by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Having over thirty years of "up close and personal" experience as a college professor with at least a few colleagues who professed themselves to be so very "tolerant" but who were never satisfied unless anyone who held views contrary to theirs was intimidated into silence or fired, it is never surprising to me in the slightest that naturalists of the false opposite of the "left" are never satisfied with the results of the farces called elections that put into office those holding "proscribed" views. The "left's" relentless assaults on those who are, in their eyes, stupid or superstitious enough to disagree with them and to attempt to carry out while in office the very things that they promised to do in their successful campaigns for office make members of La Cosa Nostra seem like rank amateurs in the art of intimidation and blackmail.
Many commentators have written on the Wisconsin recall election of Governor Scott Walker that took place on Tuesday, June 6, 2012, that was engineered by a variety of civil service union thugs who were upset about the fact that Walker meant what he said when he campaigned for the governorship in 2010. These civil service union thugs were not "happy campers" when Walker, then the County Executive of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, defeated the Mayor of the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Thomas Mark Barrett, a pro-abortion Catholic who has been kept in "good standing" in in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism by the likes of conciliar "archbishops" Rembert George Weakland, Timothy Michael Dolan and, most recently, Jerome Listecki, on Tuesday, November 2, 2010, by a margin of 52.29% to 46.52%.. What a sad commentary on the state of the conciliar church when it is the son of a Baptist minister, Scott Walker, who is seen as pro-life while the Catholic, Thomas Barrett, is fully in support the chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn children under cover of the civil law.
Scott Walker prevailed again in the recall election that took place three days ago, defeating Barrett by a a slightly wider margin than he had nineteen months ago now, registering 53.1% to Barrett's 46.3%.
If you want commentary about this matter form naturalists, well, you know that are many naturalists whose work you can read. This commentary, however, is going to focus on root causes and their proximate consequences.
Needless Civil Strife As A Result of the Overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King
Men have been battling with each other ever since Cain, upset that God had found father with with his brother's sacrifice and not his own, slew his brother Abel and then sought to deny that he knew what had happened to him before he admitted to God what he had done:
[1] And Adam knew Eve his wife: who conceived and brought forth Cain, saying: I have gotten a man through God. [2] And again she brought forth his brother Abel. And Abel was a shepherd, and Cain a husbandman. [3] And it came to pass after many days, that Cain offered, of the fruits of the earth, gifts to the Lord. [4] Abel also offered of the firstlings of his flock, and of their fat: and the Lord had respect to Abel, and to his offerings. [5] But to Cain and his offerings he had no respect: and Cain was exceedingly angry, and his countenance fell.
[6] And the Lord said to him: Why art thou angry? and why is thy countenance fallen? [7] If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? but if ill, shall not sin
forthwith be present at the door? but the lust thereof shall be under
thee, and thou shalt have dominion over it. [8] And
Cain said to Abel his brother: Let us go forth abroad. And when they
were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him.[9] And the Lord said to Cain: Where is thy brother Abel? And he answered, I know not: am I my brother's keeper? [10] And he said to him: What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth.
[11] Now, therefore, cursed shalt thou be upon the earth, which hath opened
her mouth and received the blood of thy brother at thy hand. [12] When thou shalt till it, it shall not yield to thee its fruit: a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be upon the earth. [13] And Cain said to the Lord: My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon. [14] Behold thou dost cast me out this day from the face of the earth, and I
shall be hidden from thy face, and I shall be a vagabond and a fugitive
on the earth: every one, therefore, that findeth me, shall kill me. [15] And the Lord said to him: No, it shall not be so: but whosoever shall kill Cain, shall be punished sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him. (Genesis 4: 1-15.)
Husbands have battled wives, wives have battled husbands, parents and children have battled each other. King David himself was opposed by his own son Absalom. David, of whose own house Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born of His Most Blessed Mother, wept over his rebellious son's death because he was concerned over the state of the poor's soul when died, knowing that he had rebelled against the Fourth Commandment itself:
[31] And when he bad passed, and stood still, Chusai appeared: and coming up
he said: I bring good tidings, my lord, the king, for the Lord hath
judged for thee this day from the hand of all that have risen up against
thee. [32] And the king said to Chusai: Is the young man Absalom safe? And Chusai
answering him, said: Let the enemies of my lord, the king, and all that
rise against him unto evil, be as the young man is. [33] The king therefore being much moved, went up to the high chamber over
the gate, and wept. And as he went he spoke in this manner: My son
Absalom, Absalom my son: would to God that I might die for thee, Absalom my son, my son Absalom. (2 Kings 18: 31-33.)
