Up In Smoke

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Gradually Accepting Naturalism's False Premises, published on August 31, 2008, reviewed how many Catholics had gotten so accustomed to cultural trends contrary to God's Holy Laws and thus to the good of their own immortal souls that they become, at least for the most part, incapable of seeing the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and of expressing even the slightest bit of outrage when the latest offense to God is given by the scions of popular culture and/or those in the real of public policy and electoral politics, no less react at all when outrages are given to God by the scions of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

An attitude of "ho-hum" greets this or that new descent into the abyss. Some might give a shrug of the shoulder or even grimace a little bit as they ask for extra gravy or more stuffing for their Thanksgiving turkey each year. However, most Catholics in the world today, including most Catholics in the United States of America, have made their peace with the "world," happy to be immersed in the midst of its profanities and blasphemies.

Some Catholics believe that there is no need to oppose the evils of the day as "progress" must take its place and that it is "enough" for us to be "free" to believe an worship as we please.

Other Catholics believe that the advances made by pluralism are "irreversible," that we must get on with the business of our lives in the world without worrying about things that are, they convince themselves, out of their control.

We have seen traditionally-minded Catholics abandon all efforts to resist the world, plunging headlong into the rot of the popular culture, including dressing their daughters in masculine attire and patronizing the propaganda of the Judeo-Masonic Disney company's animated features of the past twenty years or so. Why not live it up, eh." You don't want to "stand out," do you?

All of this permits the devil to advance his agenda of evil on an incremental basis to such an extent that is imperceptible for the average Catholic to see or to admit.

Father Frederick Faber, writing in the Creator and the Creature, explained how perniciously the pluralism born of the Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church and to order societies rightly according to the binding precepts contained in the Deposit of Faith seeps into the consciousness of men and blinds them to the insidious nature of theological and philosophical errors:

This forgetfulness that we are creatures, which prevails in that energetically bad portion of the world which is scripturally called the world, affects multitudes of persons, who are either less able to divest themselves of the influences of old traditions and early lessons, or are happily less possessed with the base spirit of the world. It leads them to form a sort of religion for themselves which singularly falls in with all the most corrupt propensities of our hearts: a religion which in effect teaches that we can live two lives and serve two masters. Such persons consider that religion has its own sphere, and worldly interests their sphere also, and that the one must not interfere with the other. Thus their tendency is to concentrate all the religion of the week into Sunday, and to conceive that they have thereby purchased a right to a large conscience for the rest of the week. The world, they say, has its claims and God has His claims. Both must be satisfied; God first, and most scrupulously; then the world, not less exactly, though it be indeed secondary. But it is not a "reasonable service" to neglect one for the other. God and the world are coordinate powers, coordinate fountains of moral duty and obligation. He is really the religious man who gives neither of them reason to complain. We must let our common sense hinder us from becoming over-righteous. Men who hold this doctrine, a doctrine admirably adapted for a commercial country, have a great advantage over the bolder men of whom we spoke before. For they enjoy all the practical laxity of unbelievers, without the trouble or responsibility of disbelieving; and besides that, they enjoy a certain good humor of conscience in consequence of the outward respect they pay, in due season and fitting place, to the ceremonies of religion.

