Lost in the Trees Without A King to Lead Them

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Pope Saint Pius X, writing in Singulari Quadam, September 24, 1912, explained that Catholics have an obligation to scrutinize everything in public life according to the teaching of Holy Mother Church. Although His Holiness was writing at the time specifically about labor organizations, his exhortation, as he made clear in his encyclical letter, applies to the entirety of the social order:

Accordingly, We first of all declare that all Catholics have a sacred and inviolable duty, both in private and public life, to obey and firmly adhere to and fearlessly profess the principles of Christian truth enunciated by the teaching office of the Catholic Church. In particular We mean those principles which Our Predecessor has most wisely laid down in the encyclical letter "Rerum Novarum." We know that the Bishops of Prussia followed these most faithfully in their deliberations at the Fulda Congress of 1900. You yourselves have summarized the fundamental ideas of these principles in your communications regarding this question.

These are fundamental principles: No matter what the Christian does, even in the realm of temporal goods, he cannot ignore the supernatural good. Rather, according to the dictates of Christian philosophy, he must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good. All his actions, insofar as they are morally either good or bad (that is to say, whether they agree or disagree with the natural and divine law), are subject to the judgment and judicial office of the Church. All who glory in the name of Christian, either individually or collectively, if they wish to remain true to their vocation, may not foster enmities and dissensions between the classes of civil society. On the contrary, they must promote mutual concord and charity. The social question and its associated controversies, such as the nature and duration of labor, the wages to be paid, and workingmen's strikes, are not simply economic in character. Therefore they cannot be numbered among those which can be settled apart from ecclesiastical authority. "The precise opposite is the truth. It is first of all moral and religious, and for that reason its solution is to be expected mainly from the moral law and the pronouncements of religion."

One of the most glaringly laughable aspects of an electoral campaign in the United States of America is the spectacle of naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and the "right" trying to discuss the "issues" of the day from a purely naturalistic perspective. Neither United States Senator Barack Hussein Obama, D-Illinois, the Democrat Party nominee for President of the United States of America in the year 2008, or United States Senator John Sidney McCain III, R-Arizona, the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States of America in the year 2008, think or speak in terms of First or Last Things. Both are penultimate naturalists. One, Obama, is a Marxist who was trained by a mother steeped in atheism and by a mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, who was a committed Communist and a perverted man who was steeped most arrogantly in unrepentant sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandment, about which he wrote in a pseudonymous novel. The other, McCain, is a naturalist who is full of inchoate, visceral feelings without any philosophical core to guide him as his speaks his "mind," such as it is, on the issues of the day.

Each of the two major organized crime families in the United States of America, the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, attempt to provide voters with some degree of a "rationale" for supporting their candidates for elected office. These "rationales" are provided in their party platforms, which do not bind anyone and are rarely the basis of the actual policies pursued by candidates if they win their elections to the offices for which their parties have nominated them. (See Facts Are Troublesome Things.) Both McCain and his vice presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin, for example, have made it clear that that they do not agree with the Republican Party's national platform plank on abortion, which calls for a no-exceptions amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America to restore legal protection on all innocent preborn children.

Political party platforms in most other countries of the world, especially in those countries that have a parliamentary-ministerial system of government, are indeed meant to serve as the basis of public policy. A political party (or governing coalition of political parties) in a parliamentary system is committed to implementing its platform agenda, which voters use as a basis to decide which party's candidates for the national legislature (Parliament, Chamber of Deputies, Bundestag, National Assembly, Diet, Knesset, Sejm, Duma, Cortes, whichever nomenclature is used in a given country) to support. Although there have been some creeping influences of the "American way" of conducting campaigns based on personality and viscera rather than on issues in some European countries, it is still the case in most countries with a parliamentary-ministerial form of government that voters understand that a particular party's programmatic platform is indeed going to serve as the basis of that party's governing policies if it wins a majority of seats in a parliamentary election.

This is not the case in the United States of America, which has a presidential-congressional form of government and a highly de-centralized electoral system that reflects the heterogeneity of a "pluralistic" society.

