Liars Still Lie, Liars Still Lie Regularly
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Human beings are easily distracted by all of the bread and circuses, all of the sideshows, of Modernity and Modernism. So much so that they lose, if they had ever it to begin with, any sense of real history and become totally uninterested in understanding, no less focusing on, remote and proximate root causes of the problems that dominate the news cycles. There are even some fully traditional Catholics who think that it is "unrealistic" to focus on root causes as there is the "need" to "solve" various problems now, disregarding entirely that each of the problems facing us at this time are the result, remotely, of Original Sin and, proximately, of the Actual Sins of men that must proliferate and spiral them into the abyss of absolute lawlessness as a result of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King.
This article, therefore, is an an effort to remind readers of this site of points that have been made repeatedly on this site in its nearly ten years of existence and that had been made for over a decade before that in The Wanderer, Celebrate Life, The Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture, The Remnant, Catholic Family News and online at The Daily Catholic and the Seattle Catholic (which has expunged all of my feature articles) and in lectures given in over one hundred locations in the 1990s and first four years of the last decade. A lot of the points had been made also in volume one of Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism.
Focusing Always on Root Causes
We do not organize nations around the false principles of Protestantism and the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry.
We do not restore "order" in nations by the false principles of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonic naturalism.
Catholicism
is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.
The Modern civil state was born of Martin Luther's diabolical revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church, which is why Protestantism has not been, is not now nor can ever be any kind of means of personal sanctification or salvation, no less a foundation of true social order.
To wit, the hideous lecher, drunk and
theological revolutionary, Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., rejected these
truths because he could not live in accord with the binding precepts of
the Divine Positive Law an the Natural Law, preferring a life of wanton
sin and debauchery to a simple cooperation with the graces won for us on
the wood of the Holy Cross by Our King, Christ the King, on Good Friday
and that flow into the hearts of souls of human beings through the
loving hands of Our Lady, Mary our Immaculate Queen, she who is the
Mediatrix of All Graces. Martin Luther projected his own abject refusal
to reform his life onto the entirety of the Catholic Faith, refusing to
accept the fact that he was solely responsible for his wanton life of
sin and debauchery and for refusing to undertake the hard work to root
out his sins in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance to scale the heights of
personal sanctity.
To reaffirm himself in his life of sin, therefore,
Martin Luther, the revolutionary tool of the devil, had to invent an
entire theology designed to make it appear as though it was not
necessary for man to humble himself before the true God of Divine
Revelation by reforming one's life in cooperation with Sanctifying
Grace, by undertaking penances to make reparation for one's sins, by
being willing at all times and in all places to subordinate one's mind
and will to that of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, in all that
pertains to the good of his immortal soul.
Martin Luther thus dispensed with the truth that
Christ the King established a visible, hierarchical community that is
the Catholic Church.
Martin Luther thus dispensed with Sacred (or Apostolic) Tradition as one of the two sources of Divine Revelation.
Martin Luther thus helped to deify man by making him
the sole interpreter of Sacred Scripture, meaning that men could come to
mutually contradictory conclusions concerning the meaning of what was
contained in Holy Writ, thus making a mockery of the work of God the
Holy Ghost, Who inspired the writing of Sacred Scripture and Who has
always guided the Catholic Church with the charism of infallibility as
she has pronounced what books are indeed inspired (and thus part of the
Bible) and the meaning of various passages.
Martin Luther's radical egalitarianism had to
dispense with the concept of the Social Reign of Christ the King as
there could be no visible, external check on the abuse of governmental
authority if Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did not establish
His Holy Catholic Church as a visible, hierarchical community with the
authority to intervene with civil officials as a last resort after
discharging her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching and exhortation
when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention. This is why
some princes of German states gave the hideous, lecherous drunk Martin
Luther their protection. They wanted to be free to govern in a purely
Machiavellian manner without the "interference" of the Sovereign Pontiff
in Rome or his duly appointed bishops.
Martin Luther told us in
his own words that there must be a "separation of Church and State,"
that leaders may be Christians but it is not as Christians that they are
to rule:
"Assuredly," said Luther, "a
prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought
to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The
man is Christian, but his function does not concern his religion." (as quoted in Father Denis Fahey in The Mystical City of Christ in the Modern World.)
Martin Luther is thus the one who thus set the world on a
course of the utter madness in which we find ourselves at the present
time, a world in which most Catholics froth at the mouth when they hear
that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is meant to reign as the
King of both men and their nations.
Luther's endorsement of "separation of Church and State" that Pope Saint Pius X termed a "thesis absolutely false" in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906, made possible the rise of and the ultimate triumph of the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, who believes that he can exercise the legislative powers given in Article I of the Constitution of the United States of America to the two houses of the Congress of the United States of America by the use of executive orders, and his band of lawless, lying thugs are simply the ultimate end products of what began with Martin Luther and was institutionalized in the wake of the naturalism of the likes of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the "founding fathers" of the United States of America, many of whom had a
founding hatred for Christ the King.
It takes a lot of dodging on the part of
those who have made demigods out of the framers of the Constitution of
the United States of America to refuse to admit that it is entirely
logical for contemporary jurists and elected officials such as Obama/Soetoro and his minions to have
little regard for the plain meaning of the words contained in that
document's text as Protestants and modernist Catholics have shown for
the plain meaning of the words of Sacred Scripture as they have been
given and explained to us by the infallible teaching authority of the
Catholic Church. Why should we have any more reverence for the words of mere men, whose bodies have long since decayed after their deaths, when
the written Word of God can be deconstructed of Its plain meaning to
suit the arbitrary whims of men?