Hitherto we have spoken of classes of persons in whom we take no interest, further than the sorrow which all who love God must feel at seeing Him defrauded of His honor, and all who love their fellow-men in seeing so much amiability, so much goodness, with a millstone round its neck which must inevitably sink it in the everlasting deeps. Let us come now to those with whom we are very much concerned; and for whom we have ventured to compose this little treatise. Errors filter from one class of men into another, and appear in different forms according to the new combinations into which they enter. We are all of us more affected by the errors which prevail around us than we really suppose. Almost every popular fallacy has its representative even among the children of faith; and as when a pestilence is raging, many are feeble and languid though they have no plague-spot, so  is it in matters of religion. The contagion of the world does us a mischief in many ways of which we are hardly conscious; and we often injure ourselves in our best and highest interests by views and practices, to which we cling with fatal obstinacy, little suspecting the relationship in which they stand to widely spread evils, which we behold in their naked deformity in other sections of society, and hold up to constant reprobation. The forgetfulness that we are creatures, which produces the various consequences already mentioned, is an error which is less obviously hateful than a direct forgetfulness of God, and consequently it wins its way into holy places where the other would find no admittance, or want hospitality. Good Christians hear conversations around them, catch the prevailing tone of society, read books, and become familiarized with certain fashionable principles of conduct; and it is impossible for their minds and hearts not to become imbued with the genius of all this. It is irksome to be always on our guard, and from being off our guard we soon grow to be unsuspicious. When a catholic enters into intimate dealings with protestants, he most not forget to place his sentries, and to act as if he was in an enemy's country; and this is unkindly work, and as miserable as it is unkindly. Yet so it is. When newspapers tell us that catholicism is always more reasonable and less superstitious when it is in the immediate presence of protestantism, they indicate something that they have observed, namely, a change. Now if our religion be changed by protestantism, we can have little difficulty in deciding whether it has changed for the better or the worse. All this illustrates what we mean. The prevailing errors of our time and country find their way down to us, and corrupt our faith, and lower our practice, and divide us among ourselves. This unstartling error of forgetting that we are creatures is thus not without grave influence upon conscientious catholics; and it is to this point that we are asking your attention. (Father Frederick Faber, The Creator and the Creature, written in 1856 and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1978, pp. 27-29.)

 

These two paragraphs summarize most succinctly how Catholics have come to make their "peace" with the evils represented by the errors of Modernity and Modernism, starting with the Protestant Revolution itself.

The errors flowing the the various strains of the Protestant Revolution are hateful in the sight of God. Yes, true, God alone judges the souls of individual adherents of the Protestant sects, as He alone judges our own immortal souls. Protestantism, however, is evil of its nature. God hates all false religions. He hates all falsehoods. Why? Because theological falsehoods blaspheme Him and make a mockery of His work of Redeeming us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Protestantism is a revolution against the fact that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded but one Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the sole repository of the Deposit of Faith, the sole and infallible teacher of all that is contained in that Deposit of Faith, the sole means of human sanctification an salvation on the face of this earth. This is not a "minor" matter.

Protestantism is a revolution against the fact that Divine Revelation consists of both Sacred Scripture and Apostolic or Sacred Tradition, making of each "believer" his own "interpreter" of the "Word," an absurdity that leads to a gazillion different "interpretations as to the meaning of various Scriptural passages and, ultimately, to unbelief itself.

Catholics have nothing to "learn" from Protestantism. Nothing. The Fathers of the Council Trent, as some apologists for the former arch-heretic who served as the head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism from April 19, 2005, until February 28, 2013, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI are still contending, did not "misunderstand" Martin Luther or John Calvin or Thomas Cranmer in the Sixteenth Century any more than the Fathers of the Council of Nicea "misunderstood" Arius and Arianism in the Fourth Century (although some defenders of Arius at the time contended that this was indeed the case). The Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, does not "get things wrong" in dogmatic councils that meet under His infallible guidance and protection.

Protestantism has given impetus to a new wave of radical individualism, anticlericalism and semi-Pelagianism in the past four hundred ninety-five years that has made possible the triumph of naturalism in the midst of the world and thus in the hearts and minds of so many hundreds of millions of Catholics yet attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. It has been a relatively easy thing for Catholics who have made these accommodations to the spirit of Protestantism to have acted likewise as the counterfeit church of conciliarism has adopted and implemented much of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic spirit, starting with the abominable Novus Ordo service. There is no need to do battle with the "world" when its false spirit has been enshrined in what purports to be the Catholic liturgy and is defended in the "official" documents issued by and under the authority of the conciliar "pontiffs."

The blithe acceptance of the evils of Protestantism has led to the blithe acceptance of evils in the popular culture. It is, after all, a relatively easy thing to be sanguine about cultural evils once one has convinced himself that false religions are not hated by God and that the false, blasphemous tenets of these false religions do not pose a grave and immediate threat to the eternal good of souls and to the temporal good of society, making it easier for those who deny entirely the Incarnation of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost to be about their demonic business of promoting immodesty of dress, indecency in speech and impurity in thought, word, and action.

The counterfeit church of conciliarism has aided and abetted this sanguine attitude of Catholics concerning the world and the evils abroad in its popular culture, admitting, of course, that a few "peeps," squeaked in the tones of "human dignity" and "human rights" absent any reference at all to the Social Reign of Christ the King, have passed from the lips of conciliar "pontiffs" and their "bishops," especially concerning surgical abortion, albeit without recognizing the fact that social evils protected under cover of law are the precise result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt.