Unlike their European counterparts, American political party platforms are exercises in attempting to reach a delicate balance of appealing to a party's core constituency groups while at the same time appealing to so-called "moderate" or "independent" voters who might be prone to support its candidates if efforts are made to "speak" to their concerns. As I indicated in Facts Are Troublesome Things, even the chairmen of the committees responsible for writing political party platforms know their work will have little relationship to the implementation of public policy if its nominees get elected. Then United States Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Minority Leader of the United States Senate from 1959-1969, famously threw the bulky Republican Party national platform of 1968 from the podium to the floor of the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, on Monday, August 5, 1968, signifying the the platform's duties had been completed and that only historians or political scientists would bother to study it in the years ahead.

To be sure, this is not always the case. The Democrat Party national platform of 1972, which called for an equal number of women and men to be appointed to Federal positions and for universal health care provided by the Federal government, was one of the most openly ideological national political party platforms in the recent past, calling for "family planning" in one of its planks:

Family planning services, including the education, comprehensive medical and social services necessary to permit individuals freely to determine and achieve the number and spacing of their children, should be available to all, regardless of sex, age, marital status, economic group or ethnic origin, and should be administered in a non-coercive and non-discriminatory manner. (Political Party Platforms.)

For the most part, however, political party platforms in the United States of America are meaningless exercises, frequently guided by "focus groups" and other polling devices, in naturalism that are not the basis in most instances of campaign rhetoric or actual policy policy.

Indeed, there is no need to "grapple" with the "issues" of the day. The chaos we find abroad in the United States of America and elsewhere is the result, proximately speaking, of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry, which has helped to spawn endless types of naturalistic "philosophies" or quasi-salvific "ideologies by which men are supposed to organize their own lives and those of their nations. There is no naturalistic, secular, interdenominational, nondenominational, religiously indifferent, philosophical or ideological manner to "solve" social problems and/or to provide "order" within the souls of men or within a nation-at-large.

Thus it is, good readers, that American political party platforms--and most campaign rhetoric--winds up convincing even believing Catholics that there is something short of Catholicism, some sort of "common" ground, naturalistically speaking, by which the "greater evil" can be retarded, oblivious to the fact that the "lesser evil" advances the devil's agenda of naturalism more cleverly and with greater support from "conservatives" than could ever be done by a Marxist whose agenda is open and well-known. Efforts are thus made by well-meaning people to establish "conservative" or "libertarian" "principles by which "limited government" can be restored according to the naturalistic, anti-incarnational and religiously indifferentist "founding" principles, which are in and of themselves the very reasons why the civil state has grown so much and so inexorably (as I have demonstrated in a number of recent articles.)

Limited civil government is only possible in the properly ordered Catholic state, where citizens would be possessed of the sensus Catholicus and would not look to "government" for the "solutions" to problems that have their remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in our own Actual Sins. Individual issues that arise would be examined by Catholics in light of First and Last Things as they made honest efforts to apply the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in the concrete circumstances in which they find themselves. Catholics can disagree about the application of principles. They are not free to disagree about the fact that the Faith governs all of our actions, both personal and social, at all times.

Pope Leo XIII made it abundantly clear in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, and in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, that those who search for merely "natural' solutions to the problems of man search in vain:

The Church, it is certain, at no time and in no particular is deserted by God; hence, there is no reason why she should be alarmed at the wickedness of men; but in the case of nations falling away from Christian virtue there is not a like ground of assurance, "for sin maketh nations miserable." If every bygone age has experienced the force of this truth, wherefore should not our own? There are, in truth, very many signs which proclaim that just punishments are already menacing, and the condition of modern States tends to confirm this belief, since we perceive many of them in sad plight from intestine disorders, and not one entirely exempt. But, should those leagued together in wickedness hurry onward in the road they have boldly chosen, should they increase in influence and power in proportion as they make headway in their evil purposes and crafty schemes, there will be ground to fear lest the very foundations nature has laid for States to rest upon be utterly destroyed. Nor can such misgivings be removed by any mere human effort, especially as a vast number of men, having rejected the Christian faith, are on that account justly incurring the penalty of their pride, since blinded by their passions they search in vain for truth, laying hold on the false for the true, and thinking themselves wise when they call "evil good, and good evil," and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness." It is therefore necessary that God come to the rescue, and that, mindful of His mercy, He turn an eye of compassion on human society. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. 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.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established ( by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,-and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

