Naturalistic Time Bombs

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The entire foundation of the modern civil state is false. That is, as I have tried to explain on this site repeatedly, the modern civil state contains within itself the seeds of its degeneration as it is founded on falsehoods that can lead only to one possible end: social disorder that necessitates the rise of the "leviathan," that is, of the monster civil state that exercises an increasingly greater amount of control of the lives of individual citizens.

Although most of the truths below have been covered in a succinct manner in A Catechism of the Social Reign of Christ the King, it is always worthwhile to review how a thousand different noxious forces at work in the world and in the counterfeit church of conciliarism attempt to convince us that there is something other than Catholicism that can serve as the foundation of personal and social order.

First, the modern civil state is founded in the belief that it is not necessary to for human beings to undertake everything in their daily lives in light of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, at the Annunciation, has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. This leads men to believe that they are more or less autonomous, that it is not necessary for them to be subordinate to the one and only true Church in everything that pertains to the good of their immortal souls. As Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, the only result of such a belief is the triumph of the spirit of practical atheism as the lowest common denominator for social thought and action:

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.

 

Second, the modern civil state is founded in the belief that men can be virtuous by their own powers, one of the essences of the spirit of Judeo-Masonry, and that men do not need to have belief in, access to, and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to live virtuous lives and thus "contribute" to the common temporal good.

These false premises have to produce a world where most men believe God is as utterly indifferent to dogmas of Faith as they are. This blasphemous projection of religious indifferentism upon the Divine Mind is necessary to foster belief in one false naturalistic philosophy or ideology as having the "answer" to problems that have their remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in the Actual Sins of men, including those men in the Sixteenth Century who revolted against the Catholic Church and her exercise of the Social Reign of Christ the King by means of the Protestant Revolution, and that can be ameliorated (lessened in their intensity) only by the daily reformation of souls in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace as men seek to live in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to and explicated by the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

The devil has delighted in convincing Catholics that it is possible to leave one's Catholicism "at the door," so to speak, as one embraces this or that naturalistic philosophy or ideology as the all-embracing "explanation" or "cure" of various social problems. Indeed, the devil has been so successful in convincing Catholics that the Catholicism is not the one and only foundation of personal and social order and that it is not necessary for the civil state to recognize the true Church officially and to accord her the favor and the protection of the laws that they recoil in horror when someone attempts to disabuse them of the naturalistic falsehoods into which they have fallen. Even some Catholics who reject false ecumenism in the theological realm embrace it politically without realizing that false religions are the enemies of the true God of revelation and that there is no interdenominational, nondenominational, secular, naturalistic, philosophical or ideological means to retard social evils.

We look to our true popes for the Mind of the Divine Redeemer on the Church's Social Teaching. Here is what a few of them have taught us as they have reiterated the consistent, perennial teaching of Holy Mother Church concerning the necessity of restoring all things in Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through His true Church. We do not look to the "talking heads" of naturalism, each of whom would be aghast at the contention that the passages below from our true popes bind the consciences of all men in all circumstances at all times as they are reiterations of truths from which no human being may dissent legitimately:

Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the soul without making it better, so it cannot enter into public life without establishing order. With the idea of a God Who governs all, Who is infinitely wise, good, and just, the idea of duty seizes upon the consciences of men.  It assuages sorrow, it calms hatred, it engenders heroes. If it has transformed pagan society--and that transformation was a veritable resurrection--for barbarism disappeared in proportion as Christianity extended its sway, so, after the terrible shocks which unbelief has given to the world in our days, it will be able to put that world again on the true road, and bring back to order the states and peoples of modern times. But the return of Christianity will not be efficacious and complete if it does not restore the world to a sincere love of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles. It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and the heiress of His Redemption.  It has preached the Gospel, and has defended it at the price of its blood, and strong in the Divine assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it, it makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which It has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its inviolable integrity. Legitimate dispenser of the teachings of the Gospel It does not reveal itself only as the consoler and Redeemer of souls, but It is still more the internal source of justice and charity, and the propagator as well as the guardian of true liberty, and of that equality which alone is possible here below. In applying the doctrine of its Divine Founder, It maintains a wise equilibrium and marks the true limits between the rights and privileges of society. The equality which it proclaims does not destroy the distinction between the different social classes  It keeps them intact, as nature itself demands, in order to oppose the anarchy of reason emancipated from Faith, and abandoned to its own devices. The liberty which it gives in no wise conflicts with the rights of truth, because those rights are superior to the demands of liberty.  Not does it infringe upon the rights of justice, because those rights are superior to the claims of mere numbers or power. Nor does it assail the rights of God because they are superior to the rights of humanity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)