It is important to remember this fact as the
Constitution is utterly defenseless against being misinterpreted as its
framers did not accept the fact that there is an ultimate teaching
authority to be found in the Catholic Church to guide men as they pursue
the common temporal good in light of man's Last End: the possession of
the glory the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God
the Holy Ghost. Although Holy Mother Church leaves it to the prudence of
men to form the specific institutional arrangements by which they will
govern themselves in a particular body politic, she does insist that men
defer to her in all that pertains to the good of souls and that they
seek to pursue virtue in their own lives by cooperating with the graces
won for them by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on the wood of
the Holy Cross that flows into their hearts and souls through the
loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.
Men who do not accept this, however, will find that
all of their efforts to provide for a just social order, no matter how
well-intentioned, will decay over the course of time. The fact that the
specific institutional arrangements found in the Constitution of
the United States of America, none of which is objectionable in se to
the Catholic Faith, have been used to pursue more and more manifest
injustices that are at odds even the words found in the document's text
and are opposed to written thought of the framers themselves is the
result of the anti-Incarnational premises which formed their
intellectual perspectives. We are witnessing only a more open and thus
obvious collapse of the order that was meant to be provided by the
Constitution for a variety of reasons, including, of course, the fact
that there has been a deprivation of Sanctifying and Actual Graces in
the world as a result of the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions of
conciliarism.
The proximate root cause of this decay was caused by
the false premises of the American founding that have led jurists and
politicians to make as much short work of the text of the Constitution
as the plain words of Holy Writ have been made by the Scriptural and
dogmatic relativism that Protestantism let loose on the world nearly
five hundred years ago. The framers of the American Constitution were
but the victims of Protestantism's revolution against the objective
nature of Revealed Truth.
The men who framed the
Constitution of the United States of America were products of the
Protestant Revolt and of the so-called Age of Reason (or Enlightenment).
They accepted without question the belief that it was possible for men
of divergent religious beliefs–or the lack thereof–to work together
reasonably for the common good without referencing any one church as the
foundation of a country’s civil order. They believed further in the
heresy of semi-Pelagianism, which contends that men have enough inherent
grace in themselves to be good, that we do not need belief, in access
to or cooperation with sanctifying grace to be virtuous. The framers of
the Constitution believed that men of “civic virtue” would present
themselves for public service and would, after a long process of
compromise, negotiation and bargaining amongst the diverse interests and
opinions represented in the United States Congress, make decisions that
redounded to the common good (see, for example, James Madison, The Federalist, Numbers 10 and 51).
James Madison himself quite specifically believed that there was no
one “opinion” that could unite men of such divergent backgrounds as
found themselves in the United States of America at the end of the
Eighteenth Century. Thus, a dialectical process of conflict amongst
divergent interests (religious, sectional, economic, occupational) had
to be created to force those who took positions that constituted a
majority “view” at any time to at least consider the viewpoints of those
who were in the minority of a given issue. In this way, Madison
reasoned, whatever majorities emerged in Congress on any piece of
legislation would be transient, indigenous to one particular issue at
one particular time, and sensitive to and concerned about the rights of
those who disagreed with them. Such a system, which was premised on the
exercise of statesmanship on the part of those elected to serve in
Congress and as President, would create the “extended commercial
republic” where no one person or interest could predominate on all
issues at all times.
The institutional arrangements created to effect this “extended
commercial republic” were very complex. A division of powers between the
central government and the state governments (Federalism). A separation
of powers amongst the three branches of the central government
involving a number of checks and balances. Different powers given to
each of the two chambers of the Congress (bicameralism). Staggered
elections for the members of the United States Senate, a body whose
members were elected by state legislatures until the ratification of the
Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Popular election originally of only one
body, the House of Representatives. A President elected by electors
appointed by whatever method deemed best by state legislatures. All of
this was supposed to produce a tension that resulted in internal
safeguards to prevent, although not absolutely make impossible, the
abuse of power and the rise of the tyranny of the majority.
There is only one little problem with this schemata: it was premised
on the belief that matters of civil governance do not have to be
founded in a reliance on the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has
entrusted to His true Church and that the Church herself has no role to
play to serve as the ultimate, divinely-instituted check on the abuse of
temporal governmental power. It was difficult enough for the Church at
times during the Middle Ages, when she exercised the Social Reign of
Christ the King, to restrain certain rulers. It is impossible for any
purely human institution to restrain the vagaries of fallen human nature
over the course of time. Men who are not mindful of their First Cause
and their Last End as He has revealed Himself solely through His true
Church will descend to their lower natures sooner rather than later.
This is what happened in short order following the ratification of the Constitution.
Political parties arose
during President George Washington’s tenure in office. Although
Washington himself abhorred the rise of political parties and saw the
dangers that would threaten national order if professional, career
politicians emerged as a caste undo themselves, he was powerless to stop
them from forming and taking over the entirety of the governmental
process. Although the names of the political parties have changed over
the last two hundred ten years, the partisan political divisions that
developed during the Washington Administration have come to define the
very nature of American electoral politics and the making of public
policy. What is best for a particular political party is best for the
nation. So much for the pursuit of the common temporal good on a purely
naturalistic level, no less in light of man's Last End.
The era of “Jacksonian Democracy” from 1828 to 1836 spelled the
death-knell for the founders’ misplaced hopes that the Constitution
itself would serve as a safeguard against the dangers posed by raw
majoritarianism, the essence of Andrew Jackson’s political beliefs,
which were derived from the American Revolution’s foreign cousin, the
French Revolution. All notion of a political system that restrained the
exercise of raw political power was pure mythology from Jackson’s time
forward.