Conflict between human beings is just part of the consequences of Original Sin and of the Actual Sins of men.
There was conflict aplenty even during the years of Christendom. Intrigue fueled by personal ambitions, rivalries of one sort or another or by motivations of revenge were all too common in royal courts, including the most important royal court on the face of the earth, the papal household. Christian kings and emperors made war upon each other. Infighting among generals and their officers of the same army shaped the outcome of battles. Indeed, as depicted fairly accurately in For Greater Glory, which will be the subject of tomorrow's commentary, there was great mistrust among the leaders of the Cristeros in Mexico.
Additionally, of course, human nature being what it is, sloth, one of the seven deadly or capital sins, manifested itself all too frequently even during the High Middle Ages as those who served at court or in various administrative capacities in the service of the crown and the enforcement of laws preferred to exert the least possible effort just to "get through" a given day.
All of this having been noted, however, it is also true that men in the era of Christendom were not divided on matters of Faith and Morals, on matters of First and Last Things. While they may have had great difficulties on occasion in keeping God's laws and thus of practicing the Holy Faith well, they nevertheless knew what was right and wrong and were united in their beliefs in the tenets of the Catholic Faith.
Pope Pius XII noted this in Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939:
It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through
identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free
from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps
they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of
settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the
just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by
restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable
settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from
the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis
which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939.)
It was Martin Luther's rebellion against the Divine Plan that God Himself had instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church that divided men over First and Last Things, thus paving the way for the triumph of secular substitutes for religious faith in general just as Luther had substituted his own heretical views of Christianity in the place of the true Faith, which is the only foundation of personal and social order.
Pope Leo XIII explained this very succinctly in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:
There was once a time when States were governed by
the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine
virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws,
institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and
relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus
Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere,
by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates;
and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly
interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore
fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and
always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs
which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any
enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed
them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true
worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest;
retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as
the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture;
bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most
wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human
suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a
condition of things, the answer is -- beyond all question, in large
measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great
undertakings were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to
completion.
A similar state of things would certainly have
continued had the agreement of the two powers been lasting. More
important results even might have been justly looked for, had obedience
waited upon the authority, teaching, and counsels of the Church, and had
this submission been specially marked by greater and more unswerving
loyalty. For that should be regarded in the light of an ever-changeless
law which Ivo of Chartres wrote to Pope Paschal II: "When kingdom and
priesthood are at one, in complete accord, the world is well ruled, and
the Church flourishes, and brings forth abundant fruit. But when they
are at variance, not only smaller interests prosper not, but even things
of greatest moment fall into deplorable decay."
But that harmful and deplorable passion
for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of
all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural
sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst
all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst
forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst
of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and
boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new
conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at
variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the
natural law.
Amongst these principles the main one lays down
that as all men are alike by race and nature, so in like manner all are
equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own
master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that
each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do
whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over
other men. In a society grounded upon such maxims all government is
nothing more nor less than the will of the people, and the people, being
under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. It does
choose, nevertheless, some to whose charge it may commit itself, but in
such wise that it makes over to them not the right so much as the
business of governing, to be exercised, however, in its name.
The authority of God is passed over in silence,
just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human
society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound
together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could
be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did
not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a State becomes nothing
but a multitude which is its own master and ruler. And since the people
is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and
of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound
by any kind of duty toward God. Moreover. it believes that it is
not obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire
which of the very many religions is the only one true; or to prefer one
religion to all the rest; or to show to any form of religion special
favor; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every
creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form
of religious belief.
And it is a part of
this theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred
to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever
religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this
the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each
one's conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained
opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of
divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think
whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks.
Now, when the State rests on foundations like
those just named -- and for the time being they are greatly in favor --
it readily appears into what and how unrightful a position the Church is
driven. For, when the management of public business is in harmony with
doctrines of such a kind, the Catholic religion is allowed a standing in
civil society equal only, or inferior, to societies alien from it; no
regard is paid to the laws of the Church, and she who, by the order and
commission of Jesus Christ, has the duty of teaching all nations, finds
herself forbidden to take any part in the instruction of the people.