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.)

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.)

Let the Princes and Rulers of peoples remember this truth, and let them consider whether it is a prudent and safe idea for governments or for states to separate themselves from the holy religion of Jesus Christ, from which their authority receives such strength and support. Let them consider again and again, whether it is a measure of political wisdom to seek to divorce the teaching of the Gospel and of the Church from the ruling of a country and from the public education of the young. Sad experience proves that human authority fails where religion is set aside. The fate of our first parent after the Fall is wont to come also upon nations. As in his case, no sooner had his will turned from God than his unchained passions rejected the sway of the will; so, too, when the rulers of nations despise divine authority, in their turn the people are wont to despise their human authority. There remains, of course, the expedient of using force to repress popular risings; but what is the result? Force can repress the body, but it cannot repress the souls of men. (Pope Benedict XV, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, November 1, 1914.)

When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. 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. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

 

Although the point below has been made many times on this site, it is useful yet again to point out, especially to newer readers, that these pronouncements are perpetually binding upon at all times. Those who dissent from them are Modernists. Who says? Pope Pius XI, that's who:

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.

It is necessary ever to keep in mind these teachings and pronouncements which We have made; it is no less necessary to reawaken that spirit of faith, of supernatural love, and of Christian discipline which alone can bring to these principles correct understanding, and can lead to their observance. This is particularly important in the case of youth, and especially those who aspire to the priesthood, so that in the almost universal confusion in which we live they at least, as the Apostle writes, will not be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive." (Ephesians iv, 14) (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922; see also The Binding Nature of Catholic Social Teaching)

 

The men who founded the United States of America, a prototype of the modern, religiously indifferentist civil state, the men who had a founding hatred for Christ the King, did not intend for there to be the social disorder that has ensued as a result of the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles upon which they, however inchoately, sought to build a framework of limited self-government replete with a complex systems of internal checks and balances designed to make it difficult for any one group or region of the country to exercise a tyranny of the majority in the making and execution of public policy. No matter that the founders did not intend for social chaos to ensue and that they sought to prevent such disorder by devising institutional structures (Federalism, bi-cameral ism, separation of powers, the electoral college, institutionalized protections for the ability of those in the minority on given issues to be given a say in the policy-making process) to maintain a stable body politic, a nation not founded on true principles must degenerate into a situation of social chaos and institutionalized immorality under cover of the civil law sooner rather than later.

The founders, in other words, gave us, yes, unknowingly perhaps, ticking naturalistic time bombs that were bound to explode sooner or later.

Truth be told, of course, those naturalistic time bombs started exploding soon after the nation's founding. Orestes Brownson saw the degeneration that was taking place right before his own very eyes in the 1840s as American electoral politics revolved around material well-being to the exclusion of any consideration of man's Last End, which, as Pope Saint Pius X noted in Vehementer Nos, must be aided by the civil state. How many Catholics today understand or accept the simple truth that the civil state has an obligation to aid man in the pursuit of his Last End?