Abraham Lincoln had little regard for Constitutional restraints.
Woodrow Wilson, an Anglophile, believed that he was a Prime Minister entitled to reflexive support of the Congress.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke every law imaginable
to pursue his statist policies of the New Deal and the involvement of
the United States in World War II. Presaging the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service by President Richard Milhous Nixon and President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the the tax collectors to hound and harass his "enemies," a misue of power in which he took particular delight.
John Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack
Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro each have seen fit to make the Constitution suit their own
purposes, sometimes by ignoring it entirely or, at least in some cases,
by getting a compliant Supreme Court of the United States of America to
ratify their abuses of power.
Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States have justified
the creation of so-called “independent regulatory agencies, which
violate the principles of “separation of powers” by exercising each of
three powers of government (legislative, executive, judicial), applied
the provisions of the Bill of Rights, written to restrain the powers of
the central government and not the state governments,
to the state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process
of law” clause, thereby expanding the power of the central government
greatly, circumscribed the legitimate powers of the states to supervise
their own elections, and have served as laboratories of rank social
engineering by making it impossible to prevent the sale of
contraceptives and to permit the execution of the innocent unborn by
abortion and the elderly by means of the withdrawal of food and water
and by “doctor-assisted suicide.” And this is to say nothing about how
the "commerce clause" (subsection eight of section eight of Article I of
the Constitution) has been used to justify expansions of the power of
the Federal government that make poor King George III seem like quite an
amateur in the practice of abusing executive powers.
Many of the various people who have served as
justices of the Supreme Court of the United States over the years have
believed that the words of the Constitution represent either the
ultimate authority pertaining to the exercise of governmental power or
are so fungible as to admit of constant re-interpretation in the name of a "living tradition." Cases
involving various constitutional principles may be decided one way at
one time and another way at another time. Few things are ever "settled"
entirely the Supreme Court decisions unless the naturalists of the
"left" are satisfied. We have too much evidence of how the naturalists
of the "right" talk about "reversing" various Supreme Court decisions
(such as the decisions in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton,
January 22, 1973) at one time to wind up "settling" for what their
counterparts in the "left" believe is "settled" law. How much talk have
you heard this year from candidates on the "right" about reversing Roe v. Wade? Point made, thank you very much.
Such is the inevitable,
inexorable result of a country that rejects the belief that all civil
law, whether exercised by a central government or state governments,
must be subordinated in all things at all times to the binding precepts
of the Divine positive law and the natural law as those laws have been
entrusted to and explicated by Holy Mother Church.
No level of government, whether central or state, has any authority
to permit any action contrary to God’s law and thus injurious to the
sanctification and salvation of the souls of its citizens. No mere human
constitution is above God’s law. No mere human being has the right to
decide for himself that he is exempt from the immutable doctrine of the
Social Reign of Christ the King. Thus, those men, including the framers
of the Constitution of the United States of America, no matter how
well-intentioned, who believed that it is possible for “reasonable men”
to pursue the “common good” absent a subordination of their lives and
their work to Our Lord as He has revealed Himself through His true
Church are bound to set their descendants on a downward spiral that will
end only in the destruction of their nation or when said nation is
converted to the true Faith.
Just the Latest in a Long Line of Statists
What does any of this mean to the currently reigning
caesar, Barack Hussein Obama? Nothing. He lives in utter ignorance,
convinced of his own righteousness, convinced that he can twist and distort
the plain words of the Constitution to justify his statist policies.
No matter how arrogant Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro is, however, he is just the latest in a long line of statists of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic naturalist statists who have felt free to ignore the truths contained in the appendix below.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro has been educated by liars, which is why he told lies about himself in his fable of an autobiography, Dreams of My Father.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soteoro told lies to get elected to the Senate of the United States of America in the State of Illinois in 2004 as he ran against Alan Keyes, who had never lived in Illinois a day in his life but was offered as a sacrificial lamb to the put up against the TelePrompTer, then a Illinois State Senator, who had delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convetion in Boston, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, July 27, 2004.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro told liees as he ran against Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is a liar to the core of her own Rogerian being, for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2007 and 2008. Some giddy naturalists of the false opposite of the "right" hailed Obama/Soetoro's narrow defeat of the woman who had given us HillaryCare in 1993 and who referred to a "vast right conspiracy" to dismiss her husband's involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in January of 1998, a celebration that I, ever a party pooper for giddy naturalists, warned was misplaced (see One Devil Goes, Another One Enters). Then again, why bother to read such detailed articles when one can be titilated by supposedly "expert" comments made in "twitterverse" that never address root causes.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro has governed by weaving a fabric of lie after lie after lie, believing that he is quite indeed above the laws of both God and men.
The United States Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has become more of a proponent of injustice and rank evil that was the case even under the tenures of former Attorney Generals Janet Reno and Alberto Gonzales. Criminal actions sanctioned by the Holder's office include Fast and Furious and a de facto turning aside calls for an independent counsel to investigate the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to persecute "conservative" groups applying for tax-exempt status. A blind eye has been turned to the truth about the attacks on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, on Tuesday, September 11, 2012.
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other minions have told lie after lie after lie to get the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, and to sustain it even after the lies were exposed.
Ah, this is nothing new. This is part of the fabric of a nation built on the lie that men and nations can govern themselves absent a due submission to the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Holy Catholic Church.
