Meet George Jetson
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Meet George Jetson, circa 1962.
Meet George Jetson in U.S. District Court in Chicago, Illinois, December 9, 2008.
The hair is a little darker. The cut of the jib is the same, however: smarmy. Yes, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, arrested two days ago, on Tuesday, December 9, 2008, on a variety of "pay to play" bribery charges, including attempts to sell his appointment to fill President-elect Barack Hussein Obama's now-vacant seat in the United States Senate, is a living, breathing real-life cartoon character out of central casting from Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Although the ravages of the after-effects of Original Sin and our own Actual Sins can manifest themselves in any one of us at any moment, causing us to fall into the devil's snares, if only temporarily, it is far easier for men who live in the midst of the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferent and semi-Pelagian lies of Modernity to fall into venality as they rarely, if ever, think of their mortality or the fact that there will be a Particular Judgment rendered on their immortal souls by Christ the King Himself. It is easier for men in this naturalistic world of Modernity to commit all manner of unrepentant sins and for those who hold power in the civil government to come to view themselves as "little caesars" who are entitled to make as much money as they can while they are in office.
Pope Pius XI, writing in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, explained that contemporary political disputes center mostly around power and money, not on the pursuit of the common temporal good in light of man's Last End:
To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives.
There is no need to link to the transcript released by the United States Attorney for Northern Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, on December 9, 2009, which contains the vulgar, profane language of the Governor of the State of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich and his wife Patricia and chief of staff, John Harris. Readers can find this quite readily. What is interesting to note from the news summaries of the transcript of the Federal government wiretaps of Blagojevich's bold efforts at selling public policy and at least one public office to the highest bidder is the tremendous sense of entitlement and invincibility exhibited by all involved. There is no sense of doing one's work for the honor and glory of God. There is only a frantic desire to drink form the public trough and to make use of elected office in order to "cash in," that public office and the "goodies" that go with it are indeed the "rightful" possession of those in office and the "public," fools that they are, exist to enable these officials to pick their pockets election after election after election. Blagojevich's case also involves at least the desire to get editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune who were critical of him fired in exchange for his help with the Tribune's efforts to sell fabled Wrigley Field on the near north side of Chicago.
This is, of course, nothing new in American politics. President Andrew Jackson helped to popularize the belief that the principal purpose of elections is to win elections in order to reward one's friends and supporters with government positions (patronage), thereby giving one's friends and supporters extra incentives to work hard for one's re-election and/or for the election of other members of one's political party. False accusations made against opponents, attempts to intimidate or silence opposition voices, outright fraud in the casting and counting of election ballots, rigged contract biddings, cronyism in the naming of appointees to run various non-elected offices and departments, extortion, blackmail, bribery and other unsavory means to secure and retain political power and the perquisites, including money, that flow from it have been a regular part of American politics from the late-1820s to the present day.
President Abraham Lincoln sought to silence his critics during the War between the States. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson had the Congress of the United States of America pass legislation during the First World War that, according to then United States Senator Hiram Johnson of California, made it "illegal" to criticize Wilson or his policies. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service and illegal wiretaps to hound some of his own critics. Former United States Representative Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Democrat Party primary in 1948 against Governor Coke Stevenson by a total of eighty-three votes as about 210 people in Duval County, Texas, voted in alphabetical order, mind you, at the same polling place with two minutes left before voting ended. Then United States Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the beneficiary of moves orchestrated by his campaign and City of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley to engage in vote fraud in the 1960 presidential election. President Lyndon Baines Johnson had the deliberations room at the Supreme Court building wiretapped and had three television sets in his living quarters in the White House so that he watch each of three broadcast network news casts to see if any of the anchormen were criticizing him. Sadly, we know all about President Richard Milhous Nixon's "enemies list" and other illegal activities, and can any of us ever forget the overt criminality of the William Jefferson Blythe Clinton White House or the lawless disregard for the Constitution of the United States of America exhibited by the outgoing President, George Walker Bush?