Yes, it is an easy thing to accommodate oneself to the prevailing cultural trends once one accepts the "benign" nature of the Protestant Revolt and accepts the pluralistic, religiously indifferentist civil state as a "benefit" to Catholicism rather than a deadly poison.

Thus it is that many of the social evils that came to the surface of popular culture in the 1960s have been "mainstreamed" into daily life. Our immortal souls are bombarded in supermarkets and other retail stores with the horrors of "rock" "music." We must put up with this assault upon our senses as shopping is a necessity, although we should not subject our children to this assault if it possible to do so. We must not subject ourselves to the devil's "music" voluntarily. There are, for example, restaurants that do not play "rock" "music" and it is these that should be patronized.

"Rock" "music," however, is one of those evils that has been "mainstreamed" in the past sixty years. What was one an eclectic preserve of teenagers and college students that aroused the condemnation of at least a few solid Catholic bishops and priests is now an "accepted norm," especially as the "baby boomers" of the 1950s and 1960s have become older and serve now as the decision-makers of the corporations that make the marketing decisions, based on the same kind of focus-group polling that has been adapted for use by the organized crime families of naturalism in the political realm, as to what "music" to play in various retail outlets. As is the case with any other evil, such as Protestantism, that becomes "accepted" over time simply because most people, including most Catholics have come to believe that past judgments were too "harsh" and that we must seek to find the "good" in something that has become so widespread and institutionalize, "rock music" has become "accepted" precisely because most people are used to it after decades of being exposed to it day in and day out without cease.

That which is evil does not become "good" as it is accepted more and more over the passage of time. That which is evil does not become "less evil" simply because other evils have arisen that are said to be "worse" by means of comparison.

The same is true of the growing acceptance and rather blase attitudes that have developed even among many Catholics about the use of marijuana. No matter how many people, including libertarians, try to rationalize the use of this substance, principally because of the guilty consciences caused by using it in the past or doing so at present, the smoking of marijuana for so-called "recreational" use remains what it has always been, a Mortal Sin. The fact that majorities in the States of Colorado and Washington voted to decriminalize the sale, possession and use of marijuana shows that the long, gradual process of accepting the use of the cannabis weed as nothing unusual or intrinsically immoral has resulted in an electorate more willing to accept what was unthinkable fifty years ago prior to the arrival of the "Beatles," who helped to popularize this mind-numbing drug. Although voters in the State of Oregon defeated a similar referendum, it is only a matter of time that voters in the State of California follows suit.

Indeed, the late Gary Crosby, son of the late Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby, related that his father told him to try "grass" in order to learn how to "relax." "Der Bingle," the "Pride of Gonzaga University" in Spokane, Washington, learned about "grass" from Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong. It is no accident that New Orleans, Louisiana, the "birthplace of the blues," was a hotbed of marijuana use in the second decade of the Twentieth Century after it had first gained acceptance in the city's district of ill-repute in which Louis Armstrong himself had been born in 1901.

Marijuana use in New Orleans was linked from its inception in 1909 with the immoral activity of the selling of human bodies. Thus it was only logical for New Orleans to serve as one of the cradles of jazz music, whose very sensuality is a celebration of "cool" passivity and the sort of mindless self-indulgence for which marijuana is used and into which it plunges so many of its users into lives wasted in darkened rooms while their intellects are dulled and their wills weakened to commit various other sins. Virtue the building block of personal sanctity, becomes replaced by mindless self-indulgence and escapism that lowers one's span of attention and is in many instances the "highway" to stronger, even more addictive substances in pursuit of the "high" that becomes the very raison d'etre of daily life.

Although there are even some traditionally-minded Catholics, including clergymen, who believe that the civil state has no business illegalizing marijuana, the truth of the matter is that marijuana stays in the body longer than does alcohol, which is water soluble whereas marijuana is fat soluble, where it is stored, not eliminated, cumulatively. One's ability to drive a motor vehicle or to perform in school as a student or in one's position of employment becomes dangerously impaired as a result, frequently with deadly results.