Here are a few of the observations made by Orestes Brownson about the materialistic nature of American public life just seventy years after the Declaration of Independence, a document that nowhere mentions Christ the King or Mary our Immaculate Queen, explaining that a society that ignores or is indifferent to the Incarnation is bound to degenerate over the course of time:

What, then, is true national greatness? We answer, that nation is greatest in which man may most easily and effectually fulfil the true and proper end of man. The nation, under the point of view we here consider the subject, is in the people. Its greatness must, then, be in the greatness of the people. The people are a collection or aggregation of individuals, and their greatness taken collectively is simply their greatness taken individually. Consequently the greatness of a nation is the greatness of the individuals that compose it. The question of national greatness resolves itself, therefore, into the question of individual greatness. The greatness of the individual consists in his fulfilling the great ends of his existence, the ends for which Almighty God made him and placed him here. No man is truly great who neglects life's great ends, nor can one be said in truth to approach greatness any further than he fulfils them.

In order, then, to determine in what true national greatness consists, we must determine in what consists true individual greatness; and in order to determine in what true individual greatness consists, we must determine what is the true end of man; that is, what is the end to which Almighty God has appointed man, and which he is while here to labor to secure. What, then, is the end of man?  For what has our Maker placed us here? To what has he bidden us aspire? Were we placed here merely to be born and to die,-to live for a moment, continue our species, toil, suffer, drop into the grave to rot, and be no more for ever? If this be our end, true greatness will consist in living for this life only, and in being great in that which pertains to this life. The greatest man will be he who succeeds best in amassing the goods of this world, in securing its honors and luxuries, or simply in multiplying for himself the means of sensual enjoyment. In a word, the greatest man will be he who most abounds in wealth and luxury.

We mean not to say, that, in point of fact, wealth and luxury, worldly honors and sensual gratifications, are the chief goods of even this life; but simply that they would be, if this were our only life, if our destiny were a destiny to be accomplished in this world. It is because this world is not our home, because we are merely travellers through it, and our destination is a world beyond it, that the life of justice and sanctity yields us even here our truest and most substantial pleasure. But confine man to this life, let it be true that he has no destiny beyond it, and nothing could, relatively to him, be called great or good, not included under the heads of wealth and luxury. Nothing could be counted or conceived of as of the least value to him that does not directly or indirectly minister to his sensual enjoyment. No infidel moralist has ever been able, without going out of his own system, or want of system, to conceive of any thing higher, nobler, more valuable, than sensual pleasure.

But this life is not our only life, and our destiny is not accomplished here. The grave is not our final doom; this world is not our home; we were not created for this world alone; and there is for us a life beyond this life. But even this, if we stop with it, does not answer our question. We may conceive of a future life as the simple continuation of our present natural life, and such the future life is conceived to be by not a few among us, who nevertheless flatter themselves that they are firm believers in the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel. Every being may be said to have a natural destiny or end, which its nature is fitted and intended to gain. The Creator, in creating a being with a given nature, has given that being a pledge of the means and conditions of fulfilling it, of attaining to its natural end. Man has evidently been created with a nature that does not and cannot find its complete fulfilment in this life. He has a natural capacity for more than is actually attainable here. In this capacity he has the promise or pledge of his Maker that he shall live again.

The promises of God cannot fail. Man therefore must and will live again. But this is only the pledge, so to speak, of a natural immortality, and reveals to us only a natural destiny. It is only a continuation of our natural life in another world. The end we are to labor for, and the means we are to adopt to gain it, must be precisely what they would be in case our life were to terminate at the grave. Our future life being still a natural life, what is wisest and best for that portion we are now living would be wisest and best for that portion we are hereafter to live. Hence, what is wisest and best for time would be wisest and best for eternity.

Hence it is that we find so many who, though professing belief in a future life, judge all things as if this life were our only life. They look to the future life only as the continuation of the present, and expect from it only the completion of their natural destiny. They agree in all their moral judgments, in all their estimates of the worth of things or of actions, with those who believe in no future life at all. They profess to hope for a future life, but live only for time; because their future life is to be only a continuation of time. Hence they say, as we ourselves were for years accustomed to say, He who lives wisely for time lives wisely for eternity; create a heaven here, and you will have done your best to secure your title to a heaven hereafter.