There is nothing, therefore, that should come as a terrible shock in the matter of Rod Blagojevich, who, like the former Governor the State New York, Elliot Spitzer, who had to resign nine months ago because of his own sense of entitlement and invincibility as he engaged in tawdry behavior, other than the fact that the raw nature of his bare-knuckled, foul-mouthed "pay for play" was recorded and that he, knowing that he has been under Federal investigation since he was sworn into office in 2003 and that his Republican predecessor, George Ryan, sits in prison at this time, continued to conduct his unseemly business without so much as batting an eyelash. Much like Spitzer, who kept up his reckless behavior until it was brought to light, Blagojevich was intent on running the Governorship of the State of Illinois like he was indeed a "little caesar" who was answerable to no one, not even God Himself.
Like Spitzer, Blagojevich is a truly despicable human being who has used his time in office to promote chemical and surgical baby-killing under cover of law. He, a member of the heretical and schismatic Serbian Orthodox sect, is one of the singularly most pro-abortion officials in public life, and that is quite a statement in a country where most public officials support chemical abortifacients in all instances and support surgical baby-killing under cover of law in at least the "hard" cases, if not at all times without any restrictions whatsoever:
In 2005 the governor issued an executive order forcing all pharmacists in the state to fill prescriptions for the abortifacient morning after pill. He boasted in a 2006 interview, “Rather than try to get the legislature to pass something—because we attempted to and they didn’t do it—on my own, through executive order action, I forced these guys to fill prescriptions for birth control for women who come in with prescriptions from their doctors.”
In 2006, after members of the legislature sought to overturn his executive order, he made known his intent to veto any bills that would have protected the conscience rights of doctors and pharmacists.
In a 2006 State of the State address, Blagojevich said, "Now, I understand that several bills have been introduced that would overturn my executive order to protect women's reproductive freedoms … So let me make something else very clear -- if any of those bills reach my desk, they are dead on arrival."
Also in 2006 he boasted to the Windy City Times, “I’m the only candidate in this race who is 100 percent pro-choice.”
He further explained, “Think about what we’ve been able to do since I’ve been governor. The reproductive freedoms of women are more protected in Illinois than any state in America. That’s in [stark] contrast to the advances and assaults coming from the Bush administration of Washington. We passed a law under my leadership to make insurance companies fill female contraceptives. Illinois had never done that before and we passed that law.”
In recent weeks the Illinois governor has garnered the praise of Planned Parenthood and other abortion-promoters by writing to the Secretary of the Department for Health and Human Services. In that letter he expressed his strong disapproval of a proposed Bush administration regulation that threatens health-providers with the loss of government funding if they do not protect the conscience rights of their health care workers. (Major Pro-Abortion Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich Caught Red-Handed.)
God is just. He deals with His sworn enemies in His good time. Some get dealt with at the end of their lives. Others get dealt with in this life. It is, of course, a great mercy from God to be chastised and corrected and humiliated in this life as these of some of the ways by which He calls souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross to repentance and correction by their being converted to the Catholic Faith or their returning to Its practice by means of making a good Confession to a true bishop or a true priest. Each one of our own sins is going to be revealed on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead. Those who do not realize or accept this are permitted by God to get a "sneak preview," if you will, of that Last Day in order that their strong wills are bent and their overweening pride broken to help effect a conversion or re-conversion to the true Faith.
Although many in the secular news media are providing Barack Hussein Obama (who wants, quite by the way, to use his full name for the inauguration on January 20, 2009, after claiming that various "conservative" radio talk show hosts were engaged in inflammatory or bigoted behavior when doing so during the election campaign that ended on November 4, 2008) with cover in the story of the governor of his home state, Obama is being exposed as a much as a liar as the forty-second President of the United States of America whose wife he has just appointed to be his Secretary of State. Obama is claiming that he never spoke to Blagojevich about the vacancy caused by his resignation from the Senate after his election victory (to be confirmed on Monday, December 15, 2008, as the electors march to their state capitals to cast the actual ballots for President and Vice President of the United States of America) thirty-seven days ago now. This contradicts what is chief aide David Axelrod, who is a combination of Karl Rove and Richard Cheney insofar as shaping Obama's strategies and policies is concerned, said on Fox News Chicago on Sunday, November 23, 2008:
"I know he's talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them." (Obama wants governor to quit over alleged Senate seat sell-off attempt.)