To wit, sixteen people died on January 4, 1987, in Chase, Maryland, when the marijuana-influence crew of a Conrail freight train ignored track signals warning them to stop, causing Amtrak passenger train 94 to crash into it. You better believe that the civil government has a role to play in its assurance of public safety by illegalizing such a substance, whose short-term and long-term effects are denied by its advocates but are all too clear in the lives of those who have been maimed or had their loved ones killed in marijuana-related accidents.

Even the bastion of baby-killing and perversity known as The New York Times featured an article, written by a physician who describes himself as a partisan Democrat but who has seen the effects of "medical marijuana" use on his patients that rightly termed the supposedly "scientific" claims of marijuana advocates as nothing other than "phony science," which is exactly what it is, nothing more, nothing less (Marijuana Activists Trumpet Phony Science). Although the author is clearly a statist and prone to mocking those of us who reject the myth of "global warming," he has seen the harm of marijuana first-hand and knows that each and every single one of its arguments made to support it, including the false claim that it is beneficial for those suffering from glaucoma, is misleading and/or entirely false.

No ill-effects from smoking marijuana?

Sorry, you can save your propaganda from Hell for someone else as I have been opposed to this diabolical trap from the devil ever since it surface "above ground," if you will, with the advent of the "Beatles" in the 1960s, and I exaggerate not when I state that my firm, unequivocal opposition to it in high school did not make me popular in the slightest (I seem to have had a problem with that "popularity" business over the course of sixty-two years, two months of life). And, to put it mildly, I was shocked five years after graduating from high school to discover some of the people with whom I had been friendly years before actually used it, smoking it openly in the house of school board member, who was not there at the time. I just could not believe my eyes, and the resultant shock and disapproval, which I expressed in typewritten letters, estranged me from several people for a few years. I may have been an adolescent in the 1960s. However, I was not a participant in the "rock music" and "drug" culture of that era.  Yes, save your argumentative e-mails on this one as I have no time to waste on those who want to advocate the "harmless" nature of this terrible drug or who want to make a "libertarian" argument for its "decriminalization." I am completely inflexible, as in totally rigid, on this issue. No compromise. No concessions of any kind. None. Ever. Not one little bit.

Indeed, a protracted discussion took place between then United States Representative Stanley Lundine (D-Jamestown, New York) and Ulster County, New York, District Attorney Michael Kavanagh about the relatively new phenomenon of crack cocaine during a debate among candidates for lieutenant governor of the State of New York held at The New York Times building in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York, on Tuesday, October 14, 1986. The two went back and forth for what seemed like an eternity. When it came my time to speak as the candidate of the Right to Life Party I simply said that the problem we faced was not crack cocaine, it was the glorification and decriminalization of marijuana, the highway that leads to all other hallucinogenic substances. My opponents had to shake their heads in agreement. A society that loses sight of the Cross will look inevitably to pills and substances to take away the pain of a world that is in the grip of the devil himself. And the devil is, after all, the author of all novelties, seeking to tickle the ears of men by things that look and sound "new" to appeal to their pride and their vanity (see Big Pharm Trumps the Holy Cross).

Oh well, some might say, it's no "sin" to "relax" a little bit.

Relaxation is one thing. Marijuana is by its very nature the antithesis of the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as no one needs to "escape" from his crosses by the uses of a substance that lessens his ability to reason and thus diminishes his capacity to engage in cognitive activities and to make moral choices consonant with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

As noted fourteen months ago now in First-Hand Evidence Of Fraud, the priests of the Society of Saint Pius X are, leaving aside their false ecclesiology that has caused its very foundation stones to be shattered in recent years, among the most reliable guides on moral issues today as, unlike others, they have been trained in a systematic manner wherein they can use actual reason rather than rely on the rote memorization of 1950s textbooks, not a few of whose authors were just champing at the bit for Papa Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, to die so that the envelope" of novel moral teaching they were pushing as far as was possible then could be pushed to its next phase of "evolution." Here, therefore, are two fine statements about marijuana that were published originally in The Angelus:

 

“Neither the effeminate, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards...will possess the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 6:10). Drunkenness is a deliberate excess in the use of intoxicating drink or drugs to the point of forcibly depriving oneself of the use of reason for the sake of gratifying an inordinate desire for such drink and not for the sake of promoting health. This is contrary to the virtue of temperance, and specifically sobriety. Sobriety regulates man’s desire and use of intoxicants, and is vitally necessary for an upright moral life. The evil of intoxication lies in the violence committed against one’s nature by depriving it of the use of reason. He deprives himself of that which makes him specifically human - his ability to think. The drunk, or in this case the drug user, desires this loss of reason because of the feeling of liberation which accompanies it precisely from this lack of control of the will over the reason. It is unnatural, contrary to sleep, which also deprives one of the use of reason but in a natural manner.