Hence it is that the morality of many who profess to be Christians is the same which is adopted and defended by infidels. This is so obviously the case, that we not unfrequently find men who call themselves Christians commending downright unbelievers in Christianity as good moral men, and who see no reason why the morality of the infidel should not be the same in kind as the morality of the Christian. Hence it is supposed that morality may be taught in our schools, without teaching any peculiar or distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Morality, we are told, is independent of religion, and not a few regard it as sufficient without religion. So common has this mode of thinking and speaking become amongst us, that we heard the other day a tolerably intelligent Catholic, who would by no means admit himself to be deficient in the understanding or practice of his Catholic duties, say, that, if a man were only a good moral man, he did not care what was his distinctive religious belief. Many who go further, and contend that religion is necessary to morality, contend for its necessity only as a sort of police establishment. It is necessary, be cause the natural sanctions of the moral law are not quite sufficient to secure obedience, and religion must be called in by its hopes and fears to strengthen them.

Now all this is perfectly consistent and right, if it be true that man has only a natural destiny. We ought, in such a case, to judge all things which concern us precisely as if this were our only life. Religion could be of no value further than it strengthened the police, kept people from picking one another's pockets or cutting one another's throats. But man's destiny is not natural, but supernatural. Almighty God created him with a specific nature, but not for an end in the order of that nature, or to be attained by its simple fulfilment. He created him to his own image and likeness, but appointed him to a supernatural destiny,-to an end above what is attainable by the fulfilment of his nature,- to an end not promised in his nature, and which is not be stowed as the reward of fulfilling it. This end is to know and love God; but in a sense far higher than we can know and love him by our natural powers, and as he is now beheld through a glass, darkly, or seen dimly through the medium of his works, as we see the cause in the effect. It is to see him face to face, and to know and love him with a knowledge and love the same in kind, though not in degree, with which God knows and loves himself ;-this is the end for which man was intended, and which it is made his duty and his high privilege to seek. But this end surpasses the utmost capacity of our nature, and requires not only a supernatural revelation of God, but the supernatural elevation of our nature itself. It consists in our being made partakers of the divine nature in an ineffable sense, and in a sense above that in which we partake of it in being created after the image and likeness of God. Hence, St. Peter says, "By whom [Jesus Christ] he hath given us very great and precious promises, that by these you may be made partakers of his divine nature." So also St. John :-" We are now the sons of God, and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; because we shall see him as he is."

This fact in these times is overlooked. Men have wished to rationalize the Gospel, to find a philosophic basis for the mysteries of faith. In attempting this, they have labored to bring the whole of divine revelation ,within the domain of reason, and have been led to exclude, as no part of it whatever they found themselves unable to bring within that domain. Reason is necessarily restricted to the order of nature, and can in no instance, of itself, go out of that order. Hence, revelation has come very widely to be regarded as only a republication of the natural law, as at best 'only a running commentary on it, designed simply to explain the natural order, and not to reveal any thing above it.

Men who claim to be Christians, and even ministers of the Gospel, everywhere abound, who have no faith in the supernatural order, scarcely a conception of it. We spent nearly two hours the other day trying to enable a Protestant minister, and him by no means a weak or ignorant one, even to conceive of the supernatural; but in vain. So perverted had his mind become by the false theologies of modern times, that he could attach no meaning to the assertion, "There is a supernatural order." He could use the word supernatural, but it had no meaning for his mind not within the order of nature. Thousands are in the same sad condition. To them nature is all, and all is nature. Indeed, the word nature itself has no definite meaning for them. If a man by a word raise the dead, it is natural; if Moses smite the rock and living waters gush forth, it is natural,-all by a natural power, a natural law. Travelling in the same direction, they lose themselves in a wilderness of absurdities.

