Modernity in the World, Modernism in the Church

by Thomas A. Droleskey

It is upon this day that we commemorate with sadness the thirty-second anniversary of the abominable decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Roe v. Wade. Having just commenced graduate studies in the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, word of the decision came as I was driving to an afternoon class. Baby-killing under cover of law until the day of birth by means of surgical abortion had been deemed a constitutional right by seven justices of the Court, five of had been appointed to the Court by Republican presidents (Dwight Eisenhower had appointed William Brennan and Potter Stewart; Richard Nixon had appointed Warren Burger, Lewis Powell, and the man who wrote the Court's opinion in Roe, Harry Blackmun). The current Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, was then an Associate Justice who voted in the minority on the case, being joined by Associated Justice Byron White, who had been appointed to the Court by President John F. Kennedy.

The decision in Roe had its remote origins in the events that precipitated the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century and thereafter, starting with the Protestant Revolt and the subsequent rise of Freemasonry. As I have noted in many other commentaries on this site and in my formerly printed journal, Christ or Chaos (1996-2003), the modern state is founded on the beliefs that it is not necessary for the civil government to acknowledge the Incarnation of the God-Man as definitional in the lives of men and their nations, that the Deposit of Faith the God-Man entrusted to His true Church is irrelevant to the pursuit of justice at home and peace in the world, and that it is not necessary for men to have access or cooperate with sanctifying grace in order for them to pursue "civic virtue." This is the ethos of Freemasonry, an ethos that has been embraced to a large extent by the documents and pastoral practices of the Church herself since the pontificate of Pope John XXIII.

The overthrow of Catholicism as the necessary foundation of civil order leaves a nation rudderless. Petty men who know nothing of actual history accede to and then leave positions of power believing in their own messianic powers to transform their countries and the world. Although the concrete manifestations of this rudderless approach to life and public policy take different names and different forms in different places and at different times, the fact remains that it is impossible for men to order their own lives and those of their nations without acknowledging the Social Reign of Christ the King and seeking to subordinate all of their actions, both private and public, to the Deposit of Faith He has entrusted to His true Church, keeping in mind the simple reality that the common good of nations is inexorably bound up with the seeking of our last end, namely, the possession of the Beatific Vision for all eternity by having persisted until our dying breaths in a state of sanctifying grace.

Consider these words of Pope Leo XIII's Immoratale Dei, an 1885 encyclical letter on the Christian Constitution of States, that have been oft-quoted on this site:

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 life, from 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.

A rejection of the Catholic Church as the only divinely founded institution to which has been entrusted the entirety of Divine Revelation, both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, leads logically over time to the deification of man and to the triumph of the power of the state to speak for "man" and his needs. Those who reject the divine origins and rights of the Catholic Church believe that they can interpret the only source of Divine Revelation they admit exists, Sacred Scripture, on their own without any ultimate authority to direct them. This leads to mutually contradictory conclusions as to the meaning of the passages of Sacred Scripture, which is why over 33,000 different Protestant denominations in the nearly 500 years since a lecherous monk named Father Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the church door in Wittenberg. It is a short step from the proliferation of mutually contradictory conclusions about Sacred Scripture to the abject denial of the historicity of Scripture itself and thus the rise of skepticism, if not outright unbelief, as being equally acceptable as some sort of ill-defined and ever-changing "belief" in Our Lord as that professed by the Protestant sects. And if one can come to mutually contradictory conclusions about Scripture, if not deny the Divinity of the Word Who was made Flesh in Our Lady's virginal and Immaculate Womb, well, then, it is relatively simple to deconstruct all written words of their objective meaning, including those found in constitutions and laws.

As the founding documents of the United States of America, being but an expression of the errors of Modernity, are based in an indifferentist view of the Incarnation and the Deposit of Faith, no role is admitted to the true Church to help direct men in the pursuit of the common good in light of their Last End. It is enough, we are told, that the Church is able to administer the sacraments to the members of her flock and to have a "place at the table" in the public "marketplace" of ideas. However, this view is, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Immoratale Dei, suicidal. A nation that rejects the Social Reign of Christ the King finds itself drifting in the direction of the lowest common denominator, something that Pope Leo saw so very well in his prophetic Testem Benevolentiae, which has been analyzed extensively on this site.

The embrace of religious indifferentism as the lowest common denominator was on fully display in the inaugural address delivered by President George W. Bush on January 20, 2005:

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Contrast the fruit of this country's signature religious indifferentism with the plain, irrefutable logic of Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei:

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.