Drug use gives an illicit means of escape. Besides being a sin, it also manifests an immaturity on the part of the user. Through an act of violence against himself, he escapes from the responsibility of decision making and control in his life. When this deprivation is complete, e.g., actions totally contrary to normal behavior, incapability of distinguishing between good and evil, etc., it is a grave sin. “In vino veritas,” said the Romans, not without reason. Any state short of complete drunkenness, without sufficient reason, is of itself venially sinful, but even in this case it may be a mortal sin if it causes scandal, injury to health, harm to one’s family, etc. It is important also to note that a man is responsible for all the sinful actions committed while intoxicated which he had, or ought to have, foreseen.

According to Jone-Adelman in Moral Theology, the use of drugs in small quantities and only occasionally is a venial sin if done without sufficient reason. This could be the case, for example, with sleeping pills. Obviously, deprivation of the use of reason through narcotics is to be judged as alcohol. The use of most drugs is complicated by the fact that they are illegal. This also signifies the will of the user to break the law, an offense against social justice. This compounds the sin. The speed with which a drug alters one’s consciousness also aggravates its use. This rapidity risks a greater potential to deprive oneself of the use of reason and thus to pass on to stronger intoxicants for increased effect. Therefore, adding to the violation of the virtue of justice, the grave scandal caused, the grave danger of addiction, and the stronger consciousness-altering ability of marijuana, it is difficult to excuse one of mortal sin. Moreover, experience tells us that its use is frequently an occasion of mortal sin, especially sins of the flesh and the use of narcotic drugs. But to willingly and knowingly place oneself in an unnecessary proximate occasion of mortal sin is to commit a mortal sin. Fr. James Doran, September 1993.

The old text books [on moral theology] do not speak of this new problem of the modern world. However, the immorality of drug abuse can be clearly deduced from the principles which allow an evaluation of the malice of alcohol abuse. The distinction is made between imperfect drunkenness, the fact of making oneself tipsy deliberately, which can only be a venial sin, and perfect drunkenness, which is drinking until one is drunk. This is a mortal sin because a drunken person loses the use of reason. This is St. Thomas Aquinas’s response to the objection that the quantity of wine drunk is but a circumstance, which cannot make a venial sin into a mortal sin:

With regard to drunkenness we reply that it is a mortal sin by reason of its genus: for that a man, without necessity, and through the mere lust of wine, makes himself unable to use his reason, whereby he is directed to God and avoids committing many sins, is expressly contrary to virtue. That it be a venial sin is due to some sort of ignorance or weakness, as when a man is ignorant of the strength of the wine, or of his own unfitness, so that he has no thought of getting drunk, for in that case the drunkenness is not imputed to him as a sin, but only the excessive drink…. (ST, I-II, q. 88, art. 5, ad1)

The consumption of illegal drugs, even those called soft drugs, is comparable not to becoming tipsy on a little wine but to perfect drunkenness. For these drugs have their effect by causing a “high,” that is, an emotional experience when a person escapes from the demands of reality. For a brief period he lives in an unreal, euphoric world. All the other effects, such as relaxation, come as a consequence of this “high,” or unreal euphoria. If this state does not always prohibit all use of reason, it most certainly does always impede the most important use of reason, which St. Thomas just explained to us “whereby he is directed to God and avoids committing many sins.” All drugs deaden the conscience, and obscure the practical judgment as to right and wrong and what we must do. With respect to morality, their effect is consequently equivalent to the removal of the use of reason, and is a practical refusal to direct all of man’s acts to God through reason.

Drug abuse is consequently much worse than the pure seeking of pleasure or relaxation that some claim it to be. It is a denial of the natural and supernatural order, according to which God has created us in His image and likeness that our acts might be ordered to His honor and glory. Moreover, it goes without saying that the abuse of drugs is directly opposed to the Catholic spirit, which spirit of sacrifice, the practical application of the spirit of the cross, is essential to the living of our faith.

