Dilexi Te: A Poverty of Faith, Truth, and Facts

Replete with references drawn exclusively from the conciliar and postconciliar documents, Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV’s Dilexti Te, October 4, 2025, is a product of the conciliar revolutionary mind from beginning to end, starting with the fact that the document stresses the work of the “contemporary” church service to the poor.

The Catholic Church has always served the poor, but not as an end in of itself.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, explained that institutions to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and abandoned did not exist before the missionary work of Holy Mother Church after Pentecost Sunday as it was her sons and daughters endeavored from the beginning to shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, care for the sick, feed the hungry, and to give water to the thirsty:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest; retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a condition of things, the answer is — beyond all question, in large measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great undertakings were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to completion.

22. A similar state of things would certainly have continued had the agreement of the two powers been lasting. More important results even might have been justly looked for, had obedience waited upon the authority, teaching, and counsels of the Church, and had this submission been specially marked by greater and more unswerving loyalty. For that should be regarded in the light of an ever-changeless law which Ivo of Chartres wrote to Pope Paschal II: “When kingdom and priesthood are at one, in complete accord, the world is well ruled, and the Church flourishes, and brings forth abundant fruit. But when they are at variance, not only smaller interests prosper not, but even things of greatest moment fall into deplorable decay.”^[21]

23. But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The contemporary manifestations of actual economic and social injustices that Prevost/Leo XIV decried in Dilexi Te have their remote proximate origins in the overthrow of the Social Reign of the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent rise and triumph, albeit temporary, of Judeo-Masonic ideologies, whether of the false opposites of the naturalist “left” or “right, that are anthropocentric and thus reject the necessity of a firm belief in the he Catholic Faith and of the pursuit holiness as the foundation of as a truly just social order as can be realized here below in this passing, mortal vale of tears.

Writing in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, Pope Pius XI explained that personal sanctity is the only basis of a genuinely just social reform:

And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.  (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)

In other words, order in the world is premised upon order in the souls of men, who need Sanctifying Grace to overcome their sins and to make reparation for them while seeking to pursue the heights of personal sanctification. Catholic sanctity built and maintained Western civilization for nearly a thousand years, not the pursuit of “dreams” and “destinies” according to the dictates of Judeo-Masonic religious indifferentism and/or of outright Marxism.

Despite all of the references to the work of various saints over the centuries to help the poor, Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV’s Dilexi Te ignores all proximate root causes and seeks to address social injustices without seeking to restore all things in Christ the King as though the first law of the Catholic Church is not the salvation of souls but the service of the poor. While Holy Mother Church has always worked tirelessly to relieve the material wants of those in poverty, she has always done so to advance their sanctification and salvation.

Thus, as a work of the conciliar revolutionary mind, Dilexi Te stresses the “need” to abolish what is called “structures of sin” while it called for “structural” “solutions to correct the situation those “structures of sin” have caused:

Structures of sin that create poverty and extreme inequality

90. At Medellín, the bishops declared themselves in favor of a preferential option for the poor: “Christ our Savior not only loved the poor, but, ‘being rich, he became poor.’ He lived a life of poverty, focused his mission on preaching their liberation, and founded his Church as a sign of this poverty in our midst… The poverty endured by so many of our brothers and sisters cries out for justice, solidarity, witness, commitment and efforts directed to ending it, so that the saving mission entrusted by Christ may be fully accomplished.” [90] The bishops stated forcefully that the Church, to be fully faithful to her vocation, must not only share the condition of the poor, but also stand at their side and work actively for their integral development. Faced with a situation of worsening poverty in Latin America, the Puebla Conference confirmed the Medellín decision in favor of a frank and prophetic option for the poor and described structures of injustice as a “social sin.”

91. Charity has the power to change reality; it is a genuine force for change in history. It is the source that must inspire and guide every effort to “resolve the structural causes of poverty,” [91] and to do so with urgency. It is my hope that we will see more and more “politicians capable of sincere and effective dialogue aimed at healing the deepest roots — and not simply the appearances — of the evils in our world.” [92]  For “it is a matter of hearing the cry of entire peoples, the poorest peoples of the earth.” [93]

92. We must continue, then, to denounce the “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and to recognize that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” [94]  There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.

93. In his Encyclical Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis reminded us that social sin consolidates a “structure of sin” within society, and is frequently “part of a dominant mindset that considers normal or reasonable what is merely selfishness and indifference. This then gives rise to social alienation.” [95] It then becomes normal to ignore the poor and live as if they do not exist. It then likewise seems reasonable to organize the economy in such a way that sacrifices are demanded of the masses in order to serve the needs of the powerful. Meanwhile, the poor are promised only a few “drops” that trickle down, until the next global crisis brings things back to where they were. A genuine form of alienation is present when we limit ourselves to theoretical excuses instead of seeking to resolve the concrete problems of those who suffer. Saint John Paul II had already observed that, “a society is alienated if its forms of social organization, production and consumption make it more difficult to offer the gift of self and to establish solidarity between people.” [96]

94. We need to be increasingly committed to resolving the structural causes of poverty. This is a pressing need that “cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely provisional responses.” [97] I can only state once more that inequality “is the root of social ills.” [98] Indeed, “it frequently becomes clear that, in practice, human rights are not equal for all.” [99] (Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV, Dilexi Te, October 4, 2025.)

For all of conciliarism’s rigid ideological adherence to Giovanni Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI’s “preferential option for the poor” (for an antidote to this false slogan, one can look at the Reverend John Perricone’s The Preferential Option for the Poor Sinner as one ignores references to the conciliar sect as the Catholic Church, which it is not) and its efforts to  fight “structures of sin,” even Karol Jozsef Wojtyla/John Paul II, who admittedly believed in the slogan of “solidarity” as well as other aspects of Sillonism, stressed in Reconciliatio et Paententiae, that there was really no such thing as “social sin” but, instead, the concentration of the individual sins of men:

Having said this in the clearest and most unequivocal way, one must add at once that there is one meaning sometimes given to social sin that is not legitimate or acceptable even though it is very common in certain quarters today.(74) This usage contrasts social sin and personal sin, not without ambiguity, in a way that leads more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the abolition of personal sin, with the recognition only of social gilt and responsibilities. According to this usage, which can readily be seen to derive from non-Christian ideologies and systems-which have possibly been discarded today by the very people who formerly officially upheld them-practically every sin is a social sin, in the sense that blame for it is to be placed not so much on the moral conscience of an individual, but rather on some vague entity or anonymous collectivity such as the situation, the system, society, structures or institutions.

Whenever the church speaks of situations of sin or when the condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.

A situation-or likewise an institution, a structure, society itself-is not in itself the subject of moral acts. Hence a situation cannot in itself be good or bad.

At the heart of every situation of sin are always to be found sinful people. So true is this that even when such a situation can be changed in its structural and institutional aspects by the force of law or-as unfortunately more often happens by the law of force, the change in fact proves to be incomplete, of short duration and ultimately vain and ineffective-not to say counterproductive if the people directly or indirectly responsible for that situation are not converted. (Karol Jozsef Wojtyla, Reconciliatio et Paenetentia, December 2, 1984.)

