Naturalism's Boomerang

by Thomas A. Droleskey

There was quite a telling editorial, "Redifining Marriage," in The New York Times yesterday, Saturday, July 10, 2010, in support of two decisions rendered on July 8, 2010, by Judge Joseph Tauro of the United States District Court for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in the cases of Gill v. United States Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. the United States Department of Health and Human Services that declared parts of the United States Defense of Marriage Act, which was signed into law by then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton on September 21, 1996. Here is a passage from that editorial:

There were two cases that came before Judge Tauro on this subject, allowing him to arrive at the same conclusion in two different ways. In one case, brought by Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, the judge said the marriage act exceeded Congress’s powers and infringed on the state’s right to regulate marriage. This does not appear to be a legitimate basis for overturning the act. Many of the biggest federal social programs — including the new health care law — deal with marriages and families, as the Yale law professor Jack Balkin noted on Thursday, and states should not be given the right to supersede them.

The judge made a better argument in the other case, brought by a gay rights group, that the marriage definition violates the equal-protection provisions of the Constitution. There is no rational basis for discriminating against same-sex couples, he ruled, discrediting the reasons stated by lawmakers in 1996, including the encouragement of “responsible procreation” and traditional notions of marriage and morality. In this argument, he was helped by the Obama administration’s obligatory but half-hearted defense of the law, which since last year no longer supports Congress’s stated reasons. (Editorial: Redefining Marriage.)

 

Behold naturalism's boomerang.

That is, behold what happens to a world founded in the belief that men can know personal and social order absent the Catholic Faith. Men who believe in this have no means to protect themselves or their societies from a gradual descent into total madness. Unrepentant sins whose objective gravity, leaving subjecting culpability and judgment of individual souls entirely to God, offends God and thus destroys all order within souls and within societies must abound in such a world of madness.

Although men can know the Natural Law (those moral truths that exist in the very nature of things and are knowable by human reason), albeit imperfectly, without light of Divine Revelation or the authority of the Catholic Church, they nevertheless did the light of Divine Revelation and the teaching authority and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church to know the precepts of the Natural Law perfectly and to be equipped by means of Sanctifying Grace to observe them. Human positive law (that is, those laws made by human beings in their institutions of civil governance) must be subordinated in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which the entirety of social order. It is impossible to produce the temporal common good, which must be pursued 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), while protecting under cover of the civil law and promoting abroad in popular culture grave evils that are threats to the very existence of nations.

Permit me to quote once again from Silvio Cardinal Antoniano that was cited in Pope Pius XI's Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

 

Pope Pius XI, though discussing "civil unions" to recognize men and women who were living together as a "married couple" without benefit of even a civilly recognized marriage, no less a sacramentally valid marriage, explained that the civil state has no authority from God to recognize and confer benefits upon objectively sinful behavior:

Armed with these principles, some men go so far as to concoct new species of unions, suited, as they say, to the present temper of men and the times, which various new forms of matrimony they presume to label "temporary," "experimental," and "companionate." These offer all the indulgence of matrimony and its rights without, however, the indissoluble bond, and without offspring, unless later the parties alter their cohabitation into a matrimony in the full sense of the law.

Indeed there are some who desire and insist that these practices be legitimatized by the law or, at least, excused by their general acceptance among the people. They do not seem even to suspect that these proposals partake of nothing of the modern "culture" in which they glory so much, but are simply hateful abominations which beyond all question reduce our truly cultured nations to the barbarous standards of savage peoples.

 

Contrary to what naturalists who label themselves as "liberals" or "libertarians" or even many "conservatives" contend, such things as baby-killing, whether chemical or surgical or both, or perverse sins against nature cannot be made "legal" by a decision or a court or by a legislative enactment or executive order or by a plebiscite to reflect "the will of the people," which is considered by many naturalists, especially the libertarians, as the "will of God" that must govern legislative enactments. In other words, human beings are demigods who are "free" to act as they desire, with a few exceptions here and there, of course, as long as the "will of the people" is observed. Naturalists of the liberal bent believe that judges and other potentates can do what they want no matter what the "people" may desire.

This is all erroneous as contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave until the General Resurrection of the Dead on the Last Day do not "determine" moral truth any more than they determine the physical laws of nature. The law of gravity cannot be "repealed" by a decision of a judge or of a president or of a government or a mayor. The law of gravity cannot be "repealed" by a majority vote of a human legislature or the majority vote of the "people" in a plebiscite (a referendum on a particular issue that is put to the voters at a general or a special election for their approval or rejection, sometimes originating as a result of legislative initiative or state constructional mandate and sometimes originating as as result of a grassroots petition drive to place a particular question on the ballot, which is called an "initial." one of the "good government" reforms of the Progressive Era). It is also true that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law cannot be repealed by the pronouncement of any judge or executive or legislative or popular enactments.

It is that simple.

That most people in the world do not believe this today is the result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the myriad of inter-related naturalistic forces of Judeo-Masonry that promote the falsehood that men can live as brothers as they "respect" different religious beliefs and even unbelief itself as they rely upon natural virtue to be good citizens.

