Missing The Really Big Picture
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Francis "Cardinal" George, the conciliar "archbishop" of Chicago and the President of the United States Conference of Conciliar "Bishops," a man who is an enabler of perverted "bishops" and priests/presbyters, has said that the procedural vote in the United States Senate to table an amendment to ban the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund the surgical assassination of preborn children in the nearly two thousand page bill that would give us ObamaCare, a de facto nationalization of the health care industry, was a "grave mistake." The Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), a member of the Americanist sect known as the Mormons, has said that the ObamaCare bill is not an abortion bill, that we "can't afford to miss the big picture" (see Senate vote on abortion in health reform called 'a grave mistake').
Both Francis George, who was an enabler of the morally corrupt "Bishop" Daniel Leo Ryan and of "Father" Daniel McCormack (see Perverted Priest Transferred to Mental Health Center | NBC Chicago), and Harry Reid are missing the really big picture: that the provision of health care is not a function of the civil government. We have, as I have noted in other commentaries on this subject, arrived at a situation wherein most people have lost sight of the fact the principal function of the civil government is to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven. Neither Francis George or Harry Reid accept these simple words of Pope Saint Pius X, contained in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:
That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)
Statism has risen around the world directly as a result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution in the Sixteenth Century and by the subsequent rise of the vast web of inter-related naturalistic theories and philosophies and ideologies that we term collectively as Judeo-Masonry. It is impossible for men to realize and to keep a truly limited government that operates within the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication unless they submit themselves in all that pertains to the good of souls to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, recognizing that she has right--exercised judiciously and only as a last resort after exhausting her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching and exhortation--to interpose herself with civil leaders if the good of souls demands her motherly intervention.
Pope Saint Pius X, writing in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, explained something that I will go to my grave attempting to communicate to the very, very few numbers of people who read this site: that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order:
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
Just as it is impossible to restore Holy Mother Church on the basis of the multifaceted lies and apostasies and blasphemies and sacrileges of concilairism, so is it impossible to provide for the common temporal good on the basis of the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-pelagian principles upon which the modern civil state is founded and which lead inexorably and inevitably to the rise of the monster state under which we now live.
Dr. Raphael Waters, a noted expert in the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, wrote recently on what constitutes the just limits of the powers of the civil government:
Governments around the world are venturing into state absolutism, socialism, statism, totalitarianism, Communism, Fascism or whatever you like to call it. They apparently do not know that, in trying to take over several social functions and ownership or partial ownership of productive enterprises, they are offending the following arguments which determine the function of the state:
It is not the function of a government to conduct the following
• give pensions (e.g. social security);
• give food stamps;
• give health care;
• own instruments of business, transportation, etc. except public goods to aid its governance of common goods
• conduct a public education system, if it finds it necessary to establish public schools.
If a government finds itself in the position of having to establish a school system, or give health care or establish some other community aid, it should be moving towards divesting itself of the system right from the start so that lower organizations could take over.
It certainly is not the function of a government to make war on its own citizens, for example, by abortion, euthanasia and so on. Indeed it has a grave obligation to preserve and protect its subjects, the future of the extremely young and the frailty and wisdom of the elderly.
It is the function of a government
a) To govern, that is, to see that the citizens are able to obtain these things for themselves.
b) The practical principle of reason governing civil authority is this: The end is principle in practical matters. But what is the end of any society? It is the common good. Government is, above all, guardian of the common good.
c) Moreover, according to the principle of subsidiarity, what can be done by the lower ought not to be done by the higher. In other words, if the people can perform some function, the government ought not do it.
The common good consists of immaterial goods in society, e.g. civic friendship, peace, order, freedom, justice, a well informed public opinion, love of the law, love of the heritage of the nation, love of its cultural goods (those goods which are the object of the speculative intellect), love of the health and welfare of the citizens, and a healthy religious state in the nation. The common good of civil society is the following: What the citizens have in common, not what belongs to them as private goods.
The state should concern itself with what we have in common—the common good, not private goods. Note that the common good is not the sum of private goods. For example, the public funds are not the same as the sum of the private funds and the public health, the function of government, is not the sum of private healths.
The government does not obtain the common good; the people by cooperative effort obtain those goods. The legislators govern the people by watching over the nation and guiding the people so that all can share in these things which are perfectly divisible. Each of us by contributing more to the CG gets more out of it; yet by anyone sharing in it causes us not to lose anything since being non-material goods, they are perfectly divisible.