With reference to matters that are of twofold jurisdiction, they who
administer the civil power lay down the law at their own will, and in
matters that appertain to religion defiantly put aside the most sacred
decrees of the Church. They claim jurisdiction over the marriages of
Catholics, even over the bond as well as the unity and the
indissolubility of matrimony. They lay hands on the goods of the clergy,
contending that the Church cannot possess property. Lastly, they treat
the Church with such arrogance that, rejecting entirely her title to the
nature and rights of a perfect society, they hold that she differs in
no respect from other societies in the State, and for this reason
possesses no right nor any legal power of action, save that which she
holds by the concession and favor of the government. If in any State the
Church retains her own agreement publicly entered into by the two
powers, men forthwith begin to cry out that matters affecting the Church
must be separated from those of the State. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)
Yes, you see, the evils of our age did not start with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on January 22, 1983.
The evils of our age did not start with the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut on June 7, 1965.
The evils of our age did not start did not start
with the appointment of then California Governor Earl Warren, a
thirty-third degree Freemason, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
the United States of America by then President Dwight David Eisenhower
in 1953.
The evils of our age did not start with the the
appointment of Freemasons Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, William Douglas,
James F. Byrnes, Robert H. Jackson, Wiley B. Rutledge, Harold Burton,
Fred Vinson, Tom Clark, and Sherman Minton by the thirty-third degree
Freemasons named Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman between
1937 and 1949. (There were eight--count 'em, eight--Freemasons on the
court between 1949 and 1954!)
I will never tire of reminding the limited (and mostly penurious) readership of this website that the evils of our day are the direct result of the
planned, intentional overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King
begun by the Protestant Revolt in 1517 and institutionalized by the rise
of contemporary Judeo-Masonry in 1717 and thereafter.
Error divides. Catholicism unites.
Protestantism has divided into a welter of warring,
contradictory sects, numbering well over thirty-three thousand. Its
errors have influenced the development and progression of conciliarism,
which has seen a situation arise where the divisions between formerly
Catholic parishes are so pronounced that many "conservative" and
traditionally-minded Catholics attached to the conciliar structures go
to great lengths to avoid the "ultra-progressive" revolutionaries who
believe in a different faith than they do. Catholicism is supposed to
speak with one voice, una voce, as it is the voice of Christ
the King, Who has but one voice. It is no accident that our nation and
the world is seeing more overt manifestations of evil and error when the
lords of conciliarism have made their own "reconciliation" with the
principles of Modernity, starting with religious liberty and separation
of Church and State.
Yet it is that "conservatives" think that this or that strategy will "take the country back" from the statists who are currently in power, willing to compromise in a pragmatic sense for what they think will be long term results but can never be, at the very best, short term "fixes" that will those on the "left," who constitute a sold two-fifths of this nation when one combines the hard-core ideologues with so-called "moderates" who believe in the right of women to surgically kill their preborn children and who believe that people of the same gender have the right to "marry" under cover of the civil law, will always agitated against until things are "settled" once and for all according to their own unshakable beliefs.
This is wrong.
Pope Pius XI explained this in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:
There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on
this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day
conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the
War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have
proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to
understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy
Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be
consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine
Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)
Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They
waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile
attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being
successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It
was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments
should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that
all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an
assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon
law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure
basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan
philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the
divine law. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
Governments founded on the false, naturalistic principle that it is not necessary, either in theory or in practice, to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End (the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity) must see social order collapse under the weight of countervailing pressures over the course of time.
Thus it is that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's very well-intentioned efforts to rein in the budget-busting benefits (generous pension and health insurance programs) paid out to civil service employees and to tighten state spending in general will never be accepted by the "left," composed of veritable fascists who resent it when the "people" dare to dissent from their "received truths." Those who belong to the false opposite of the naturalists "left" are quite
prone to blame their defeats, such as the one suffered on Tuesday, June 5. 2012, on "outside money" when it was the public employees' unions whose leaders imported all manner of people to militate against Walker's proposals almost as soon as they were introduced in February of 2011 (see Rank and File Union Thuggery ala Obama/Alinksy).
Alas, this is nothing new in the recent history of the United States of America.
Over Thirty Years of Experience In Demonizing The "Right"
Leftists did not like it one little bitty bit when former California Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected as President of the United States of America on Tuesday, November 4, 1980. They made trouble for him at every turn. Some of the groups who opposed his Strategic Defense Initiative and his proposal to place Pershing II Cruise Missiles in Europe were funded by front groups for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. United States Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas P. O'Neill (D-Massachusetts) attempted to demonize Reagan at every turn, although Reagan never took any of the attacks personally and would invite the pro-abortion Catholic over to the White House for drinks now and again.
Advised by his sister, who was a member of the Maryknoll order that has become a stronghold of Marxism and was back in the 1980s completely in support of the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua, O'Neill bitterly opposed Reagan's plans to provide assistance to the Contra rebels. It was with O'Neill's blessing that United States Representative Edward Boland introduced an amendment (the Boland Amendment) that banned the provision of assistance to the Contras to overthrow the Sandinista Communists, although it did not ban "humanitarian" assistance. (The Defense Appropriations Act to which the Boland Amendment was attached as a rider was passed on December 8, 1982, and signed into law by President Reagan on December 21, 1982.)
Mind you, this is not to say that Reagan's policies were beyond criticism. Not at all. The fortieth President of the United States consistently put the economic cart before the moral horse, providing pro-life rhetoric in his annual State of the Union address to Congress and in his telephoned messages to Miss Nellie Gray at the annual March for Life, and his end-run around a Congressional ban against the provision of assistance to the Contra rebels resulted in an unholy alliance with drug dealers and the trading of arms for American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Even though Reagan, who had a Republican majority in the United States Senate with which to work between January 20, 1981, and January 3, 1987, was successful in convincing enough Democrats in the United States House of Representatives to support his tax-cut and other economic programs in 1981, largely through dint of his own incontestably strong powers of persuasion and the charm that he used to disarm fence-straddling "boll weevil" Democrats in the House, he did not push decisively against the surgical killing of preborn babies and supported the funding of Title X and international "family planning" programs. As has been noted on this site in the past, he also supported the fully pro-abortion Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court of the United States of America and campaign for the likes of the pro-abort scalawag United States Senator Robert Packwood (R-Oregon) in a 1986 primary against a challenger, Oregon State Representative Joe Lutz, a Baptist minister, who took a pro-life position.
Reagan, though, did blink ultimately, agreeing in 1986 to the one of the largest tax increases in history, an agreement that contributed in no small measure to the loss of the United States Senate to the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" that year, a loss that emboldened the hard-core "lefties" in both houses of Congress to make Reagan's final two years the most difficult of his presidency. These difficulties were highlighted by Senate hearings on the Iran-Contra controversy and the open ideological warfare that broke out on July 1, 1987, when Reagan nominated Robert Bork, then a judge serving on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, for the vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States of America created by the resignation of Associate Justice Lewis Powell, an appointee of President Richard Milhous Nixon who was one of the seven votes in favor the the court's decisions in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. (By the way, Republican Robert Packwood "repaid" Reagan for his support in the 1986 primary by voting against Bork's confirmation.)
Ronald Wilson Reagan's successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who had served his eight years as Reagan's dutiful vice president, tried to present himself in his inaugural address on January 20, 1989, as a more "reasonable," "moderate" figure than Reagan, claiming famously that he wanted to have a "kinder, gentler America," something that left Reagan and his pro-abortion wife, Nancy Davis Reagan, scratching their heads as they headed back to California. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) was determined, though, to greet Bush the Elder's more "moderate" brand of Republican naturalism with bitter and determined opposition at every turn, forcing the patrician from Texas by way of his native Connecticut to break his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge that he made in his acceptance address at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, on August 1988. Bush's surrender to the Democrats on the issue of taxing and spending and his decision to do the bidding of a "new world order" that he himself heralded in a speech to a joint session of Congress after the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 prompted Patrick Joseph Buchanan to wage a primary battle against him for renomination in 1992.
Appease thugs, my friends, and the result will always be the same. Thugs are emboldened by even the slightest form of appeasement and compromise.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker did not appease the union thugs in his state and prevailed nevertheless in a result that is being downplayed by partisans of Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus, who, of course, views all opposition to him as being illegitimate as it is based on "hatred" of his brand of "social justice" and tinged with what he believes is "racism" against him, even though those same people would have been hailing Walker's defeat as a "victory" for themselves if the "people," who sometimes get in the way of "progress" because they do not know what is "best" for them, and a sign that the "right" is dead in the United States of America. Such is the predictable hypocrisy of those who adhere to the false opposite of the naturalist "left."
Even though they lost in Wisconsin, however, mark this and mark it well: nothing is ever "settled" in a pluralistic country filled with a rich diversity of error until it is "settled" according to the dictates of the "left," who seek to denounce anyone who would "unsettle" such things as "legalized" baby-killing and "gay marriage" despite having sought for decades beforehand to "overturn" laws that they did not "like." They, the high priests and priestesses of Modernity, must be obeyed without dissent. And the truth of the matter is, as I have noted on this site frequently, is that the demographics are on their side for future and more permanent victories barring a miraculous conversion of this nation to the Social Reign of Christ the King as a fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary following the consecration of Russia by a true pope to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Behold the errors of Russia that are in our own midst.
Government Bloat As The Result of the False Foundation of the Anti-Incarnational Civil State of Modernity
The problems associated with the growth of union thuggery amongst public employees in the past eighty years is a direct consequence of the creation of large and mostly impersonal bureaucracies that violate the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity that limits legitimate personal freedoms, principally by means of the confiscatory taxing powers used to feed the administrative bloat of governments at all levels (local, state, national, supranational). and that seeks to replace the family as the essential building block of a stable society.
Remove the safeguards provided
by the Social Reign of Christ the King, ladies and gentlemen, and the
way is left open for the rise and the triumph of open banditry in the form of the
confiscatory taxation policies of the civil state, whether of the
"democratic" or "totalitarian" variety, both of which are simply two
sides of the same Judeo-Masonic, naturalist coin, which must be
re-minted every now and again as caesar becomes more bloated with
increased governmental expenditures and the increased taxation necessary
to fund such expenditures.
Indeed, the rise of permanently established
political parties in the United States of America in the 1790s produced what many observers call one of
the chief curses of Modernity: the professional, career politician, a
creature who believes that we exist to enable his career by having him
pick our pockets of our money and then telling us how much better off we
are now that he has acquired it and is in its control. Government
bureaucracies grew in the Nineteenth Century at the state and local
levels, first by means of the patronage system, which sought to provide
political workers with employment to make them and their families
dependent upon the party leaders for their employment.
Government employment was seen in the era of
unbridled patronage as a reward for political loyalty, thereby
engendering sloth and incompetence as contracts were given to private
sector contractors to build government buildings or roads or canals with
the understanding that a certain portion of each contract must be "kicked
back" to the party leaders in power in that jurisdiction. The Democratic
political party machine, Tammany Hall, that predominated in the City of
New York from 1854 until the overthrow of leader Carmine DeSapio in
1961 (which was engineered in part by former First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt, former New York Governor and United States Senator Herbert
Lehman, future U.S. Representative and New York City Mayor Edward Irving
Koch and attorney Edward Costikyan) was just one of many such
organizations that thrived on the use of taxpayer dollars to keep itself
in power.
Pope Leo XIII understood these developments. Consider, if you will, a brief passage from Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:
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 Pius XI amplified this point in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:
Public life is so enveloped, even at the
present hour, by the dense fog of mutual hatreds and grievances that it
is almost impossible for the common people so much as freely to breathe
therein. If the defeated nations continue to suffer most terribly, no
less serious are the evils which afflict their conquerors. Small nations
complain that they are being oppressed and exploited by great nations.
The great powers, on their side, contend that they are being judged
wrongly and circumvented by the smaller. All nations, great and small,
suffer acutely from the sad effects of the late War. Neither can those
nations which were neutral contend that they have escaped altogether the
tremendous sufferings of the War or failed to experience its evil
results almost equally with the actual belligerents. These evil results
grow in volume from day to day because of the utter impossibility of
finding anything like a safe remedy to cure the ills of society, and
this in spite of all the efforts of politicians and statesmen whose work
has come to naught if it has not unfortunately tended to aggravate the
very evils they tried to overcome. Conditions have become increasingly
worse because the fears of the people are being constantly played upon
by the ever-present menace of new wars, likely to be more frightful and
destructive than any which have preceded them. Whence it is that the
nations of today live in a state of armed peace which is scarcely better
than war itself, a condition which tends to exhaust national finances,
to waste the flower of youth, to muddy and poison the very fountainheads
of life, physical, intellectual, religious, and moral.