The slaughter of the unborn in this country by means of surgical abortion is but the all-too-logical result of the belief that abject evils can be retarded by an appeal to the mythic powers of a nation's "ideals" and by the embrace of various forms of "conservatism" to preserve that nation's founding principles. A nation, though, that rejects the authority of the true Church and thus eschews the necessity of Catholicizing every aspect of its social life will wind up with its national leaders using its mythic ideals to serve as an anti-Church from which to launch an ideological, international crusade for the triumph of its ideals throughout the world as the only source of progress. The irony could not be more apparent: a nation that refuses to take action to stop the slaughter of the unborn ("the time is not right to end abortion," says the National Right to Life Committee, a shill for President Bush and his anti-life policies) and actually funds the chemical slaughter of the unborn in this country means of Title X programs and in other countries by means of "international family planning programs proclaims itself to be the best agent for promoting world peace. There is a word for this: madness.

Pope Pius XI wrote of this madness of the belief that nations and international organizations can provide the foundation for world peace. Writing in in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, issued in 1922, he noted:

No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.

It is apparent from these considerations that true peace, the peace of Christ, is impossible unless we are willing and ready to accept the fundamental principles of Christianity, unless we are willing to observe the teachings and obey the law of Christ, both in public and private life. If this were done, then society being placed at last on a sound foundation, the Church would be able, in the exercise of its divinely given ministry and by means of the teaching authority which results therefrom, to protect all the rights of God over men and nations.

It is possible to sum up all We have said in one word, "the Kingdom of Christ." For Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by His teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example. Jesus reigns over the family when it, modeled after the holy ideals of the sacrament of matrimony instituted by Christ, maintains unspotted its true character of sanctuary. In such a sanctuary of love, parental authority is fashioned after the authority of God, the Father, from Whom, as a matter of fact, it originates and after which even it is named. (Ephesians iii, 15) The obedience of the children imitates that of the Divine Child of Nazareth, and the whole family life is inspired by the sacred ideals of the Holy Family. Finally, Jesus Christ reigns over society when men recognize and reverence the sovereignty of Christ, when they accept the divine origin and control over all social forces, a recognition which is the basis of the right to command for those in authority and of the duty to obey for those who are subjects, a duty which cannot but ennoble all who live up to its demands. Christ reigns where the position in society which He Himself has assigned to His Church is recognized, for He bestowed on the Church the status and the constitution of a society which, by reason of the perfect ends which it is called upon to attain, must be held to be supreme in its own sphere; He also made her the depository and interpreter of His divine teachings, and, by consequence, the teacher and guide of every other society whatsoever, not of course in the sense that she should abstract in the least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and by that very fact make them the more deserving and certain promoters of their happiness here below.

The madness represented by the belief that American ideals of freedom will make the world better is mirrored by many of President Bush's conservative critics, most of whom refuse to acknowledge in their public commentaries that it is Catholicism that is the sole foundation of personal and social order. The Orestes Brownson Society is thus doing a great service by place this Nineteenth Century convert's writings on the internet, showing us what a Catholic commentator is supposed to have: true apostolic courage to profess the Catholic Faith as the only basis for individual happiness and social order, being willing to be regarded with disfavor by Protestants and secularists alike. The commentaries on this website reach only handful of people. There are Catholics who have the attention of millions of people worldwide. It is time for them to realize that the wisdom contained in the encyclical letters of Catholic Tradition bind the consciences of all Catholics, containing within them prophetic wisdom from which it is a sin to dissent and about which it is even a greater sin to keep silent. These gifted people must come to realize that they are part of the problem as long as they advert to conservatism or some secular society or some political party as the means to "restore" founding principles. We need to restore the founding beliefs of Christendom, namely, Catholicism.

For example, President Bush spoke in his inaugural address of his unprecedented power grab over public schooling:

And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time. To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society.

Public schools are places of abject evil. Although there are Catholics in work in them and try to mitigate the harm that is done within them, it is nevertheless true that public schools are evil in and of their nature. Consider the wisdom of Pope Pius XI in his 1929 encyclical letter, Divini Illius Magistri:

Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. . . .

From this it follows that the so-called "neutral" or "lay" school, from which religion is excluded, is contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist in practice; it is bound to become irreligious. There is no need to repeat what Our Predecessors have declared on this point, especially Pius IX and Leo Xlll, at times when laicism was beginning in a special manner to infest the public school. We renew and confirm their declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions. . . .

For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.

Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current term, the true and finished man of character. For, it is not every kind of consistency and firmness of conduct based on subjective principles that makes true character, but only constancy in following the eternal principles of justice, as is admitted even by the pagan poet when he praises as one and the same "the man who is just and firm of purpose."[66] And on the other hand, there cannot be full justice except in giving to God what is due to God, as the true Christian does.