We do not organize nations around the false principles of naturalism. We do not restore "order" in nations by the false principles of naturalism. Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

To wit, a Catholic possessed of the sensus Catholicus would have an understanding of the following basic truths, thereby eliminating most of the "issues" that are raised in the course of elections by naturalists who want to "solve" problems caused by the overthrow of Christendom:

The civil state has an obligation to recognize the true Church and to accord her the favor and the protection of the laws.
There are limits that have been revealed positively by God and that exist in the nature of things (the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law) that bind the consciences of all men in all circumstances in all places at all times.
No one, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, may defy the laws of God as they have been entrusted to the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church possesses the Divine right to interpose herself with the civil authorities as last resort when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention following the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching and exhortation.
Each man on the the face of the earth has a solemn obligation to submit himself to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church on all that pertains to the good of souls, accepting humbly and in a spirit of docility the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has revealed to us exclusively through the Catholic Church.
Social order depends upon order within the state of the individual souls of men.
Order within the individual souls of men depend upon their having belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace thus being equipped to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and to act according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has discharged It exclusively in the Catholic Church.
All of the problems of the world, bar none, are caused by Original Sin and the Actual Sins of men.
The only way to "reform" societies is for men to reform their souls in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.
The family is the basic unit of society and as such its members (father, mother, children) have an obligation to perform the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy for each other and to provide, as far as is humanly possible, for the spiritual and temporal care of close relatives (grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins) when they are unable to do so.
The virtues are to be cultivated within the family unit as worldliness is eschewed and as parents and children live here on this earth in light of their Last End, the possession of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Heaven for all eternity.
Each home should be enthroned to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary as each member within it is totally consecrated to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through that same Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
As far as is humanly possible in this era of apostasy and betrayal when the availability of true offerings of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass have been limited to a relative handful of locations, families must endeavor to assist at Holy Mass on a daily basis and to spend time as a family, at least on a weekly basis, before Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament. This is an antidote to worldliness and to naturalism.
Each family must pray at least one set of mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary every day.
Each family must read about the lives of the saints, preferably in conjunction with the Mass of the day.
Each family must be content to live in accord with the Virtue of Modesty, dressing and speaking as befits redeemed creatures, careful to avoid any degree of participation in cultural fashions or activities contrary to the good of our souls or those of others.
Parents must welcome as many children as God sees fit to send them, refusing to do anything to prevent the conception of children or to conceive children by artificial means if God has seen fit not to bestow upon them any (or with a particular number of) children.
Husbands and wives must understand that a Sacramentally valid, ratified and consummated marriage is indissoluble, and that there is no problem within the family that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer during His Passion and Death and that caused those Seven Swords of Sorrow to be thrust through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother.
Similarly, children must be taught there there is no cross (rejection by friends, a failing grade in a class, ridicule, ostracism, sickness, the death of a parent or other close relative, financial setbacks) that is the equal of what our sins caused Our Lord to suffer as He redeemed us, understanding as well that each cross we are asked to bear has been fashioned for us by the very hand of God Himself for all eternity for His greater honor and glory and for our sanctification and salvation.
Families, in conjunction with Our Lady's Fatima Message, must seek to make reparation for their own sins and those of the whole world, seeking to live in joy as they embrace voluntarily more and more penances to help convert sinners in this life and to come to the aid of the Poor, Suffering Souls in Purgatory.
It is essential for families to get themselves to the Sacred Tribunal of Penance on a weekly basis.
Families must not immerse themselves in the consumer mentality that is abroad in our land, being content with a sufficiency of the means of this world and making certain to give back unto God the first fruits of whatever material benefits He has bestowed upon them.
Parents must understand that they are the principal educators of their children, cooperating with their legitimate pastors and legitimate, truly Catholic schools to help them to be educated in all things, sacred and profane, in light of the Holy Faith.
Those in the civil government must understand that their first obligation is to foster those conditions within their jurisdictions that will be conducive for the sanctification and salvation of the souls of their fellow citizens, seeking to root out those things that are grievously sinful and thus pose a grave, if not fatal, threat to souls and to the commonwealth.
The civil government must pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, doing nothing to interfere with the sanctification and salvation of its citizens.

