We Continue to Learn Nothing, 2004

by Thomas A. Droleskey

[2008 Foreword: This article was published in a Catholic newspaper in November of 2004, and was reprinted in Volume 1 of Restoring Christ as the King of All Nations. It was in this article that I first wrote about non-participation in the fraud that is our Judeo-Masonic electoral system. Please forgive the conciliar references. I was about thirteen months away from doing my due diligence to divest myself of the false "resist and recognize" ecclesiology into which I had immersed myself. And I have omitted the name of the individual who a well-meaning woman from New England had chosen to be my "running mate" in a write-in campaign for president and vice president that she had organized in 2004. The individual would not like being named, even though his name appeared in the article in print, given the differences that have come to light since that time, and I do not want to tweak noses. I want to focus on issues. There are a few things that I would change or phrase differently, something that is manifest in my writings of the past few years

[The point of posting this article is to note that I am writing nothing new these days. Indeed, what I have written was once considered to be good enough to put in print with the endorsement of some who are recoiling in horror at what I am writing at the present time.

[The act of John Sidney McCain III and his wife Cindy is the same tired act of George Walker Bush and his wife Laura: "We're pro-life even though we make exceptions." No, you are not! The Fifth Commandment admits of no exceptions. Anyone who makes exceptions to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment is simply less pro-abortion than those who are completely pro-abortion without any restrictions. To accept this tired old political game of appearing "pro-life" while accepting the surgical dismemberment of some babies in some cases and while expressing "respect" for those who "disagree" with those who support all surgical abortions without restriction is to play the devil's games on his terms. John and Cindy McCain or George and Laura Bush do not get to determine "exceptions" to the laws of God. And those who choose to be silent about this evil game being played most cynically by these professional panderers to every side of the political spectrum imaginable are helping to make it appear that it is "no big deal" to support exceptions to the absolute inviolability of innocent human life.

[For example, here is an excerpt from The New York Times report of an appearance by the McCains on a television program called The View, which I have never viewed:

On the topic of abortion, Mr. McCain said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973, was “a very bad decision.” He said he would not impose a litmus test on any of his nominations to the Supreme Court “because that’s not fair to the American people.” But, he said, he would nominate justices who would interpret the constitution as it was written and not legislate from the bench.

This prompted Whoopi Goldberg to worry that if he wanted to return to the constitution as it was written, and not as it was amended, she would be returned to slavery.

“I understand your point,” Mr. McCain said, as Ms. Goldberg theatrically fanned herself as if recovering from a big scare. “An excellent point.”

He then said that while he is “pro-life” because he believes that life begins at conception, “I also respect the views of those who don’t.”

That prompted Ms. Walters to ask, “So, you believe in choice?” but before he could answer, they all agreed to move on to other topics.

Shortly thereafter, Cindy McCain, the candidate’s wife, arrived on the set. She was asked if she agreed with Ms. Palin that there should be no exceptions for abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. (Ms. Palin has indicated that she would allow an exception only if the mother’s life were at stake.)

“We disagree on that issue,” Mrs. McCain said.

So, there are exceptions? “Yes,” Mrs. McCain said, adding, “John and I agree on this issue.” Mr. McCain has said he favors exceptions for rape and incest and to save the life of the mother.

Mr. McCain swooped in at this uncomfortable moment for his wife and said he would appoint all kinds of people to his administration, including Democrats. Asked if that included Mrs. Clinton, he took the opportunity to pay homage.

“I know that she wants to stay in the Senate, but I will work with Hillary Clinton because I’ve worked with her in the past, we’ve traveled together, Barbara, you know that, we have a working relationship that’s of mutual respect and frankly, appreciation,” he said. As she comes back to the Senate, he said, “she will be one of the most influential and powerful members of the Senate. You got to work together.”

This brought a big round of applause. ( ‘The View’ Couch Not So Cozy for McCain.)

 

[In other words, politics as usual. The McCain administration, which will be populated by the neoconservative war mongers, will also be populated by a galaxy of pro-aborts, just like the "pro-life" Bush administration. Sleepy "conservatives" will be convinced that all is well as policies are pursued that advance evil time and time again. Why should this surprise us? It's been the same since the administration of Ronald Wilson Reagan. It's the same phenomenon we see as "conservatives" project their fondest desires into the skull of the conciliar "popes," attempting to justify various blasphemies and apostasies and sacrileges as being "necessary" and/or in accord with the Catholic Faith. The supposedly "lesser" evil has shown itself to be more potent in advancing the institutionalization of evil under cover of law than the allegedly "greater" evil.