Natural laws cease to be laws imposed on nature, laws she must obey, and from which she cannot withdraw herself, and become forces, agents, creators. It is not strange, then that they lose sight of the supernatural destiny of man, and look only for a natura1 destiny, to be obtained not as a reward for obedience to grace, but as the natural consequence of the cultivation or development of our natural powers.  Read the writings of the celebrated Dr. Channing, or of the school which he founded or to which he was attached, and you shall never find a single recognition of the supernatural order, properly so called,-any allusion to a supernatural destiny. The highest end you will find presented is that to which we may attain by the unfolding of our higher nature, of our natural sentiments of love and reverence. The school goes so far as to contend that our nature is susceptible of an unbounded good, and that our natural sentiments of love and reverence are capable of an infinite expansion. Yet these are rational Christians, and they boast of their reason! They talk of the absurdities of Catholic theology, and see no absurdity in supposing that a finite nature may be infinitely expanded, or that a nature can be something more than it is without any thing super-natural.

But this by the way. The true end for which man is to live is the supernatural end to which we are appointed, the beatitude which God hath promised to all that love and serve him here. His true end is not the fulfilment of nature, but what the sacred Scriptures term "eternal life"; and "This is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." We cannot know God, without loving him. Hence we say, the end of man is to know and love God. But to know him intuitively, as he knows himself; for we are to see him as he is, -not as he appears through the medium of his works, but as he is in himself. We cannot thus know him naturally, for thus to know him exceeds the power of the highest possible created intelligence. We must be like him, before we can see him as he is,-be made, in a supernatural sense, partakers of his divine nature. To know him intuitively as he is in himself, is, however, the glorious destiny to which we are appointed, and to which we may attain, if we will. A more glorious destiny we cannot desire. In it we possess God himself, who is the sovereign good. Even here we find our highest good in knowing the truth and loving goodness, dim as is our view of the one, and feeble as is our hold of the other. What must it be, then, when we come to behold, by the light of glory, our God face to face, with no cloud intervening to obscure his infinite beauty, no distance between us and his ineffable love? Well may it be said, "Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what our God hath prepared for them that love him." He will reward them with no inferior, no created good; but will give them himself, will himself be their portion for ever.

But this supernatural destiny, since it is supernatural, is not naturally attainable. We may cultivate all our natural powers, we may fill up the highest and broadest capacities of our nature, realize the highest ideal, and yet be infinitely, -we use the word in its strict sense,-infinitely below it. It is not attained to by "self-culture," by the development and exercise of our highest natural powers, including even the boasted sentiments of love and reverence. It is nothing that is due, or ever can be due, to our nature. It is a gift, and can be obtained only as bestowed. But it will be bestowed only on the obedient, and is bestowed as the reward of obedience. Our destiny is eternal life, and the condition of obtaining it is obedience. Obedience is not, as some of the sects teach, the end for which we were made. We were made not that we might obey God, but that we might possess God, and we obey him as the condition of possessing him. (National Greatness)

 

Orestes Brownson understood that the very foundation of the United States of America was defective because it ignored the fact of the Incarnation and was premised upon man's ability to be good with the sanctifying or teaching offices of the Catholic Church. True national greatness is directly dependent upon the desire on the part of a nation's citizens to be canonizable saints. The naturalistic time bombs were exploding all over the place in the Nineteenth Century. So few observers saw this to be the case.

Pope Leo XIII understood the dangers posed by the heresy of Americanism, which attempted to superimpose the naturalistic beliefs of the American founding upon the Faith, thereby perverting and distorting how Catholics viewed the world. Pope Leo XIII, writing in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, understood that Catholics in the United States of America, exposed to a steady diet of Calvinist materialism and religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and pluralism and naturalism would come to view Holy Mother Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith, which is, of course, exactly what has happened. This is how Pope Leo XIII put the matter in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, an Apostolical Letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, the longtime Americanist archbishop of Baltimore:

But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.

In the apostolic letters concerning the constitution of states, addressed by us to the bishops of the whole Church, we discussed this point at length; and there set forth the difference existing between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.

 

Most Catholics today, influenced by the naturalism of Americanism and the ethos of conciliarism that is a progeny of Americanism, do not understand Holy Mother Church to be a "divine society" that is different" from "all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice men." Most Catholics today indeed have been influenced into thinking that the Catholic Faith is not the sole foundation of personal and social order, attacking with great bitterness and vindictiveness anyone who points out their defections from the Faith concerning the obligation of the civil state to recognize the true Church and to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End.