There has never been a time of perfection in the history of the world, not even in the era of Christendom. Human nature has been wounded by Original Sin. Social conditions will always suffer from the consequences of fallen human nature as manifested in the Actual Sins of men. Be that as it may, however, there is an essential difference between the Christendom of the Middle Ages and our present day: individual men understood that their sins were the source of the problems of the world and that the reform of their societies depended upon the reform of their own lives. They did not look to the "government" to "resolve" problems that they knew were caused by their own sins and those of others. And they understood that they would encounter personal tragedies that were their own responsibilities to address, aided by the Charity of others, starting with that of the Church herself.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, explained the glory of the Middle Ages as the Church provided for the needs of the dependent and the indigent:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest; retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a condition of things, the answer is -- beyond all question, in large measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great undertakings were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to completion.

Yes, Catholics are supposed to understand that social problems are to resolved in the institution closest to those who find themselves in need, starting in the family and then by the Church (whether at the parish or the diocesan levels). The intervention of the civil government comes only as a last resort.

That is, there would be no need for "debates" about "Social Security" or "health care" or even the proper, balanced care of the environment in a Catholic state.

As noted a few days ago, grown children would understand that it is their obligation, not that of the civil government or of the Shady Rest Nursing Home, to care for their elderly parents if they become unable to care for themselves. Grown children are supposed to be the "social security" program for elderly parents. Grown children are supposed to make sacrifices to return to their parents the constant care that was given to them, the children, when they were helpless infants. This is an obligation, not an option, of the Fourth Commandment.

Similarly, a well-ordered Catholic state would be possessed of citizens who understood that the maintenance of physical health is second to the maintenance of their spiritual health. While we have an obligation imposed by the Fifth Commandment to take reasonable care of our bodies and to refrain from engaging in acts of gluttony and/or intemperance in the use of alcoholic drinks or any use of hallucinogenic substances (whose use is designed of their nature to dull the senses and to diminish one's rationality, the subject of a forthcoming article on the evils of marijuana), none of us is going to live forever. The mania to preserve our physical health at all costs has increased in almost exact proportion to the indifference to our spiritual health has decreased in the past forty to fifty years. We are supposed to understand that acute sicknesses and/or chronic diseases as the result of Adam's Fall and that each is sent to us for the honor and glory of God and our own sanctification as we make reparation for our sins as the consecrated slaves of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

We live in a world where so many millions upon millions of Catholics, to say nothing of non-Catholics, are inordinately worried about their physical health and who believe that it is the duty of the civil government to provide them with the highest degree of health care imaginable so that their physical lives can be preserved for as long as possible. Such a worry about physical health places the good of the body, which is destined for the corruption of the grave until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day, over the good of the soul.

Some of the saints punished themselves severely by means of working as hard as they could for the sanctification and salvation of souls, dying at a relatively early age as a result. They did not "kill" themselves. They sought merely to work hard for the honor and glory of God as befits redeemed creatures without thinking about the physical consequences that they would encounter as a result. The glories of Heaven far surpass the pains of this passing, mortal vale of tears. We are not to spend our days inordinately worrying about what is "going to happen to us" if we have a heart attack or a stroke or are diagnosed with cancer. We are to spend our days glorifying God and making reparation for our sins as we prepare for the moment of our Particular Judgments. Indeed, the first call that should be placed for us when we are suffering from some life-threatening episode is to a true priest, not to "911," so that the Sacrament of Extreme Unction may be administered to us. The priority in such a case is the soul, not the body.