[You want to believe in the political equivalent of the tooth fairy? Go right ahead. I am going to continue to point out the cold, hard facts of political life and to point out how these facts are the result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and that the only remedy for us is the restoration of Christendom, which cannot be built on compromises with errors and lies.

[To the 2004 article, "We Continue to Learn Nothing.]

 

There is great wisdom to be found amongst the comedic elements of The Honeymooners. A vignette from one of the episodes from the 1955-56 season, the sole year that the featured skit of varying lengths from The Jackie Gleason Show was its own weekly thirty minute series, in which bus driver Ralph Kramden prophesied to his wife Alice that her mother, Mrs. Gibson, would start an argument within three minutes of her arriving in their apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

“Three minutes, Alice! Three minutes! I won’t have to say a word. Not a word. Your mother will start an argument within three minutes.”

Jackie Gleason’s character then brought out and set an alarm clock for three minutes as his mother-in-law goaded him by telling Alice that she could have married a thinner man and as she worried whether she was getting enough to eat because her husband was so fat. Ralph did a slow burn and did his famous “homina, homina, homina” as she went on and on. The breaking point came when she revealed the “surprise” ending to a mystery play on Broadway that Ralph was about to see with his pal, the subterranean worker named Ed Norton. As soon as she blabbed the surprise ending (“it was the butler who did it, not the husband”), the alarm clock rang and Kramden pointed his finger at her as he yelled:

“YOU ARE A BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABERMOUTH!!!!! A BLAAAABERMOUTH!”

Well, after a self-imposed moratorium on commenting on electoral politics, during which time I had to listen to various equivalents of Mrs. Gibson try my patience by how they were portraying President George W. Bush as a defender of innocent human life in the womb and by saying that there were “proportionate” reasons to vote for him rather than a candidate of conscience as there was reason to believe that at least some lives would be saved, I am breaking my silence. Although I am indeed through commenting on the specifics of electoral politics as a continuing matter (apart from putting out within a few months an anthology of my commentaries on the subject), I do want to offer a word to those apologists, whether clerical or lay, who tried to portray a vote for George W. Bush as a vote for the common good that might result in the saving of some lives:

“YOU ARE A BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABERMOUTH!!!!! A BLAAAABERMOUTH!”

Here are a few things that prompted me to do a slow burn as I was observing my self-imposed moratorium:

1) Everything that came out of the mouth of the reprobate known as John F. Kerry.

2) Everything that came out of the mouth of the woman who made Miss Piggy seem like an expert in tact and etiquette, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

3) Everything that came out of the mouth of the smarmy pipsqueak named John Edwards, who only knows how to make oodles of money by oozing sentimentality in front of juries in medical liability cases.

4) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life despite the fact that he supports the slicing and dicing of babies in their mothers’ wombs in certain cases.

5) The contention that “harm” has been limited and “babies saved” in his administration as he has personally supervised an increase in funding for the chemical execution of countless millions of babies here and around the world through “family planning” programs.

6) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life despite the fact that he campaigned actively for fully pro-abortion politicians in his own political party, including campaigning for pro-abort Arlen Specter against the less pro-abortion Patrick Toomey earlier this year. Of course, I forgot. A political party is not a church. How silly of me.

 
7) The contention that George W. Bush will staff the judiciary with “prolife” judges despite the fact that he says he has no litmus test for the appointment of judges to the Federal judiciary and despite the fact that he has appointed thorough-going pro-aborts, such as Michael Chertoff, to that judiciary (Chertoff sits on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals). We forget that the Democrats will never permit anyone who is seen to be the remotest bit hostile to Roe v. Wade get confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court. And there are at least four Republican senators (Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter) who are thoroughly pro-abortion and might abandon Bush on a candidate not seen to be in the “judicial mainstream.” Specter, who is in line to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, said on November 4, 2004, that he will oppose any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court who is deemed to be pro-life. “ ‘When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely,’ Specter said, referring to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.” In other words, Bush certainly knew what he was doing when campaigning for Specter and against Toomey, didn’t he?

