Still Utterly Defenseless Against Itself

by Thomas A. Droleskey

As I have written on many occasions. including most recently in Chester Riley, Call Your Office, the Constitution of the United States of America is defenseless against efforts on the part of legal positivists, moral relativists or craven merchants of raw political power to deconstruct the meaning of its plain words to suit their own nefarious, expedient purposes. That is, a document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words becomes as susceptible to manipulation and misinterpretation as the Bible itself does when one rejects the fact that we have an authoritative guide for the interpretation of Holy Writ, the Catholic Church. It is much easier to deconstruct and to distort a document written by mere men once it is accepted that the Word of God has no ultimate authority on this earth to guide men in the meaning of what God has revealed therein.

Consider, for example, just three passages from the New Testament that Protestants and many modernist Catholics have sought to deconstruct (that is, to replace the plain meaning of words with their own projections as to what those words should mean).

Here is the first passage to be considered:

I am the living bread which came down from heaven. [52] If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world. [53] The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat? [54] Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. [55] He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. (John 6: 51-55.)

 

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was preaching the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, which is rejected by Protestants and by many modernist Catholics. Those who reject the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church feel free to to reduce words of the Divine Redeemer into mere symbolism.

Here is a second passage that Protestants and many modernist Catholics have deconstructed of its plain meaning:

He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. [22] When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. [23] Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained     (John 20: 21-23).

 

This passage proves that Our Lord was instituting the Sacrament of Penance as He gave our first bishops the power to forgive and to retain sins. The nefarious practitioner of natural vice against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, Martin Luther, rationalized his own persistence in his sins by claiming that the Sacrament of Penance was not instituted by Our Lord, that his own steadfast, stubborn refusal to reform his life after making a Confession was not his fault but a veritable proof of the totally corrupt nature of man and thus the inefficacy of a "man-made" ritual. Only God Himself knows the toll that Luther's wishful projection of his own desire to justify himself in his sins has taken on individual souls. We know all too well the toll that it has taken in the world.

Here is a third passage that Protestants and many modernist Catholics have deconstructed, if not ignored altogether:

And it came to pass, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: [42] And she cried out with a loud voice, and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. [43] And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? [44] For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. [45] And blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord.

[46] And Mary said: My soul doth magnify the Lord. [47] And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. [48] Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. [49] Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; and holy is his name. [50] And his mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear him. (Luke 1: 41-50.)

 

Why should I reinvent the wheel? Let me quote directly from the commentary provided in the Challoner Douay-Rheims Bible:

[48] "Shall call me blessed"... These words are a prediction of that honour which the church in all ages should pay to the Blessed Virgin. Let Protestants examine whether they are any way concerned in this prophecy.

 

Indeed. Let Protestants examine whether they are in anyway concerned in this prophecy.  Most of them, of course, are not.

To wit, a recovering drug addict approached me in the parking lot of a supermarket in San Antonio, Texas, on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, September 8, 2005, sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with "I'm Addicted to Jesus." He approached me to inquire as to whether I was "saved," whereupon I gave him a brief discourse on the fact that the Catholic Church is one and only true Church, that Protestantism rejects the plain meaning of the words of Sacred Scripture, to say nothing of rejecting entirely Sacred (or Apostolic Tradition). The man ran away as I quoted "all generations shall call be blessed" and as I asked him whether he calls the Mother of God blessed. He took to dodging between cars in the parking lot as he tried to refute the passages that prove the illogical and contradictory nature of Protestantism's claims about doctrine.

Similarly, it takes a lot of dodging on the part of those who have made demigods out of the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America to refuse to admit that it is entirely logical for contemporary jurists and elected officials to have has little regard for the plain meaning of the words contained in that document's text as Protestants and modernist Catholics have shown for the plain meaning of the words of Sacred Scripture as they have been given and explained to us by the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church. Why should we have any more reverence for the words of mere men, whose bodies have long since decayed after their deaths, when the written Word of God can be deconstructed of Its plain meaning to suit the arbitrary whims of men?

It is important to remember this fact as the Constitution is utterly defenseless against being misinterpreted as its framers did not accept the fact that there is an ultimate teaching authority to be found in the Catholic Church to guide men as they pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End: the possession of the glory the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Although Holy Mother Church leaves it to the prudence of men to form the specific institutional arrangements by which they will govern themselves in a particular body politic, she does insist that men defer to her in all that pertains to the good of souls and that they seek to pursue virtue in their own lives by cooperating with the graces won for them by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on the wood of the Holy Cross that flows into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Men who do not accept this, however, will find that all of their efforts to provide for a just social order, no matter how well-intentioned, will decay over the course of time. The fact that the specific institutional arrangements to be found in the Constitution of the United States of America, none of which is objectionable in se to the Catholic Faith, have been used to pursue more and more manifest injustices that are at odds even the words found in the document's text and are opposed to written thought of the framers themselves is the result of the anti-Incarnational premises which formed their intellectual perspectives. We are witnessing a more open and thus obvious collapse of the order that was meant to be provided by the Constitution for a variety of reasons, including, of course, the fact that there has been a deprivation of Sanctifying and Actual Graces in the world as a result of the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions of concilairism.

The proximate root cause of this decay was caused by the false premises of the American founding that have led jurists and politicians to make as much short work of the text of the Constitution as the plain words of Holy Writ have been made by the Scriptural and dogmatic relativism that Protestantism let loose on the world nearly five hundred years ago. The framers of the American Constitution were but the victims of Protestantism's revolution against the objective nature of Revealed Truth.

The men who framed the Constitution of the United States of America were products of the Protestant Revolt and of the so-called Age of Reason (or Enlightenment). They accepted without question the belief that it was possible for men of divergent religious beliefs–or the lack thereof–to work together reasonably for the common good without referencing any one church as the foundation of a country’s civil order. They believed further in the heresy of semi-Pelagianism, which contends that men have enough inherent grace in themselves to be good, that we do not need belief, in access to or cooperation with sanctifying grace to be virtuous. The framers of the Constitution believed that men of “civic virtue” would present themselves for public service and would, after a long process of compromise, negotiation and bargaining amongst the diverse interests and opinions represented in the United States Congress, make decisions that redounded to the common good (see, for example, James Madison, The Federalist, Numbers 10 and 51).

James Madison himself quite specifically believed that there was no one “opinion” that could unite men of such divergent backgrounds as found themselves in the United States of America at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Thus, a dialectical process of conflict amongst divergent interests (religious, sectional, economic, occupational) had to be created to force those who took positions that constituted a majority “view” at any time to at least consider the viewpoints of those who were in the minority of a given issue. In this way, Madison reasoned, whatever majorities emerged in Congress on any piece of legislation would be transient, indigenous to one particular issue at one particular time, and sensitive to and concerned about the rights of those who disagreed with them. Such a system, which was premised on the exercise of statesmanship on the part of those elected to serve in Congress and as President, would create the “extended commercial republic” where no one person or interest could predominate on all issues at all times.

The institutional arrangements created to effect this “extended commercial republic” were very complex. A division of powers between the central government and the state governments (Federalism). A separation of powers amongst the three branches of the central government involving a number of checks and balances. Different powers given to each of the two chambers of the Congress (bi-cameralism). Staggered elections for the members of the United States Senate, a body whose members were elected by state legislatures until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Popular election originally of only one body, the House of Representatives. A President elected by electors appointed by whatever method deemed best by state legislatures. All of this was supposed to produce a tension that resulted in internal safeguards to prevent, although not absolutely make impossible, the abuse of power and the rise of the tyranny of the majority.

There is only one little problem with this schemata: it was premised on the belief that matters of civil governance do not have to be founded in a reliance on the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has entrusted to His true Church and that the Church herself has no role to play to serve as the ultimate, divinely-instituted check on the abuse of temporal governmental power. It was difficult enough for the Church at times during the Middle Ages, when she exercised the Social Reign of Christ the King, to restrain certain rulers. It is impossible for any purely human institution to restrain the vagaries of fallen human nature over the course of time. Men who are not mindful of their First Cause and their Last End as He has revealed Himself solely through His true Church will descend to their lower natures sooner rather than later.