Mind you, this is not to take away from John Paul II’s defections from the Faith that put him outside the pale of Holy Mother Church. However, he was correct in this instance even though he committed grave sins against the Holy Faith, especially those concerning the First Commandment, and it is very telling that his three successors in the conciliar chair of apostasy and betrayal never discussed the effects of personal sins upon the world.

Perhaps more to the point, however, is that the Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV’s discussion of structural reforms has nothing to do with Catholicism as it is but the continuation of the Lockean construct that treats social problems as though men themselves were not in need of spiritual and moral reform.

From John Locke’s Construct Provided the Framework for Political Ideology and for Conciliarism’s Social Teaching

Some background is necessary to explain the historical circumstances that gave rise to John Locke and his “canonization” Pelagianism in the realm of politics and social policy.

The abuses of power by English Protestant monarchs, including the subjugating of Ireland and the persecution of Catholics in the Land of Saints and Scholars who refused to defect from the true Church, a persecution that would last until 1921 and still persists in Northern Ireland, led to all manner of social unrest in England, especially as those Anglicans who were followers of John Calvin sought to eradicate all remaining vestiges of Catholicism from Anglican "worship" and "doctrine" (removing Latin from certain aspects of the heretical Anglican liturgy, smashing statues, eliminating high altars in favor of tables, things that have been undertaken in the past fifty-six years in many formerly Catholic churches that are now in the custody of the counterfeit church of conciliarism). This unrest produced the English Civil Wars of the 1640s and the establishment in 1649 of what was, for all intents and purposes, a Calvinist state under the control Oliver Cromwell that became a Cromwellian dictatorship between the years of 1653 to 1660 until the monarchy under the House of Stuart was restored in 1660. Oh yes, King Charles I lost his head, quite literally, in 1649 as the "Roundheads" of Oliver Cromwell came to power in 1649 following seven years of warfare between "parliamentarians" and "royalists." Revolutions always wind up eating their own. The English monarchy itself was eaten up by the overthrow of the Social Reign of the King of Kings by Henry VIII of the House of Tudor in 1534.

King James II, who had converted to Catholicism in France in 1668 while he was the Prince of York under his brother, King Charles II of the restored monarchy, acceded to the English throne on June 6, 1885, following his brother's death, which occurred after Charles II himself had converted to the Faith on his deathbed. Suspicious that the property that had been acquired and the wealth that had been amassed as a result of Henry VIII's social-engineering land grab of 150 years before would be placed in jeopardy, Protestant opponents of King James II eventually forced him to abdicate the throne in 1688, his rule having been declared as ended on December 11 of that year. The abdication of King James, whose second wife, Mary of Modena, had been assigned Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere as her spiritual director when she was the Princess of York, is referred to by Protestant and secular historians as the "glorious revolution," so-called because it ushered in the penultimate result of the Protestant Revolution, the tyranny of the majority.

It was to justify the rise of majoritarianism that John Locke, a Presbyterian (Calvinist) minister, wrote his Second Treatise on Civil Government. Locke believed, essentially, that social problems could be ameliorated if a majority of reasonable men gathered together to discuss their situation. The discussion among these "reasonable men" would lead to an agreement, sanctioned by the approval of the majority amongst themselves, on the creation of structures which were designed to improve the existing situation. If those structures did not ameliorate the problems or resulted in a worsening of social conditions then some subsequent majority of "reasonable men" would be able to tear up the "contract" that had bound them before, devising yet further structures designed to do what the previous structures could not accomplish. Locke did not specify how this majority of reasonable men would form, only that it would form, providing the foundation of the modern parliamentary system that premises the survival of various governments upon the whims of a majority at a given moment.

In other words, England's "problem" in 1688 was King James II. The solution? Parliament, in effect, declared that he had abdicated his throne rather than attempt to fight yet another English civil war to maintain himself in power as the man chosen by the parliamentarians to replace him, his own son-in-law William of Orange, who was married to his daughter Mary, landed with armed forces ready to undertake such a battle. The parliamentary "majority" had won the day over absolutism and a return to Catholicism.

Political ideologues capitalized on the divisions caused the Martin Luther’s, John Calvin’s, Ulrich Zwingli and Henry VIII’s respective breaks from Rome.

A writer of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli provided the “philosophical muscle,” so to speak, that was used by political ideologues (those who subscribed to the allegedly “salvific” power of a political belief system, whether it be liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, fascism, utilitarianism, statism, materialism, legal positivism, libertarianism, etc.) to do away with all reference to the supernatural in order to emphasize the merely natural aspects of human existence. By doing this, you see, the political ideologues sought to empower individual rulers with a “blank check” to rule as they believed that had to rule in order to acquire, retain and increase their own raw political power.

To this end, Machiavelli wrote two works in the late-Fifteenth Century that were instrumental in shaping the minds of political rulers after Martin Luther broke with the Catholic Church and thus made it possible for princes and kings and emperors to rule without what they saw as the sort of “interference” from a pope or a kingdom’s local bishops to observe the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Those two works were as follows: and A Discourse on Livy.

The essence of Machiavelli’s teaching was to separate the practice of politics from all objective moral norms. Machiavelli believed that there was no need for a prince to agonize over the morality of particular decisions. All that such a prince needs to do is to determine what is expedient for his own ends. In other words, a prince may use whatever means he deems, including, lying, cheating and, if necessary, killing, to realize whatever end he has set for himself. This is known as “amorality,” the belief that human actions can be undertaken without regard to their inherent morality or lack thereof. “The ends justify the means.” If one has to cheat, cheat. If one has to lie, lie. If one has to kill, kill. This is the foundation of the policies of almost every country in the world today as those in public office seek to advance their own ends by using whatever means it takes to realize them. We see this with particular clarity in the conduct of election campaigns and in efforts by presidential administrations to cover-up crimes that “had” to be committed in order to preserve their “legitimacy” and “credibility” with the public.

No matter the influence Machiavelli, however, it was John Locke who was the father of political ideology. Locke is the father of the political ideology of “liberalism,” which contends that social problems may be resolved by the creation of structures, sanctioned by the majority, and that such structures may be reformed or enlarged by subsequent majorities over the course of time. All political ideology is, as Russell Kirk noted in The Roots of American Order, inverted religion, an effort to replace Christianity as the foundation of social life by convincing mere creatures that they, by their own unaided powers, can make the world “better” without ever addressing the root causes of those problems.

As noted above, John Locke wrote The Second Treatise on Civil Government, which established his understanding of democracy as being a form wherein the people voluntarily relinquished their claim to total liberty in order to enjoy the protection of their basic rights and liberties (life, liberty and property) by a government they create, elect and participate in.

Locke based his philosophy upon the following premises:

1. The human being lived originally in a “state of nature,” where there was to be found no law, no organized society and thus no order. In such a situation, the human being was incapable of realizing the protection of his basic rights of life, liberty and property.

2. As noted above, in the state of nature everyone was “free” to do as he pleased.

3. Such “freedom,” though, carried risks within the “state of nature” as some human beings used their freedom to violate the rights of others.

4. Lacking any organized means to deal with the risks that existed in the state of nature, Locke hypothesized, without specifying when this happening or how, that a majority of “reasonable” men gathered together to perfect the state of nature in which the human beings were at risk of losing their rights to life, liberty and property.

5. These “reasonable men” conclude that the state of nature was defective and that the human being had to be taken out of it in order to be governed by a government created by and with the consent of those to be governed.

6. The price of protecting basic rights and liberties would be the forfeiture of the claim to total liberty. That is, human beings must voluntarily relinquish (give up) their claim to “total liberty” in order to enjoy the protection of their rights to life, liberty and property by a government of their own creation.

7. Thus it is that Locke believed government was not part of the very nature of things, that is was an artificial “imposition” upon the human being that could, if left unchecked, serve as a threat to the human being.

8. The supposed “safeguard” in Locke’s construct would be the creation of a government by a “majority” of reasonable men, who would devise, whether in a formal (or written) manner or an informal (unwritten) manner a “social contract” to bind the community together in a set of rules to be administered by elected officials serving in government structures.

9. If, however, the problems sought to be ameliorated or resolved by the government created by the social contact continue or, worse yet, worsen, then another reasonably majority of men could arise to revised or expand existing structures and/or to create new ones to “fix” that which had gone unresolved.

This is the essence of liberalism, therefore, and its influence is vast on both the so-called “left”
 and “right” in the United States of America today. Lockeanism also influenced some, although not all, of the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America. Lockeanism convinces human beings, who are mere contingent beings, that is, beings who did not create themselves, and whose bodies are destined for the corruption of the grave until the General Judgment of the living and the dead on the Last Day. In other words, political ideology convinces men that they are “gods” who can decide for themselves how to “improve” or “perfect” a world brought into disorder caused by their own sins. Remember, even Plato and Cicero, pagans who did not believe in Divine Revelation, understood the connection between order in the soul and order in society.

The flaws of the John Locke’s ideology are as follows:

1. The “state of nature” never existed. There never existed a time when human beings lived in a moral vacuum, devoid of hierarchy and of any means of external governance over them. Again, even pagans understood this from the use of reason. Christians understand that God Himself, the Most Blessed Trinity, is the true Governor of men Who has ordained laws to govern the physical properties of the universe and Who has ordained laws to govern men in the moral choices they make. The “state of nature” is pure mythology.

2. All human problems, therefore, are the result of man’s fallen nature, something that many of the founders understood:

A principal difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was this: the American revolutionaries in general held a biblical view of man and his bent toward sin, while the French revolutionaries in general attempted to substitute for the biblical understanding an open optimistic doctrine of human goodness advanced by the philosophes [the false philosophers] of the rationalistic Enlightenment. The American view led to the Constitution of 1787; the French view, to the Terror and to a new autocracy [Napoleon Bonaparte]. The American Constitution is a fundamental law deliberately meant to place checks upon will and appetite. The French innovations would endure no such checks upon popular impulses; they ended under a far more arbitrary domination. (Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p. 29.)

3. Importantly, Locke confused liberty with license. Having the physical ability to perform an act does not mean that one has the moral right to commit it. Thus, one does not have the freedom morally to push his neighbor in front of an oncoming subway train. How can it be said, therefore, that one is giving up his “freedom” not to commit an act that is of its nature morally wrong.

4. Locke thus conclude erroneously that government is an artificial imposition upon human society that takes men out of the state of nature in order to protect their rights to life, liberty and property that he said were at risk in the state of nature. Government is not an artificial imposition upon human society. As noted in number two, supra, government and hierarchy are simply part of the nature of things.

5. Locke trusted naively in the infallible reasonableness of the majority. Locke could not conceive of a circumstance whereby a majority would be composed of anyone other than reasonable men. As we know, of course, the crowd is often wrong. The crowd on Good Friday, motivated by our sins having transcended time, cried out for Barabbas and called for the Crucifixion of their very Redeemer. The mere fact that a majority supports or opposes something at a given point in time means nothing if what is supported or opposed is wrong in and of its nature. Democracy is not about giving the “majority” whatever it wants. This is same as mobocracy.

6. Locked believed wrongly in the ability of mere structural reform to solve perfect the “state of nature,” that is, to “resolve” social problems once and for all. Such a belief, while held most sincerely by most people alive today, treats the symptoms of problems rather than the root cause of those problems. Without understanding that the root cause of social problems is fallen human nature—and hence remediable only by constant conversion to holiness on a daily basis), the human being becomes convinced that he can create THE solution to the problems of war, poverty, homelessness, economic injustice, racism, greed, environmental pollution, and the like. The fact that such problems remain, if not worsen, does nothing to convince Lockeans of the rightness of their position.

Similarly, there are those who believe that the mere expenditure of funds on social problems will result in the resolution of those problems. The failure of such programs to work (urban poverty remains high, teen unemployment rates, especially in urban areas, remains high, drug abuse is on the rise across all segments of society, many schools produce students who are functionally illiterate and are unable to speak in grammatically correct English, being ignorant, through no fault of their own, in basic facts of world and American history) does nothing to cause such ideologues to rethink their basic premises. The same is true of those who believe that the mere expenditure of money will produce a stronger defense of the nation (or those who think that the elimination of weapons by itself will produce peace). There were wars long before there were modern weapons.

The belief in structural reforms as the means to resolve social problems leads the human being to believe in self-redemption. This is the same thing as the heresy of Pelgianism, the belief that human beings can more or less “save” themselves by stirring up within the souls graces necessary to “do” whatever it is they set their minds to doing without any type of supernatural assistance.

7. Locke’s system leads to frustration. If one believes that structural reform in and of itself is the means to resolve social problems, then one is bound to lead a life of utter frustration. The person who believes that “others” are responsible for their problems are rootless and restless, constantly searching for “external” solutions to ease their sense of unhappiness (an unhappiness that originates interiorly within themselves). Similarly, a society seeking in good faith to deal with serious problems will find itself quite frustrated when the problems remain despite the “best” efforts to eradicate them. New solutions are therefore proposed as the “next step” to resolve problems that will only worsen over times. Karl Marx, for example, saw the failure of liberalism while living in London, England, and proposed what he thought was the ultimate solution: communism, which was to produce “peace and justice” by killing off the bourgeoisie (the capitalists) and redistributing their wealth so that a “classless” society could emerge wherein all no cause for envy, war or competition would exist. (

Locke’s influence on modern thought is profound even though most of the men who framed the Constitution of the United States of American had made a break with some of Locke’s simple-minded majoritarian formulae for secular self-redemption. As a practical political matter, however, Locke’s ideas—and those of the French Revolution—became the basis of American politics, public-policy making and jurisprudence.

Unfortunately for Locke, you see, social problems cannot be ameliorated merely by the creation of structures devised by “reasonable men” and sanctioned by the majority.

All problems in the world, both individual and social, have their remote causes in Original Sin and their proximate causes in the Actual Sins of men. There is no once-and-for-all method or structure by which, for example, “peace” will be provided in the world by the creation of international organizations or building up or the drafting of treaties. 

There is no once-and-for-all method or structure by which, for example, “crime” will be lessened in a nation by the creation of various programs designed to address the "environmental" conditions that are said to breed it.

The only way in which social conditions can be ameliorated is by the daily reformation of individual lives in cooperation with the graces won for men by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ upon the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. And to the extent that social structures can be effective in addressing and ameliorating specific problems at specific times in specific places, those who create and administer them must recognize their absolute dependence upon God's graces and that there is no secular, non-denominational or inter-denominational way to provide for social order. Social order and peace among nations depend entirely upon the subordination of the life of every person and the activities of every nation to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it is exercised by the Catholic Church.

The modern state is founded on the specific and categorical rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it is exercised by the Catholic Church. There is thus the need for modern man for find sterile ideologies or philosophies to substitute for the true Faith so as to guide him in the course of daily life. The failure of the social structures fashioned after the Lockean model to effect an amelioration of the problems they were intended to address does nothing to deter “true believers” from continuing to persist in the blindness that led them to reject the true Faith and to trust in their own cooked-up schemes.  

No, the “true believers” in liberalism or conservatism or capitalism or socialism or communism or fascism or Nazism or utilitarianism or pragmatism or positivism (or any and all other brands of secular “isms”) must spend their entire lives searching for a “better way” to realize the goals of their particular ideology or philosophy or economic system. It cannot possibly be, they have convinced themselves, that their initial premises were wrong from the outset. No, the problem must be in the implementation and/or in the communication of their ideas, not in the false nature of the ideas upon which they have based all of their truly delusional hopes.

The Lockean construct for the resolution of social problems is but one part of the Revolution, as it was termed by Popes Pius VI, VII, VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Saint Pius X, against the Faith. The Lockean construct preceded the rise of contemporary Freemasonry in England by twenty-nine years, fitting in nicely with the Judeo-Masonic desire to obliterate the necessity of subordinating all things in personal and social life to the reality of the Incarnation by stressing the conviction that the “universal brotherhood of men” can put aside “denominational differences” to pursue the “common good” Locke's belief that men could resolve their social problems by the creation of structures, in essence the self-redemptive heresy of Pelagianism, also dovetailed into the Judeo-Masonic belief that men can pursue “civic virtue” on their own without belief in, access to or cooperation with sanctifying grace. These false beliefs lead men and their societies into complete and utter chaos, which is the goal of the chief revolutionary, the devil himself, who desires the minds of men to be locked up by the blindness engendered by their narcissism and pride.

The Lockean construct leads to many mutations, all of which have one common theme: the ability of man to better his lot in life on his own without subordinating himself to the Deposit of Faith that the God-Man has entrusted to His true Church.

In the United States, for example, the Lockean construct has produced a situation where liberalism had to give way to the socialism that has been creeping up on us in the past century since the administrations of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, and, at the present time, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The failure of incremental, structural “reforms” to improve social conditions led to an increase in the size and the power of government at all levels (state, local, national) and a reduction in the legitimate natural law rights of citizens to be free from the tyranny of governmental leaders possessed of the notion that secular salvation comes from the state.

Thus, the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson was actually a descent into statism, especially as represented by the creation of the Federal Reserve System, expedited by the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and by many of the policies of his immediate predecessor, Herbert Clark Hoover), and expanded by Lyndon Baines Johnson's “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” programs. The attempts to “engineer” the better society through government programs has reached such a stage that even though itself is being punished at the state law (and laws are pending on the national level to make criticism of the behavior of certain people a “hate” crime). A land born in the delusional belief that man can ever be "free" without Our Lord and His Holy Church produces all to logically and inexorably a new caste of slaves, most of who are so diverted by bread and circuses that they protest nary a bit as their legitimate freedoms and property are taken away from them bit by bit under one pretext or another. All of this, however, was but a prelude to the socialism of the present moment, including stimulus packages, ObamaDeathCare, Biden’s “infrastructure” boondoggle, and the pork-barreling that squanders so many billions of taxpayer dollars (pork-barreling goes by the more commonly known name of “earmarks” today).

Elsewhere, however, the Lockean construct leads to a degree of violent frustration. That is, the failure of structural reforms to, say, “end” poverty or to “end” wars convinced a number of visionaries that violent, bloody revolutions were necessary to overthrow the remaining vestiges of Catholicism in order to replace it all at once with a man-made paradigm for peace and justice on earth. The French Revolutionaries, the Mexican Revolutionaries, the plotters of the Italian Risorgimento, Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf in Germany, the Bolshevik, and Maoist Revolutionaries—and scores upon scores of others—believed that their revolutions would bring about a new age for mankind. The failure of even those “once-and-for-all” revolutions, however, to produce their expected results led to attempts to revitalize the revolutionary zeal, a "reform of the reform," if you will. And it will ever be thus in the minds of those who have rejected the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order as they have been shaped by the demonically inspired naturalistic, religiously indifferentist, semi-Pelagian delusions of Modernity and of Modernism within the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Corrupting the Meaning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan Yet Again

Following the example of his Marxist-friendly predecessor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV is continuing to corrupt, pervert, and distort the true meaning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Dilexi Te as he has done several other times in the past five months, twelve days:

105. The dominant culture at the beginning of this millennium would have us abandon the poor to their fate and consider them unworthy of attention, much less our respect. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Fratelli Tutti, challenged us to reflect on the parable of the Good Samaritan (cf. Lk 10:25-37), which presents the different reactions of those confronted by the sight of a wounded man lying on the road. Only the Good Samaritan stops and cares for him. Pope Francis went on to ask each of us: “Which of these persons do you identify with? This question, blunt as it is, is direct and incisive. Which of these characters do you resemble? We need to acknowledge that we are constantly tempted to ignore others, especially the weak. Let us admit that, for all the progress we have made, we are still ‘illiterate’ when it comes to accompanying, caring for and supporting the most frail and vulnerable members of our developed societies. We have become accustomed to looking the other way, passing by, and ignoring situations until they affect us directly.” [115]

106. It is important for us to realize that the story of the Good Samaritan remains timely even today. “If I encounter a person sleeping outdoors on a cold night, I can view him or her as an annoyance, an idler, an obstacle in my path, a troubling sight, a problem for politicians to sort out, or even a piece of refuse cluttering a public space. Or I can respond with faith and charity, and see in this person a human being with a dignity identical to my own, a creature infinitely loved by the Father, an image of God, a brother or sister redeemed by Jesus Christ. That is what it is to be a Christian! Can holiness somehow be understood apart from this lively recognition of the dignity of each human being?” [116] What did the Good Samaritan do?

107. These questions become all the more urgent in light of a serious flaw present in the life of our societies, but also in our Christian communities. The many forms of indifference we see all around us are in fact “signs of an approach to life that is spreading in various and subtle ways. What is more, caught up as we are with our own needs, the sight of a person who is suffering disturbs us. It makes us uneasy, since we have no time to waste on other people’s problems. These are symptoms of an unhealthy society. A society that seeks prosperity but turns its back on suffering. May we not sink to such depths! Let us look to the example of the Good Samaritan.” [117] The final words of the Gospel parable — “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37) — represent a mandate that every Christian must daily take to heart. (Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV, Dilexi Te, October 4, 2025.)

What about seeing the image of God in innocent preborn children rather than denigrating their lives as being only one issue among and being on the same level with migration as an absolute human right that no government can seek to regulate legitimately as well as being on the same level with the “care of creation.” Blessing an ice block?

Additionally, Father George Leo Haydock explained the deeper allegorical meaning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan:

Ver. 34. This is the allegorical meaning of the parable: The man that fell among robbers, represents Adam and his posterity; Jerusalem, the state of peace and innocence, which man leaves by going down to Jericho, which means the moon, the state of trouble and sin: the robbers represent the devil, who stripped him of his supernatural gifts, and wounded him in his natural faculties: the priest and Levite represent the old law: the Samaritan, Christ; and the beast, his humanity. The inn means the Church; wine, the blood of Christ; oil, his mercy; whilst the host signifies St. Peter and his successors, the bishops and priests of the Church. (Origen, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and others) (Luke 10 – Haydock Commentary Online.)

Although, as Prevost/Leo points out in Dilexi Te, almsgiving is indeed an essential aspect of the Christian life, there is a much greater need for men to be healed spiritually in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, something that Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J., noted in his first sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost:

"A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, who also stripped him; and having wounded him went away leaving him half dead."--Luke 10. 

Today's Gospel presents to our consideration the sad condition of a man who has had the misfortune to lose the precious boon of saving grace by yielding to temptation, and falling into mortal sin.

But, at the same time, it points to the great fortune that becomes ours, as children of the true Church, through the grace the effects of the Sacrament of Penance which Christ left His Church for the salvation and restoration of those who, robbed and wounded by sin, cast themselves repentantly into the arms of God's infinite mercy.

Hence, this authority to forgive sin is the most important power and grace Christ left His Church for the salvation of the sinful human race. But, unhappily, all who apparently receive this Sacrament do not really receive absolution; for there are many whose heart is not in that disposition necessary for the forgiveness of sin. The first and most important condition is abhorrence of sin, and a thorough appreciation of the misfortune into which sin has precipitated us. The greater this abhorrence is, the deeper our grief, the more thorough and effective will be our repentance, the more sincere our resolution to avoid all sin in future, and our faithfulness in keeping this resolution.

Today's Gospel, by what it tells us of the robbed and wounded traveler, is especially qualified to awaken and increase within us this disposition of heart.

Mary, thou refuge of sinners, full of grace, pray for us, that God may give us the light to recognize fully the evil of sin, and to avoid it for evermore! I speak in the most holy name of Jesus, to the greater glory of God!

If the sinner really desires to receive, through the Sacrament of Penance, absolution, and to be sanctified and saved, then it is his duty to repent of his sin sincerely, and to make the firm resolution never to offend God again.

The consideration of the benefits of which sin robs us, and the wounds it deals us, will especially incline our hearts to repent thus. The robbed and wounded traveler of Jericho reminds us of this, and places this sad state of the soul figuratively before our eyes.

The man attacked by robbers lies upon the ground stripped of his garments. What are these garments, morally and spiritually considered, in connection with the state of a sinner? I reply: Sin deprives him of that inexpressibly great good, the garment of sanctifying grace. To obtain a faint conception of the value of this benefit, we need only consider the connection in which we stand, as man, to God, and to the approaching eternity.

I say: We are, it is true, as reasonable beings already the image of God since God is a Spirit, and the soul is also a spirit; but this nobility of the soul this God-like nature does not entitle us to that supernatural destination by which we are permitted to see and to possess God.

This good fortune does not fall to the lot of man until after the bestowal of sanctifying grace, a fact to which the book of Genesis refers in testifying that God created man, not only to His own image, but also to His likeness. It is by sanctifying grace that we become the kindred of God; become like Him, as children are like their father.

No mind of man can divine the splendor, the beauty, which sanctifying grace pours out over the soul. It is when in this state that man receives the right to call God, not only his Lord, but also his " Father." It is, further, in this state that man enters into the communion of the angels and saints, and in heaven shares for evermore their joy, their bliss, and their merits and glorification.

Man is then in that happy state which enables him, with the aid of actual grace, to raise himself, with every breath, higher and higher in the joys of heaven, and to place always purer and more beautiful jewels in the crown of his merits. In the same measure in which the light of sanctifying grace is communicated to the soul here upon earth, so one day the light of glory will be communicated when the soul leaves earth to go to God, to see, to know, to love Him, and to partake of His infinite glory.

Man, when in this state of grace, may consider himself as a fellow-citizen of the angels in the heavenly Jerusalem; he may greet all saints as brothers and sisters; may call the Blessed Virgin, Mother; and Jesus, as man, nay, even God, his Brother a prerogative which is not even granted to the angels!

How great a possession is sanctifying grace! It is represented in the Apocalypse as the magnificent garment which clothes the saints in splendor.

But, behold! one single mortal sin robs man of this precious, magnificent garment of his soul; robs him suddenly of all his merits, all his claims to the kingdom of glory; for there is no communion between light and darkness, between God and sin, between Christ and Belial!

Christ says: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven." He also, together with all his fallen comrades, had come into existence in this state of sanctifying grace. It was sin, and that only committed in thought, that took this good from him and all the angels, changing them from beautiful inhabitants of heaven into horrible demons, and cast them from their high places into the abyss of hell! They are lost forever!

The same miserable condition befalls the soul that, after being clothed in the heavenly vesture of sanctifying grace, has the misfortune to fall into mortal sin!

Heaven, the inheritance of glory and bliss in the communion of the saints is lost, man has no longer the right to consider himself the fellow-citizen of the angels and saints, to greet the Blessed Virgin as mother, Jesus as Brother and Saviour!

Lost are all the merits which he had earned until now; and, as long as he remains in this state, there is no possibility of his gaining merits for the life to come, even if he fast, give alms, and do all that appears worthy of praise.

Besides this, sin robs him of the peace of his soul, of the comfort a good conscience gives; of the joys, not only of those found in prayer, but of all those which the Catholic Church offers her children during the ecclesiastical year; of the consolation of a worthy reception of the Blessed Eucharist, and of the hope of heaven!

Sin also wounds the faculties of the soul. It injures the mind, the understanding, respecting things of salvation. It even conceals the greatness of the misery it occasions. Sin wounds, enfeebles the will, and burdens it with the slavish chains of habit. Sin wounds the memory by crowding it with sinful recollections, and deceptive imaginations. Sin wounds heart and feeling in such a manner that all desire to lead a virtuous life slowly dies.

Sinner, in order that you may repent and confess worthily, consider how sin has robbed you, and how it has inflicted deadly wounds upon you! Amen! (Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J., Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.)

Dilexi Te’s “Solutions” Are No “Solutions” At All

As a Modernist by way of the conciliar revolution, Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV tries to have it both ways when he criticizes those who preach “self-reliance” to help the materially poor as well those who want to rely solely or primarily upon government assistance. He even included a passage of providing “spiritual assistance” to the poor without stressing the fact that the worst form of poverty is that which deprives a person of Sanctifying Grace in his immortal soul.

Moreover, as has been the case with every antipapal encyclical letter, apostolic exhortation, homily, speech or message dealing with poverty and other social problems, Dilexi Te does not acknowledge that we must work and pray for the restoration of the Catholic City, and it fails to do this because men such as Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV do not want such a restoration as they are believers in globalism, which is the sterile Judeo-Masonic substitute for Catholicism as the overarching guide to all human activity, personal and social.

We must understand that the remote cause for all the problems in the world is Original Sin and that our own Actual Sins are the proximate causes for creating and exacerbating rather than ameliorating those problems as many, although not all, Catholics sought to do during the era of Christendom.

Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV does not understand that Catholicism provides the means to create the truly just social order, or does he understand that Protestantism, with which he seeks to effect a “communion,” is what brought us the abuses of unbridled capitalism and socialism, which was and remains a purely naturalistic reaction to those problems.  (Appendix B provides a little history lesson about the Middle Ages for Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV.)

The best response to the conciliarism’s approach to poverty and social is to be found in an address given by Archbishop of Venice, Giuseppe Melchiorre, in 1896:

In August 1896 in Padua, the second Congress of the Catholic Union for Social Studies took place. We have already seen that this organization had been created seven years before by Professor Giuseppe Toniolo, in the presence of the Bishop of Mantua [Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto]. This time, eight bishops were present and several directors of the Opera del Congressi took part. All the eminent representatives of the Italian Catholic Movement were present (Medolago Pagnuzzi, Alessi and others). Cardinal Sarto’s address attracted considerable notice. Faced with “ardent enemies” (unbelief and revolution) “…menacing and trying to destroy the social fabric,” the Patriarch of Venice invited the participants to make Jesus Christ the foundation of their work: “the only peace treaty is the Gospel.” He warned them against what is now called the “welfare state,” the state which provides everything and provides all socialization: “substituting public almsgiving for private almsgiving involves the complete destruction of Christianity and it is a terrible attack on the principle of ownership. Christianity cannot exist without charity, and the difference between charity and justice is that justice may have recourse to laws and even to force, depending on the circumstances, whereas charity can only be imposed by the tribunal of God and of conscience.” If public assistance and the redistribution of wealth are institutionalized, “poverty becomes a function, a way of life, a public trade…” (Yves Chiron, Saint Pius X: Restorer of the Church. Translated by Graham Harrison. Angelus Press, 2002, p. 100)

Conclusion

We must be about the business of making reparation for our sins by offering up the sufferings of this moment, which include this moment of apostasy and betrayal that makes it appear that an open heretic is able to “change” Catholic teaching and which includes also rank enemies of the true Church in public life, by recognizing yet again that this is the time that God Himself has from all eternity ordained us to live. What is a little suffering in this life compared with eternal glory in the next?

We must live high the Cross of the Divine Redeemer in all that we do as we carry about us the banner of Christ the King, offering everything we suffer to the Throne of the Most Blessed Trinity as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, remembering that the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is our shield and that her Most Holy Rosary is our weapon against all the enemies of our salvation personally, including the assaults of the lords of Modernity and those of the lords of Modernism.

These words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893, should inspire us all in these times of such tribulation and tumult:

13. But men of carnal mind, who love nothing but themselves, allow their thoughts to grovel upon things of earth until they are unable to lift them to that which is higher. For, far from using the goods of time as a help towards securing those which are eternal, they lose sight altogether of the world which is to come, and sink to the lowest depths of degradation. We may doubt if God could inflict upon man a more terrible punishment than to allow him to waste his whole life in the pursuit of earthly pleasures, and in forgetfulness of the happiness which alone lasts for ever.

14. It is from this danger that they will be happily rescued, who, in the pious practice of the Rosary, are wont, by frequent and fervent prayer, to keep before their minds the glorious mysteries. These mysteries are the means by which in the soul of a Christian a most clear light is shed upon the good things, hidden to sense, but visible to faith, "which God has prepared for those who love Him." From them we learn that death is not an annihilation which ends all things, but merely a migration and passage from life to life. By them we are taught that the path to Heaven lies open to all men, and as we behold Christ ascending thither, we recall the sweet words of His promise, "I go to prepare a place for you." By them we are reminded that a time will come when "God will wipe away every tear from our eyes," and that "neither mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow, shall be any more," and that "We shall be always with the Lord," and "like to the Lord, for we shall see Him as He is," and "drink of the torrent of His delight," as "fellow-citizens of the saints," in the blessed companionship of our glorious Queen and Mother. Dwelling upon such a prospect, our hearts are kindled with desire, and we exclaim, in the words of a great saint, "How vile grows the earth when I look up to heaven!" Then, too, shall we feel the solace of the assurance "that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory" (2 Cor. iv., 17).

15. Here alone we discover the true relation between time and eternity, between our life on earth and our life in heaven; and it is thus alone that are formed strong and noble characters. When such characters can be counted in large numbers, the dignity and well-being of society are assured. All that is beautiful, good, and true will flourish in the measure of its conformity to Him who is of all beauty, goodness, and truth the first Principle and the Eternal Source. (Pope Leo XIII, Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893.) 

The final victory belongs to the Immaculate Heart of Mary when a true pope is restored miraculously to the Throne of Saint Peter and fulfills her Fatima Message by consecrating Russia to it with all of the world’s true bishops. Our mission now is to try, despite our sins and failings, to plant a few seeds that will result in this triumph.

The errors of Modernity, including all forms of naturalism, and Modernism will be defeated.

We are soldiers in the Army of Christ the King.

Let us use the shield of the Brown Scapular and the weapon of the Holy Rosary to vanquish the foes of our own salvation and of the Holy Faith in the world-at-large and in the places that belong to the Catholic Church occupied now by brigands.

What are we waiting for?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Viva Cristo Rey! 

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, pray for us.

Saint John Cantius, pray for us.

Appendix A

On the Feast of Saint Cantius

Today is the Feast of Saint John Cantius, whose love of Our Lord in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and of holy purity, which some conciliar revolutionaries believe have nothing to do with the sanctification and salvation of souls, should inspire us all:

This John was the son of godly and respectable parents named Stanislaus and Anne, and was born in the year of our Lord 1397, in the town of Kenty, a place in the diocese of Crakow in Poland, from which he took the Latin name of Cantius. By his gentleness, innocency, and seriousness he gave great hopes even from his childhood. He studied Philosophy and Theology in the University of Crakow, wherein he rose step by step to be a Professor and teacher of those sciences wherein he lectured many years, not only enlightening the minds of his hearers, but stirring up in them all godliness, instructing them by ensample as well as by word. Having taken Priests' orders, he ceased not to busy himself with letters, but added thereto the striving after Christian perfection. He grieved exceedingly that God should be offended on all hands, and offered up to Him, day by day, not without many tears, the Unbloody Sacrifice for a propitiation for himself and for his people. He was for some years a faithful Parish Priest at Ilkusi, but after a while gave it up for fear of the danger of souls, and accepted the call of the University to take up again his Professorship.

What time was left him over from his work, he gave up partly to the profit of his neighbour, more especially in preaching, and partly in prayer, wherein he is said sometimes to have had heavenly visions and messages. The sufferings of Christ took such hold upon him, that he sometimes passed whole nights without sleep in thinking thereon, and that he might more keenly realize them, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There he was seized with such a passionate longing to be a martyr, that he preached Christ crucified even to the Turks. He went four times to Rome to the thresholds of the Apostles, on foot, and laden with a wallet, partly to do honour to the Apostolic See, for which he had a great reverence, and partly (to use his own expression) that he might clear off the pains of his own purgatory by use of the Pardons for sin which are there daily offered. In one of these journeys he was set upon by highway robbers, who plundered him, and having asked him if he had any more, whereto he answered, Nay, left him and fled. Then he remembered that he had some gold pieces sewn up in his clothes. So he ran after the robbers with shouts, and offered them these also, but they were so amazed at the simplicity and charity of the holy man, that they gave him back even that which they had already taken. To hinder scandal-mongering, he wrote up upon the walls, after the ensample of holy Austin [Saint Augustine], certain texts, to be an unceasing warning to himself and others. He gave his own bread to the hungry, and clothed the naked, not with bought raiment only, but by stripping himself of his own garments and shoes, himself meanwhile letting down his own cloak to trail upon the ground, lest any should see that he returned home barefoot.

He slept very little, and that upon the ground; his clothing was enough only to clothe his nakedness, and his food to keep him alive. He kept his virgin purity guarded like a lily among thorns by rough hair-cloth, scourging, and fasting. For about thirty-five years before his death he never tasted flesh- meat. At length, when he was full of days and good works, he felt that death was near, and made himself ready to meet it by a long and careful preparation, and to be the freer, he gave to the poor everything that was left in his house. Strengthened by the Sacraments of the Church, and having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ, he took flight to heaven upon the 24th day of December, (in the year of our Lord 1473.) He was famous for miracles both before and after his death. His body was carried into the University Church of St Anne, hard by his dwelling, and there honourably buried. The popular reverence and the crowds around his sepulchre grew greater day by day, till he hath come to be held in honour as one of the chiefest holy defenders of Poland and Lithuania. At the glory of more wonders, Pope Clement XIII., upon the 16th day of July, in the year 1767, with solemn pomp, enrolled his name among those of the Saints. (Matins, Divine Office, Feast of Saint John Cantius.)

Saint John Cantius remains a contrast with the conciliar revolutionaries, men who mock Holy Purity and bodily mortifications, who are continuing their revolutionary work under Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV.

Entrusting these truly tumultuous times to Our Lady through her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, we beg her, the very Mother of God, to help us to make reparation for our own many sins by enduring the crosses of the moment with love, joy, fortitude and gratitude as her consecrated slaves of her Divine Son that her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, which will indeed triumph in the end!

The conciliarists lose in the end. Christ the King will emerge triumphant once again as the fruit of the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of His Mother and our Queen, Mary Immaculate. The Church Militant will rise again from her mystical death and burial.

Keep praying. Keep sacrificing. Keep fulfilling Our Lady's Fatima Message in your own lives.

Appendix B

A History Lesson for Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV

Although Martin Luther’s revolution, aided and abetted by Talmudic instigators, started the process that created the world of Modernity, it was the influence of John Calvin and his own brand of Judeo-Protestantism that has shaped the world of injustice and conflict today.

Among his many other false beliefs, John Calvin believed that those in the civil government could separate the "saved" from the "damned" was the degree of their material success here on earth. John Calvin believed that material success was a sign of "divine election." Thus it is that we have the Calvinist "work ethic" as those who subscribe to Calvin's warped, heretical views of God and man work hard not to give honor and glory to the Most Holy Trinity through the Immaculate Heart of Mary but to show to others that they are "saved" by virtue of their material "success" in this passing, mortal vale of tears. 

Calvin’s belief in material success as the sign of divine election or predestination that has provided the foundation for the modern economic system that has forced man off of the land and dehumanized him as he has been made a slave of "material success" by the captains of industry and banking. Calvinism, which is little more than Talmudic Judaism with a slight Christian gloss, has engendered all manner of economic abuses, not the least of which is the contemporary practice of usury, discussed earlier in this book, founded in the belief that men may ignore the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in order to be "successful" in this world. 

The injustices engendered by this amoral, naturalistic view of the world helped to encourage open atheists and anti-Theists, such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, to postulate a utopian system of naturalism based upon a materialistic view of man that denied his supernatural essence. The diabolical lie of Marxism-Leninism is but the logical consequence of John Calvin's materialistic view of man that denied that there could be an Omnipotent and Omniscient God Who created rational beings with free wills to choose for or against Him as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church.

Father Fahey elaborated on the effects of Protestantism, especially the warmed-over version of Talmudic Judaism that is Calvinism, in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World: 

It was, however, the Calvinistic doctrine on predestination and the signs by which a man's divine election could be recognized, which specially favored the advent of the unlimited competition, unscrupulous underselling and feverish advertising of the present day. In his able work, from which a passage has already been quoted, Professor O'Brien shows that it was in the peculiarly British variety of Calvinism, known as Puritanism, that all the Calvinist doctrines of succession life as a sign of man's predestination, of the respect and veneration due to wealth, had their fullest development. 

When all is said and done, Calvinism remains the real nursing-father of the civic industrial capitalism of the middle classes. . . . Since the aggressively active ethic inspired by the doctrine of predestination urges the elect to the full development of his God-given powers, and offers him this sign by which he may assure himself of his election, work becomes rational and systematic. In breaking down the motive of ease and enjoyment, asceticism lays the foundation of the tyranny of work over men . . . production for production's sake is declared to be a commandment of religion." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

This has great application in every aspect of contemporary life. Most people work not for the honor and glory of God, thus giving him the fruit of their labors as the consecrated slaves of His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, but for the sake of "success," to gain what is considered to be financial "wealth" and earthly "success" as ends that justify each and every method used to achieve such success. This has been the Calvinist "contribution" to the world, so enshrined in the ethos of the "American dream," which eschews the Holy Poverty of the Holy Family of Nazareth and of such great saints as Saint Francis of Assisi and his helper and fellow adorer of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Saint Clare of Assisi. Father Fahey quoted Gilbert Keith Chesterton's observation about the insidious influence of that wretched people known as the Puritans (or Pilgrims) in a footnote on page sixteen of The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World: 

"The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical City of Christ in the Modern World.)

The Protestants, however, were not alone in helping to usher in the world of amorality in commerce and politics and statecraft and popular culture, including what has become known as competitive sports. Father Fahey explained the “Talmudic connection,” if you will, from which the Calvinist world-view is derived:

The learned writer, Werner Sombart, in his great work, Die Juden and das Wirtschafsleben ("The Jews in Economic Life"), attributes the great, if not the deciding, role in the formation of the modern economic outlook or mentality to the Jewish race, for to them he attributes the introduction of the ideas of "free commerce" and "unchecked competition" into a society with quite different ideas. He points out the contrast between this Jewish mentality and the ordered outlook of the Middle Ages in phrases that are worthy of citation:--

"When we examine matters more closely . . . we shall immediately see that the struggle between Jewish and Christian merchants is a struggle between two views of the world, or, at least, between two economic mentalities imbued with principles that are different or even opposed. In order to understand this statement we must represent to ourselves the spirit which inspired that economic life into which, since the sixteenth century, Jewish elements have forced their way in ever increasing volume. To this spirit they openly showed themselves so rudely opposed that they were everywhere felt to be interfering with the livelihood and subsistence of the people. During the whole time which I have designated as the period of incipient capitalism . . . the same fundamental outlook on economic relations prevailed as had been accepted during the Middle Ages. . . The unrestrained, unbridled striving after gain was considered by most people during this whole period as unlawful, as unchristian, because the spirit of the old Thomistic economic philosophy as yet swayed men's minds, at least officially." The Jewish mentality was opposed to the outlook on life impressed on society by the Catholic Church, for (:) "the Jew stands out as the business man pure and simple, as the man who, in business, takes account only of business, and who in conformity with the spirit of true capitalist economy, proclaims, in the presence of all natural ends, the supremacy of gain and profit." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.) 