[2008 note: Yes, Republicans fell in line for John G. Roberts and Samuel Alito, who are legal positivists who believe that the Natural Law has no role to play in Constitutional interpretation, but only after Bush tried to give us the pro-abort Harriet Miers. Remember her? Do You Still Believe in the Tooth Fairy? and The Triumph of Militant Protestantism, the latter of which included the same recitation that I have been making throughout the course of the past fifteen years or so:

[Mr. President, no one who supports one abortion under cover of law is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, no one who supports and funds the chemical abortions of preborn babies is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, no one who appoints those who support baby killing in all instances to governmental positions is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, no one who appoints such pro-abortion individuals as Michael Chertoff to a seat on a United States Circuit Court of Appeals (and then as Homeland Security Secretary), is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, no one who campaigns for pro-aborts in his own political party is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, no one who funds “limited” embryonic stem cell research is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, no president whose administration sends its Solicitor General to argue before the Supreme Court of the United States that a pro-life hero, Joseph Scheidler, is a “bandit” under the Hobbs Act for “interfering” with a “legitimate business,” baby-killing, is “pro-life.”

[Mr. President, you are a pro-life fraud. You have been enabled by Catholic sycophants interested in their own access to the corridors of power and “places at the table.”]

 

8) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life when he says that he can “understand” that people can have different “opinions” on the issue, that it is a “difficult” issue. Would he ever say that about opposing racism or anti- Semitism, for example?

9) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life when he appoints proaborts to every quarter of his administration. Would he appoint anyone who was tainted by even a whiff of racism or anti-Semitism?

10) The contention that the flawed, immoral partial-birth abortion ban would “save” lives even though a needless and immoral “life of the mother” exception would have permitted this type of child-killing and even though two other forms of child-killing in the later stages of pregnancy (dilation and evacuation, hysterotomy) remain perfectly legal.

11) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life when his administration is the first, as Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie noted on Meet the Press, to fund stem-cell research and when the President himself noted on August 9, 2001, that in vitro fertilization is an important tool to help infertile couples conceive a child.

12) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life when he has done nothing, as in zero and zilch, to reverse the September, 2000, decision of the Food and Drug Administration to market the human pesticide, RU-486.

13) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life even though he never answered the question put to him by moderator Bob Schiefer in the third presidential debate, held on October 13, 2004, as to whether he favored the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

14) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-life even though the Unborn Victims of Violence Act contained a “life of the mother” exception” and recognizes the “right” of a mother to kill her child by means of a surgical abortion. Yes, indeed, we can limit the harm of abortion and save babies by referring to abortion as a “right.” I guess I missed that in Logic and Reasoning 101.

15) The contention that George W. Bush is a friend of justice when his then Solicitor General, Theodore Olson, argued in the case of N.O.W. v. Scheidler on December 4, 2002, that Joe Scheidler, a Catholic hero who has saved countless babies and the souls of their mothers from the consequences of childkilling, should have had his conviction on the grounds of the Hobbs Act upheld, contending that Scheidler was engaged in the equivalent of banditry by trying to talk women out of killing their children. Olson argued that Scheidler was depriving a legitimate business, an abortuary, from the money that would have been derived from their “clients” had not Scheidler “interfered.” Ah, yes, the administration of George W. Bush wants to save babies. I forgot.

16) The contention that George W. Bush is a friend of the pro-life movement when he has done nothing to reverse the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) and has an Attorney General, John Ashcroft, that has actually continued former Attorney General Janet Reno’s Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy (VAAPCON) task force. It was under this task force during the Clinton Administration that two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited a women in Toledo, Ohio, in 1995, warning her that she would be arrested if she sent another “threatening” letter to a baby-killer. The nature of the threat? That she was praying for the baby-killer’s conversion. Ah, yes, once again, I forgot that George W. Bush is pro-life and that an effort to squelch legitimate, non-violent pro-life activity by terming it as “violence” is all right when done by a “pro-life” Republican administration. I forgot.

17) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-family when he says that he opposes “marriage” for sodomites and lesbians but supports the “right” of the states to accord those engaged in unrepentant acts of perversity something called “civil union” status.

18) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-family when he appoints sodomite Michael Guest to be our Ambassador to Romania and stands by as Guest’s sodomite “partner” serves as “hostess” for diplomatic functions at our embassy in Bucharest. Ah, yes, isn’t “diversity” and “tolerance” wonderful?

19) The contention that George W. Bush is less of a statist than the Democrats when he proposes–and Congress funds—programs that will test every child and teacher and school aide for “mental illness,” a measure that smacks of Stalinism and is designed to insure that the Eli Lilly Company can make more money off of the government by selling psychotropic drugs to those diagnosed with mental illness under this draconian program.

20) The contention that George W. Bush is pro-family when he boasts of his support for the monstrosity known as public schooling, rife from its very inception in this country with the ethos of Masonry and is currently in the hands of committed ideologues who hate the Catholic Faith.