The answer to this madness is the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King as a result of the fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message and thus of the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart. It is not to be found in anything offered in the cottage industries created by various Protestant and naturalist merchants of "information" and "truth" (Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Hugh Hewitt, et al.), each of whom has products galore which are nothing more than the modern equivalents of snake-oil salesmen who serve their own roles in agitating the masses and keeping Catholics from considering the events of the world in light of First and Last Things and keeping them by turning off the idiot box, which they should have thrown out of their houses a long time ago, and the radio and praying more and more Rosaries each day.
Father Frederick Faber, writing in The Creator and Creature, which was published in 1856, explained the influence of worldliness upon Catholics even in his own day, a worldliness that causes us to lose sight of the fact that the side shows of the lords of Modernity are simply that, side shows from the devil that distract us from the simple truth that men and their nations must be converted to Catholicism and that individual men must live penitentially in reparation for their sins as they beseech the Mother of God to help them to grow in holiness so that they are ready at all times to die in a State of Sanctifying Grace. These words of Father Faber are worth considering once again if you have read them before. They are worth reading for the first time if you have not done so:
The question of worldliness is a very difficult one, and one which we would gladly have avoided, had it been in our power to do so. But it is in too many ways connected with our subject, to allow of its being passed over in silence. In the first place, a thoughtful objector will naturally say, If the relation between the Creator and the creature is such as has been laid down in the first eight chapters, and furthermore if it is as manifest and undeniable as it is urged to be, how comes it to pass that it is not more universally, or at least more readily, admitted than it is? Almost all the phenomena of the world betray a totally opposite conviction, and reveal to us an almost unanimous belief in men, that they are on a quite different footing with God from that one, which is here proclaimed to be the only true and tenable one. There must be at least some attempt to explain this discrepancy between what we see and what we are taught. The explanation, we reply, is to be found in what Christians call worldliness. It is this which stands in the way of God's honor, this which defrauds Him of the tribute due to Him from His creatures, this which blinds their eyes to His undeniable rights and prerogatives. How God's own world comes to stand between Himself and the rational soul, how friendship with it is enmity with Him--indeed an account of the whole matter must be gone into, in order to show, first, that the influence of the world does account for the non-reception of right views about God, and, secondly, that the world is in no condition to be called as a witness, because of the essential falsehood of its character. This identical falsehood about God is its very life, energy, significance, and condemnation. The right view of God is not unreal, because the world ignores it. On the contrary, it is because it is real that the unreal world ignores it, and the world's ignoring it is, so far forth, an argument in favor of the view.
But not only does this question of worldliness present itself to us in connection with the whole teaching of the first eight chapters; it is implicated in the two objections which have already been considered, namely, the difficulty of salvation and the fewness of the saved. If it is easy to be saved, whence the grave semblance of its difficulty? If the majority of adult Catholics are actually saved, because salvation is easy, why it is necessary to draw so largely on the unknown regions of the death-bed, in order to make up our majority? Why should not salvation be almost universal, if the pardon of sin is so easy, grace so abundant, and all that is wanted is a real earnestness about the interests of our souls? If you acknowledge, as you do, that the look of men's lives, even of the lives of believers, is not as if they were going to be saved, and that they are going to be saved in reality in spite of appearances, what is the explanation of these appearances, when the whole process is so plain and easy? To all this the answer is, that sin is a partial explanation, and the devil is a partial explanation, but that the grand secret lies in worldliness. That is the chief disturbing force, the prime counteracting power. It is this mainly, which keeps down the number of the saved; it is this which makes the matter seem so difficult which is intrinsically so easy; nay, it is this which is a real difficulty, though not such an overwhelming one as to make salvation positively difficult as a whole. Plainly then the phenomenon of worldliness must be considered here, else it will seem as if an evident objection, and truly the weightiest of all objections, had not been taken into account, and thus an air of insecurity will be thrown, not only over the answer to the preceding two objections, but also over the whole argument of the first eight chapters.
This inquiry into worldliness will, in the third place, truthfully and naturally prepare us for the great conclusion of the whole inquiry, namely, the personal love of God is the only legitimate development of our position as creatures, and at the same time the means by which salvation is rendered easy, and the multitude of the saved augmented. For it will be found that the dangers of worldliness are at once so great and so peculiar, that nothing but a personal love of our Creator will rescue us from them, enable us to break with the world, and to enter into the actual possession of the liberty of the sons of God.
O, it is a radiant land--this wide, many-colored mercy of our Creator! But we must be content for a while now to pass out of its kindling sunshine into another land of most ungenial darkness, in the hope that we shall come back heavy laden with booty for God's glory, and knowing how to prize the sunshine more than ever. There is a hell already upon earth; there is something which is excommunicated from God's smile. It is not altogether matter, not yet altogether spirit. It is not man only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an infection, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a coloring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery, an impersonal but a very recognisable system. None of these names suit it, and all of them suit it. Scripture calls it, "The World." God's mercy does not enter into it. All hope of its reconciliation with Him is absolutely and eternally precluded. Repentance is incompatible with its existence. The sovereignty of God has laid the ban of the empire upon it; and a holy horror ought to seize us when we think of it. Meanwhile its power over the human creation is terrific, its presence ubiquitous, its deceitfulness incredible. It can find a home under every heart beneath the poles, and it embraces with impartial affection both happiness and misery. It is wider than the catholic Church, and is masterful, lawless, and intrusive within it. It cannot be damned, because it is not a person, but it will perish in the general conflagration, and so its tyranny be over, and its place know it no more. We are living in it, breathing it, acting under its influences, being cheated by its appearances, and unwarily admitting its principles. Is it it not of the last importance to us that we should know something of this huge evil creature, this monstrous seabird of evil, which flaps its wings from pole to pole, and frightens the nations into obedience by its discordant cries?
But we must not be deceived by this description. The transformations of the spirit of the world are among its most wonderful characteristics. It has its gentle voice, its winning manners, its insinuating address, its aspect of beauty and attraction; and the lighter its foot and the softer its voice, the more dreadful is its approach. It is by the firesides of rich and poor, in happy homes where Jesus is named, in gay hearts which fain would never sin. In the chastest domestic affections it can hide its poison. In the very sunshine of external nature,in the combinations of the beautiful elements--it is somehow even there. The glory of the wind-swept forest and the virgin frost of the Alpine summits have a taint in them of this spirit of the world. It can be dignified as well. It can call to order sin which is not respectable. It can propound wise maxims of public decency, and inspire wholesome regulations of police. It can open the churches, and light the candles on the altar, and entone Te Deums to the Majesty on high. It is often prominently, and almost pedantically, on the side of morality. Then, again, it has passed into the beauty of art, into the splendor of dress, into the magnificence of furniture. Or, again, there it is, with high principles on its lips, discussing the religious vocation of some youth, and praising God and sanctity, while it urges discreet delay, and less self-trust, and more considerate submissiveness to those who love him, and have natural rights to his obedience. It can sit on the benches of senates and hide in the pages of good books. And yet all the while it is the same huge evil creature which was described above. Have we not reason to fear?
Let us try to learn more definitely what the world is, the world in the scripture sense. A definition is too short, a description is too vague. God never created it; how then does it come here? There is no land, outside the creation of God, which could have harbored this monster, who now usurps so much of this beautiful planet, on which Jews was born and died, and from which He and His sinless Mother rose to heaven? It seems to be a spirit of spirit, which has risen up from a disobedient creation, as if the results, and after-consequences of all the sins that ever were, rested in the atmosphere, and loaded it with some imperceptible but highly powerful miasma. It cannot be a person, and yet it seems as if it possessed both a mind and a will, which on the whole are very consistent, so as to disclose what might appear to be a very perfect self-consciousness. It is painless in its operations, and unerring too; and just as the sun bids the lily be white and the rose red, and they obey without an effort, standing side by side with the same aspect and in the same soil, so this spirit of the world brings forth colors and shapes and scents in our different actions, without the process being cognisable to ourselves. The power of mesmerism on the reluctant will is a good type of the power of this spirit of the world upon ourselves. It is like grace, only that it is contradictory.
But it has not always the same power. It the expression may be forgiven, there have been times when the world was less worldly than usual; and this look as as if it were something which the existing generator of men always gave out from themselves, a kind of magnetism of varying strengths and different properties. As Satan is sometimes bound, so it pleases God to bind the world sometimes. Or He thunders, and the atmosphere is cleared for awhile, and the times are healthy, and the Church lifts her head and walks quicker. But, on the whole, its power appears to be increasing with time. In other words, the world is getting more worldly. Civilization develops it immensely, and progress helps it on, and multiplies its capabilities. In the matter of worldliness, a highly civilized time is to a comparatively ruder time what the days of machinery are to those of hand-labor. We are not speaking of sin; that is another idea, and brings in fresh considerations: we are speaking only of worldliness. If the characteristic of modern times go on developing with the extreme velocity and herculean strength which they promise now, we may expect (just what prophecy would lead us to anticipate) that the end of the world and the reign of anti-Christ would be times of the most tyrannical worldliness.
This spirit also has its characteristic of time and place. The worldliness of one century is different from that of another. Now it runs toward ambition in the upper classes and discontent in the lower. Now to money-making, luxury, and lavish expenditure. One while it sets towards grosser sins; another while towards wickedness of a more refined description; and another while it will tolerate nothing but educated sin. It also has periodical epidemics and accessions of madness, thought at what intervals, or whether by the operation of any law, must be left to the philosophy of history to decide. Certain it is, that ages have manias, the source of which it is difficult to trace, but under which whole communities, and sometimes nations, exhibit symptoms of diabolical possession. Indeed, on looking back, it would appear that every age, as if an age were an individual and had an individual life, had been subject to some vertigo of its own, by which it may be almost known in history. Very often, the phenomena, such as those of the French Revolution, seem to open out new depths in human nature, or to betoken the presence of some preternatural spiritual influences. Then, again, ages have panics, as if some attribute of God came near to the world, and cast a deep shadow over its spirit, marking men's hearts quail for fear.
This spirit is further distinguished by the evidences which it presents of a fixed view and a settled purpose. It is capricious, but, for all that, there is nothing about it casual, accidental, fortuitous. It is well instructed for its end, inflexible in its logic, and making directly, no matter through what opposing medium to its ultimate results. Indeed, it is obviously informed with the wisdom and subtlety of Satan. It is his greatest capability of carrying on his war against God. Like a parasite disease, it fixes on the weak places in men, pandering both to mind and flesh, but chiefly to the former. It i one of those three powers to whom such dark pre-eminence is given, the world, the flesh, and the devil; and among these three, it seems to have a kind of precedence given to it, by the way in which our Lord speaks of its in the Gospel, though the line of its diplomacy has been to have itself less thought of and less dreaded than the other two; and, unhappily for the interests of God and the welfare of souls, it has succeeded. It is, then, pre-eminent among the enemies of God. Hence the place which it occupied in Holy Scripture. It is the world which hated Christ, the world which cannot receive the Spirit, the world that loves its own, the world that rejoices because Christ has gone away, the world which He overcame, the world for which He would not pray, the world that by wisdom knew not God, the world whose spirit Christians were not to receive, the world that was not worthy of the saints, the world whose friendship is enmity with God, the world that passeth away with its lusts, the world which they who are born of God overcome, or, as the Apocalypse calls its, the world that goes wandering after the beast. Well then might St. James come to his energetic conclusion, Whosoever therefore will be a friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God. It is remarkable also that St. John, the chosen friend of the Incarnate Word, and the Evangelist of His Divinity, should be the one of the inspired writers who speaks most often and most emphatically about the world, as if the spirit of Jesus found something especially revolting to it in the spirit of the world.