David Axelrod "correct" himself precisely sixteen days after he made that statement:
But on Tuesday, Axelrod said he was "mistaken when I told an interviewer last month that the president-elect has spoken directly to Gov. Blagojevich about the Senate vacancy. They did not then or at any time discuss the subject."
Earlier this year, Obama's incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told the New Yorker that Emanuel, Obama and Blagojevich's campaign co-chair, David Wilhelm, were among the top strategists of Blagojevich's 2002 gubernatorial victory.
On Tuesday, Wilhelm told ABCNews.com it was an advisory council that included Rahm and Obama but was not limited to them. He disputed the notion that Obama was "an architect or one of the principal strategists."
Emanuel himself later backed off his comments to the New Yorker, saying "like always [Wilhelm's] right and I'm wrong," ABCNews.com reported. (Obama wants governor to quit over alleged Senate seat sell-off attempt.; see also
7 Blago Questions for Obama)
What was that about "change" you can believe in? Politics in Cook County, Illinois, is as crooked now as it has been in the past, and Barack Hussein Obama has been a beneficiary of this crookedness as he rose through the ranks of power in the Cook County Democrat Party machine that was once in the control of the late Richard J. Daley and is now in the control of that Daley's son, Richard M. Daley:
Rezmar kept getting city and state funding, even as earlier projects fell into disrepair and financial troubles.
Rezko and Mahru couldn't find money to get the heat back on.
But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.
Obama has been friends with Rezko for 17 years. Rezko has been a political patron to Obama and many others, helping to raise millions of dollars for them through his own contributions and by hosting fund-raisers in his home.
Obama, who has worked as a lawyer and a legislator to improve living conditions for the poor, took campaign donations from [now convicted operator Antoin "Tony"] Rezko even as Rezko's low-income housing empire was collapsing, leaving many African-American families in buildings riddled with problems -- including squalid living conditions, vacant apartments, lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers.
The building in Englewood was one of 30 Rezmar rehabbed in a series of troubled deals largely financed by taxpayers. Every project ran into financial difficulty. More than half went into foreclosure, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.
"Their buildings were falling apart,'' said a former city official. "They just didn't pay attention to the condition of these buildings.''
Eleven of Rezko's buildings were in Obama's state Senate district.
Obama, now a U.S. senator running for president, has come under fire over his friendship with Rezko, who was charged last fall with demanding kickbacks on state business deals under Gov. Blagojevich.
Much of the criticism has centered on two real estate deals involving Obama's South Side mansion. In the first, Obama paid $300,000 less than the asking price for a doctor's home, while Rezko's wife paid the doctor full price for the vacant lot next door. Then -- a few months before Rezko was indicted -- Obama bought part of that lot from Rezko's wife.
But Obama's ties with Rezko go beyond those two real estate sales and the political support, the Sun-Times found. Obama was an attorney with a small Chicago law firm -- Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland -- that helped Rezmar get more than $43 million in government funding to rehab 15 of their 30 apartment buildings for the poor.
Obama role unclearJust what legal work -- and how much -- Obama did on those deals is unknown. His campaign staff acknowledges he worked on some of them. But the Rezmar-related work amounted to just five hours over the six years it said Obama was affiliated with the law firm, the staff said in an e-mail in February.
Obama, however, was associated with the firm for more than nine years, his staff acknowledged Sunday in an e-mail response to questions submitted March 14 by the Sun-Times. They didn't say what deals he worked on -- or how much work he did.
"The senator, relatively inexperienced in this kind of work, was assigned to tasks appropriate for a junior lawyer,'' according to an e-mail from Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. "These tasks would have included reviewing documents, collecting corporate organizational documents, and drafting corporate resolutions.''
In fact, Gibbs wrote, "Senator Obama does not remember having conversations with Tony Rezko about properties that he owned or any specific issues related to those properties.''
Rezko and Mahru had no construction experience when they created Rezmar in 1989 to rehabilitate apartments for the poor under the Daley administration. Between 1989 and 1998, Rezmar made deals to rehab 30 buildings, a total of 1,025 apartments. The last 15 buildings involved Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland during Obama's time with the firm.