21) The contention that George W. Bush just has to call Islam “a religion of peace.” Forget about “Say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no, anything else is from the evil one.” The man from Crawford just "has” to say these kinds of things. It can’t possibly be that he, a man who does not read books and is thus not versed in actual history, is simply saying this because he believes it to be so. Oh, I forgot. George W. Bush is too clever for that.

22) The contention that George W. Bush is a “conservative” when he pursues policies that would have made the late Hubert Horatio Humphrey appear to have been fiscally penurious. This is the very high price tag for overlooking the statism of one who says he is conservative while spending the country into bankruptcy.

23) The contention that George W. Bush’s membership in Skull and Bones and Richard N. Cheney’s Freemasonic membership tell us nothing about how they are undeserving of public trust.

24) The contention that international peace is guaranteed by the spread of the American concept of liberty and democracy around the world, not the spread of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

Oh, I may have missed a few of things that I would have written endless pages of commentary about during the course of the campaign had I not been concentrating on the launching of Christ the King College. What I want to concentrate on in this commentary, though, is the contention made by so many well-meaning people, including bishops and priests, that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote to “limit harm” that would result in the saving of babies.

Anyone who contends that harm has been limited and babies saved as a result of the policies of George W. Bush is delusional.

This is the actual record, folks. These are facts that pro-life Catholics choose to ignore while they bury their heads in the sand in order to convince themselves that Bush has to be our friend because John Kerry was so terrible and unacceptable. And this is precisely how the devil wins in our system of government, which has been under his sway from its very foundation because it rejects the Social Reign of Christ the King as exercised by Our Lord’s one true Church, the Roman Catholic Church, founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

A nation founded in the belief that social order can be maintained with a studied indifference to the Incarnation and the Deposit of Faith Our Lord entrusted to His true Church–and founded in the belief that “civic virtue” can be pursued by its citizens absent a belief in, access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace–is a nation that does the devil’s bidding in all of its national life and is thus bound to deteriorate into the conditions under which we now find ourselves living.

What is especially maddening–and why it was so very difficult to keep my peace during the election process–is that the very people who enabled George W. Bush as a champion of life and of “family values” refused to criticize their champion when he did the things I have enumerated above. Indeed, the silence of “conservative” Catholics and evangelical Protestants in the face of Bush’s continued betrayal of the standards of fundamental justice founded in Truth Incarnate actually emboldened Bush to continue to push the envelope, knowing that those who enjoyed access to White House briefings and invitations to strategy sessions with Karl Rove would not want to jeopardize their privileges and status in order to hold the President’s feet to the fire as he governed in a cynically calculated manner so as to solidify his political base without threatening “mainstream voters.”

A lot of people are going to be encouraged by the fact that "moral values" played such a critical role in the re-election of President Bush. Catholics aren't supposed to have "values," which are subjective. We live by truths contained in the Deposit of Faith. Furthermore, the fact that large numbers of people who are concerned, no matter how viscerally, with the moral state of the country can be duped into thinking that George W. Bush is their friend is a cause for weeping, not rejoicing. It demonstrates the power of wishful thinking at its height and will subject the causes that these good people care about to be consigned to the back-burner, just as the Democratic Party has treated minority voters as chumps for over seventy years now.

Shame on those who held their tongues during the last four years. Shame on those who held their tongues during the just ended the campaign. Shame on those who refuse to face facts and who think that, in spite of all of the evidence of what has happened in Republican administrations since 1981, “things will change” in the second Bush administration. Shame on those who will continue to keep quiet as anti-life, anti-family and statist policies are pursued with abandon by a President who knows little of actual history and invokes words such as “the Almighty” and “faith” into which his adherents will project their own fondest beliefs without for a second recognizing that their emperor has no clothes.

The Bishops and Proportionate Reasons

St. Louis Archbishop Raymond L. Burke and the Most Reverend Rene H. Gracida, the retired Bishop of Corpus Christi, Texas, both of whom, unlike many of their brethren in the hierarchy, are sincerely concerned about the restoration of legal protection to the preborn, wrote tracts before the election to help clarify the question of whether it is ever permissible for a Catholic to vote for a pro-abortion candidate. After noting correctly that a Catholic could never licitly vote for a candidate who is fully pro-abortion, Bishop Gracida posed a hypothetical case in order to apply the Catholic principle of proportionality:

“There is only one thing that could be considered proportionate enough to justify a Catholic voting for a candidate who is known to be proabortion, and that is the protection of innocent human life. That may seem to be contradictory, but it is not.