It is this world which we have to fight against throughout the whole of our Christian course. Our salvation depends upon our unforgiving enmity against it. It is not so much that it is a sin, as that it is the capability of all sins, the air sin breathes, the light by which it sees to do its work, the hotbed which propagates and forces it, the instinct which guides it, the power which animates it. For a Christian to look at, it is dishearteningly complete. It is a sort of catholic church of the powers of the darkness. It is laws of its own, and tastes the principles of its own, literature of its own, a missionary spirit, a compact system, and it is a consistent whole. It is a counterfeit of the Church of God, and in the most implacable antagonism to it. The doctrines of the faith, the practices and devotions of pious persons, the system of the interior life, the mystical and contemplative world of the Saints, with all these it is at deadly war. And so it must be. The view which the Church takes of the world is distinct and clear, and far from flattering to its pride. It considers the friendship of the world as enmity with God. It puts all the world's affairs under its feet, either as of no consequence, or at least of very secondary importance. It has great faults to find with the effeminacy of the literary character, with the churlishness of the mercantile character, with the servility of the political character, and even with the inordinateness of the domestic character. It provokes the world by looking in progress doubtingly, and with what appears a very inadequate interest, and there is a quiet faith in its contempt for the world extremely irritating to this latter power.
The world on the contrary thinks that it is going to last for ever. It is almost assumes that there are no other interests but its own, or that if there are, they are either of no consequence, or troublesome and in the way. It thinks that there is nothing like itself anywhere, that religion was made for its convenience, merely to satisfy a want, and must not forget itself, or if it claims more, must be put down as a rebel, or chased away as a grumbling beggar; and finally it is of opinion, that of all contemptible things spirituality is the most contemptible, cowardly, and little. Thus the Church and the world are incompatible, and must remain so to the end.
We cannot have a better instance of the uncongeniality of the world with the spirit of the Gospel, than their difference in the estimate of prosperity. All those mysterious woes which our Lord denounced against wealth, have their explanation in the dangers of worldliness. It is the peculiar aptitude of wealth and pomp, and power, to harbor the unholy spirit of the world, to combine with it, and transform themselves into it, which called forth the thrilling malediction of our Lord. Prosperity may be a blessing from God, but it may easily become the triumph of the world. And for the most part the absence of chastisement is anything but a token of God's love. When prosperity is a blessing, it is generally a condescension to our weakness. Those are fearful words, Thou has already received thy reward; yet how many prosperous men there are, the rest of whose lives will keep reminding us of them; the tendency of prosperity in itself is to wean the heart from God, and fix it on creatures. It gives us a most unsupernatural habit of esteeming others according to their success. As it increases, so anxiety to keep it increases also, and makes men restless, selfish, and irreligious; and at length it superinduces a kind of effeminacy of character, which unfits them for the higher and more heroic virtues of the Christian character. This is but a sample of the different way which the Church and the world reason.
Now it is this world which, far more than the devil, fare more than the flesh, yet in union with both, makes the difficulty we find in obeying God's commandments, or following His counsels. It is this which makes earth such a place of struggle and of exile. Proud, exclusive, anxious, hurried, fond of comforts, coveting popularity, with an offensive orientation of prudence, it is this worldliness which hardens the hearts of men, stops their ears, blinds their eyes, vitiates their taste, and ties their hands, so far as the things of God are concerned. Let it be true that salvation is easy, and that by far the greater number of Catholics are saved, it is still unhappily true that that the relations of the Creator and the creature, as put forward in this treatise, are not so universally or so practically acknowledged as they ought to be. Why is this? Sin is a partial answer. The devil is another partial answer. But I believe worldliness has got to answer for a great deal of sin, and for a great deal of devil, besides a whole deluge of iniquity of its own, which is perpetually debasing good works, assisting the devil in his assaults, and working with execrable assiduity against the sacraments and grace. The world is for ever lowering the heavenly life of the Church. If there ever was an age in which this was true, it is the present. One of the most frightening features of our condition is, that we are so little frightened of the world. The world itself has brought this about. Even spiritual books are chiefly occupied with the devil and the flesh; and certain of the capital sins, such as envy and sloth, no loner hold the prominent places which they held of the systems of the elder ascetics; and yet they are just those vices which contain most of the ungodly spirit of the world. The very essence of worldliness seems to consist in its making us forget that we are creatures; and the more this view is reflected upon, the more correct will it appear.