As previously mentioned, the principal evil of drug abuse is the destruction of moral conscience. It follows that the atrocious consequences of drug abuse are inseparable from it, and are willed together with the drugs themselves. This includes the breaking of the law in the consumption of drugs; and in the means of obtaining them, such as theft; and in the effort to sell them in turn to others, often minors or children. Other consequences include the incredible self-indulgence which accompanies the almost insatiable desire for always more titillating experiences, sins of blasphemy, the often satanic rock music, and the sins against purity and chastity, which are the consequence of the loss of shame and conscience. Sins against charity and justice abound, such as disobedience to parents and refusal to do one’s duty at school or work, not to mention the bad company-keeping which is the breeding ground of all vices. Long term results are also willed in their cause, and they include such things as emotional and physical addiction, the passage from soft to hard drugs, the damage done to the body and to general health by prolonged drug use, culminating in the “fried” brains of the person who cannot even reason clearly, let alone make a moral judgment. It is a mortal sin to place one’s physical and spiritual health in such proximate danger, even if a person is to pretend that he is immune from this danger and that “it could not happen to me.”

Even the often liberal and ambiguous Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1994 in application of the principles of Vatican II, acknowledges this:

The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law. (§2291)

This does not, however, exclude the use of narcotic drugs for therapeutic reasons. Their use, under medical supervision, is justified by a sufficiently grave and proportionate reason, even if they do deprive a person temporarily of the use of reason. (Cf. Merkelbach, Summa Theologiae Moralis, II, 925). For it is not the loss of reason which is willed. It is only an indirect consequence, so that there is not necessarily a disorder with respect to the final end of man. The typical example is pain control.

In conclusion, therefore, the use of marijuana, like any hard or soft drug, must be considered a mortal sin. If on occasion some people might be in ignorance as to the gravity of this sin, it is clearly evident that the matter is objectively serious. Consequently, it must be confessed as a mortal sin, and a person is obliged to confess drug abuse under pain of a bad or sacrilegious confession. If he forgot to confess the sin, he must then confess it at the first possible opportunity that he has. The priest who claimed that this was not a mortal sin has fallen into the trap of laxity.

Fr. Peter Scott, January 1999 (Is smoking marijuana a sin? What about taking drugs?.)

Yet it is that in this country where the universal franchise has indeed led to the "universal madness" prophesied in 1872 by Pope Pius IX "the "people" get to "vote" on "legalizing" various mortal sins that have gained widespread acceptance culturally and whose use is considered to be, as noted above, just as commonplace as anything else.

It is the "universal franchise" that gave us a total creature of the 1960s and 1970s as President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama/Soetoro, on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, and once again on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Obama/Soetoro has used the bully pulpit of the presidency of the United States of America to agitate in behalf of every social evil that came of age in the first two decades of his life at a time when the conciliar revolutionaries were drying up the wellsprings of Sanctifying and Actual Graces by means of their false, sacramentally barren liturgical rites and their false doctrines that are premised upon an acceptance of the very anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity that have plunged us into a moral abyss that would have made even the likes of Nero and Caligula blush with shame.

Much in the manner of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is using his forum as "Pope Francis," to give a "papal" approbation to all of the revolutionary propaganda he learned in the 1960s and helped to propagate in Argentina as "Father" Bergoglio in the 1970s as to "legitimize" himself in the eyes of his critics no matter where they might be located up and down and all across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide in this time of apostasy and betrayal, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro continues to use the American presidency as the vehicle to justify his own immoral and illegal practices as a young adult:

 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Less dangerous, he said, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” What clearly does trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for marijuana among minorities. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.” But, he said, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.” Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that “it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

As is his habit, he nimbly argued the other side. “Having said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There is a lot of hair on that policy. And the experiment that’s going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge.” He noted the slippery-slope arguments that might arise. “I also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?” (David Remnick: On and Off the Road with Barack Obama.)

No, never mind about all of the transportation accidents (automobile, truck, railroad, subway, bus, airplane, motor boating) that have been caused by the use of marijuana.