“Consider the case of a Catholic voter who must choose between three candidates: candidate A, who is completely for abortion on demand, candidate B, who is in favor of very limited abortion, i.e., in favor of greatly restricting abortion and candidate C, a candidate who is completely against abortion but who
is universally recognized as being unelectable.

“The Catholic voter cannot vote for candidate A, because that would be formal cooperation in the sin of abortion if that candidate were to be elected and assist in passing legislation, which would remove restrictions on, abortion on demand.

“The Catholic can vote for candidate C, but that will probably only help ensure the election of candidate A.”

This is an application of the principle of proportionality, which asserts that the foreseen but evil consequences of a morally justified act must be weighed against the good end sought. In this instance, Bishop Gracida was saying that a vote for George W. Bush was justified even though he is partly pro-abortion because he might be able to assist in limiting the harm of abortion. Voting for a completely pro-life candidate who has “no chance of winning” would help to elect John F. Kerry in this instance (in those states where the outcome was not a foregone conclusion prior to election day). The application of the principle of proportionality in this instance, though, is wrong-headed and is based upon the assumption (really, the unfulfilled hope) that President Bush’s administration has saved lives and/or will save lives in the future. The litany provided above proves that President George W. Bush has done nothing substantive to save lives or to limit the harm caused by surgical and chemical abortions. And Bishop Gracida’s application of the principle of proportionality makes a practical political judgment about a particular election that discounts entirely the spiritual value of a vote of conscience when offered to Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be used as she sees fits for the conversion of this nation to the Social Reign of Christ the King. Bishop Gracida winds up encouraging Catholics to cast their votes for a man who has done much to enable abortion and the careers of those who support it in his own party without realizing that we become material cooperators in evil by refusing to be honest about President Bush’s actual, abysmal record.

One may never deliberately choose evil so that good may come out of it. To state that one can legitimately choose to do evil is the heretical moral principle known as proportionalism, popularized by Father Richard McCormick, S.J., and condemned by the Holy See in 1975 and again by Pope John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation, Reconciliatio et Paenetentiae, in 1984, which contends that a preponderance of good motives and extenuating circumstances can make an objectively evil act morally licit to pursue in light of subjective considerations.

Bishop Gracida simply tried to apply the legitimate principle of proportionality to the circumstances faced by voters on November 2, 2004.

Others attempted to justify a vote for George W. Bush by resorting explicitly to the “lesser of two evils” theory, which has a theological basis in the writings of Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri (Theologia Moralis. Lib. II Tract. III De Praec. Char.). However, this theory is a theological opinion, not de fide Catholic dogma. Saint Alphonsus admits that one opinion is that it is never permissible to choose the lesser of two evils. He states that a second opinion, which he considered as probable, said that it would be permissible to choose the lesser of two evils because the one persuading is not seeking evil, but the good, namely the choice of a lesser evil.

Even if one concedes the probability of the correctness of St. Alphonsus’s opinion, however, the principle still needs to be applied in concrete circumstances. As has been demonstrated in part one of this commentary, the “lesser of two evils” approach in voting has shown itself to be practically stupid, actually advancing evil “under the radar screen,” so to speak, as those who have convinced themselves that the “greater” evil has been vanquished fail to see how the “lesser” evil is indeed advancing the same evils as the “greater” evil might have done. And, practically speaking, there is always a candidate of conscience for whom to vote if one chooses to participate in the system at all. The “lesser of two evils” approach to voting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which denies to candidates of conscience any possibility at all of success as they must be deemed “viable” in order to earn votes. How can a candidate of conscience become “viable” if priests, for example, tell Catholic voters that it is a sin to vote for him?

We thus become trapped between two evil entities without any possibility of doing anything more than “limiting harm” rather than advancing the common good.

As Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922:

“To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole.”

Are we to be perpetually locked into the struggle between the two rival families of gangsters, the Republicans and the Democrats? To admit this is to see the dose of the so-called “lesser evil” become higher and higher over the course of time as pro-life voters fall prey to some new Democratic bogeyman or bogeywoman. A case can be made that the cause of fundamental justice founded in Truth Incarnate is more at risk in a second Bush administration because good people are lulled to sleep, thinking that they have a friend in the White House and that they can’t possibly criticize him for anything as “he is doing the best he can under the circumstances.” Imagine if John Kerry proposed the mental health testing program that Bush has put in place. “Conservatives” would be up in arms.