Public schools thus help to perpetrate ideologies that reaffirm national myths, religious indifferentism chief among them, and that distort history to portray the true Faith as the enemy of human liberty and scientific progress. A nation that is founded on the specific and categorical rejection of the necessity of its confessing the true Church as the foundation of all social activity finds itself trusting in its own institutions to form future generations of citizens after its own fashion.

What makes it especially difficult for Catholics who subscribe without dissent to the entirety of the Church's Social Teaching to have any chance, humanly speaking, of influencing the course of public policy is the fact that the Church herself in her human elements is steeped in the same errors that have produced the modern state. The errors of Modernity are embodied in the Church at present in the form of Modernism. The errors of the Sillon, condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in 1910, have been embraced with zeal since the pontificate of Pope John XXIII, characterizing the spirit of the Second Vatican Council (especially Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae), thereby robbing those outside of the Church of the prophetic voice of Catholic Tradition, which saw the errors of Modernity (Protestantism, Freemasonry, Liberalism, Americanism, the French Revolution, Socialism, Communism, Nationalism, Materialism, Positivism, Utilitarianism, Nazism, Relativism, Statism, Nihilism, et al.) as enemies to be confronted.

Look, for example, at Pope Saint Pius X's far-seeing wisdom, expressed in Our Apostolic Mandate (On the Sillon), 1910:

The same applies to the notion of Fraternity which they found on the love of common interest or, beyond all philosophies and religions, on the mere notion of humanity, thus embracing with an equal love and tolerance all human beings and their miseries, whether these are intellectual, moral, or physical and temporal. But Catholic doctrine tells us that the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in the theoretical or practical indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren plunged, but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well as for their material well-being. Catholic doctrine further tells us that love for our neighbor flows from our love for God, Who is Father to all, and goal of the whole human family; and in Jesus Christ whose members we are, to the point that in doing good to others we are doing good to Jesus Christ Himself. Any other kind of love is sheer illusion, sterile and fleeting.

Indeed, we have the human experience of pagan and secular societies of ages past to show that concern for common interests or affinities of nature weigh very little against the passions and wild desires of the heart. No, Venerable Brethren, there is no genuine fraternity outside Christian charity. Through the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ Our Saviour, Christian charity embraces all men, comforts all, and leads all to the same faith and same heavenly happiness.

By separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, Democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization. If, as We desire with all Our heart, the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.

Finally, at the root of all their fallacies on social questions, lie the false hopes of Sillonists on human dignity. According to them, Man will be a man truly worthy of the name only when he has acquired a strong, enlightened, and independent consciousness, able to do without a master, obeying only himself, and able to assume the most demanding responsibilities without faltering. Such are the big words by which human pride is exalted, like a dream carrying Man away without light, without guidance, and without help into the realm of illusion in which he will be destroyed by his errors and passions whilst awaiting the glorious day of his full consciousness. And that great day, when will it come? Unless human nature can be changed, which is not within the power of the Sillonists, will that day ever come? Did the Saints who brought human dignity to its highest point, possess that kind of dignity? And what of the lowly of this earth who are unable to raise so high but are content to plow their furrow modestly at the level where Providence placed them? They who are diligently discharging their duties with Christian humility, obedience, and patience, are they not also worthy of being called men? Will not Our Lord take them one day out of their obscurity and place them in heaven amongst the princes of His people?

We see these errors today within the Church. They go by somewhat different names. Aggiorgiamento. Ecumenism. Inculturation of the Gospel into the Liturgy. Religious Liberty. Dialogue. Assisi. World Youth Day. Cursillo. The Charismatic Movement. However, the errors of the Sillon condemned by Pope Saint Pius X are the foundation of the entirety of the conciliarist ethos, making it almost impossible, humanly speaking, for the Church to confront an unbelieving world. Why should an unbelieving world abandon its belief in its own salvific powers when the Church's own shepherds, including the Pope himself, refuses to speak in unapologetically Catholic terms, starting with efforts to replace the foundations of the modern state with the Social Reign of Christ the King?

Consider once more the words of Pope Saint Pius X. He could just as well have been lecturing Pope John Paul II and his bishops as the members of the Sillon in France in 1910:

We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.