Rezko and Mahru also managed the buildings, which were supposed to provide homes for poor people for 30 years. Every one of the projects ran into trouble:
• Seventeen buildings -- many beset with code violations, including a lack of heat -- ended up in foreclosure.
• Six buildings are currently boarded up.
• Hundreds of the apartments are vacant, in need of major repairs.
• Taxpayers have been stuck with millions in unpaid loans.
• At least a dozen times, the city of Chicago sued Rezmar for failure to heat buildings.
For five weeks, the Sun-Times sought to interview Obama about Rezko and the housing deals. His staff wanted written questions. It responded Sunday but left many questions unanswered. Other answers didn't directly address the question.
Among these: When did Obama learn of Rezmar's financial problems? "The senator had no special knowledge of any financial problems,'' Gibbs wrote.
Did the senator ever complain to anyone -- government officials, Rezmar or Rezko -- about the conditions of Rezmar's buildings? "Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as [a] matter of routine,'' Gibbs wrote.
Did the senator ever discuss Rezmar's financial problems with anyone at his law firm? "The firm advises us that it [is] unaware of any such conversations,'' Gibbs wrote.
Turns down Rezmar job; Obama's friendship with Rezko began with a telephone call.
It was 17 years ago. Obama had just become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Newspapers wrote about him. One story caught the eye of David Brint, a vice president of Rezmar, a new company that had become the Daley administration's favored developer of low-income housing.
"I just cold-called him," Brint said in an interview.
Brint said he wanted to know if Obama would come work for Rezmar, developing housing for the poor -- something Obama had expressed interest in, according to the story Brint had read. Brint arranged for Obama to meet Rezko, but Obama didn't take the job.
Obama, who has a law degree from Harvard, subsequently returned to Chicago to lead a voter-registration drive in 1992.
The next year, Obama joined Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, a 12-lawyer firm that specialized in helping develop low-income housing. The firm's top partner, Allison S. Davis, was, and is, a member of the Chicago Plan Commission, appointed by Mayor Daley. Davis was also a friend of Rezko. Davis and Rezko would eventually go into business together, developing homes.
Another firm partner, Judson Miner, ran the city Law Department under Mayor Harold Washington, one of Obama's political idols.
Asked what Rezko cases Obama worked on, Miner told the Sun-Times, "We'll put together a list of the cases he worked on involving Rezko/Rezmar in the next day or two.''
That was March 13. He never provided the information.
While at the law firm, Obama spent much of his time working on issues that would help improve conditions in poor neighborhoods, according to his first book, Dreams from My Father, published in 1996.
"In my legal practice, I work mostly with churches and community groups, men and women who quietly build grocery stores and health clinics in the inner city, and housing for the poor,'' Obama wrote in the book.
Three community groups represented by Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland were partners with Rezmar in the troubled housing deals.
Rezko offers Obama support
Obama had been at the firm for two years when he began his political career, running to replace state Sen. Alice Palmer.
Rezko became Obama's political patron. Obama got his first campaign contributions on July 31, 1995: $300 from a Loop lawyer, a $5,000 loan from a car dealer, and $2,000 from two food companies owned by Rezko.
Around that time, Rezmar began developing low-income apartments in partnerships with the Chicago Urban League and two other not-for-profit community groups, both founded and run by Bishop Arthur Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God and a powerful ally of the mayor -- the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., known as WPIC, and the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization.
All three community groups were clients of the Davis law firm. Davis himself was treasurer of WPIC when it went into business with Rezmar.
Why go into business with Rezmar? "We thought they were successful,'' Davis said, noting that little development was taking place in Woodlawn.
At the time, Rezmar had been in business for six years and had become one of City Hall's favored developers of low-income housing, managing 600 apartments in 15 buildings it rehabbed with government funding. Teaming now with community development groups, Rezmar rehabbed another 15 buildings, with 400 apartments, between 1995 and 1998. Each deal involved a mix of public and private financing -- loans from the city or state, federal low-income-housing tax credits and bank loans.
By the time Rezmar started working with those community groups, at least two of its earlier buildings were falling into disrepair -- including the Englewood apartment building at 7000 S. Sangamon where the tenants were without heat for five weeks.
