Signs of Apostasy Abound
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Over four thousand children are killed every day in the United States of America by means of surgical abortion. Thousands more die each day as a result of chemical abortifacients. Although public opinion polls seem to indicate something of a shift against surgical baby-killing as we approach the thirty-seventh anniversary of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe. v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, the simple fact that most Americans can go about their daily lives so cavalierly as so many of their fellow human beings are butchered under cover of the civil law speaks much about how far-reaching the effects of one man's actions can be. That is, one man, Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., let loose the forces that overthrow the Social Reign of Christ the King in Europe and thus made it possible for there to arise the modern civil state that professes allegiance to no church, including the one and only true Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the rock of Peter, the Pope.
Martin Luther's revolution against the Divine Plan that Our Lord Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church made it possible for men to accomplish a goal that was near and dear to the heart of Modernists themselves, as Pope Saint Pius X explained in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907:
Formerly it was possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual and to speak of some questions as mixed, conceding to the Church the position of queen and mistress in all such, because the Church was then regarded as having been instituted immediately by God as the author of the supernatural order. But this doctrine is today repudiated alike by philosophers and historians. The state must, therefore, be separated from the Church, and the Catholic from the citizen. Every Catholic, from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed to its wishes, its counsels, its orders -- nay, even in spite of its rebukes. For the Church to trace out and prescribe for the citizen any line of action, on any pretext whatsoever, is to be guilty of an abuse of authority, against which one is bound to protest with all one's might. Venerable Brethren, the principles from which these doctrines spring have been solemnly condemned by Our predecessor, Pius VI, in his Apostolic Constitution Auctorem fidei
Although the "popes" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism have sought to encourage Catholics to take their "place" in the public forum along with other "believers" so that the precepts of the Natural Law can be observed as the foundation of civil law, these "pontiffs" have failed to recognize the truth that social order must degenerate over time when the true Church is not recognized by the civil state and when those in public life fail to subordinate their pursuit of 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. The Catholic Church is the authoritative interpreter of the Natural Law, and it is therefore specious to contend that men can seek to adhere to the precepts of the Natural Law without the teaching and sanctifying offices of Holy Mother Church, something that Pope Leo XIII made very clear in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:
God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.
So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established ( by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,-and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue.
In other words, as I will keep reminding you until the day I die or am rendered unable to write and speak, Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Men need the authority of the Catholic Church to teach them the meaning of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law (those laws revealed positively by God and entrusted to His Holy Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication) and the Natural Law (those moral truths that are knowable by reason alone but which have been given to Holy Mother Church for their authoritative understanding) and to equip them by means of Sanctifying Grace to observe these binding precepts. Men who believe that they do not need the authority of the Catholic Church to guide them and their nations in all that pertains to the good of souls wind up imprisoning themselves in lives of personal despair and/or imprisoned to the ever shifting sands of "popular sovereignty" and the statism that must follow in the wake of such false "sovereignty" of mere creatures.
All but a handful of those attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are convinced that the American concept of the "separation of Church and State" works to "protect" the ability of the Catholic Church to influence public policy. Unfortunately for those who believe in this delusion, it is also the case that Catholics are influenced by the forces of pluralism into believing that they have no obligation whatsoever to view the world through the eyes of the true Faith, less yet to be faithful to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in their own personal lives or as the foundation of just public policy.
Pope Pius IX, writing in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864, prophetically explained what happens in lands where religious indifferentism is permitted to prevail as the foundation of social order:
For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling. (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)
The currents of this "most injurious babbling, stemming from the effects of the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry and the development of the heresy of Americanism in the United States of America (the exaltation of all aspects of the American founding as being perfectly compatible with the Catholic Faith and a veritable model for the rest of the world; see
Babbling Inanities of Americanism) helped to produce the conciliar view of church-state relations that had been condemned repeatedly by true pope after true pope prior to the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958. The conciliar view of church-state laws has, in turn, given rise to a bifurcation among conciliarists along the same kinds of "conservative" and "liberal" lines as found in the organized crime families that control the United States of America, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
"Conservative" conciliarists oppose surgical baby-killing without even acknowledging the fact the proximate cause for the American slaughter of the innocent preborn was the Protestant Revolt and the rise of the religiously indifferentist civil sate of Modernity. Many "liberal" conciliarists support surgical and chemical baby-killing under cover of the civil law, sometimes openly (as in the case of pro-abort Catholic officials in public life), sometimes more carefully by means of providing funding to organizations that are involved in the killing of babies and/or that support the promotion of special "rights" for those engaged in perverse acts in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.
The conciliar "bishops" of the State of California fall into the latter category as they have permitted the so-called "Catholic Campaign for Human Development" to fund openly pro-abortion organizations and agencies:
SAN FRANCISCO, California, January 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Members of Reform CCHD Now, a coalition of Catholic groups seeking a renewal of the bishops' domestic anti-poverty arm (the Catholic Campaign for Human Development), have unearthed what they say is an “irony” in the organization’s treatment of the issue of health care.
The pro-life coalition has pointed out that at the same time as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is working hard to keep abortion funding out of the national health care bill, the CCHD, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and Archbishop George Niederauer have persisted in supporting an organization that successfully lobbied for two municipal universal health plans that fund contraception and abortion.
In fact, Reform CCHD Now (RCN) says that this support has had an important impact on the national health care debate: one of the health plans, promoted by the San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP), has been held up as a model for national health care reform, even winning praise from President Obama.
SFOP has been slated for a grant of $35,000 from CCHD, despite a November report by Rob Gasper of the Bellarmine Veritas Ministry (BVM), which revealed that SFOP has prided itself on winning support for two health clinics, and that these clinics provide contraception and (abortifacient) emergency contraception. Without contradicting the evidence, the national CCHD office exonerated the organization, on the basis that SFOP has the support of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
The Archdiocese, explained CCHD, “strongly supports the work of [SFOP] to expand access to health care to children.” Both Cardinal William Levada, formerly Archbishop of San Francisco, now Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Archbishop Niederauer have spoken at SFOP events, they said, and the organization has “met regularly with Archdiocesan staff to coordinate work on health care access and other issues that affect the poor and immigrant families.”
BVM and American Life League (ALL), another RCN member, have now revealed, however, that SFOP has also been a key player in developing two health care programs in San Francisco that offer abortion and contraceptive services. According to ALL, “it is perfectly clear and completely undeniable that SFOP is actively involved in promoting abortion and birth control, in direct violation of Catholic Church teaching and CCHD guidelines.”
First, SFOP worked with the San Francisco Health Plan (SFHP) to secure the adoption of the Healthy Kids (HK) program, which provides universal health care for children. SFOP's role was considerable, as their efforts were even mentioned in a city resolution supporting a similar statewide program. They also have been credited with enrolling 2,000 children in the city initiative.
According to the SFHP website, “family planning” services are offered to San Francisco's youth through HK. These services include both contraception and “elective abortions.”
California's bishops also backed the statewide HK bill, despite its commitment to abortion and contraception. According to the public record, the California Catholic Conference offered arguments in favour of the bill, supporting it alongside Catholic Charities of California, the Alliance of Catholic Health Care, and Catholic Healthcare West. The Conference sided against the California Right to Life Committee, who, as the sole opposition to the bill, argued “that teenage girls will be brought into government-funded programs promoting birth control and abortion services without parental consent.”
SFOP also prides itself on securing the implementation of Healthy San Francisco (HSF), a pioneer universal health care program begun two years ago that is intended to serve the city's uninsured residents. Community Catalyst, a national non-profit dedicated to promoting health care access, lists SFOP as a key player in rallying support for the program, alongside ACORN and others. Like HK, HSF also provides abortion, contraception, and (abortifacient) emergency contraception.
“The Archdiocese of San Francisco and the CCHD continue to flash their pro-life credentials, but how do they explain the glowing endorsement both gave for the SFOP’s involvement in the pro-abortion Healthy San Francisco and Healthy Kids programs?” asks Michael Hichborn of ALL. “The USCCB has called the pro-abortion provisions in the National Health Care bill ‘unacceptable,’ and yet these provisions are similar to those in the Healthy San Francisco plan, which the Archdiocese of San Francisco supported through the efforts of SFOP.”
The Archdiocese of San Francisco's support for SFOP is deep, as the national CCHD office indicated. They are listed on SFOP's website as a partner, along with nearly a dozen Catholic parishes, and nine Catholic churches are listed as having SFOP organizing committees. The Archdiocese lists an SFOP employee, Sarah Nolan, as their Parish Organizer/Outreach Coordinator, giving her SFOP e-mail address.
Being the first universal health care program of its kind in the U.S., numerous sources, including media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, have touted Healthy San Francisco as a model for national health care reform. In a February address to the nation's mayors, President Obama praised Newsom, saying “Instead of just talking about health care, mayors like Gavin Newsom in San Francisco have been ensuring that those in need receive it.”
Other key players have taken notice as well. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has met with Mayor Newsom about the city's health care experience, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, representative for San Francisco, has supported Newsom in his efforts.
“Essentially, the current health care package Congress is trying to ram down our throats drew heavy inspiration from the Healthy San Francisco plan,” Hichborn observed. “So we have the Archdiocese of San Francisco, the CCHD, and the California Catholic Conference to thank for this mess!”
In his most recent report on SFOP, Bellarmine Ministry’s Rob Gasper asks that the Archdiocese clarify its positions regarding the two health plans promoted by SFOP. “Without such action, Catholics may become confused due to the appearance of disagreement between the USCCB and San Francisco Archdiocese regarding support for health care reform which includes abortion funding,” he writes.
“We expect the Archdiocese of San Francisco and CCHD to consider the facts and begin the process of severing ties with SFOP immediately,” said Hichborn, “and await Bishop Morin’s correction for calling our accusations ‘outrageous’ and ‘untruthful.’”
See the Bellarmine Veritas Ministry report. See American Life League's full listing of the evidence collected regarding CCHD grantees. (CCHD, San Fran Archdiocese Supported Abortion-Funding Health Plan; it would be especially helpful to look at the extensive list of no-goodniks who are funded by the CCHD that is provided on the American Life League's full listing above.)
Let's see. Who is the conciliar "archbishop" of San Francisco? Ah, yes, I remember. George Niederauer, a close friend of the previous "conciliar" archbishop of San Francisco, William Levada, who was the hand-picked selection of his mentor, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, on May 13, 2005, to serve as the prefect of the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Niederauer and Levada share a beach house in Manhattan Beach, California, with their old pal from Saint John's Seminary in Camarillo, California, a fellow named Roger Mahony. Signs of apostasy abound as human lives and souls are ripped apart by the accommodations that the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made to the lies of Modernism, possessed as they are by the spirit of Modernism that was condemned so forcefully by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis on September 8, 1907.
Then again, what is the death of bodies and souls to men who esteem the symbols of false religions in violation of the First and Second Commandments, men who enter into places of false worship and praise the beliefs of those same false religions, men who offend God every time they participate in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo worship service, men who can look the other way as entire doctrines of the Faith are denied openly, including "Archbishop" Robert Zollitsch's denial that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died on the wood of the Holy Cross in atonement for our sins? Men who have lost the Faith also lose any sense of outrage that is part of the sensus Catholicus when Faith and Morals are under attack.
Indeed, the anti-Incarnational lies of Modernity that are at the foundation of the conciliarist worldview were born in the blood of Catholics. This is as true of the Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church as it has been of the various social revolutions of the past two hundred-twenty years. Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., made this point very clear in his discourse about Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen in The Liturgical Year:
Protestantism was established and rooted by the shedding of torrents of blood; and yet Protestants count it as a great crime that, here and there, the children of the true Church made an armed resistance against them. The heresy of the sixteenth century was the cruel and untiring persecutor of men, whose only crime was their adhesion to the old faith--the faith that had civilized the world. The so-called Reformation proclaimed liberty in matters of religion, and massacred Catholics who exercised this liberty, and prayed and believed as their ancestors had done for long ages before Luther and Calvin were born. A Catholic who gives heretics credit for sincerity when they talk about religious toleration proves the he knows nothing about the past or the present. There is a fatal instinct in error, which leads it to hate the Truth; and the true Church, by its unchangeableness, is a perpetual reproach to them that refuse to be her children. Heresy starts with an attempt to annihilate them that remain faithful; when it has grown tired of open persecution it vents its spleen in insults and calumnies; and when these do not produce the desired effect, hypocrisy comes in with its assurances of friendly forbearance. The history of Protestant Europe, during the last three centuries, confirms these statements; it also justifies us in honouring those courageous servants of God who, during that same period, have died for the ancient faith.
Protestantism's initial warfare against Catholics the the Catholic Faith sounds a whole lot like conciliarism's warfare against Catholics who have "prayed and believed as their ancestors had done for long ages" before Roncalli and Montini and Luciani and Wojtyla and Ratzinger. And it is warfare against the Holy Faith that makes warfare among men and their nations all the more inevitable. The forces of Modernity and Modernism have indeed waged a constant, unremitting remitting warfare against the Faith, united as one, despite differences on other matters, in their mutual aggression against the Sacred Rights of the Social Reign of Christ the King.
Although I will have another commentary on the issue of the daily slaughter of the preborn on January 22, 2010, it is useful to point out in this brief commentary once again Catholicism is the one and only foundation of social order.
The Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary is the path to personal and social peace. Hasn't Our Lady herself told us so in her Fatima Message? Shouldn't we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states in life permit and also add the devotion of her Seven Dolors to our daily spiritual life if we have not done so already?
The modern religiously indifferentist state is evil. It needs to be replaced by the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen, a work that starts with our own total consecration to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother and the enthronement of our very homes to these same matchless twin Hearts of Love and Compassion. We are changing the world by the changing of souls to the true Faith, starting with our own on a daily basis as we cleave to true bishops and true priests in the catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds.
We must never forget these words of Pope Saint Pius X, contained n Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, whose one hundredth anniversary will come and go in but seven months, eight days without any notice from Ratzinger/Benedict as the philosophy of The Sillon condemned by Pope Saint Pius X is the philosophy of conciliarism itself:
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.
The true religion is Catholicism, not conciliarism, not any secular, naturalistic ideology of the "left" or of the "right." We must enfold ourselves into the love of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as we make reparation for our own many sins, which are so responsible for the worsening of the state of the Church Militant on earth and of the world-at-large, as we seek to restore all things in Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen.
May it be our privilege to make reparation for our own sins by being hated by the naturalists and the conciliarists for remaining faithful to Christ the King through Mary our Immaculate Queen and the confessionally Catholic civil state no matter what may befall us in this passing, mortal vale of tears.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