The naturalistic time bombs of Americanism have gone off in many different directions.

Some Catholics who subscribe to one or more of the variations of the "leftist" brand of naturalism believe in the ability of the civil state to resolve various social problems by the use of confiscatory taxation and the ever-increasing size, scope and power of that civil state, being completely indifferent to, if not totally supportive of, one moral evil after another, including the direct, intentional taking of innocent preborn human life (see Another Victim of Americanism, Behold The Free Rein Given to Error, Unfortunate Enough to Be A Baby, Beacon of Social Justice?, Spotlight On The Ordinary, What's Good For Teddy Is Good For Benny, Sean O'Malley: Coward and Hypocrite, More Rationalizations and Distortions, and Death To Babies: Kennedy's Continued Legacy).

Other Catholics, those who subscribe one or more of the "rightist" brand of naturalism, believe in the myths of the American founding fathers, that is is possible to have a "limited" government without according the Catholic Church her Divinely-instituted right to exercise the Social Reign of Christ the King when her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation fails to convince civil officials of their duty to subordinate public policy to the Deposit of Faith in grave matters pertaining to the good of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Yet others, inebriated with the falsehoods of libertarianism, subscribe to the thoroughly naturalistic belief that state legislatures have the "right" to "decide" the legal permissibility of the direct, intentional killing of innocent preborn babies, whether by surgical means, or to permit those engaged in perverse acts in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments to "marry" with the "blessing" of the civil state according to the "will" of the "people" in a particular state. These poorly deluded Catholics, some of whom are absolutely contemptuous of the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church and do indeed fall under Pope Pius XI's condemnation as "moral, legal, and social" Modernists, do not understand that no human institution at any level of governance (state, local, national, provincial, territorial, supranational) has any authority to enact legislation contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

That so few Catholics, including so few Catholics who assist at chapels administered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of the conciliar "shepherds" who embrace the falsehoods of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State, understand any of this today is part of the Chastisement being visited upon us as a result of our own sins, our own infidelities.

What is true in the pluralistic United States of America is also true in once thoroughly Catholic Ireland today. The people of Ireland, having succumbed to the naturalistic fairy tales of the Treaty of Lisbon and its alleged "guarantees" for the right to life in the Irish Constitution, will find themselves unable to resist the "educational" efforts of the pro-abortion apparatchiks within the bureaucracies of the European Union to change the Irish Constitution so that it is "in line" with the rest of Europe, steeped in the throes of one naturalistic lie after another. Any nation, no less one with a thoroughly Catholic heritage, that surrenders itself into the hands of a supranational organization replete with enemies of the Catholic Faith will find itself suffering from the effects of naturalistic time bombs there just as much as has been case in the United States of America, where most Catholics do not give a thought at to the Holy Faith in the context of their daily lives, no less to its application in public policy and popular culture.

It cannot be that way with us. We must strive to be Catholic at all times as we make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, offering ourselves entirely to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.  And what a wonderful thing it would be if more and more Catholics drank from the mystical insights of the saint whose blessed life we commemorate today, Saint Bridget of Sweden, who was favored with revelations about the sufferings that our sins imposed upon Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death.

We can retard the naturalistic time bombs of Modernity and Modernism with every Rosary we pray. Every Rosary we pray can help some soul to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith, thereby coming to understand and to accept the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Every Rosary we pray can help some soul to recognize that he has an obligation to pray and to work for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King as the fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary following the fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message by a true pope and all of the world's true bishops.

How will all things be restored in Christ? Miraculously. God specializes in miracles, does He not? Our Lady's apparitions to Juan Diego in Mexico 478 years ago resulted in the miraculous conversion of over nine million indigenous people in the Americas. Why do we doubt that the faithful fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message by a true pope and all of the world's true bishops could so the same?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Knock, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints