Only Themselves to Blame
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Many of the conciliar "bishops" in the United States of America are gearing for a pitched battle with the administration of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., in the event that Obama, whose actual election to the Presidency of the United States of America will take place today, Monday, December 15, 2008, the Octave Day of the Feast of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception, as the electors elected on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, meet in their respective state capitals to cast their votes, follows through on a pledge he made in 2007 to sign the "Freedom of Choice Act," known colloquially as "FOCA."
This hideous piece of legislation, which has been languishing in one Congress after another for twenty-five years, would attempt to reverse all state laws that have, the belief goes, restricted baby-killing in some form or another, including parental notification and and waiting period laws. As with everything else in American politics and government, however, there is more this matter than meets the eye, which is why it is important to treat this matter on two levels, one dealing with the hype and the reality of the legislation, the other dealing with how the conciliar "bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. and their Americanist predecessors in the Catholic Church have only themselves to blame for this state of affairs.
Hype and Reality
It must be stipulated first and foremost that the text of the "Freedom of Choice Act" is indeed monstrous:
A BILL to protect, consistent with Roe v. Wade, a woman's freedom to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Freedom of Choice Act'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
(1) The United States was founded on core principles, such as liberty, personal privacy, and equality, which ensure that individuals are free to make their most intimate decisions without governmental interference and discrimination.
(2) One of the most private and difficult decisions an individual makes is whether to begin, prevent, continue, or terminate a pregnancy. Those reproductive health decisions are best made by women, in consultation with their loved ones and health care providers.
(3) In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479), and in 1973, in Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) and Doe v. Bolton (410 U.S. 179), the Supreme Court recognized that the right to privacy protected by the Constitution encompasses the right of every woman to weigh the personal, moral, and religious considerations involved in deciding whether to begin, prevent, continue, or terminate a pregnancy.
(4) The Roe v. Wade decision carefully balances the rights of women to make important reproductive decisions with the State's interest in potential life. Under Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the right to privacy protects a woman's decision to choose to terminate her pregnancy prior to fetal viability, with the State permitted to ban abortion after fetal viability except when necessary to protect a woman's life or health.
(5) These decisions have protected the health and lives of women in the United States. Prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 1,200,000 women each year were forced to resort to illegal abortions, despite the risk of unsanitary conditions, incompetent treatment, infection, hemorrhage, disfiguration, and death. Before Roe, it is estimated that thousands of women died annually in the United States as a result of illegal abortions.
(6) In countries in which abortion remains illegal, the risk of maternal mortality is high. According to the World Health Organization, of the approximately 600,000 pregnancy-related deaths occurring annually around the world, 80,000 are associated with unsafe abortions.
(7) The Roe v. Wade decision also expanded the opportunities for women to participate equally in society. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (505 U.S. 833), the Supreme Court observed that, `[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.'.
(8) Even though the Roe v. Wade decision has stood for more than 34 years, there are increasing threats to reproductive health and freedom emerging from all branches and levels of government. In 2006, South Dakota became the first State in more than 15 years to enact a ban on abortion in nearly all circumstances. Supporters of this ban have admitted it is an attempt to directly challenge Roe in the courts. Other States are considering similar bans.
(9) Further threatening Roe, the Supreme Court recently upheld the first-ever Federal ban on an abortion procedure, which has no exception to protect a woman's health. The majority decision in Gonzales v. Carhart (05-380, slip op. April 18, 2007) and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America fails to protect a woman's health, a core tenet of Roe v. Wade. Dissenting in that case, Justice Ginsburg called the majority's opinion `alarming', and stated that, `[f]or the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health'. Further, she said, the Federal ban `and the Court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court'.
(10) Legal and practical barriers to the full range of reproductive services endanger women's health and lives. Incremental restrictions on the right to choose imposed by Congress and State legislatures have made access to reproductive care extremely difficult, if not impossible, for many women across the country. Currently, 87 percent of the counties in the United States have no abortion provider.
(11) While abortion should remain safe and legal, women should also have more meaningful access to family planning services that prevent unintended pregnancies, thereby reducing the need for abortion.
(13) Although Congress may not create constitutional rights without amending the Constitution, Congress may, where authorized by its enumerated powers and not prohibited by the Constitution, enact legislation to create and secure statutory rights in areas of legitimate national concern.
(14) Congress has the affirmative power under section 8 of article I of the Constitution and section 5 of the 14th amendment to the Constitution to enact legislation to facilitate interstate commerce and to prevent State interference with interstate commerce, liberty, or equal protection of the laws.
(1) GOVERNMENT- The term `government' includes a branch, department, agency, instrumentality, or official (or other individual acting under color of law) of the United States, a State, or a subdivision of a State.
(2) STATE- The term `State' means each of the States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and each territory or possession of the United States. (of America.).
(3) VIABILITY- The term `viability' means that stage of pregnancy when, in the best medical judgment of the attending physician based on the particular medical facts of the case before the physician, there is a reasonable likelihood of the sustained survival of the fetus outside of the woman.
SEC. 4. INTERFERENCE WITH REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH PROHIBITED.
(a) Statement of Policy- It is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.
(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.
(c) Civil Action- An individual aggrieved by a violation of this section may obtain appropriate relief (including relief against a government) in a civil action.
SEC. 5. SEVERABILITY.
If any provision of this Act, or the application of such provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, or the application of such provision to persons or circumstances other than those as to which the provision is held to be unconstitutional, shall not be affected thereby.
SEC. 6. RETROACTIVE EFFECT.
This Act applies to every Federal, State, and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other
action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act. (Full Text of S. 1173, 110th Congress.)
There is no argument from this writer concerning the egregious nature of this bill. This is a bill aimed as a dagger against the innocent preborn and thus against God Himself. Efforts to oppose passage of this bill are commendable as the consequences will be, if sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States of America (which is a most doubtful proposition even if, say, Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg or John Paul Stevens retires during Obama's first time as their replacements will be like-minded pro-death legal positivists who will not change the essential four-to-four-to-one split that exists on the Court at the present time, with Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy serving as the "swing" vote in many cases now), most fascistic.
As a political scientist who taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels in different colleges and universities for over thirty years, however, I can tell you, without minimizing the horrors of the bill, that the actual reality of the matter is a little more complex than might first seem to the naked eye. Let me explain.
Although there is generally widespread support in the United States of America for "permitting" the surgical dismemberment of preborn human beings in their mothers' wombs under cover of law, there is also widespread support on what are considered to be "reasonable" restrictions placed on how, when and why babies are killed at the state level. There are at least some supporters of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, of both major organized crime families of naturalism (political parties) who will serve in the upcoming 111th Congress of the United States of America who like to assuage or salve their consciences by claiming that they support "reasonable" restrictions on surgical abortion while mouthing the canard that they simply do not want to "interfere" with a "woman's 'basic' right to "choose" to kill their children. Still other members of Congress, especially Catholics, like to point to their support for "reasonable" restrictions on surgical abortion as they mouth the canard that "they are personally opposed to abortion but cannot 'impose' their morality on those who disagree with them."
Such members of Congress do not want the "Freedom of Choice Act" to see the light of day as they know that at least some of their Catholic constituents who might have voted for them for "other reasons" in spite of their support for surgical abortion would withdraw their support in the next election. This is why the "Freedom of Choice Act" (introduced as S. 25 and H.R. 1068 and H.R. 25) never made it out of committee in the 103rd Congress between January 3, 1993, and January 3, 1995, even though Democrats held a 57-43 seat majority in the Senate and a 258-176 majority in the House of Representatives at a time when a the President and Vice President of the United States of America were absolute pro-abortion fanatics, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. Remember them? I think there were pretty pro-abortion, don't you?
Clinton and Gore knew that reversing all state legislation restricting abortion would be a little "much" for some of their Catholic supporters to swallow, which is why Clinton used various executive orders (including the restoration of funding for embryonic stem-cell research and to authorize the United States Food and Drug Administration to begin the testing of the human pesticide, RU-486) on January 22, 1993, as a means of expressing his "bona fides" with the pro-abortion lobby, "bona fides" that were proved also with the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Bill, which was passed by the United States Senate on May 12, 1994, by a vote of 69-30, including six supposedly "pro-life" Republican senators, and never reversed by any Republican-controlled Congress thereafter, including during the years of the Presidency of George Walker Bush. Clinton and Gore also proved their pro-abortion "bona fides" by opposed the partial ban on partial birth abortions. FOCA, however, was a little too rich for their blood.
Despite Barack Hussein Obama's statement in 2007 that the "first thing" he would do as President would be sign FOCA into law, he is a political realist who is not going to jeopardize his desire to "unify" the country for his latter-day "New Deal" programs that will nationalize more and more of the American economy that will not have been nationalized prior to January 20, 2009, by the outgoing socialist in the White House, George Walker Bush. Obama will issue the same sort of executive orders on January 22, 2009, that were signed by Clinton on January 22, 1993. He will prove his pro-abortion "bona fides" in any number of ways and has done so already by choosing a Cabinet that is completely pro-abortion (the outgoing president's administration is a mixture of people who are partly pro-abortion and those who are completely pro-abortion).
The mere fact, however, that Democrats in the 111th Congress that convenes on January 6, 2009, will hold an effective majority of 59-41 (assuming the Norm Coleman seat in Minnesota goes to the clown named Al Franken) in the Senate and will have a 257-178 majority in the House of Representatives does not quite mean that FOCA is going to have any easier of a time getting out of committee than it did in the 103rd Congress sixteen years before. True, there is a more reasonable chance of it getting out of committee and possibly being passed by Congress and signed into law by Barack Hussein Obama. Nevertheless the reality is a bit more complex than all of the hype that has thrown all sorts of people into fits of histrionics for the past few months. Politicians like to be re-elected and the prospect of losing the support of former "Reagan Democrats" (and the children of "Reagan Democrats") who have made their way "home" to the Democrat Party in the past two years might very well take the sails out of FOCA despite the overwhelming majority that the Democrat Party will have in both Houses of the Congress of the United States of America in the 111th Congress.
All of this having been duly noted, of course, the fact does remain that FOCA will pass and be signed into law if Barack Hussein Obama believes that is worth his while to fight a battle with the "conservative" conciliar "bishops" who have already signaled that they will mobilize the support of Catholics who are yet attached to their structures. Obama's decision to fight this battle would have to made after he has calculated that he can overcome any opposition among Democrats in the House and Senate who might be loathe to reverse all state laws restricting surgical abortions in one fell swoop and then convince the American people that such an action is justifiable. And such a decision on the part of Obama and his advisers would be made after very carefully targeted polling to determine what, if any, impact the conciliar "bishops'" opposition to FOCA might play in the 2010 and 2012 elections. FOCA will procced to passage and signing only if such polling indicates that the influence of the conciliar "bishops'" on their people on FOCA is politically negligible or, at the very least politically "tolerable."
This is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. The likelihood is, though, that the draconian nature of FOCA will permit advocacy groups on both sides to raise lots and lots of money either to prevent the bill from being passed or to push for its passage.
FOCA is what is known as a "rain maker" bill as money will rain down from the sky as a result of the alarmist direct-mail fund-raising pieces that will be sent out to mobilize the "base" to put pressure on members of Congress. When all is said and done, however, none of the lobbying in opposition to or support of the bill will matter if Obama and his advisers make a calculation that the bill is a "worthy" cause for his administration to push in its first year in office. Unless I have read the situation incorrectly, which is certainly possible, I do not believe that Obama wants to fight this battle at this time.
Only Themselves to Blame
Some of the leading "conservative" "bishops" have promised to fight FOCA if it does turn out that the bill stands a chance of being reported out of committee in the 111th Congress and signed into law by President Barack Hussein Obama. Despite the opposition that has been voiced thus far from these conciliar "bishops," the fact of the matter remains that these men will have only themselves--and their Americanist predecessors in the Catholic Church--to blame for this turn of events. Let me explain.
The conciliar "bishops" do not realize that a civil constitution whose text refuses to recognize the Social Reign of Christ the King must be at the mercy of whoever controls the levers of civil governance at any point in time. There is no stable, enduring means to enforce moral truth on even the level of the Natural Law as the civil government under a religiously indifferentist constitution admits of nothing higher than the text of its own words as the "final" arbiter of what is considered to be legally permissible.
Leaving aside the specific institutional arrangements found in the American Constitution that are within the competency of men to adopt as they see fit, the fatal flaw of the Constitution is that it refuses to recognize the Catholic Church as the true religion and refuses to admit that her bishops have the right to interpose themselves as a last resort when the good of souls demands their intervention. Such a constitution is as defenseless in the hands of legal positivists on a court and/or in the hands of popular majoritarian sentiment as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants and Modernist Catholics. Each "individual's" interpretation is as good as another. Who is anyone else to say what a particular passage means? There no ultimate authority to decide the matter permanently. What matters ultimately in such a situation is the mere weight of numbers, which can change with the changing of "opinion" from time to time.
Such is not the foundation of a stable social order or any sense of true justice. God is, after all, a Majority of One, and He has spoken exclusively and definitively through the Catholic Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. He has taught us through His Catholic Church that men and nations must submit to the Deposit of Faith at all times and that the fate of nations is tied to the extent to which their citizens live in accord with that Deposit of Faith and seek to grow in virtue by means of cooperating with Sanctifying Grace. Any governmental system that ignores these truths or is hostile to them will degenerate into barbarism over the course of time.
Alas, the bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century saw the Constitution as a "protection" to the rights of Catholics. Most of them never stopped to consider the fact that the most of the founders of this nation were naturalists who hated the Catholic Church, men who were willing to tolerate Catholics as citizens in the hope that future generations of Catholics would be so "Americanized" that they would think and speak and act just like other citizens, that is, as naturalists. As has been noted on this site before, one of the chief goals of Horace Mann when he proposed the creation of the first state board of education in 1837 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was to "Americanize" the children of the Irish immigrants who were steeped in the "foreign," 'undemocratic" ways of Catholicism.
Many Catholics did indeed plunge themselves headlong into the "American" (or pluralist) ways of egalitarianism and religious indifferentism and materialism and naturalism to such an extent that they saw electoral politics as the means of upward social and economic mobility at a time when many anti-Catholic nativist organizations were persecuting them quite overtly. Politics, not grace, was the means to overcome the assaults of the nativists. And it was the Democrat Party that opened its doors to the Catholic immigrants in the Nineteenth Century (just has it has done to immigrants in our own day) to provide itself with new voters who would work hard for the election of its candidates. This made possible the rise of Catholics through the ranks of ward and precinct level politics to get elected to citywide and statewide offices in many areas. And it is gratitude to the Democrat Party for its "openness" (which was nothing other than an expression of electoral self-interest) that made so many Catholics, including a lot of bishops, content to think that the policies of the Democrat Party and the teaching of the Catholic Church were one and the same.
As noted in Making the Same Tragic Mistakes Again and Again, Catholics in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries became so wedded to the naturalist entity known as the Democrat Party that their many of their bishops became the ready lap dogs of anti-Catholic Presidents and their administrations:
The American bishops did the bidding of the anti-Catholic Woodrow Wilson over and over again, including forming the National Catholic War Council (which transformed itself over the years into what it is at present, the United States Conference of Catholic "Bishops," whose administrative apparatus in Washington, District of Columbia, is full of statists and supporters of perverse acts in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments) to support the unjust involvement of the United States of America in the war of nationalism being fought in Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia, what is now called World War I. Did it matter to these bishops that the man who fully supported the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico wanted to dismember Catholic nations in Europe and replace them with secular, Masonic republics based on the "principles" of American exceptionalism? No, none of this mattered to the bishops. They supported the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. After all, Catholics "have" to vote, right?
Did it matter to the American bishops that the thirty-third degree Freemason Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported policies in full violation of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity enunciated by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931? No. They supported him. They did his bidding for him. They even silenced the courageous Father Charles Coughlin, who was using his radio program to criticize the Freemason and statist Roosevelt, daring also to name "names" concerning who was behind the increase of the power of the Federal government of the United States of America, that is, the ancient enemies of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who adhere to the Talmud. The American bishops continued to do Roosevelt's bidding for him even though this terrible tyrant, who spied on his enemies and used government agencies to crush them as best he could, appointed a disciple of Margaret Sanger, Rexford G. Tugwell, to be the Governor of the Territory of Puerto Rico who supported a program of "voluntary" sterilization of the Puerto Rican people.
The legacy of the likes of James Cardinal Gibbons, the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore who did the bidding of the anti-Catholic Woodrow Wilson, and Francis Cardinal Spellman, who did the bidding of the Freemason Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Richard Cardinal Cushing, who indemnified the Kennedys at every turn, has been carried on in our own day by "bishops" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who have refused to discipline pro-abortion Catholics, first in the Democrat Party and later in the Republican Party, while "teaching" that Catholics must consider a "range" of issues, including "support for the poor," as though government redistributionist policies, each of which is based on false naturalistic principles, designed to deal with social problems that have arisen as a result of contraception and divorce, both of which paved the way for abortion, were compatible with Catholic social teaching.
The likes of Edward Moore Kennedy and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Nancy Pelosi and Richard Durbin and Thomas Harkin and Charles Rangel and Barbara Mikulsi and Mario Matthew Cuomo and David Paterson and James Florio and Christopher Dodd and John F. Kerry and Patrick Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy III and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and George Elmer Pataki and Martin Meehan and Jack Reed and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Loretta Sanchez Brixey and Linda Sanchez and Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudolph William Giuliani and Tom Ridge and Marcy Kaptor and Patrick Leahy and Maurice Hinchey and Charles Rangel and Geraldine Ferraro and Jennifer Granholm and Kathleen Sebelius and Patricia Murray and Susan Collins and Susan Molinari and Rick Lazio and Thomas Foley and Jim Doyle, among others, have been able to get elected over and over again during their political careers because they had, at the very least, the de facto support of their conciliar "bishops" and/or because no conciliar "bishop" dared to excommunicate them to send a signal to Catholics attached to the structures of the counterfeit church that they must never render support to anyone in public life who supports even one instance wherein it is said to be morally permissible as a matter of principle to directly kill and dismember Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ mystically in the persons of innocent preborn children in their mothers' wombs.
Barack Hussein Obama will be elected today (his questionable status as a natural-born citizen being left, evidently, to one of those things to be revealed only on the Last Day) by the electors in state capitals across the United States of America in large measure because Catholics have been "taught" by many conciliar "bishops" and "priests" that one is not disqualified from holding any office of public trust if he supports even one instance whereby an innocent human being may be put to death directly under cover of the civil law.
There is a special irony in all of this: the "conservative" "bishops" in the United Sates of America who are making well-intentioned efforts to stand fast in the wake of the possible passage of FOCA by the 111th Congress are to a man dissenters from the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church that the civil state has an obligation to recognize the true religion and to accord her the favor and the protection of the laws. They have cast themselves out of the Church by accepting as a "protection" to Catholics that which was wrought by the Protestant Revolt and cemented in place by Judeo-Masonry, the separation of Church and State. God will not be mocked. The Catholic Church has taught from time immemorial that the civil state does indeed have this obligation to recognize her as the true religion and pope after pope in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries warned of the devastating consequences that would occur for men and their societies if the rights of Christ the King were violated.
It is one thing, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Libertas, June 20, 1888, to have to make the best of the reality of the modern civil state in order to continue the work of the Church as she ministers to the sacramental and temporal needs of her children in pluralistic societies while at the same time continuing to teach her children the truth of her Social Teaching and to exhort them to plant seeds for the conversion of their fellow citizens and their nation to the true Faith. It is quite another to admit as a matter of principle that the modern, religiously indifferentist civil state is the ideal form of government in and of itself and that it would be wrong to seek a return to Christendom, which is precisely what has been taught by the conciliar "popes" and their conciliar "bishops." This leaves the conciliar "popes" and "bishops" hamstrung in dealing with the symptoms, such as chemical and surgical abortions, of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as they have accepted the underlying revolutionary principles that brought about the rise of the modern civil state and deification of man.
Pope Leo XIII knew that his own encyclical letters Immortale Dei, November 1, 1900, and Libertas and Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, were not, by and large with a few exceptions here and there, being taught by the bishops of the United States of America to their flocks, which is why he wrote the following in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895:
As regards civil affairs, experience has shown how important it is that the citizens should be upright and virtuous. In a free State, unless justice be generally cultivated, unless the people be repeatedly and diligently urged to observe the precepts and laws of the Gospel, liberty itself may be pernicious. Let those of the clergy, therefore, who are occupied with the instruction of the multitude, treat plainly this topic of the duties of citizens, so that all may understand and feel the necessity, in political life, of conscientiousness, self restraint, and integrity; for that cannot be lawful in public which is unlawful in private affairs. On this whole subject there are to be found, as you know, in the encyclical letters written by Us from time to time in the course of Our pontificate, many things which Catholics should attend to and observe. In these writings and expositions We have treated of human liberty, of the chief Christian duties, of civil government, and of the Christian constitution of States, drawing Our principles as well from the teaching of the Gospels as from reason. They, then, who wish to be good citizens and discharge their duties faithfully may readily learn from Our Letters the ideal of an upright life. In like manner, let the priests be persistent in keeping before the minds of the people the enactments of the Third Council of Baltimore, particularly those which inculcate the virtue of temperance, the frequent use of the sacraments and the observance of the just laws and institutions of the Republic.
How many of the "conservative" conciliar "bishops" who are most justifiably concerned about the "Freedom of Choice Act" have read these encyclical letters? How many of them understand that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order? How many of them accept the following truths stated by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906?
That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error." (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)
Was Pope Saint Pius X wrong? Must the civil state aid man in the pursuit of his Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son and Holy Ghost for all eternity? The Catholic Church teaches that Pope Saint Pius X was correct, that he was merely reiterating truths that have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to her magisterial authority for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. And it was the rejection of these truths by most, although not quite all, of the American bishops of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries that made it possible for the Americanist spirit to be incorporated into Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes at the "Second" Vatican Council, an Americanist spirit that is deeply embedded in the Modernist heart of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. This Americanist spirit has so infected the average Catholic in the United States of America that moral pronouncements made by conciliar authorities fall on deaf ears in many instances as he has been taught to accept the Judeo-Masonic lie that "one opinion is as good as another" in a free country, revealing yet again the prophetic nature of Saint Augustine's teaching that "the death of the soul is worse than the freedom of error."
Pope Leo XIII, writing near the end of Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, saw that some of the bishops of the United States of America wanted the Church there to be "different" from how she was in the rest of the world:
But if [the term "Americanism"] this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.
That vision of a "different" Church in America was the vision that would lead to the rise of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, a false entity that has made its "reconciliation" with the false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of the modern civil state. All of the well-intentioned efforts of various conciliar "bishops," and quite possibly Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself, to oppose such evils as the "Freedom of Choice Act" have been made necessary by surrender to false principles, first by the Americanist bishops of yore and then by the conciliarists themselves. And what an irony it is that FOCA has more of a chance to be stopped by the calculated self-interest of career politicians, including Obama himself, than by the conciliarists' efforts to appeal to "religious liberty" and "states' rights."
We must, of course, pray for our country. We must pray that hideous laws will be thwarted by the intercession of Our Lady, who is the Patroness of this country under her title as the Immaculate Conception. More importantly, however, we must make reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
Our Rosaries of reparation will help to unite us more fully to the mysteries of salvation upon which we meditate when we salute Our Lady as Saint Gabriel the Archangel did at the Annunciation and proclaim her to be blessed as Our Lady herself spoke in the Magnificat, asking her to pray for us now and at the hour of our deaths. Each Rosary we pray, especially before her Divine Son's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, will help us to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and to be more willing therefore to plant some seeds for the conversion of men and nations, including our own nation of the United States of America, to the true Faith, outside of which there is salvation and without which there can be no true social order.
Consecrating ourselves as always to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, may we see beyond the crises of the moment in order to be calm and still in the crossing of Our Lady's arms and in the folds of her mantle. She will help us to get home to Heaven as we seek to be more zealous in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of herself, Our Immaculate Queen.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon, a triumph that will be heralded by unceasing shouts of:
Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, 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