As was the case with each of his two immediate predecessors, Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX, Pope Leo XIII used the weight of his encyclical letters, each of which binds the consciences of all people on the face of this earth that express immutable principles that no one can dissent from in the slightest, to explain the consequences of the fall of Christendom:

As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must necessarily tend to ruin if they go astray from "The Way." The Son of God, the Creator and Redeemer of mankind, is King and Lord of the earth, and holds supreme dominion over men, both individually and collectively. "And He gave Him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve Him" (Daniel vii., 14). "I am appointed King by Him . . . I will give Thee the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession" (Psalm ii., 6, 8). Therefore the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil thing for the common weal wherever Christianity does not hold the place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very end is lost sight of, for which, under God's providence, human society has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature. But when men's minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

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. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

 

There is no need to have a "Defense of Marriage Act." The fact that there is such a thing, whose "constitutionality" will be argued eventually before the Supreme Court of the United States of America on the grounds of whether the Congressional act is a proper application of the "full faith and credit" and "effects" provision of Article IV (Sections 1 and 4, respectively) of the Constitution of the United States (which it is) or whether the matter of the denial of "marriage licenses" to those engaged in perverse sins against nature is in violation of the "equal protection of the law" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (as Judge Tauro, who was appointed by one President Richard Milhous Nixon on September 12, 1972, to his lifetime Federal judgment, ruled in the case of Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services), is a sign of the madness in which we live.

Could imagine a "Defense of Gravity Act" (DOGA)? Men are given the capacity by God to know certain things that He had written in their very hearts, such as the simple truth that no central or national or state or local government has any "right" from God to enact laws that "permit" "marriages" between persons of the same gender? Marriage is not "defined" by a court or a legislature or by the people. God had told us what marriage is, and He speaks infallibly through His true Church, the Catholic Church.

Judges in England after the Normal Conquest in 1066 in the Catholic Middle Ages sat in courtrooms adorned by the Crucifix (and it is the Crucifix, not the Ten Commandments, that we want placed in our own civic buildings after the conversion of this nation to the Catholic Faith and thus the Social Reign of Christ the King; see Whose Commandments?, which was written in my "resist but recognize" period). They used their sensus Catholicus to apply the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law (those laws revealed positively by God in Holy Writ and Sacred Tradition and have been taught in His Holy Name by Holy Mother Church) in individual cases to, make decisions and/or to impose punishments that were in accord with the dictates of strict justice and were commensurate with and proportionate to the facts of a given case. This is how, at least in large measure, the body of law known as Common Law emerged in Catholic England. These judge also understood that they themselves would be judged by Christ the King at the moment of their Particular Judgments with an exactitude of scrutiny for all of the judicial decisions that they handed handed down during their service on the bench. This sense is lost almost entirely as a result of the triumph of the Protestant and Masonic spirit that has corrupted and perverted the notion of law and justice.

The contemporary madness to enact laws about every aspect of life is but the sordid heritage of Protestantism's reliance on the "written word" alone and its rejection of Sacred Tradition. Everything must thus be written down, although that which is written down can be as subject to "reinterpretation" as are the words of Holy Writ itself as there is no ultimate authority given to Protestants to which they must give full assent of their wills. Thus it is that we have a phalanx of written laws and veritable army of lawyers and constitutional law experts to interpret the law according to a variety of principles, some of which conflict one with the other. There are some things that are just supposed to do without their being written down because they have been written onto the very flesh of our hearts by God Himself in the Natural Law and because Holy Mother Church has been given to us to explain how each apparent moral dilemma in our personal and social lives can be understood according to right principles, true principles, immutable principles of Catholic truth.

A Catholic simply knows that a marriage is between a man and a woman and he does not need to codify that in the civil law. There was never any "need: to do this in the Middle Ages. There is a "need" now because we are living through the manifestation of the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles, based as they are upon Protestant errors and Judeo-Masonic naturalism.

The mania for everything being "written down in law" was a particular heritage of this hideous, bloodthirsty Catholic-hating people known as the Calvinists. It is their "contribution," as wretched as it is, that produced an environment where such laws as follows, many of which were on the books (although not enforced) in many states when Barbara Seuling's You Can't Eat Peanuts in Church and Other Little-Known Laws was published in 1975. Here is a brief list of such laws that are contained in that book:

You must have a doctor's written prescription to take a bath in Boston

           Wearing suspenders is illegal in Nogales, Arizona
           In South Dakota it is against the law for an eighty-year-old woman to stop and talk to a young married man
           A Louisiana law upholds your right to grow as tall as you like.
           It is against the law to sing out of tune in North Carolina
           In Brainerd Minnesota, an old law requires every male to grow a beard
           In Natoma Kansas it is illegal to practice knife throwing at someone wearing a striped suit.
           No one over the age of 88 is permitted to ride a motorcycle in Idaho falls, Idaho
           The law regulates the size of wheatcakes during bank holidays in Michigan
           California law is worded in such a way that it is illegal to trap a mouse without a hunting license
           A law in Idaho makes it illegal to give your sweetheart a box of candy weighing less than fifty pounds
           In Santa Anna, California, you are not permitted to swim on dry land
           It is unlawful to whistle on Sunday in Louisiana
           In Connecticut the law gives beavers the legal right to build a dam
           In Belvedere, California, the law states "No dog shall be in public without its master in a leash.
           Its illegal to cross the street on Sunday in Marblehead Massachusetts unless it is absolutely necessary.
           You cannot fish for trout from the back of a giraffe in Idaho
           In San Francisco you are forbidden by law to spit on your laundry
           In Massachusetts it is illegal to eat peanuts in church
           In Los Angeles it is against the law to us the US mail to complain about roaches in your hotel room.
          An ordinance in Pocatello, Idaho makes it illegal to look gloomy
           Minneapolis law makes it illegal to drive a red automobile
           In Marshall Minnesota it is against the law for women to shine their shoes on Saturday
           In the Pine Island district of Minnesota, a man must tip his hat when passing a cow
           In Knoxville Tennessee it is illegal to lasso a fish
           In Minneapolis the legal punishment for double parking is being put on a chain gang and being fed only
           bread and water.
           In Portland Oregon it is illegal to wear roller skates in public restrooms
           In Minneapolis it is illegal to install a bathtub in your home unless it has legs
           A San Francisco law requires that elephants on market Street be kept on a leash
           It is illegal to break out of jail in White Cloud Kansas
           In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a dog has the right to one bite
           In Indiana there is a law against taking a bath in the winter
           In Texas it is against the law to carry wire cutters with you in your vehicle (Illustrations : The Law.)

 

Crazy, you say? Yes. Indeed. As crazy as these laws were, however, not even the Calvinists and those who wrote laws like mad during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in state legislatures and city councils around the United States of America thought it was necessary to "define" marriage. Although the Calvinists would be loathe to admit this fact, they were still influenced by the vestigial after-effects of Catholicism in the world and by the outflowing of Actual Sins from offerings of Holy Mass that have been largely eradicated today by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and their bogus sacramental rites. A world where most people are deprived of access to Sanctifying Graces as well as Actual Graces will be one where they plunge themselves into what Pope Gregory XVI called in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, an "abyss," one that has been produced by Protestantism and sustained by the naturalistic forces of Judeo-Masonry and one in which so many Catholics no longer "think" as Catholics but as sappy sentimentalists who wax over false notions of "love" and "compassion."

Although the specific piece of legislation, the Defense of Marriage of Act, that was declared to be an unconstitutional violation of "states' rights" as protected by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America and of the aforementioned "equal protection" clause must make its way up to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and from there to the Supreme Court of the United States of America if at least four justices vote to grant certiorari to hear the case from whichever side loses at the circuit level, something that may take another year or two, just in time for the circus of the 2012 elections, it is interesting note at this early juncture that naturalists who oppose "same gender marriage" have no ultimately authority to which to appeal as, eschewing the authority of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the Catholic Church, they deal with proponents of special "rights" for those engaged in unrepentant acts of perversity who also believe that there is no ultimate authority on this matter. The devil thus wins as one group of naturalists tries to "defend marriage" on every ground but the supernatural while the other group promotes perversity on purely naturalistic ground.

Have you seen this phrase before? Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Catholics ought to be reminded of the simple truth that the civil state has an obligation to recognize the true religion and to be subordinate to the Catholic Church in all that pertains to to the good of souls, a truth that is immutable, as Pope Pius XI made abundantly clear in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 22, 1923:

 

 

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Let us make sure to use the weapon that was lifted high by Saint Pius X throughout his priesthood, Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, as we seek to eradicate sin from all our own lives, making use of the Sacred Tribunal of Penance on a weekly basis and spending time before Our Lady's Divine Son in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament as we offer up our daily acts of penance to His Most Sacred Heart through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as her consecrated slaves. We must never doubt the fact that Our Lady's Immaculate Heart will triumph.

Let us use the spiritual weapons that Our Lord has given us through His Most Blessed Mother, understanding these words that Saint Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Ephesians apply to us right now in our current ecclesiastical and civil circumstances:

 

 

Not serving to the eye, as it were pleasing men, but, as the servants of Christ doing the will of God from the heart, With a good will serving, as to the Lord, and not to men. Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man shall do, the same shall he receive from the Lord, whether he be bond, or free. And you, masters, do the same things to them, forbearing threatenings, knowing that the Lord both of them and you is in heaven; and there is no respect of persons with him. Finally, brethren, be strengthened in the Lord, and in the might of his power.

Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace:

In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God). By all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the spirit; and in the same watching with all instance and supplication for all the saints: (Ephesians 6: 6-18.)

 

 

 

Let us also remember these words that Our Blessed and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

 

Omnia instaurare in Christo.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

 

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Pope Saint Pius I, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?