When our Blessed Lord describes the days before the Flood, and again those which shall precede the end of the world, He portrays them rather as times of worldliness than of open sin. Men were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage; and He says no more. Now none of these things are wrong in themselves. We can eat and rink, as the apostle teaches us, to the glory of God, and marriage was a divine institution at the time of the Flood, and is not a Christian Sacrament. In the same way when He describes the life of the only person whom the gospel narratives follows into the bode of the lost, He sums it up as the being clothed in purple and fine linen, and feasting sumptuously every day. here again there is nothing directly sinful in the actions which He names. It surely cannot be a mortal sin to have fine linen, nor will a man lose a state of grace because he feasts sumptuously every day, provided that no other sins follow in the train of this soft life. The malice of it all is in its worldliness, in the fact that this was all or nearly all the lives of those before the flood, of those before the days of anti-Christ, and of the unhappy Dives. Life began and ended in worldliness. There was nothing for God. It was comprised in the pleasures of the world, it rested in them, it was satisfied by then. Its characteristic was sins of omission. Worldliness might also be defined to be a state of habitual sins of omission. The devil urges men on to great positive breaches of the divine commandments. The passions of the flesh impel sinners to give way to their passions by such dreadful sins, as catch the eyes of men and startle them by their iniquity. Worldliness only leads to these things occasionally and by accident. It neither scandalizes others, not frightens the sinner himself. This is the very feature of it, which, rightly considered, ought to be so terrifying. The reaction of a great sin, or the same which follows it, are often the pioneers of grace. They give self-love such a serious shock, that under the influence of it men return to God. Worldliness hides from the soul its real malice, and thus keeps at arm's length from it some of the most persuasive motives to repentance. Thus the Pharisees are depicted in the Gospel as being eminently worldly. It is worldliness, not immorality, which is put before us. There is even much of moral decency, much of respectable observance, much religious profession; and yet when our Blessed Saviour was among them, they were further from grace than the publicans and sinners. They had implicit hatred of God in their hearts already, which became explicit as soon as they saw Him. The Magdalen, the Samaritan, the woman taken in adultery--it was these who gathered round Jesus, attracted by His sweetness, and touched by the graces which went out from Him. The Pharisees only grew more cold, more haughty, more self-opinionated, until they ended by the greatest of all sins, the crucifixion of our Lord. For worldliness, when its selfish necessities drive it at last into open sin, for the most part sins more awfully and more impenitently than even the unbridled passions of our nature. So again there was the young man who had great possessions, and who loved Jesus when he saw Him, and wished to follow Him. He was a religious man, and with humble scrupulosity observed the commandments of God; but when our Lord told him to sell and give the price to the poor and to follow Him, he turned away sorrowful, and was found unequal to such a blessed vocation. Now his refusing to sell his property was surely not a mortal sin. It does not appear that our Lord considered him to have sinned by his refusal. It was the operation of worldliness. We do not know what the young man's future was; but a sad cloud of misgivings must hang over the memory of him whom Jesus invited to follow Him, and who turned away. Is he looking now in heaven upon that Face, form whose mild beauty he so sadly turned away on earth?
Thus the outward aspect of worldliness is not sin. Its character is negative. It abounds in omissions. Yet throughout the Gospels our Saviour seems purposely to point to it rather than to open sin. When the young man turned away, His remark was, How hard it is for those who have riches to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But the very fact of our Lord's thus branding worldliness with His especial reprobation is enough to show that it is in reality deeply sinful, hatefully sinful. It is a life without God in the world. It is a a continual ignoring of God, a continual quiet contempt of His rights, an insolent abatement in the service which He claims from His creatures. Self is set up instead of God. The canons of human respect are more looked up to than the Divine Commandments. God is very little adverted to. He is passed over. The very thought of Him soon ceases to make the worldly man uncomfortable. Indeed all his chief objections to religion, if he thought much about the matter, would be found a repose on his apprehension of it as restless and uncomfortable. But all this surely must represent an immensity of interior mortal sin. Can a man habitually forget God, and be in a state of habitual grace? Can he habitually prefer purple garments and sumptuous fare to the service of his Creator, and be free of mortal sin? Can be make up a life for himself even of the world's sinless enjoyments, such as eating, drinking, and marrying, and will not the mere omission of God from it be enough to constitute him in a state of deadly sin? At that rate a moral atheist is more acceptable to God than a poor sinner honestly but freely fighting with some habit of vice, to which his nature and his past offenses set so strongly, that he can hardly lift himself up. At that rate the Pharisees in the Gospel would be the patterns for our imitation, rather than the publicans and sinners; or at least they would be as safe. Or shall we say that faith is enough to save us without charity? If a man only believes rightly, let him eat and rink and be gaily clothed, and let him care for nothing else, and at least that exclusive love of creatures, that omission of the Creator, provided only it issues in no other outward acts than his fine dinners and his expensive clothes, shall never keep his soul from heaven. His purple and his sumptuous feasting shall be his beatific vision here, and then his outward morality shall by God's mercy hand him on to his second beatific Vision, the Vision of the beauty of God, and the eternal ravishment of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity! Can this be true?
Yet on the other hand, we may not make into sins what God had not made sins. How is this? O it is the awful world of inward sin which is the horror of all this worldliness! It is possession, worse far than diabolical possession, because at once more hideous and more complete. It is the interior irreligiousness, the cold pride, the hardened heart, the depraved sense, the real unbelief, the more implicit hatred of God, which makes the soul of the worldly man an actual, moral, and intellectually hell on earth, hidden by an outward show of faultless proprieties, which only make it more revolting to the Eye that penetrates the insulting disguise. The secret sins moreover of the worldly are a very sea of iniquity. Their name is legion; they cannot be counted. Almost every thought is sin, because of the inordinate worship of self that is in it. Almost every step is sin, because it is treading underfoot some ordinance of God. It is a life without prayer, a life without desire of heaven, a life without fear of hell, a life without love of God, a life without any supernatural habits at all. Is not hell the most natural transition from such a life as this? heaven is not a sensual paradise. God is the joy, and he beauty, and the contentment there; all is for God, all from God, all to God, all in God, all around God as the beautiful central fire about which His happy creatures cluster in amazement and delight. Whereas in worldliness God is the discomfort of the whole thing, an intrusion, an unseasonable thought, an unharmonious presence like a disagreeable uninvited guest, irritating and fatiguing us by the simple demand His presence makes on sufferance and our courtesy. O surely such a man has sin in his veins instead of blood!