As we live in an anti-Catholic world that is in the grip of the devil, who hates God and therefore hates our immortal souls as they are made in the image and likeness of the One he hates, it is the case today that many, although far from all, medical professionals fail to view the human being as a redeemed creature and are thus prone to over treat someone who is near death or to consign to death those whose "profitability" is to be found in the marketing of their spare body parts or who are simply "inconvenient" for those who have to care for them. After all, it is a relatively easy thing for a profession that accepts the slicing and dicing of innocent preborn babies up to and including the day of birth to carve up human beings who are deemed to be candidates for voluntary or involuntary donation of their body parts and/or to use a morphine drip to slow stop a patient's heart. (For more information on organ transplants and "brain death," please see Dr. Paul Byrne on Brain Death (From The Michael Fund Newsletter.)

Consider some of the proximate causes of the vast increases in the costs of health care in the past fifty years or so:

Medications are prescribed to treat problems caused by the chemical additives that have been in our foods and in our drinks.

The chemical companies make profits by making products that make us sick.

The pharmaceutical companies make profits by making products designed to "cure" us of the sicknesses caused by the products made by the chemical companies.

Hospital administrators and insurance company/managed care company executives care about the "corporate" bottom line, approving payments for some but not for others, making them the equivalent of the supreme temporal judges as to who will live and who will die.

Some patients or their families bring lawsuits when "things" go wrong, as happens more often than not because there are not a few in the medical professions who are so bereft of their own understanding to treat each patient as they would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself--and of the responsibility they bear on their immortal souls for the proper treatment of the sick and disabled and the dependent--that they are slipshod in the performance of their duties. Other patients or their families bring lawsuits when "things" go wrong not because of gross incompetence or indifference but because of an oversight caused by simple human error. Still others bring lawsuits because they cannot accept the fact of their own mortality, believing that "someone" must be to "blame" for the fact that they have cancer or heart disease or multiple sclerosis or nephritis, thereby refusing to accept the cross that has been sent to them by God to help them to make reparation for their own sins prior to their deaths.

Catholic common sense would prevail in a country governed by the truths of the true Faith. A Catholic physician would use that Catholic common sense to say to a patient, "Look, you're ninety years old. There's no need to have quadruple bypass surgery. It's time for you to prepare for a good, holy and sacramentally provided-for death." Yes, of course, a person has the right to choose a course of medical treatment not prohibited by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. There does come a time, however, when a person should be possessed enough of the sensus Catholicus to accept his mortality and to understand that it is in many cases neither necessary or advisable to do the bidding of the giant hospitals and pharmaceutical companies if other circumstances (a husband or a wife's responsibilities to each other and/or their children, a pastor's responsibilities to his flock when no clear replacement is at hand, etc.) do not obligate one morally to at least consider an extensive course of treatment.

What about those in genuine need of legitimate medical assistance who cannot afford to pay for it? This is what the Catholic Church provided from time immemorial, replete with Catholic doctors, some of whom were members of various third orders of religious communities, who donated their services. The Catholic Church, not the government, used to be the institution which provided the legitimate health care to be given to human beings in the discharge of the Corporal Works of Mercy.

How sad it is that many of the formerly genuinely Catholic hospitals have been merged with secular corporations as the counterfeit church of conciliarism and the "religious" communities associated with it participate in a "bottom line" mentality that is of John Calvin and Adam Smith, not that of Saint John of God and the his Brothers Hospitallers or that of the love given by Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini in her own hospitals. Some of these "merged" conciliar-secular hospitals do hideous things morally and/or play a "shell game" by having the "secular" unit of the hospital kill babies and/or prescribe or dispense contraceptives or deny living human beings food and water while the "conciliar" unit of the hospital plays dumb and denies any knowledge of or control over what happens in that "secular" unit.