A much more serious and lamentable evil
than these threats of external aggression is the internal discord which
menaces the welfare not only of nations but of human society itself. In
the first place, we must take cognizance of the war between the classes,
a chronic and mortal disease of present-day society, which like a
cancer is eating away the vital forces of the social fabric, labor,
industry, the arts, commerce, agriculture -- everything in fact which
contributes to public and private welfare and to national prosperity.
This conflict seems to resist every solution and grows worse because
those who are never satisfied with the amount of their wealth contend
with those who hold on most tenaciously to the riches which they have
already acquired, while to both classes there is common the desire to
rule the other and to assume control of the other's possessions. From
this class war there result frequent interruptions of work, the causes
for which most often can be laid to mutual provocations. There result,
too, revolutions, riots, and forcible repression of one side or other by
the government, all of which cannot but end in general discontent and
in grave damage to the common welfare.
To these evils we must add the contests
between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a
real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable
and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare,
but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private
interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole.
From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to
the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme
authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These
political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times,
eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more
deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been
given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large
measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these
different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the
principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with
any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however,
are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction
or another. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
Although many factors
contributed to the decline of the patronage system, including the rise
of the civil service, especially at the Federal level, in the Nineteenth
Century, and the influence of the media and money in statewide and
national elections, making it possible for political neophytes to run
for and to win major elected offices without having "worked their way
through the ranks," it is still the case in many local areas around the
United States of America where things have been arranged so as to permit
the appointment of large numbers of "political appointees," bloating
local budgets and circumventing the "hiring by [alleged] merit" of the
patronage system.
I did, for example, a line-item analysis of
the budget of the Town of Oyster Bay in 1997 when I was running
for the position of Town Supervisor, the chief executive of that
subdivision of the County of Nassau (which is divided into three towns,
Oyster Bay, Hempstead, North Hempstead, and two cities, Glen Cove and
Long Beach), discovering one unnecessary civil service and patronage position after another. I made
the point in a pamphlet produced for the campaign that those who work
only for the advancement of their own careers--or for advancement of the
careers of those who hired them and upon whom their future livelihood
depends--will not work in most instances for the honor and glory of God.
(My expertise in this area is not only academic, having taught courses
in State and Local Government, one of my major fields of study for the
doctorate in political science, but from personal experience gained
during a brief period as a government employee in 1987-1988.)
It is no wonder, therefore, that basic
services are provided on a minimal level, so much so that what should be
a rather basic service in this day of technological advances in the
field of traffic planning and engineering, the synchronization of
traffic lights on heavily traveled local thoroughfares, is not even
considered to be important to improve the quality of daily living and
thus to advance the common temporal good. Those who do not think
supernaturally at all times, you see, become steeped in the morbidity of
careerism and sloth, both of which place fallen men in a stupor of
materialism and self-indulgence from which it is impossible to escape,
barring the working of the graces won for us on Calvary by the shedding
of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood and
that flow into our hearts and souls by the working of the Holy Ghost in
the sacraments through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of
All Graces.
There is all manner of waste at the state and
local levels of government, replete with political appointees, many of
whom are paid hefty salaries, whose positions are totally unnecessary
and advance the common good not one whit. The average citizen has been
convinced, however, that the bloat of government at all levels,
including those closest to him, is irreversible and might even think
that the bloat does him such good, although he would be hard-pressed in
most instances to name some of the elected officials in his own
community. No, the average citizen is too diverted by the bread and
circuses to see how the property and sales and income taxes and various
"user-fees" imposed at the state and local levels is unjust and goes to
enable the political careers of the thieves they have put into office
quite willingly.
More than anything else, however, the bloat of the
size of the civil state and the scope of its power, especially at the
Federal level in the United States of America, has been made possible by
the systematic, organized attack against the family by the organized
forces of Judeo-Masonic naturalism, which has produced various evils in
the world (including removing the father from the home during the work
day and taking the family off of the land, a continuation of the process
begun after King Henry VIII broke from Rome in the 1530s). The attack
on the family, which was part and parcel of the so-called Industrial
Revolution, became part of naturalism's cultural agenda in the years
following the end of World War I. Immodesty of attire was promoted by
Madison Avenue advertising firms and displayed in motion pictures in the
1920s. As noted so frequently on this site, the dawn of radio programming began to attack the regularity of prayer in the
family and interrupting family patterns of meals, conversation and
sleep. Contraception and divorce were promoted with abandon. Behold the results.