Ah, those same people are silent when Bush puts money and power into the hands of anti-Catholic psycho-quacks, believing that “Bush knows best. He’s our friend, you know.” The devil without his tail is much more dangerous than the devil with his tail, which is why Bush’s abjectly evil policies pass by unnoticed and without criticism by otherwise right-thinking Catholics. What is Bishop Gracida and Father Frank Pavone and Austin Ruse going to say if the 2008 election is between Rudolph Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, that a Republican Catholic pro-abort is less evil than a Democrat Methodist pro-abort? Is it too much to ask these establishment pro-life leaders to hold Bush’s feet to the fire and to force him to pay attention to the voters who voted for him because these pro-life leaders represented Bush as our friend?

Archbishop Raymond Burke addressed the issue of non-voting in his pastoral letter:

“While I respect very much the sentiments of those who are so discouraged with the failure of our public leaders to promote the common good that they have decided not to vote at all, I must point out that the Catholic who chooses not to vote at all, when there is a viable candidate who will advance the common good, although not perfectly, fails to fulfill his or her moral duty, at least, in the limitation of a grave evil in society.”

Archbishop Burke himself makes assumptions here that are without merit and without any foundation in fact. Archbishop Burke assumes that “a viable candidate,” meaning George W. Bush, will advance the common good, “although not perfectly.” George W. Bush has failed to advance the common good at all. Period. Indeed, he has contributed mightily to the further decay of the common good. His assertion, made, I am sure, in all good conscience, does not stand the test of the facts presented above. George W. Bush is no friend of the common good. And while the Baltimore Catechism, which is rife with Americanism, and the recent conciliarist documents, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, contain references to a citizen’s “civic duty” to vote, this is not de fide Catholic dogma. If they were, you see, then Pope Leo XIII was wrong to have exhorted Italian Catholics not to vote in national elections in the Masonic regime responsible for the overthrow of the Papal States. There are legitimate reasons for not voting at all and they cannot be dismissed by incanting Masonic slogans about “civic duty” and/or by claiming a man who has rotten policies is actually a promoter of the common good.

A Bad Tree Cannot Bear Good Fruit

The last “practical” vote that I cast was for President George Herbert Walker Bush’s re-election in 1992. I feared the election of then Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Blyth Clinton. I thus held my nose and voted for a man whom I knew had been rightly excoriated by Patrick Joseph Buchanan in the primaries that year. It was shortly after that time that I embraced a firm policy of voting only for completely pro-life candidates whatever their chance of winning, believing that an electoral campaign provided us as Catholics with an opportunity to speak of the truths of the Faith, especially about the root causes of our proximate problems: the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King. This is why I campaigned actively for Patrick Buchanan in 1995 and 1996 during the caucus/primary season and why I campaigned for Howard Phillips of the then named U.S. Taxpayers Party in the general election in 1996. It is also why I undertook my failed New York State Right to Life Party primary campaign against then Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato in 1998.

As Dr. Charles E. Rice noted during my campaign that year, no candidate who supports even one abortion under cover of law is deserving of our votes. Such a candidate does not recognize the fact that the civil law may never licitly permit the execution of even one innocent human life. No one who holds such a view, Dr. Rice, wrote, is worthy to hold any office of public trust, whether elected or appointed, including being a “trustee of a mosquito abatement district.”

The belief that even one human being may be put to death under cover of law skews one's judgment and predisposes one to act in expedient, utilitarian ways in all of his decisions and leads ultimately to the silencing of the life issue altogether.

Well, as much as I continue to respect those who voted for candidates of conscience (there was a campaign, I learned during the summer, to promote write-in votes for yours truly for president and for an unnamed Catholic writer for vice president), I have been convinced that the time for non-participation in a system that is evil of its nature has come. This is a personal judgment that is not received from the hand of God. However, it is a judgment that is not antithetical to Catholic doctrine and is premised upon a sober and realistic view of a political system that is based upon a rejection of the Incarnation and the Deposit of Faith as essential for personal happiness and hence all social order. Are we expected to enable a world view that contends that it is possible to advance social order absent an effort to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen? Are we not participating in our destruction as Catholics by endorsing a system that seeks to silence the Holy Name and the authority of the true Church as the only means by which men can be happy in this life as a preparation for the blessedness of Heaven?

The myths of the American founding have quite a hold on both “conservative” and traditional Catholics. As Michael Davies noted so well, the Social Reign of Christ the King was never preached in the United States of America. Thus, while Catholics were able to adhere to basic creedal truths when the Traditional Mass was normative in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries despite being seduced by the allure of electoral politics and Calvinist materialism, the liturgical revolution itself was an enshrining of the false principles of Modernity and Modernism, including Americanism, thus further neutralizing Catholics from thinking and speaking and acting as Catholics in their social discourse.