The tenants there had no heat from Dec. 27, 1996, until at least Feb. 3, 1997, when the city of Chicago sued to turn the heat on. The case was settled later that month with a $100 fine.
It was during that time that the area's new state senator, Barack Obama, got a $1,000 campaign donation from Rezmar. The date: Jan. 14, 1997.
Obama works on Rezmar deals; Obama spent the next eight years serving in the Illinois Senate and continued to work for the Davis law firm.
Through its partnerships, Rezmar remained a client of the firm, according to ethics statements Obama filed while a state senator.
Davis said he didn't remember Obama working on the Rezmar projects.
"I don't recall Barack having any involvement in real estate transactions,'' Davis said. "Barack was a litigator. His area of focus was litigation, class-action suits.''
But Obama did legal work on real estate deals while at Davis' firm, according to biographical information he submitted to the Sun-Times in 1998. Obama specialized "in civil rights litigation, real estate financing, acquisition, construction and/or redevelopment of low-and moderate income housing,'' according to his "biographical sketch."
And he did legal work on Rezko's deals, according to an e-mail his presidential campaign staff sent the Sun-Times on Feb. 16, in response to earlier inquiries. The staff didn't specify which Rezmar projects Obama worked on, or his role. But it drew a distinction between working for Rezko and working on projects involving his company.
"Senator Obama did not directly represent Mr. Rezko or his firms. He did represent on a very limited basis ventures in which Mr. Rezko's entities participated along with others,'' according to the e-mail from Obama's staff.
Obama buys Rezko land
Over the years, Rezko, Mahru, their wives and businesses have given more than $50,000 to Obama's campaign funds, records show. And Rezko has helped raise millions more.
Rezko was among the people Obama appointed to serve on his U.S. Senate campaign finance committee, the Sun-Times reported in 2003. The committee raised more than $14 million, according to Federal Election Commission records, helping send Obama to Washington in 2004.
As a U.S. senator, Obama grew closer to Rezko.
Two years ago, Obama bought a mansion on the South Side, in the Kenwood neighborhood, from a doctor. On the same day, Rezko's wife, Rita Rezko, bought the vacant lot next door from the same seller. The doctor had listed the properties for sale together. He sold the house to Obama for $300,000 below the asking price. The doctor got his asking price on the lot from Rezko's wife.
Last year, Rita Rezko sold a strip of that vacant lot to Obama for $104,500 -- a deal Obama later apologized for, acknowledging that people might think he got a favor from Rezko. Obama called the episode "boneheaded'' and a "mistake.''
At the time Obama bought that strip of land, it had been reported that Rezko was under federal investigation for influence-peddling involving the administration of Blagojevich, whose campaign also received Rezko's financial support.
Rezko has since been indicted for allegedly demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state business under Blagojevich. Rezko's trial has been postponed while investigators sort through his finances.
'Disenchanted with Rezmar'
Rezmar's final low-income housing deals involving the Davis law firm went bad quickly.
Those deals were supposed to provide affordable housing for at least 25 years. But the first deal Rezmar struck with the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp. collapsed in just six and a half years, when the state sued for foreclosure. WPIC and its sister agency, the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization, ultimately forced Rezmar to give up control of all 12 buildings they rehabbed together, citing financial troubles and deteriorating conditions of the buildings.
The state foreclosure suit came because Rezmar had stopped making monthly mortgage payments in March 2001 on a state loan to help turn an old nursing home into low-income apartments at 6140 S. Drexel, in Obama's state Senate district.
"WPIC became disenchanted with Rezmar and wanted to get rid of them,'' Brazier said. "They thought the buildings weren't being kept up properly. There were some financial problems.''
Rezmar and WPIC cut all ties last October, when the Chicago City Council agreed to let Rezmar out of a city loan. Rezmar transferred its interest to The Wolcott Group, a management company run by business partners of David Brint -- the man who had introduced Rezko to Obama (Barack Obama and his slumlord patron :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES.)