Years and years of wasteful, duplicative, needless spending and regulatory programs at the state level, much of it mandated by Federal laws and regulations have now caught up with the class of leftist elitists who populate the civil service and who believe that public service is a right, not a privilege, that they can use as a bludgeon to prevent them from making any kind of legitimate contributions into benefit packages that are contributing handsomely to state budgetary crises and as they seek to retain collective bargaining privileges that have made non-elected bureaucrats more of a potent force in administrative law and governance than elected officials. And the class of leftist elitists who populate civil service employees' unions will brook no opposition as they seek to indemnify themselves against their own sloth, against any effort to retrench the permanent regulatory bureau racy that sustains them and empowers them to look down on elected officials who are their superiors, at least nominally, and the citizens who pay their salaries with contempt and scorn.
Although the reigning caesar in Washington, District of Columbia, has tried to cast the union thuggery that he has encouraged and supported and funded in terms of the alleged "popular" uprisings in much of the Mohammedan world in 2011, what we have witnessed in Wisconsin and in Ohio, a state where voters on Tuesday, November 8, 2011, repealed (by means of a referendum, "Issue 2") Governor John Kasich's efforts to impose similar restrictions on public employees' unions that Governor Walker had proposed and implemented in Wisconsin, what we are witnessing in Wisconsin and Ohio is nothing other than the sort of entitlement rioting that has taken place in Eurosocialist countries such as Greece and Spain and France and the United Kingdom in response to very modest and much long overdue efforts to curb the cradle-to-the-grave entitlement programs that are bankrupting these countries, some of which stand on the precipice of having Mohammedan majorities within a few decades, right before our very eyes. Barack Hussein Obama is a shameless demagogue, a practitioner of the worst kind of class warfare who believes in the Marxist propaganda he was taught as a teenager by the Communist named Frank Marshall Davis in Hawaii and that has shaped his work as a community thug (excuse me, "organizer") since he cut his political eyeteeth in the organizations of Saul Alinksy.
Barack Hussein Obama fashions himself as smarter than the average bear, to borrow a term from our daughter's favorite cartoon character (watched only, of course, on digital video discs, not on the devil's box called television). He has called himself the "LeBron James" (whoever he is) of the farce that is politics in this lands of naturalism and pluralism and religious indifferentism. Obama is very happy that he is rallying his leftist base with the thuggish efforts on his Marxist Organizing for America in Wisconsin and Ohio, preparing the way for revving up that base in time for next year's fifty state presidential elections (and one held in the District of Columbia) on Tuesday, November 8, 2011, to elect the electors who actually cast the electoral votes for the offices of this country's president and vice president. Obama and his like-minded Marxist aides are, though, as much stuck in the revolutionary rhetoric and ideology of the 1960s as are the aging conciliar revolutionaries of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Both are oblivious to reality as they view the world consistently through the pink lenses of their respective and utterly failed revolutions.
Contrary to the propaganda of the past year or so, civil service employees' unions are not the persecuted, oppressed factory workers seeking just wages and safe working conditions and fair working hours in the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries. They are well-paid and politically potent groups, many of which support abortion and perversity with the dues of their members. The conciliar revolutionaries of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and the lords of the left of the civil state of Modernity are simply Kindred Spirits of the New World Order). Neither the conciliar revolutionaries or the lords of the left of the civil state of Modernity understand or accept the simple fact that nations that defy the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as grave evils are protected under cover of the civil law and promoted freely in all aspects of what passes for popular culture can withstand the forces that they have let loose that will result ultimately in their utter annihilation from the face of the earth just as surely empires of the past crumbled into the dust bins of history.
Let us turn to the words of Pope Pius XI in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, for some semblance of sanity as the farce of naturalism plays itself out in our country at this time:
13. It is most sad to see how this revolutionary spirit has penetrated into
that sanctuary of peace and love, the family, the original nucleus of human
society. In the family these evil seeds of dissension, which were sown long ago,
have recently been spread about more and more by the fact of the absence of
fathers and sons from the family fireside during the War and by the greatly
increased freedom in matters of morality which followed on it as one of its
effects. Frequently we behold sons alienated from their fathers, brothers
quarreling with brothers, masters with servants, servants with masters. Too
often likewise have we seen both the sanctity of the marriage tie and the duties
to God and to humankind, which this tie imposes upon men, forgotten.