Never mind all of the lost, empty lives being led by those who have been addicted to marijuana for decades, of the loss of productivity and competence caused by employees, supervisors, managers and even owners of American businesses.

Never mind all of the high school and college/university/professional school students who cannot focus their self-absorbed minds on the subject matter being taught to them in the classroom or to have any desire to read the textbooks and other readings that are assigned to them.

Barry Soetoro says that, despite a few problems and a slippery slope that could be caused by the "legalization" of marijuana, he would rather live in a country "in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."

Talk about the pot (pun intended) calling the kettle black (pun not intended).

I mean, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro is living proof that one can break the laws of both God and men while never being held accountable civilly for his criminal conduct, although he will face a day of reckoning at his Particular Judgment if he does not convert to the true Faith and repent of his crimes while abjuring them publicly.

Moreover, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro believes that anyone who does want to hold him accountable, including those who are calling for his impeachment (see a story about Nat Hentoff urging Obama impeachment), for his crimes against God and man is racially motivated (see today's companion article, We Oppose You Because of Your Policies, Mister President, Not Because of Your Skin Color).  This man is as much as a driven demagogue and sloganeer as Jorge Mario Bergoglio himself.

If you think about it, the gradual acceptance of moral evil and aberration after another is how Fathers Annibale Bugnini, C.M., and Ferdinando Antonelli, O.F.M., sought to condition Catholics for their liturgical revolution, starting with the changes made to the Holy Week liturgies as early as 1951 that culminated in the "reforms" of 1955/1956 and those sanctioned by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII in 1960 that resulted in the 1961/1962 Missal mandated for use in the Motu world that was used for all of three years in the conciliar structures before giving way itself to Giovanni Montini/Paul VI's Ordo Missae of 1965 on Sunday, November 29, 1964, the First Sunday of Advent.

The gradual acceptance of those liturgical changes conditioned Catholics to accept ceaseless change and instability as part and parcel of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service. Even "unauthorized changes," such as the practice of what purports to be "Communion in the hand" in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service, came to be "papally approved" and went into effect  on the First Sunday of Advent, December 2, 1977.

Similarly, the gradual acceptance of change and the "abuses" engendered thereby is how what were called at first "Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist" began to proliferate in the 1970s and 1980s. It is how "altar girls" got approved in 1994 after two decades of their popping up as close to the Apostolic Palace as the Church of Santa Maria in Transpontina on the Via della Conciliazione within a quarter mile, if that, of Piazza di Santo Pietro. It is how one liturgical "abuse" after another made its way was "mainstreamed' into the ultimate liturgical abuse of all, the Novus Ordo service itself.

The more that "the people" silently accept and thus become accustomed to things that they know are wrong is the more that they not even bat the proverbial eyelash when what was once thought unthinkable, whether civilly or ecclesiastically, becomes "legal" as many say, "Well, it's about time. Now we can move on to other, more important issues."

Ah, but there is no more important issue for any of us than to avoid the commission of one Mortal Sin and, obviously, to make reparation for any we may have committed in the course of our lifetimes.

The civil government has an obligation to seek to root out those conditions that make it more possible for men to sin grievously, thus making themselves less capable of being good citizens in the maintenance of social order. Those who souls are disordered by means of unrepented Mortal Sins will be instruments of disorder in their own lives and in the lives of others, something that affects the entirety of society.

As Saint Louis IX wrote to his son, the future King Philip III of France:

 

1. To his dear first-born son, Philip, greeting, and his father's love.

2. Dear son, since I desire with all my heart that you be well "instructed in all things, it is in my thought to give you some advice this writing. For I have heard you say, several times, that you remember my words better than those of any one else.

3. Therefore, dear son, the first thing I advise is that you fix your whole heart upon God, and love Him with all your strength, for without this no one can be saved or be of any worth.

4. You should, with all your strength, shun everything which you believe to be displeasing to Him. And you ought especially to be resolved not to commit mortal sin, no matter what may happen and should permit all your limbs to be hewn off, and suffer every manner of torment, rather than fall knowingly into mortal sin. . . .

32. Dear son, freely give power to persons of good character, who know how to use it well, and strive to have wickednesses expelled from your land, that is to say, nasty oaths, and everything said or done against God or our Lady or the saints. In a wise and proper manner put a stop, in your land, to bodily sins, dicing, taverns, and other sins. Put down heresy so far as you can, and hold in especial abhorrence Jews, and all sorts of people who are hostile to the Faith, so that your land may be well purged of them, in such manner as, by the sage counsel of good people, may appear to you advisable.

33. Further the right with all your strength. Moreover I admonish you you that you strive most earnestly to show your gratitude for the benefits which our Lord has bestowed upon you, and that you may know how to give Him thanks therefore.

34. Dear son, take care that the expenses of your household are reasonable and moderate, and that its moneys are justly obtained. And there is one opinion that I deeply wish you to entertain, that is to say, that you keep yourself free from foolish expenses and evil exactions, and that your money should be well expended and well acquired. And this opinion, together with other opinions which are suitable and profitable, I pray that our Lord may teach you.

35. Finally, most sweet son, I conjure and require you that, if it please our Lord that I should die before you, you have my soul succored with masses and orisons, and that you send through the congregations of the kingdom of France, and demand their prayers for my soul, and that you grant me a special and full part in all the good deeds which you perform.

36. In conclusion, dear son, I give you all the blessings which a good and tender father can give to a son, and I pray our Lord Jesus Christ, by His mercy, by the prayers and merits of His blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, and of angels and archangels and of all the saints, to guard and protect you from doing anything contrary to His will, and to give you grace to do it always, so that He may be honored and served by you. And this may He do to me as to you, by His great bounty, so that after this mortal life we may be able to be together with Him in the eternal life, and see Him, love Him, and praise Him without end. Amen. And glory, honor, and praise be to Him who is one God with the Father and the Holy Spirit; without beginning and without end. Amen. (Louis IX: Advice to His Son.)

Saint Louis IX, King of France, understood the horror of sin and its ill-effects upon his realm?

Why is it that so many traditionally-minded Catholics all across and up and down the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide in this time of apostasy and betrayal make excuses for that which is mortally sinful or, even worse yet, deny that such things as smoking marijuana is mortally sinful?

The United States of America has gone "up in smoke" precisely because it was founded on false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist, anti-Incarnational and Pelagian principles that destined it to devolve into the sort of abyss prophesied by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, and by Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864 (see the appendix below). No explanation of the triumph of the "pot culture" that ignores this papal wisdom is worth the paper on which it has been written.

We are not here to indulge ourselves and to enter in states of "altered consciousness."

We are here to save our souls as members of the Catholic Church, which means that we must carry the Cross with love and gratitude as the consecrated slaves of the Divine Redeemer Who hung thereon, Christ the King, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother, she who stands at the foot of each one of our crosses as she did atop Golgotha and as she does at every true offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, that which is the unbloody re-presentation or perpetuation of that same bloody Sacrifice of the Cross.

The United States of America was placed under the patronage of Our Lady under the title of her Immaculate Conception in 1846, sixteen years after the apparitions of Our Lady to Saint Catherine Laboure and eight years before the solemn proclamation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX. Our Lady, who was conceived without any stain of Original or Actual Sin, is indeed here to help us in this land of one "accepted" evil after another. We simply need to be heroic in spreading devotion to her so that all men and women will be converted to the true Faith as the fruit of the triumph of her Fatima Message.

We need to pray that all men in this country and around the world will yoke themselves to her Immaculate Heart by means of Total Consecration according to the formula of Saint Louis de Montfort. There will be no talk of "rock music" or indecency or immodesty or marijuana or "gay marriage" or the surgical and chemical assassination of innocent preborn children we would never want to grieve Our Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart again by means of our sins and by means of being indifferent to the protection of sin in the civil law and its promotion and spread in the popular culture.

As we pray this day for the conversion of our nation to the true Faith, may we never be tempted to accept yesterday's evils as today's "norms."

May we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, giving Our Lady whatever merits we earn by our prayers and sufferings and indulgenced acts and worthy receptions of her Divine Son in Holy Communion so that we can plant a few seeds for the birth of true liberty in the United States of America, the liberty that comes only from the work of Redemption wrought for us by her Divine Son on the wood of the Holy Cross in which she participated fully as our Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

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.

Saint Agnes, pray for us.

Appendix

Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX on the Abyss Into Which "Liberty of Conscience" and "Religious Liberty" Must Lead Men and Their Nations

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again? (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

"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."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)