Case-in-point: the Most Reverend Charles Chaput, O.F.M, Cap., Archbishop of Denver, Colorado. Writing in The New York Times on October 22, 2004, Archbishop Chaput, who is himself concerned about ending baby-killing under cover of law, penned Americanist clichés that we need to understand and to reject:

Archbishop Chaput further errs by accepting as a virtue the nonconfessional nature of the Constitution of the United States of America:

“The founders sought to prevent the establishment of an official state church. Given America's history of anti-Catholic nativism, Catholics strongly support the Constitution's approach to religious freedom. But the Constitution does not, nor was it ever intended to, prohibit people or communities of faith from playing an active role in public life. Exiling religion from civic debate separates government from morality and citizens from their consciences. That road leads to politics without character, now a national epidemic.”

These arguments are quite familiar to me. I used to make them myself in my days as an apologist for the American founding as compatible with–or at least not hostile to–the ability of Catholics to promote the truths of the Faith in a free and open debate with others. Once one familiarizes himself with the patrimony of the unchanging and unchangeable social teaching of the Church on the nature of the State, however, explicated so well by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, one comes to understand that all modern states, including the United States of America, are founded on an indifference, at best, and an open hostility, at worst, to the Incarnation of the Word as Man in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb at the Annunciation. The modern state is also indifferent and/or hostile to the Deposit of Faith the God-Man entrusted to His true Church and the sacraments He instituted to make it possible for us to pursue holiness here on earth so that we can be happy for all eternity as citizens of Heaven.

The fact that the founding of this nation took place in the framework of an historical and cultural milieu shaped by the events of the preceding 250 years does not in any way justify our acceptance of its fundamental error in rejecting that which was the foundation of order during Christendom: the Social Reign of Christ the King. False ideas lead to bad consequences no matter how sincerely those who adhere to false ideas believe in them and trust in their ability to produce good fruits. Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei the inexorable logic of religious indifferentism:

“To hold therefore that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may different from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points, cannot all be equally probable, equally good, equally acceptable to God.”

The slaughter of the innocent preborn by both chemical and surgical means under cover of law is a direct consequence of a governmental system that rejects the right of the true Church to interpose herself when those in civil offices propose to do things or have in fact done things contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and/or place into jeopardy the rights of the Church and the sanctification and salvation of human souls. Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei that the Church has no specific models of governance by which men are to govern themselves in their civil communities. She does insist, however, that the true religion be favored by the State and that her right to defend the common good be recognized by the civic officials when grave necessity demands her to intervene in this regard.

Once again, the fact that we do not live in a Catholic world today does not absolve us of our responsibility to work, as Pope Leo XIII enjoined in Immortale Dei and Pope Pius XI exhorted in Quas Primas in 1925, for the planting of seeds for the Catholicization of our society, beginning with the proper explication by popes and bishops of the actual teaching of the Catholic Church on the nature of the civil State and of the necessity of the true Church enjoying the favor and the protection of the law.

Consider, for example, Pope Leo XIII’s simple declarative sentence in Immortale Dei on this precise matter:

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

Is this statement true or false? If it is true, then Archbishop Chaput’s acceptance of the American Constitution’s embrace of religious liberty–and the presuppositions of Archbishop Burke and Bishop Gracida–are wrong. An exclusion of the true Church from the business of guiding the civil state in matters of fundamental justice is a grave and fatal error. It is the error of the modern state.

And it is the error of Modernists, condemned quite specifically as such in the context of the civil state by Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, issued on September 8, 1907. The fact that this Modernist heresy has worked its way into the official documents of the Church in the conciliar and post-conciliar eras does not make it any the less heretical. The late Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton resigned from his teaching position at The Catholic University of America in the 1960s rather than teach the heresy of religious liberty, understood in the sense that the Catholic Faith must be content with being tolerated by the civil state rather than favored by it, which was condemned by every pope prior to 1958.

Pope Leo XIII makes it clear in his 1895 Longiqua Oceani, which some apologists of the American regime cite as proof of Pope Leo’s admiration of our system of government, that our specific situation was not favorable to the Catholics in this country and should not serve as a model for Catholics elsewhere in the world. After noting some of the points mentioned by Archbishop Chaput about the fact that Catholics are able to practice their Faith openly and without opposition from the Constitution, he wrote:

“Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”

This is in clear contradiction to the tenor of Archbishop Chaput’s article and to the whole thrust of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate. A “legitimate development of doctrine” must not contradict that which has gone before it. We are faced today with wholesale rejections of the teaching of the Church on the State to such an extent that the average Catholic knows nothing whatsoever of the volume and consistency of this teaching. Pope Leo XIII was concerned that Catholics in the United States, living in a cultural circumstance that must by definition marginalize the practice of the Faith solely to the realm of personal or parish observances, eschewing its articulation as the basis of all personal and social order, would be so co-opted by the errors of modernity that they would come to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than view the world through the eyes of the true Faith. He noted this quite tellingly in Testem Benevolentiae, an Apostolical Letter he wrote to James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore on January 22, 1899:

“But in the matter of which we are now speaking, Beloved Son, the project involves a greater danger and is more hostile to Catholic doctrine and discipline, inasmuch as the followers of these novelties judge that a certain liberty ought to be introduced into the Church, so that, limiting the exercise and vigilance of its powers, each one of the faithful may act more freely in pursuance of their own natural bent and capacity. They affirm, namely, that this is called for in order to imitate that liberty which, though quite recently introduced, is now the law and the foundation of almost every civil community. On that point We have spoken very much at length in the Letter written to all the bishops about the constitution of States; where We have also shown the difference between the Church, which is of divine right, and all other associations which subsist by the free will of men.”

That is, Pope Leo XIII knew that the very ethos of Americanism would undermine the ability of the Catholics to confessionally propagate the truths of the Faith and, in turn, would lead to calls to “democratize” the Church. Writing near the end of Testem Benevolentiae, Pope Leo warned Cardinal Gibbons:

“For it [the promotion of Americanism] raises the suspicion that there are some among you who conceive of and desire a church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world.”

There is a point at which the influence of the heresies of the modern state on the attitudes of Catholics and on the very ecclesiology of bishops and priests intersects. Catholics in this country have been so influenced by the ethos of the world that those among them who support abortion refer to popular secular slogans, denounced quite rightly by Archbishop Chaput in his article, to defend their positions, while those who oppose abortion advert not to the binding authority of the Church but to the authority of a Constitution founded in a specific rejection of the Incarnation and the Social Reign of Christ the King. Many of us have come to the judgment that a system that is irredeemably opposed to the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church is incapable of producing good fruit. Those of us who have come to this conclusion are not abdicating our civic responsibility. Not at all. We are attempting to plant the seeds, despite our own sins and failings, for the Catholicization of our nation and of the world, which is why I, for one, am devoting my time to the proper foundation and development of Christ the King College. I am through wasting my time on this or that symptom of the larger problem we face: the multifaceted consequences of Protestantism and Freemasonry (and all of the rotten fruit that has emanated therefrom) in the world and in the Church herself. Do we really think that a country that does not recognize Christ as its King and politicians who speak in religiously indifferentist terms are our friends?

This is not what Our Lady of Guadalupe desired when she appeared to Saint Juan Diego in 1531. It is not what the North American Martyrs shed their blood to realize. Our Lady appeared to Saint Juan Diego to Catholicize the Americas. This is not why the North American Martyrs shed their blood in what is now upstate New York and Canada to Catholicize that region of North America. We are called by virtue of our baptism and confirmation to Catholicize the United States of America, a task that is no less possible now than was the Catholicization of peoples in the known world following the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles and our dear Blessed Mother on Pentecost Sunday in the same Upper Room in Jerusalem where the Divine Redeemer had instituted the priesthood and the Eucharist.

Pope Leo XIII put it this way in Sapientiae Christianae in 1890:

“The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent.”

We must profess the Catholic faith openly and unflinchingly. Period. The Church herself must recover the voice of Blessed Miguel Augustin Pro and proclaim “Viva Cristo Rey!” in the face of the assaults being waged by secularists. It is not possible to oppose secularism and all of its multifaceted errors with secularism. We can only oppose secularism with Catholicism. While it is true that our problems will not be truly ameliorated until some pope actually does consecrate Russia to Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart in total fidelity to her Fatima requests, we must nevertheless continue the work of apostles of Christ the King, recognizing that the problems of our era are the symptoms of the world’s war against the Social Reign of Christ the King and the Church’s own neglect of the patrimony that emboldened the hands of Popes from Gregory XVI through Pius XI.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas and of the unborn, pray for us.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

 

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, 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 Peter Claver, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't time to pray a Rosary now?