This is what happened in short order following the ratification of the Constitution.

Political parties arose during President George Washington’s tenure in office. Although Washington himself abhorred the rise of political parties and saw the dangers that would threaten national order if professional, career politicians emerged as a caste undo themselves, he was powerless to stop them from forming and taking over the entirety of the governmental process. Although the names of the political parties have changed over the last two hundred ten years, the partisan political divisions that developed during the Washington Administration have come to define the very nature of American electoral politics and the making of public policy. What is best for a particular political party is best for the nation. So much for the pursuit of the common temporal good on a purely naturalistic level, no less in light of man's Last End.

The era of “Jacksonian Democracy” from 1828 to 1836 spelled the death-knell for the founders’ misplaced hopes that the Constitution itself would serve as a safeguard against the dangers posed by raw majoritarianism, the essence of Andrew Jackson’s political beliefs, which were derived from the American Revolution’s foreign cousin, the French Revolution. All notion of a political system that restrained the exercise of raw political power was pure mythology from Jackson’s time forward.

Abraham Lincoln had little regard for Constitutional restraints.

Woodrow Wilson, an Anglophile, believed that he was a Prime Minister entitled to reflexive support of the Congress.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke every law imaginable to pursue his statist policies of the New Deal and the involvement of the United States in World War II.

John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama each have seen fit to make the Constitution suit their own purposes, sometimes by ignoring it entirely or, at least in some cases, by getting a compliant Supreme Court of the United States of America to ratify their abuses of power.

Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States have justified the creation of so-called “independent regulatory agencies, which violate the principles of “separation of powers” by exercising each of three powers of government (legislative, executive, judicial), applied the provisions of the Bill of Rights, written to restrain the powers of the central government and not the state governments, to the state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process of law” clause, thereby expanding the power of the central government greatly, circumscribed the legitimate powers of the states to supervise their own elections, and have served as laboratories of rank social engineering by making it impossible to prevent the sale of contraceptives and to permit the execution of the innocent unborn by abortion and the elderly by means of the withdrawal of food and water and by “doctor-assisted suicide.” And this is to say nothing about how the "commerce clause" (subsection eight of section eight of Article I of the Constitution) has been used to justify expansions of the power of the Federal government that make poor King George III seem like quite an amateur in the practice of abusing executive powers.

Many of the various people who have served as justices of the Supreme Court of the United States over the years have believed that the words of the Constitution represent either the ultimate authority pertaining to the exercise of governmental power or are so fungible as to admit of constant re-interpretation. Cases involving various constitutional principles may be decided one way at one time and another way at another time. Few things are ever "settled" entirely the Supreme Court decisions unless the naturalists of the "left" are satisfied. We have too much evidence of how the naturalists of the "right" talk about "reversing" various Supreme Court decisions (such as the decisions in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973) at one time to wind up "settling" for what their counterparts in the "left" believe is "settled" law. How much talk have you heard this year from candidates on the "right" about reversing Roe v. Wade? Point made, thank you very much.

Such is the inevitable, inexorable result of a country that rejects the belief that all civil law, whether exercised by a central government or state governments, must be subordinated in all things at all times to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law as those laws have been entrusted to and explicated by Holy Mother Church.

No level of government, whether central or state, has any authority to permit any action contrary to God’s law and thus injurious to the sanctification and salvation of the souls of its citizens. No mere human constitution is above God’s law. No mere human being has the right to decide for himself that he is exempt from the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King. Thus, those men, including the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America, no matter how well-intentioned, who believed that it is possible for “reasonable men” to pursue the “common good” absent a subordination of their lives and their work to Our Lord as He has revealed Himself through His true Church are bound to set their descendants on a downward spiral that will end only in the destruction of their nation or when said nation is converted to the true Faith.