However, in an emergency, certainly a government should help the needy but also urging the rest of us to help them. But this should not lead to the establishment of a permanent national health scheme, educational system and so on. People are easily fooled by the economic mess in which we live as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They think in terms of jobs, working for a master, but not realizing that citizens should be owners of their homes and owners of the means of production—or, at least, shareholders in the means of production, not wage slaves.
The government should govern, that is, it should guide the community towards the common goods. This is done by means of informing the citizenry, that is, its function is an educative function.
We can determine the function of the legislature by the natural moral law which is discovered by means of an adequate understanding of human nature and, therefore, the nature of civil society and the function of government. What is proper to civil society and its government is determined by means of its end, which is the good we all have in common, the common good.
We must reject socialism as the following principles show:
1) The function of a government is to govern. That is, to shepherd society’s move towards the common good.
2) What can be done by the lower ought not be done by the higher (principle of subsidiarity)
3) A step towards dependence is a step away from independence (freedom).
It is quiet obvious that many governments have thrust socialism upon their citizens with many manipulations of the body economic and granting of so-called stimulus payments. Therefore, steps have been taken contrary to the welfare of the citizenry. (www.aquinasphilosophy.com/func-cv.htm.)
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, explained, contrary to the contention made repeatedly by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, that it is really not possible to pursue a just social order relying solely upon the Natural Law without understanding its precepts as they have been entrusted to the Catholic Church for their explication and without cooperating with Sanctifying Grace to overcome our fallen human nature and thus to grow in the virtues as we seek to scale the heights of personal sanctity:
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.
The religiously indifferentist and/or anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity must become an oppressor of its citizens over the course of time as the naturalistic spirit takes such a hold in public law and popular culture that is very difficult, humanly speaking, for even believing Catholics to see the world and everything it clearly through the eyes of the true Faith. Pope Leo XIII wrote about this exact phenomenon in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1900:
To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.
So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action.
One of the greatest crimes committed by conciliarists such as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict and Francis George is their refusal to recognize the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, believing that some kind of political ecumenism is "good enough" to retard evils that can be retarded only by the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith as men seek to grow in virtue and to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for their sins. Behold the rotten fruit of political and theological ecumenism as the conciliar "bishops" of the United States of America beg for ObamaCare as long as preborn babies do not get killed with Federal taxpayer revenue. Utter madness.
Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict can parade around in his strange regalia, which recently included a miter with two Stars of David embossed on its rear side, and extol the joys of false ecumenism and religious liberty and separation of Church and State all he wants. He continues to be an enemy of Christ the King and thus of the souls for whom Our King shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross by his refusal to seek with urgency the conversion of men and their nations to the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.
Tomorrow is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the day on which the Mother of God gave Juan Diego the Castilian roses to present to Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga (who had been appointed Bishop of the District of Mexico in 1530 but was not consecrated until 1533). Those roses had grown miraculously atop Tepeyac Hill. Our Lady had a second miracle to demonstrate through her faithful son, the fifty-five year-old widower Juan Diego: the miraculous image of herself that she left on his tilma that caused the theretofore skeptical Fray Zumarraga to kneel down in front of the astonished Juan Diego immediately upon seeing it.
A miraculous conversion of over nine million indigenous people in Latin America took place within a short time of Our Lady's apparitions to Juan Diego. Why do we doubt that such a miraculous conversion can take place in our own midst today? Why do we doubt that the United States of America can become the Catholic States of America following the fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message? What seems impossible to us is eminently possible with God. Should we not place ourselves in the crossing of Our Lady's arms and in the fold of her mantle and trust her to bring about now what seems impossible to us, the conversion of our beloved nation to the Catholic Faith?
As we continue the penitential season of Advent on the Feast of Saint Damasus, the great friend and supporter of Saint Jerome, may we keep close to Our Lady during these days of patient expectation, accepting the sufferings of the moment as a just chastisement for our own sins, lovingly forgiving all who attack us or who seek to provoke anger or rage from us, seeking ever more faithfully to bear our crosses with joy and with gratitude, making sure to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, offering all to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The lords of Modernity and of Modernism lose in the end. Our Lady's Immaculate Heart will triumph. May our patience in the bearing of the crosses of the moment, both at the hands of the conciliarists and of the statists, help us to plant a few seeds as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through Our Lady's Immaculate Heart for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and the restoration of Christendom itself.
We must never miss the really big picture: the restoration of all things in Christ the King through Mary our Immaculate Queen.