To look to the government to "fix" an alleged health-care crisis that has been caused quite specifically by the after-effects of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the infection of the "bottom line" mentality in many formerly Catholic hospitals now in conciliar control is quite misplaced. Alas, the civil state must become the true secular "church," outside of which there can be no personal happiness or social order, once people lose sight of the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Large numbers of people are, therefore, lost in the trees without a king to guide them. And make no mistake about it: people are looking for a king. They want to bestow "royal" status on someone, which is why there is still, sadly, a regal "aura" about the Kennedys, a family whose fortune was made in bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, forty-eight years after the beginning of Camelot.

Some believe that Camelot II will dawn upon us if Barack Hussein Obama wins the presidential election on November 4, 2008. And one correspondent sent me a rather sad note to state that a friend of his is comparing Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin with Our Lady, who never wore pants suits or mini-skirts and who warned Jacinta Marto in her hospital bed that many fashions would be introduced that would offend God greatly. As I keep saying, this is all insanity. Naturalists who know nothing about First and Last Things are sure guides on only one issue: how to keep a nation in the grip of the devil as symptoms of problems are "addressed" by naturalistic means without ever once understanding or accepting the fact that the reform of nations starts with the reform of souls.

People can look for their "king" or "secular saviour" in this or that election. They will never find any "solution" to the problems caused by Original Sin and our own Actual Sins.

A people who are quite sanguine about the daily slaughter of the preborn by surgical and chemical means will never be able to rest secure that their health or even their very lives will be "safe" in the hands of a health-care network managed and financed by any government.

A people content to spend their lives, objectively speaking, in states of Mortal Sin, oblivious to the harm that they have caused their immortal souls or the imminent peril to which they may have exposed themselves of losing those souls for all eternity. will focus inordinately on the health of the body.

A people unused to making reparation for their own sins and those of the whole world in a joyful embrace of Our Lady's Fatima Message will want anything painful and that demands the least bit of sacrifice from them to be taken away, anesthetized or indemnified by some government agency or program.

A people used to viewing the world naturalistically will continue to recoil from First and Last Things until and unless they are exhorted to quit their sins and to convert to the true Faith, seeing in it the only measure of true health, their spiritual health now and for all eternity:

For what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him? So the things also that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit that is of God; that we may know the things that are given us from God. Which things also we speak, not in the learned words of human wisdom; but in the doctrine of the Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God; for it is foolishness to him, and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually examined. But the spiritual man judgeth all things; and he himself is judged of no man. (1 Cor. 2: 11-15.)

We need a King, we need THE King, Christ the King, to lead us out of the darkness of the forests of naturalism so that we will be able to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and will not be in histrionics every four or eight years as this or that "worst ever" boogeyman and his "hold your nose" opponent view for power in our Judeo-Masonic system of falsehoods that continues to degenerate right before our very eyes. There is no other solution. None. And all I have to do to illustrate this point is to note once again that the millions who were histrionics eight years ago about the "worst ever" monster that year, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., now have to contend with the aftermath of the eight horrific years of the "conservative" socialist and war monger, George Walker Bush, who has almost single handedly made the Marxist nonentity named Barack Hussein Obama electable. (See: Y2K's Lesser Evil Has Brought Us Great Evils.)

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Annum Sacram, May 25, 1899, explained that Our King is indeed King of all men and nations even if they do not understand or accept his His Kinship over them:

This world-wide and solemn testimony of allegiance and piety is especially appropriate to Jesus Christ, who is the Head and Supreme Lord of the race. His empire extends not only over Catholic nations and those who, having been duly washed in the waters of holy baptism, belong of right to the Church, although erroneous opinions keep them astray, or dissent from her teaching cuts them off from her care; it comprises also all those who are deprived of the Christian faith, so that the whole human race is most truly under the power of Jesus Christ. For He who is the Only-begotten Son of God the Father, having the same substance with Him and being the brightness of His glory and the figure of His substance (Hebrews i., 3) necessarily has everything in common with the Father, and therefore sovereign power over all things. This is why the Son of God thus speaks of Himself through the Prophet: "But I am appointed king by him over Sion, his holy mountain. . . The Lord said to me, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me and I will give thee the Gentiles for thy inheritance and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession" (Psalm, ii.). By these words He declares that He has power from God over the whole Church, which is signified by Mount Sion, and also over the rest of the world to its uttermost ends. On what foundation this sovereign power rests is made sufficiently plain by the words, "Thou art My Son." For by the very fact that He is the Son of the King of all, He is also the heir of all His Father's power: hence the words - "I will give thee the Gentiles for thy inheritance," which are similar to those used by Paul the Apostle, "whom he hath appointed heir of all things" (Hebrews i., 2).

