The Logic of Overthrowing the Social Reign of Christ the King

by Thomas A. Droleskey

There is no end to the slippery slop that modern man has been on since an Augustinian monk named Father Martin Luther posted his ninety-five thesis on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. One of the first casualties of Luther's revolt against the divinely instituted Church Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, was the Social Reign of Christ the King. Luther himself believed that there was a separation between what a prince believed and how he should rule, thus paving the way for the triumph of the power of the modern state, the issue of Protestantism and Freemasonry and a plethora of related forces, which sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of that which is considered to be permissible and that which must be proscribed as reactionary, bigoted, intolerant and divisive.

The overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King has been the subject of many commentaries of mine on this site and in the previously printed journal, Christ or Chaos (1996-2003). There is no need to belabor here points made on numerous occasions in the past. However, I do want to re-state some basic principles before discussing the recent decision of the Dutch judiciary to permit hospital officials at Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands to induce the euthanizing of children under the age of twelve who are deemed to be suffering from incurable illnesses (or suffering in some other way, possibly from some long-term handicap).

The Catholic Church has taught traditionally that she has the divine right to be the ultimate arbiter on all matters that pertain to the administration of justice by the civil state. That is, the Catholic Church, either in the person of the Supreme Pontiff or of a national primate or a local bishop, has the right to interpose herself if a civil authority, whether individual or collective, proposes to do something that violates the binding precepts of the Divine positive law or the natural law--and/or promotes conditions that are deleterious to the sanctification and salvation of human souls, thus harming the common civil good of society. The Church has the right also to punish such civil authorities after the fact if such violations have taken place (say, for example, by excommunicating a civil leader or by placing an interdict on his country). Although never perfectly or consistently exercised, the power of the Church to curb the excesses of the civil state served as a brake in at least some instances during the Middle Ages on the despotic designs of various individuals. The Social Reign of Christ the King, more importantly, inspired such saintly leaders as Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Henry, Saint Louis IX, and Saint Stephen of Hungary, among others, to scale the heights of personal sanctity so as to be able to be just stewards of Christ's social kingship, realizing that they would be accountable to Christ the King at the moment of their Particular Judgments for how they sought to administer justice in His Holy Name.

The modern state admits of only those checks on its exercise of power that are imposed upon it by the demands of the multitudes, in the case of so-called "republics" such as the United States of America, or the exigencies of ideological and/or programmatic agendas the state embraces at any given point as the contemporary equivalent of its state-sponsored religion. For example, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the first nation in the Twentieth Century to permit the execution of innocent children under cover of law (thereby "liberating" women from the family and extricating her from bondage to men and to bourgeois concepts of romantic love and child-bearing). The decimation of its population as a result of the Stalinist purges and World II necessitated a retreat from unrestricted baby for a brief time after World War II, something that was done for purely utilitarian reasons so that the country could be re-populated. Once enough babies had been produced, however, the commissars went back to the original policy. In other words, there are no binding or fixed limits that guide any modern state. Not even a constitutional republic has any such limits as such a system is populated by relativists and/or positivists who have contempt for Christendom and believe in that they are the arbiters of what is permissible and what is considered, at least for the moment, to be impermissible.

In actual point of fact, state-sponsored social engineering goes back in recent centuries to the time of King Henry VIII's England. The poor who had lived for a nominal annual fee on the monastery and convent lands (as they produced the food to sustain themselves, giving some to the monastery or convent) were essentially thrown off of those lands, where their families had lived for generations, in order to redistribute the Church properties Henry had stolen to those who supported his break from Rome. Henry quite cleverly created a class of people who were dependent upon him for the property upon which they lived and the wealth they were able to derive therefrom, making them utterly supportive of his decision to declare himself Supreme Head of the Church in England. Those of the poorer classes who had been thrown off of the monastery and convent lands were either thrown into prison (for being poor, mind you) or forced to migrate to the cities, where many of them lost the true Faith and sold themselves into various vices just to survive. The effects of this exercise of state-sponsored engineering are reverberating in the world today, both politically and economically. Indeed, many of the conditions bred by the disparity in wealth created by Henry's land grab in the Sixteenth Century would fester and help to create the world of capitalist and slave wage that so impressed a German emigre in London by the name of Karl Marx. Unable to recognize the historical antecedents of the real injustices he saw during the Victorian Era, Marx set about devising his own manifestly unjust system, premised on atheism and anti-Theism, to rectify social injustice once and for all. In a very real way, Henry of Tudor led the way to Lenin of Russia.

Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the emergence of modern Germany, used the brute power of the state to create whole categories of citizens who were dependent upon its largesse for various favors. The whole concept of "social security" for the elderly was introduced by Bismarck, thereby taking the responsibility for the care of the elderly away from their grown children and shifting it to the state, thereby affording the grow children an opportunity to "enjoy" the fruit of their own labors without having to worry about caring for their parents and depriving themselves of various goodies. Bismarck encouraged the elderly to go on the government dole by insisting on a mandatory age for retirement, a subject I discussed over seven years ago now in an article in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos. This was a departure from the sensus Catholicus, which teaches us that we should be using the talents God has given us until we are no longer physically and/or mentally able to use them. The creation of an entire category of relatively able-bodied people who would spend the last years of their lives as wards of the state introduced a whole set of problems that have metastasized wildly in the past 130 years. Bismarck wanted to--and did in fact--create a culture of dependency and entitlement.

That Germany should be a proving grounds for social engineering should come as no surprise. The logical result of Martin Luther's prideful revolt against the Church the God-Man had founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, was a Germany that answered to nothing except its own nationalistic interests, defined principally in economic and military terms. It was in the inter-war years in Germany when the Weimar Republic permitted doctors and scientists to engage in all manner of eugenic experimentations in an effort to create a "better" world for the German people. The notorious Margaret Sanger and other American eugenicists had a close kinship with these German experimenters, most of whom favored mandatory sterilization of various sorts of people and who held racialist theories that they tried to envelop into a mantle of scientific and social scientific respectability. Adolph Hitler's own eugenics program, which came to full bloom in 1939 and was opposed very vigorously by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, Clemens von Galens, was merely an state-sponsored imposition of theories and goals that had occupied the time of many German scientists and doctors during the "democratic" Weimar Republic.

Hitler's Third Reich may have lost the military side of World War II. Hitler's utilitarianism, however, has prevailed. In a very real way, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin were the big winners of World War II. Social engineering, which had many devotees in the United States in the latter part of the Nineteenth and early part of the Twentieth Centuries, including United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and mass murder have become institutionalized in western "democracies" and, obviously, in unapologetically totalitarian regimes. The fact that we are discussing human cloning and/or the killing of frozen embryonic human beings for their stem cells is just part and parcel of the diabolical logic of a world where the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen is overthrown and replaced with the Reign of Man.

Then Secretary of the Interior James Watt, for example, was not wrong in the 1980s when he said that if one wanted to find an example of failed social engineering that it was not necessary to travel to the Soviet Union. All one had to do was to travel to one of our own Indian reservations, rife with alcoholism, drug addiction and various contagious diseases, the rotten fruit of the Federal government's social-engineering, which itself was the product of the failure to accept the approach that the great Father DeSmet and his fellow "black robes" (Jesuit fathers) used to such great success with the Indians. Mind you, this is just one example of how a specifically Catholic approach of dealing with the native peoples of this continent was replaced with one founded in paternalism and condescension, leaving no place for the Cross of the Divine Redeemer and the supernatural helps He has given to Holy Mother Church to be administered for the sanctification and salvation of all men in all circumstances until the end of time. All efforts at social engineering have failed in the United States and elsewhere. They will continue to fail. Indeed, they will continue to foster one monstrous development after another.

Case-in-point: the decision of Dutch judiciary to permit hospital officials at Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands to induce the euthanizing of children under the age of twelve who are deemed to be suffering from incurable illnesses (or suffering in some other way, possibly from some long-term handicap). Why is this so shocking? Yes, it is morally heinous. Shocking? There is an inexorable nexus between the killing of even one fertilized human being under cover of law in his mother's womb to the decision of the Dutch judiciary to, in effect, let children be "put to sleep" like they were sick or unwanted cocker spaniels or French poodles. Indeed, it was the de facto case in many Dutch hospitals until 2002 that parents were given up to a year after the birth of their child to determine if they wanted to "keep" him. The Netherlands is merely leading the way down the path to more and more openly draconian measures being accepted passively by citizens who have been brain-numbed by the rot of an un-Catholic and anti-Catholic world. What is happening at Groningen University Hospital will be happening elsewhere sooner than you might think.

Although the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King had some of its antecedent roots in certain aspects of the Renaissance, the triumph of the forces of the Protestant Revolt and of Freemasonry (and its allies) could not have been as thorough and as widespread if the true Church herself had not embraced the spirit of the world and silenced herself about the Social Reign of her Divine Founder and Bridegroom in order to make herself more accepted by world leaders and by the leaders of other religions. Sadly, so many of her bishops have done more than this: they have coddled theological dissent, embraced wholeheartedly the synthetic concoction of the Novus Ordo Missae (which makes no reference to the spirit of heresy or the possibility of one losing his soul for all eternity), and have been deaf, blind and dumb when confronted with their own institutions are participating merrily in the slaughter of the preborn.

Consider this news item contained in a report written by Jill Stanek, "Catholic Hospitals Commit--and U.S. Bishops Condone--Live Birth Abortion," that was posted this very day on www.worldnetdaily.com:

The news was a real bummer. A reporter named Tom Szyszkiewicz, who writes for the Catholic publications, Our Sunday Visitor and the National Catholic Register, was calling to tell me he had discovered two Catholic hospital systems were committing the induced-labor abortion procedure – live-birth abortion – on handicapped babies.

The bad news warped to bizarre when Szyszkiewicz said these hospitals were waiting until babies were 23 to 26 weeks gestation before aborting them – i.e., until they were of viable age – so they could say these weren't abortions at all, but simply labor inductions and, thus, sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

"That's crazy," I thought. Most hospitals I'm aware of that commit LBA do just the opposite: They make sure to abort babies before 23 weeks – the most recent viability cutoff date according to the American Heart Association and American Academy of Pediatrics – to avoid the ethical and legal dilemmas of deciding whether to resuscitate a baby they just tried to kill.

The Catholic hospitals' abortion strategy seemed even more risky when taking the Born Alive Infants Protection Act into account. It states that live-born babies, no matter what their gestational age or circumstances of birth, are "persons." According to the 14th Amendment, "persons" born in the United States are automatic citizens who cannot be "deprive[d] ... of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor den[ied] ... equal protection of the laws."

This means live-aborted babies can't be cast aside to die in hospital soiled utility rooms, or drowned in buckets of water, or sealed to suffocate in biohazard bags. They must be medically assessed and cared for just like wanted babies.

Last week, I contacted both hospital systems to make sure I wasn't missing something. I wasn't.

Loyola Health System in Chicago, and Providence Health System on the West Coast and Alaska, both commit live-birth abortion. But they don't like the word, abortion." They call what they do, "early induction of labor."

Webster's Dictionary defines abortion as, "the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus."

So now "termination of pregnancy" is called "early induction of labor." Euphemisms ... what would abortion proponents do without them?

Other Catholic hospitals may also be involved. Szyszkiewicz reported in the March 7, 2004, Our Sunday Visitor that Providence is the 10th largest U.S. Catholic health system, and "spokespersons for the other nine ... were either vague about their hospitals' practices or did not return calls."

Loyola and Providence say they are acting in accordance with the 2001 U.S. Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services that states, "For proportionate reason, labor may be induced after the fetus is viable."

Theologian James LaGrye from the bishops' doctrinal office said the term "proportionate" is used "for situations in which some grave risk would be incurred if an action were not taken to avoid it," wrote Szyszkiewicz, who added, "LaGrye said the mental health of the mother 'is a reason' to perform early induction."

In addition to having "mental health" concerns, Fr. Jack O'Callahan, staff ethicist at Loyola, said they are trying "to ward off the physical complications of bringing to term a child who is not going to live anyway."

Why in the world should we be shocked about the killing of "incurably ill" children under the age of twelve in the Netherlands when our own Church institutions are killing them and those who might born with handicaps as they develop in their mothers' wombs? So completely devoid of the true Faith is the conciliarist ethos that has infected the Church and caused a self-made devastation of souls that is without parallel in the history of the Church that is is not at all inaccurate to refer to the descent into barbarism at Catholic hospitals as just another example of the Novus Ordo Vaticano, which is itself an embrace of the Novus Ordo Secolorum celebrated so famously on the back of our dollar bills. Gone is any sense that each innocent human life is desired by God to be cherished and nurtured in the womb so as to be brought to the baptismal font very soon after birth (and immediately in cases where a child might die within moments or hours or days of being born) and thus be able to gave upon His very glory in the Beatific Vision for all eternity. Gone is the sense that parents who lose a child shortly after birth and baptism gain a powerful intercessor for their family's needs. Gone is the sense of all Catholic truth, of seeing the world supernaturally, of standing by the foot of the Cross of the Divine Redeemer with Our Lady, who is truly the Mother of Sorrows.

Although there have been indeed forces at work in the world that have made possible the barbaric practices of modernity, it is the embrace of Modernism within the Catholic Church that has made these forces so triumphant in the hearts and minds of our own people to such an extent that many of them do not think twice about baby-killing under cover of law or about the eugenic baby-killings taking place in our own Catholic hospitals. That the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, and his bishops can sit back and let this happen in our own institutions speaks volumes once again about the paralysis of the sensus Catholicus caused by the errors of conciliarism, including the tragic mistake known as collegiality.

There is no short-term solution to our multifaceted and inter-related problems. The instances of abject barbarism noted above have no chance of being ameliorated until and unless some Pope actually consecrates Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. We must pray and fast and make many sacrifices, especially this Ember Friday and Ember Saturday, to help make reparation for our own sins and to help move the heart of this pope or one of his successors to do precisely and only what Our Lady said on July 13, 1917 had to be done for the sake of the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart. For it is the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart that will usher in the Social Reign of Christ the King and thus be a bulwark against the promotion of sin under cover of law in the civil state.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta and Francisco, pray for us.