What does any of this mean to the currently reigning caesar, Barack Hussein Obama? Nothing. He lives in utter ignorance, convinced of his own righteous, convinced that he can twist and distort the plain words of the Constitution to justify his statist policies.

Indeed, Barack Hussein Obama has authorized a defense of his thoroughly unconstitutional ObamaCare takeover of the national health-care industry that one Federal judge has found contradictory:

Last week, Florida U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that a multi-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual insurance coverage mandate could proceed. Nineteen states joined Florida in suing the U.S. government, alleging that it had no constitutional authority to mandate that individuals buy health insurance. Alas, New Hampshire was not among them.

Judge Vinson ruled that the states raised a legitimate question about the law's constitutionality. But he also criticized the Obama administration and Congress for playing political games with the court. While the bill was being debated, White House officials and Democratic leaders in Congress asserted that the individual mandate was not a tax. After it became law, the administration started arguing that it was a tax after all. Vinson called that "Alice in Wonderland" trickery.

"Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing, after which the defenders of that legislation take an 'Alice-in-Wonderland' tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely, thereby circumventing the safeguard that exists to keep their broad power in check," he wrote. (A judge untricked: Obamacare in Wonderland.)

 

What does Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus care about the Constitution? Nothing. He's the penultimate deconstructionist and positivist (believing that something is so because he has asserted that it is so).

 

Even though presidents take an oath to uphold the Constitution, it is the actual, practical case that those who hold governmental power have the ability, albeit unjust, to distort the plain meaning of the words of the Constitution to suit their own purposes and to get away with it time and time again. A constitutional system that is not founded on the firm bedrock of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the rights of His true Church to govern men and nations in all that pertains to the sanctification and salvation of souls, thus having the ability as a final resort after the exercise of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching to interpose herself and to nullify unjust laws and actions, is completely and totally defenseless against men who believe that their desires are perfectly justifiable because they believe themselves to be justified.

As a former colleague of mine from the Department of Political Science at Illinois State University, Dr. John A. Gueguen, Jr., noted in 1977 to another colleague who was (and remains) enamored of the American founding, “The Constitution is the problem in this country.” I listened, not fully appreciating Dr. Gueguen’s wisdom at the time. I came to learn later why he was correct, that the Constitution leaves no room for Our Lord and His true Church. As the late, inimitable William C. Koneazny of the legendary Catholic Rendezvous events said to me in July of 1986 as he took a puff on a cigar while sitting on the veranda of the quite dilapidating Canaan Valley Sporting Club in Sheffield, Massachusetts, “The Constitution is evil. It doesn’t mention Christ.” Bill Koneazny was just as correct as John Gueguen had been nine years before.

Once again, it is important to turn to the wisdom of Pope Leo XIII. The words below, found in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, contain nothing other than Catholic truth:

“So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action.

There it is. “To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error.”

I will never tire of quoting this passage, especially to Catholics who are possessed of the Americanist spirit and serve as apologists of the American founding while they spit arrogantly and defiantly in the face of the immutable Social Teaching of the Church that was explicated so clearly by Popes Pius Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Saint Pius X, and Pius XI. The Constitution of the United States of America results inevitably in men such as those who have governed us in in the past and who govern us now (see Not A Mention of Christ the King) These men have had and continue to have a contempt for the very document that is the product of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic errors of Modernity and has thus placed them in positions of civil power. The Social Reign of Christ the King has given us Saint Henry, Saint Canute, Saint Wenceslaus, Saint Casimir, Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Stephen of Hungary, and the inestimable Saint Louis IX, King of France, among many others. History is on the side of the saints, not on the side of power-hungry sycophants who have a contempt even for the documents that made their rise to power possible.

May we, resolving to rid ourselves of sin and vice in our own lives on a daily basis in cooperation with the graces we receive in the Sacraments and by our reliance upon Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary, come to see the world more fully with each passing day through the eyes of the true Faith and thus help in some small way to plant the seeds for the only defense against the abuse of personal and civil power that exists, the Reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the hearts of men and in the law of their nations.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, 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 Simon and Jude, pray for us. 

See also: A Litany of Saints