But we should now give most special consideration to the declarations made by Jesus Christ, not through the Apostles or the Prophets but by His own words. To the Roman Governor who asked Him, "Art thou a king then?" He answered unhesitatingly, "Thou sayest that I am a king" John xviii. 37).And the greatness of this power and the boundlessness of His kingdom is still more clearly declared in these words to the Apostles: "All power is given to me in heaven and on earth" (Matthew xxviii., 18). If then all power has been given to Christ it follows of necessity that His empire must be supreme, absolute and independent of the will of any other, so that none is either equal or like unto it: and since it has been given in heaven and on earth it ought to have heaven and earth obedient to it. And verily he has acted on this extraordinary and peculiar right when He commanded His Apostles to preach His doctrine over the earth, to gather all men together into the one body of the Church by the baptism of salvation, and to bind them by laws, which no one could reject without risking his eternal salvation.

But this is not all. Christ reigns not only by natural right as the Son of God, but also by a right that He has acquired. For He it was who snatched us "from the power of darkness" (Colossians i., 13), and "gave Himself for the redemption of all" (I Timothy ii., 6). Therefore not only Catholics, and those who have duly received Christian baptism, but also all men, individually and collectively, have become to Him "a purchased people" (I Peter ii., 9). St. Augustine's words are therefore to the point when he says: "You ask what price He paid? See what He gave and you will understand how much He paid. The price was the blood of Christ. What could cost so much but the whole world, and all its people? The great price He paid was paid for all" (T. 120 on St. John).

How it comes about that infidels themselves are subject to the power and dominion of Jesus Christ is clearly shown by St. Thomas, who gives us the reason and its explanation. For having put the question whether His judicial power extends to all men, and having stated that judicial authority flows naturally from royal authority, he concludes decisively as follows: "All things are subject to Christ as far as His power is concerned, although they are not all subject to Him in the exercise of that power" (3a., p., q. 59, a. 4). This sovereign power of Christ over men is exercised by truth, justice, and above all, by charity.

To this twofold ground of His power and domination He graciously allows us, if we think fit, to add voluntary consecration. Jesus Christ, our God and our Redeemer, is rich in the fullest and perfect possession of all things: we, on the other hand, are so poor and needy that we have nothing of our own to offer Him as a gift. But yet, in His infinite goodness and love, He in no way objects to our giving and consecrating to Him what is already His, as if it were really our own; nay, far from refusing such an offering, He positively desires it and asks for it: "My son, give me thy heart." We are, therefore, able to be pleasing to Him by the good will and the affection of our soul. For by consecrating ourselves to Him we not only declare our open and free acknowledgment and acceptance of His authority over us, but we also testify that if what we offer as a gift were really our own, we would still offer it with our whole heart. We also beg of Him that He would vouchsafe to receive it from us, though clearly His own. Such is the efficacy of the act of which We speak, such is the meaning underlying Our words.

And since there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another,therefore is it fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to His most Sacred Heart - an act which is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, seeing that whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ Himself.

You show me the candidate who agrees with this, my friends, and I will pray plenty of Rosaries for his accession to the halls of civil power! This is no such person. To enable naturalists is to get, believe or not and golly-gee willickers, Mister Peabody, more naturalists! It's that simple. A "good naturalist" perpetrates, guess what, naturalism, sometimes doing so with greater ease than the "bad naturalist" as the latter will engender more open opposition the former, who is always enabled by a bevy of wishful thinkers and other people who permit themselves into believing that "all is well" because the "bad naturalist" has been vanquished. Such is a formula to remain lost in the trees.