Worldliness then is a life of secret sins. It is such an irresistible tendency to sin, such a successful encouragement of it, such a genial climate, such a collection of favourable circumstances, such an amazing capability of sin, that it breeds actual sins, regularly formed and with all the theological requirements, by millions and millions. It we read what the catechism of the Council of Trent says of sins of thought, we shall see how marvellously prolific sins can be, and what a pre-eminently devastating power sins of thought in particular exercise within the soul. In numberless cases open and crying sins must come at last. Still we must remember that on the whole there are two characteristics which always distinguish sins of worldliness from sins of the passions, or sins of direct diabolical temptation. The respectability which worldliness affects leads it rather to satisfy itself in secret sins. Indeed its worship of self, its predilection for an easy life, would hinder its embarking in sins which take trouble, time, and forethought, or which run risks of disagreeable consequences, and therefore would keep it confined within a sphere of secret sins. And in the next place its love of comfort makes it so habitually disinclined to listen to the reproaches of conscience, or the teasing solicitations of grace, that it passes into the state of a seared conscience, a dreaded moral sense, with a speed which is unknown even to cruelty or sensuality. (Father Frederick Faber, The Creator and Creature, written 1856 and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 314-328.)
This is a description of our world today, is it not?
These passages should be required reading of all of our traditional clergy, especially those who do not believe that it is "pastorally prudent" to speak in these terms, that they would "turn people off" if they did so, refusing them the "pleasures" of watching television or going to the "latest" motion picture or dressing in ways that offend Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother.
Anyone who believes that "our people today" are not "ready" to accept--and could never "handle"--being challenged with the truths contained in these passages from Father Faber ought to surrender to the Novus Ordo establishment immediately as the entire ethos of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service is designed to be an accommodation with the prevailing spirit of the world in order for Catholics to "relax," "have fun" and "enjoy themselves." This is the path to Hell, not the path to the glories of Heaven, which are open to those who work hard to get there, especially by eschewing worldliness in of its fancy allurements.
Indeed, Catholics are more and more susceptible to participating in the world because the world has been deprived of the Sanctifying and Actual Graces that people need to resist it. The barren sacramental rites of a false church, the counterfeit church of conciliarism, have Catholics and non-Catholics alike exposed to a veritable tornado from the devil that uproots from them all notion of eternal verities, no less an abiding commitment to the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church, the one and only true Church, for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. The chaos and lies and the killing that abound in our world today are in large measure the result of the loss of grace that has occurred because of the promulgation and institutionalization of the false rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not believe in the Social Reign of Christ the King, a doctrine of the Catholic Church that inspired countless kings and prices and queens and princesses and emperors of the Catholic Middle Ages to govern according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer as they kept uppermost in their own minds the fact that they would be judged by their Eternal High Priest and King by how well and just and diligent they were in pursuing the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, seeking to foster those conditions in their temporal realms wherein citizens could better sanctify and thus save their immortal souls as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.
The world in which we live today is one where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not reign as King and where His Most Blessed Mother is not honored as its Immaculate Queen is one where most every man will live and think and act and speak naturalistically, not supernaturally according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer as He has discharged It exclusively in the Catholic Church. The Faith must be shunted aside in favor or the pursuit of wealth or popularity or career success or in favor of this or than naturalistic"system" of economic, social and political "order" to which which must be rendered an assent of faith and a due submission of will at all times.
It cannot and it must not be this way with us, ladies and gentlemen. We must be deceived by the farce of the "battle" between the naturalists as the out-and-out-statists tell lies to protect their own power against its being diminished by the "conservative" statists while both combatants believe in the lies of Modernity.
We must grow in love more and more with God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church. We will come to hate our sins the more. We will seek to do voluntary penances for our sins and those of the whole world. We will be more attentive to the needs of the members of the Church Suffering in Purgatory. We will have more apostolic zeal for the salvation of souls, seeking to distribute Green Scapulars to those whom God's Holy Providence places in our paths each day. We will live for the Faith, not for the passing things of this world.
We must look beyond the naturalism of the moment as we trust completely in the mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, rendering unto that Heart of Hearts all of our prayers and penances and mortifications and sufferings and humiliations through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart out of which It was formed, the Immaculate Heart of Mary itself. Our trust must be in the Eucharistic piety and total Marian consecration as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our freely chosen states in life permit. We must resolve, once and for all, not to be anxious about anything in the world as we trust totally in the mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and and the intercessory power of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
We must stand up to evil in our own lives, rooting it out from our souls in cooperation with the graces sent to us by Our Lord through Our Lady's loving hands as the Mediatrix of All Graces, and fear never to call it by its proper name in the world or in the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its reconciliation with its false, anti-Incarnational and religiously indifferentist premises.
May the offerings we make to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially in this month of May, help to transform a world of lies into a world where He, the Way, the Truth and the Life, is recognized as the One and only Redeemer of men, that His truths have been entrusted for all eternity to the authority of the Catholic Church, which will forever champion His Social Reign over men and nations.
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