14. Just as the smallest part of the body feels the effect of an illness
which is ravaging the whole body or one of its vital organs, so the evils now
besetting society and the family afflict even individuals. In particular, We
cannot but lament the morbid restlessness which has spread among people of every
age and condition in life, the general spirit of insubordination and the refusal
to live up to one's obligations which has become so widespread as almost to
appear the customary mode of living. We lament, too, the destruction of purity
among women and young girls as is evidenced by the increasing immodesty of their
dress and conversation and by their participation in shameful dances, which sins
are made the more heinous by the vaunting in the faces of people less fortunate
than themselves their luxurious mode of life. Finally, We cannot but grieve over
the great increase in the number of what might be called social misfits who
almost inevitably end by joining the ranks of those malcontents who continually
agitate against all order, be it public or private.
15. It is surprising, then, that we should no longer possess that security of
life in which we can place our trust and that there remains only the most
terrible uncertainty, and from hour to hour added fears for the future? Instead
of regular daily work there is idleness and unemployment. That blessed
tranquillity which is the effect of an orderly existence and in which the
essence of peace is to be found no longer exists, and, in its place, the
restless spirit of revolt reigns. As a consequence industry suffers, commerce is
crippled, the cultivation of literature and the arts becomes more and more
difficult, and what is worse than all, Christian civilization itself is
irreparably damaged thereby. In the face of our much praised progress, we behold
with sorrow society lapsing back slowly but surely into a state of barbarism.
16. We wish to record, in addition to the evils already mentioned, other
evils which beset society and which occupy a place of prime importance but whose
very existence escapes the ordinary observer, the sensual man -- he who, as the
Apostle says, does not perceive "the things that are of the Spirit of God" (I
Cor. ii, 14), yet which cannot but be judged the greatest and most destructive
scourges of the social order of today. We refer specifically to those evils
which transcend the material or natural sphere and lie within the supernatural
and religious order properly so-called; in other words, those evils which affect
the spiritual life of souls. These evils are all the more to be deplored since
they injure souls whose value is infinitely greater than that of any merely
material object. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
Have I mentioned lately that Catholicism is the one and only means of personal and social order?
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an
inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of
civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no
true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth,
a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
As I have noted so many times before, no
formula of a naturalist of the "left" or of the "right" can produce true
improvement that will redound to men and their nations. It is only by
light of the Catholic Faith that men can see clearly enough to pursue
temporal matters in light of eternity.
Get out of the diabolical
trap of naturalism. Refuse to be agitated by the "talking heads" on
radio and television who do not understand anything about First and Last
Things and thus whose histrionics are nothing more than the injurious
babbling spoken of by Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864, as they do not understand that the
remote cause of all human problems is Original Sin and that their
proximate causes are to be found in the Actual Sins of men and thus can
be remedied only by the daily conversion of souls as they seek to grow
in sanctity by cooperating with the graces sent to them by Our Blessed
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the loving hands of His Most
Blessed Mother, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.
These "talking heads" make constant advertence to the genius of the "founding fathers," men who a founding hatred for Christ the King,
and their founding principles that have convinced men that they can
establish a social order without regard to any religion, no less the
true religion, which is the very premise of Judeo-Masonry. How can men
who believe in the very principles that are the fruit of the Protestant
Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King and of
Judeo-Masonry are the foundation of "American exceptionalism" help us to
understand issues that must be viewed through the deeper, supernatural
eyes of the Holy Faith? They can't.
What should we do?
Spend more time in prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, if this is at all possible.
Pray more Rosaries.
Make more sacrifices and make plans for some good Lenten fasting as we enter today upon the Septuagesima season of pre-Lenten preparations.
Pray for more crosses.
Pray for humiliation.
Pray to castigated and to be misunderstood and rejected more and more as was Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ throughout His life here on earth, especially during His fearful Passion and Death.
Enthrone your homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Read more books about the lives of the saints.
Stop watching television.
Don't be agitated by the lies of naturalists and their enablers.
Know that Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart will triumph.
Conscious of making reparation for our own sins,
which, although forgiven and thus no longer exist, are in need of our
making satisfaction here in this passing, mortal vale of tears before we
die, may our Rosaries each day help lift the scales of naturalism that
cloud our vision, thus making us courageous apostles of the Social Reign
of Christ the King who recognize and are unafraid to proclaim that
Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
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 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.
See also: A Litany of Saints