Pope Pius XI, writing in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925, put the matter this way:

The faithful, moreover, by meditating upon these truths, will gain much strength and courage, enabling them to form their lives after the true Christian ideal. If to Christ our Lord is given all power in heaven and on earth; if all men, purchased by his precious blood, are by a new right subjected to his dominion; if this power embraces all men, it must be clear that not one of our faculties is exempt from his empire. He must reign in our minds, which should assent with perfect submission and firm belief to revealed truths and to the doctrines of Christ. He must reign in our wills, which should obey the laws and precepts of God. He must reign in our hearts, which should spurn natural desires and love God above all things, and cleave to him alone. He must reign in our bodies and in our members, which should serve as instruments for the interior sanctification of our souls, or to use the words of the Apostle Paul, as instruments of justice unto God. If all these truths are presented to the faithful for their consideration, they will prove a powerful incentive to perfection. It is Our fervent desire, Venerable Brethren, that those who are without the fold may seek after and accept the sweet yoke of Christ, and that we, who by the mercy of God are of the household of the faith, may bear that yoke, not as a burden but with joy, with love, with devotion; that having lived our lives in accordance with the laws of God's kingdom, we may receive full measure of good fruit, and counted by Christ good and faithful servants, we may be rendered partakers of eternal bliss and glory with him in his heavenly kingdom.

Christ the King must reign in our minds, not naturalism of the "left" or naturalism of the "right."

The Rome of the pagan emperors was not converted at the ballot box. It was converted by the missionary activity of the Apostles and those who followed them, over thirteen million of whom shed their blood in defense of the Holy Faith. Why do we think the conversion of the modern civil state will take any less than that? Why do we think that we are exempt from suffering for the Faith? Why do we even think that we deserve some respite from the inexorable growth of the size and power of the modern civil state that is has arisen in the wake of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

Yes, of course, we beseech Our Lord's Most Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for mercy for ourselves and for our fellow citizens. Of course. God did, however, send the Black Death as a punishment for sins in the Fourteenth Century. We ought to reckon with the fact that while, yes, God is indeed merciful, He is also most just. Naturalism in and of itself is indeed a chastisement that leaves so many people in the darkness of a forest with seemingly no escape, a chastisement compounded with the counterfeit church of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with the very revolutionary principles of 1787 and 1789 about which Pope Leo XIII warned us as follows in Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892:

Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God.

This is why we must fulfill that part of Our Lady's Fatima Message that we are able to fulfill, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, being willing to suffer gladly anything and everything that we are asked to suffer for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and for the restoration of Christendom in the world. Our Lady wants to protect us in the folds of her mantle in these troubling times. Will we let her? Will we run to her as we renew daily our total consecration to her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart?

These words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Sapientiae Christianae and quoted above, should give us cause before we continue to rush into the insanity of listening the naturalist babblers babble on and on about "issues" that they do not understand clearly or fully because they believe in one naturalist falsehood after another:

Nor can such misgivings be removed by any mere human effort, especially as a vast number of men, having rejected the Christian faith, are on that account justly incurring the penalty of their pride, since blinded by their passions they search in vain for truth, laying hold on the false for the true, and thinking themselves wise when they call "evil good, and good evil," and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness." It is therefore necessary that God come to the rescue, and that, mindful of His mercy, He turn an eye of compassion on human society.

What can be a better description of the Judeo-Masonic electoral system in the United States of America? What can be a better description of the insanity of the naturalism of the "left" and the naturalism of the "right" now on fully display in the histrionics of the 2008 presidential campaign?

With full confidence in Our Lady's Immaculate Heart, may we rise above the histrionics, the silliness, the emotionalism and the naturalism to pray and to work for the restoration of the Catholic City as the fruit of the triumph of that same Immaculate Heart. We may not see the results with our own earthly eyes. Please God and by the intercession of Our Lady that we die in states of Sanctifying Grace, may it be our privilege to see the results from eternity, where those who have won the only election that matters, God's favor for all eternity, will praise and glorify Christ the King forever in Heaven.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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


© Copyright 2008, Thomas A. Droleskey. All rights reserved.