaching provided by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:
That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, explained that societies that look only to the Natural Law and no higher will degenerate into an abyss of lawlessness and public crime over the course of time:
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. . . .
"This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.
Behold the crimes of public life day, beginning with crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Over four thousand innocent preborn babies are butchered by surgical means under cover of the civil law in the "free" United States of America. Many thousands more are killed as a result of abortifacient contraceptives. Moreover, of course, souls are subjected to endless assaults from advertising, including unwanted circulars that arrive in our mail box and from the magazines that stare us in the face at supermarket checkout counters and from billboards that are blatant in the promotion of pornography in the name of the lie that is "free" speech.
Although it is certainly true that man's fallen human nature as a result of Original Sin and the after-effects of our own Actual Sins will create situations of disorder and chaos in our own souls and that of our nations until the end of time, it is also true that there is a difference between individuals struggling to overcome sinful temptations and/or extricating themselves from ingrained habits of sin and the cultural promotion and protection of sinful behavior under cover of the civil law. It is one thing to sin and to be sorry as one seeks out Absolution from a true bishop or a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly, worse yet to promote it under cover of the civil law and in every aspect of popular culture, which is what is done in the "free" United States of America that places a premium on a false sense of human "liberty" that is divorced from the pursuit of man's Last End as a member of the Catholic Church.
The United States of America is the country where I was born and it will be, most likely, the country where I will die. Its founding occurred within the Providence of God and has served as a salutary lesson as to what happens when men believe that they can govern themselves absent a due subordination to the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls. To criticize the nature of the American founding and to point out how its false premises have led to our situation of social chaos today is not to "hate" one's country. True love of one's country, patria, wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her conversion to the true Faith and her Catholicization in aspects of her public life and popular culture so that everything is done for the honor and glory of the Most Blessed Trinity and for the good, both temporal and eternal, of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every singe drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.
Pope Leo XIII reminded us in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, that love of one's country is a duty of the Natural Law (and it is also an obligation of filial piety under the Fourth Commandment). Love of one's country, however, is not an empty sentimentality whereby its founding premises that are antithetical to the good of souls are lionized and those responsible for those false premises are "canonized" as secular saints. True love of one's country does not consider its public policy, whether domestic or international, to be received from the hand of God or that one's country has a "mission" to spread a particular form of government that is premised on defective views as to what constitutes true human liberty and upon the falsehood that is the separation of Church and State. We are called to love God as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church, the Catholic Church, before we love our spouses and our children and our parents and our friends and our country:
It cannot be doubted that duties more numerous and of greater moment devolve on Catholics than upon such as are either not sufficiently enlightened in relation to the Catholic faith, or who are entirely unacquainted with its doctrines. Considering that forthwith upon salvation being brought out for mankind, Jesus Christ laid upon His Apostles the injunction to "preach the Gospel to every creature," He imposed, it is evident, upon all men the duty of learning thoroughly and believing what they were taught. This duty is intimately bound up with the gaining of eternal salvation: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be condemned." But the man who has embraced the Christian faith, as in duty bound, is by that very fact a subject of the Church as one of the children born of her, and becomes a member of that greatest and holiest body, which it is the special charge of the Roman Pontiff to rule with supreme power, under its invisible head, Jesus Christ .
Now, if the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings toward the Church. For the Church is the holy City of the living God, born of God Himself, and by Him built up and established. Upon this earth, indeed, she accomplishes her pilgrimage, but by instructing and guiding men she summons them to eternal happiness. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever. For fitting it is to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties toward God are of a far more hallowed character than those toward men.
Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause. Consequently, it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other. We can, certainly, and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the State and the governing powers; but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the Church a feeling of filial piety, and love God with the deepest love of which we are capable. The order of precedence of these duties is, however, at times, either under stress of public calamities, or through the perverse will of men, inverted. For, instances occur where the State seems to require from men as subjects one thing, and religion, from men as Christians, quite another; and this in reality without any other ground, than that the rulers of the State either hold the sacred power of the Church of no account, or endeavor to subject it to their own will. Hence arises a conflict, and an occasion, through such conflict, of virtue being put to the proof. The two powers are confronted and urge their behests in a contrary sense; to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters, for to please the one amounts to contemning the other.
As to which should be preferred no one ought to balance for an instant. It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men, an act of consummate wickedness to break the laws of Jesus Christ, in order to yield obedience to earthly rulers, or, under pretext of keeping the civil law, to ignore the rights of the Church; "we ought to obey God rather than men." This answer, which of old Peter and the other Apostles were used to give the civil authorities who enjoined unrighteous things, we must, in like circumstances, give always and without hesitation. No better citizen is there, whether in time of peace or war, than the Christian who is mindful of his duty; but such a one should be ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)
This is why it is very important to participate in His Excellency Bishop Robert Fidelis McKenna's Fifteen Saturdays' Rosary Crusade, which begins tomorrow, Saturday, June 26, 2010. Heaven awaits our prayers. Why we do we tarry?
Obviously, we must always keep in mind the simple fact that one of us is free from the guilt of sin, which is why we must be earnest about making reparation for them to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Mindful of our need to make reparation of our sins and relying ever more confidently upon the maternal intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Empress of the Americas, may we be emboldened to plant the seeds, starting with the enthronement of our own homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the conversion of each man and woman and child in this nation to the Catholic Faith, thereby ushering in a Christendom in that part of North America located between Canada and Mexico wherein the wonderful cry of the Cristeros, voiced so proudly by Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J., will be on the lips of all men at all times:
Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