As for you, Venerable Brethren, carry on diligently with the work of the Saviour of men by emulating His gentleness and His strength. Minister to every misery; let no sorrow escape your pastoral solicitude; let no lament find you indifferent. But, on the other hand, preach fearlessly their duties to the powerful and to the lowly; it is your function to form the conscience of the people and of the public authorities. The social question will be much nearer a solution when all those concerned, less demanding as regards their respective rights, shall fulfill their duties more exactingly.

Moreover, since in the clash of interests, and especially in the struggle against dishonest forces, the virtue of man, and even his holiness are not always sufficient to guarantee him his daily bread, and since social structures, through their natural interplay, ought to be devised to thwart the efforts of the unscrupulous and enable all men of good will to attain their legitimate share of temporal happiness, We earnestly desire that you should take an active part in the organization of society with this objective in mind. And, to this end, whilst your priests will zealously devote efforts to the sanctification of souls, to the defense of the Church, and also to works of charity in the strict sense, you shall select a few of them, level-headed and of active disposition, holders of Doctors’’ degrees in philosophy and theology, thoroughly acquainted with the history of ancient and modern civilizations, and you shall set them to the not-so-lofty but more practical study of the social science so that you may place them at the opportune time at the helm of your works of Catholic action. However, let not these priests be misled, in the maze of current opinions, by the miracles of a false Democracy. Let them not borrow from the Rhetoric of the worst enemies of the Church and of the people, the high-flown phrases, full of promises; which are as high-sounding as unattainable. Let them be convinced that the social question and social science did not arise only yesterday; that the Church and the State, at all times and in happy concert, have raised up fruitful organizations to this end; that the Church, which has never betrayed the happiness of the people by consenting to dubious alliances, does not have to free herself from the past; that all that is needed is to take up again, with the help of the true workers for a social restoration, the organisms which the Revolution shattered, and to adapt them, in the same Christian spirit that inspired them, to the new environment arising from the material development of today’’s society. Indeed, the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators: they are traditionalists.

Well-meaning people will march (after braving the snows to get there on Monday, January 24, 2005) in Washington to commemorate Roe v. Wade. Most, although not all, of these good people think that they have a friend in the White House and that Pope John Paul II has advanced the cause of the unborn. Unbeknownst to them, however, the advent of child-killing under cover of law, both by chemical and surgical means, has become more and more institutionalized throughout the world precisely because the bulwark of Tradition, Holy Mother Church, has been weakened in her human elements by the embrace of the very errors that began to be unleashed with a degree of subtlety in certain aspects of the Renaissance and came out with demonic fury during the Protestant Revolt and thereafter. It will only be when the Church abandons her own embrace of the ideals of the French Revolution, which are enshrined in the ethos of the Novus Ordo Missae, as I point out in G.I.R.M. Warfare, and her concomitant trust in novelties and innovations that she can effectively combat the errors of Modernity, having thrown off the shackles of Modernism.

January 22, 2005, is not only the thirty-second anniversary of the dreadful decision of the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. It is the 106th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's prophetic Testem Benevolentiae, an Apostical Letter written to James Cardinal Gibbons, the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore. Pope Leo noted the following near the close of this letter:

But if [the term "Americanism"] this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.

The very sort of Church desired by those bishops in Pope Leo's time who subscribed to Americanism in the United States is the very sort of Church that has emerged since the pontificate of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Although Americanism is--along with the errors of the Sillon--a species of Modernism, which has taken different forms in different places around the world, it is nevertheless true that the very errors that Pope Leo XIII knew were undermining the life of the Faith in the United States, which were related to the errors going by different names at work in Europe, at the end of the Nineteenth Century could wind up infecting the entirety of the Church. The triumph of the Americanist spirit in the highest quarters of the Church, exhibited most recently by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's embrace of the American model of the secular state and cultural pluralism, demonstrates the far-seeing wisdom of Pope Leo XIII and why it is imperative to seek direction in our own times from his wisdom without any degree of dissent whatsoever.

Ultimately, President George W. Bush is a product of Modernity. Pope John Paul II is a product in so many ways of Modernism, of which the errors of the Sillon condemned by Pope Saint Pius X are only a part (Modernism is, as the sainted pontiff noted, the synthesis of all heresies, including those of Protestantism and Freemasonry). Intensifying our own practices of prayer, penance and mortification as we approach Septuagesima Sunday tomorrow, we need to implore Our Lady, Mirror of Justice and Cause of our Joy, to bend the heart of our Holy Father (or that of one of his successors) to consecrate Russia to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, thus restoring once more Catholicism to its rightful place as the basis of personal happiness and social order. The fruit of the Triumph of her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart will be the Social Reign of her Divine Son in the world and his reign once more as King in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.

Vivat Christus Rex!