It is not known how good a singer Rod Blagojevich is or wants to be. If he or his co-defendant John Harris want to "sing," however, they might have some interesting lyrics to sell to United States Attorney for Northern Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald. Barack Hussein Obama has been thigh-deep in the muck of Cook County machine politics and has profited it handsomely from it. It stretches credulity considerably to believe that Obama's highly-disciplined campaign-turned-transition team apparatus knew nothing of Blagojevich's maneuvers that were revealed two days ago.
Will any of this matter to the American public? Probably not. After all, and I try to keep hammering this point home, if most Americans are not concerned about the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn by means of chemical and surgical abortions, why should they be concerned about out-of-control government officials who believe that they are entitled to grab as much public and private monies as possible for having arrived at their pinnacles of power after campaigns based on one lie after another? The American public keeps putting these cartoon figures into power, demonstrating once again the utter farce that is electoral politics in this Judeo-Masonic "republic" that is of the devil, for the devil and by the devil.
Obviously, these profane, foul-mouthed, power-hungry, wheeling and dealing cartoon figures in American electoral politics are to be found throughout the nation. Blagojevich's antics just happened to get recorded for the sake of posterity (and for the sake of the Federal prosecutors' case against him). I have encountered many of these cartoon figures in my years as a political activist and as a academic conducting research into their activities. Perhaps an upcoming article should be devoted to some of these quintessential American cartoon characters who believe that the government exists for them to pick the pockets of taxpayers to keep them, the cartoon figures, in power. How dare anyone from the "public" seek to interfere with such a belief!
Although I have quoted the following passage from Pope Leo XIII's Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, frequently, it is worth quoting once again:
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.
Just take a look at the cartoon figure named Rod Blagojevich to see the prophetic nature of Pope Leo XIII's words from 108 years ago.
True, there were rulers during the era of Christendom who were venal and vulgar and coarse and impure and indecent and full of crookedness and deceit. Some of these rulers were even enabled by cowardly bishops who cared for their temporal privileges and who were afraid to give up their lives in defense of the Holy Faith (see England, 1534, for one such example). There were also instances, sometimes all too common, of clerical offices being bought and sold for money and/or favors. There were also, of course, the great rulers of Christendom whom Holy Mother Church raised to her altars as exemplars of the Social Reign of Christ the King. Their likes are not to be found in the United States of America precisely because of the fact that the heresy of Americanism has ratified the Protestant Revolt's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and placed a nation of men at the "mercy" of those whom they "elect" rather than under the Mercy of the Divine Redeemer.
The devil knows that there will always be stinkers among men who will give bad example. Many of us, myself especially included, have given bad example by word or deed in our lives. What the devil revels in today, however, is the fact that there are so few sinners today who realize that they must repent of their sins as they are Baptized or as they make a good, integral Confession to a true bishop or a true priest and that there is no one in public life who can be seen today as an exemplar of Christ the King to inspire such conversions of hearts and souls. The lack of such exemplars of Christ the King today is the direct result of the combined forces of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, making it easier for men of all "faiths" or no faith at all to engage in all manner of moral crime sprees against Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross with impunity and without a thought to the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.
While we pray for the conversion of the likes of Rod Blagojevich and Barack Hussein Obama, we must pray daily for our own conversion away from the snares of naturalism that convince us that our Judeo-Masonic "electoral" process is going to "change" things. It won't. It can't. We must focus on the reform of our own souls on a daily basis in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace so that we can, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, plant a few seeds for the re-conversion of the Americas to Christ the King.
Tomorrow, Friday, December 12, 2008, is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was on December 12, 1531, that the miracle of the Castilian roses and the miraculous image of Our Lady on Juan Diego's tilma were made manifest before the eyes of the then Apostolic Administrator (and later Bishop) Fray Juan de Zumarraga. We must pray Rosaries of reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world so that Our Lady's image will be so impressed on our hearts and souls that even thought of offending her Immaculate Heart again by sin will be repulsive to us as we seek out and profit from the Mercy of the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
There can be a Catholic States of America if we entrust ourselves to Our Lord through Our Lady. The likes of cartoon figures such as those in the news at present will be long forgotten. Images of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary will abound in our land as everyone exclaims with one heart and one voice:
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