Has not the "supremacy of gain and profit" come to define almost every aspect of contemporary life, taking into account not at all the eternal good of our immortal souls? This "supremacy of gain and profit" results in the corruption of daily living, contributing to the naturalistic belief, which itself is founded in pantheism, as Father Fahey notes, that is, that man is "divine" and is above all. The achievement of our earthly goals is what defines us as human beings, and no "external" authority, such as the Catholic Church, had better get in our way of this achievement. 

A final passage from Father Fahey will underscore this point: 

The Jew it was, according to Sombart, who broke down the mentality of the Middle Ages and commercialized the relations of men. 

Professor O'Brien dissents from Werner Sombart's thesis that the growth of the capitalistic spirit, the spirit of subordination of all other considerations to that of profit, was due to the Jews. He admits, however, that Sombart's contention would be quite correct, if for the "Jews" we substituted "Judaism," and he points out the importance of Calvin's justification of usury in preparing the way for modern developments. The Puritans adopted Old Testament ideas: the Old Testament idea of the reward of virtue in this world fitted in with the Puritan teaching about the fulfillment of one's vocation.

It is unnecessary for the purpose of this work to apportion responsibility for the triumph of what we may call the does it pay? mentality in the world, between Jews and Puritans. At any rate, if the Puritans subordinated men to production, the Jews completed the process, by subordinating production itself to money. The right order, of money as a means for production and production subservient to man, is now, as we know, reversed. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

Professor George O'Brien, cited in Father Fahey's The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, summarized his judgment about the effects of Protestantism upon the contemporary world in An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation (IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003): 

The thesis we have endeavoured to present in this essay is, that the two great dominating schools of modern economic thought have a common origin. The capitalist school, which, basing its position on the unfettered right of the individual to do what he will with his own, demands the restriction of government interference in economic and social affairs within the narrowest possible limits, and the socialist school, which, basing its position on the complete subordination of the individual to society, demands the socialization of all the means of production, if not all of wealth, face each other today as the only two solutions of the social question; they are bitterly hostile towards each other, and mutually intolerant and each is at the same weakened and provoked by the other. In one respect, and in one respect only, are they identical--they can both be shown to be the result of the Protestant Reformation. 

We have seen the direct connection which exists between these modern schools of economic thought and their common ancestor. Capitalism found its roots in the intensely individualistic spirit of Protestantism, in the spread of anti-authoritative ideas from the realm of religion into the realm of political and social thought, and, above all, in the distinctive Calvinist doctrine of a successful and prosperous career being the outward and visible sign by which the regenerated might be known. Socialism, on the other hand, derived encouragement from the violations of established and prescriptive rights of which the Reformation afforded so many examples, from the growth of heretical sects tainted with Communism, and from the overthrow of the orthodox doctrine on original sin, which opened the way to the idea of the perfectibility of man through institutions. But, apart from these direct influences, there were others, indirect, but equally important. Both these great schools of economic thought are characterized by exaggerations and excesses; the one lays too great stress on the importance of the individual, and other on the importance of the community; they are both departures, in opposite directions, from the correct mean of reconciliation and of individual liberty with social solidarity. These excesses and exaggerations are the result of the free play of private judgment unguided by authority, and could not have occurred if Europe had continued to recognize an infallible central authority in ethical affairs. 

The science of economics is the science of men's relations with one another in the domain of acquiring and disposing of wealth, and is, therefore, like political science in another sphere, a branch of the science of ethics. In the Middle Ages, man's ethical conduct, like his religious conduct, was under the supervision and guidance of a single authority, which claimed at the same time the right to define and to enforce its teaching. The machinery for enforcing the observance of medieval ethical teaching was of a singularly effective kind; pressure was brought to bear upon the conscience of the individual through the medium of compulsory periodical consultations with a trained moral adviser, who was empowered to enforce obedience to his advice by the most potent spiritual sanctions. In this way, the whole conduct of man in relation to his neighbours was placed under the immediate guidance of the universally received ethical preceptor, and a common standard of action was ensured throughout the Christian world in the all the affairs of life. All economic transactions in particular were subject to the jealous scrutiny of the individual's spiritual director; and such matters as sales, loans, and so on, were considered reprehensible and punishable if not conducted in accordance with the Christian standards of commutative justice. 

The whole of this elaborate system for the preservation of justice in the affairs of everyday life was shattered by the Reformation. The right of private judgment, which had first been asserted  in matters of faith, rapidly spread into moral matters, and the attack on the dogmatic infallibility of the Church left Europe without an authority to which it could appeal on moral questions. The new Protestant churches were utterly unable to supply this want. The principle of private judgment on which they rested deprived them of any right to be listened to whenever they attempted to dictate moral precepts to their members, and henceforth the moral behaviour of the individual became a matter to be regulated by the promptings of his own conscience, or by such philosophical systems of ethics as he happened to approve. The secular state endeavoured to ensure that dishonesty amounting to actual theft or fraud should be kept in check, but this was a poor and ineffective substitute for the powerful weapon of the confessional. Authority having once broken down, it was but a single step from Protestantism to rationalism; and the way was opened to the development of all sorts of erroneous systems of morality.  Dr. George O’Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation, IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003.) 

Amintore Fanfani, who died in 1999 and had served as the Prime Minister of Italy on six different occasions of varying lengths between 1954 and 1987, noted in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, that it is only when men keep a view on their eternal destiny that they can be just stewards of the this of this world. The success of the above-named Protestant revolutionaries and naturalistic "philosophers" and "theorists" was made possible by the overthrow of he authority of the Catholic Church. Unrestrained self-seeking replaced the authority of the Catholic Church:

Those who have followed our argument cannot fail to conclude, as we do, that in the Middle Ages it was the international trade ventures that did most to favour the rise of the capitalist spirit. In light of these considerations, the conception of trade in St. Thomas, the champion of the Catholic social ideal, appears only logical, "For, "says St. Thomas, "the city that for its subsistence has need of much merchandise must necessarily submit to the presence of foreigners. Now relations with foreigners, as Aristotle says in his Politics, very often corrupt national customs: the foreigners who have been brought up under other laws and customs, in many cases act otherwise than is the use of the citizens, who, led by their example, imitate them and so bring disturbance into social life. Moreover, if the citizens themselves engage in commerce, they open the way to many vices. For since the aim of merchants is wholly one of gain, greed takes root in the heart of the citizens, by which everything, in the city, becomes venal, and, with the disappearance of good faith, the way is open to fraud; the general good is despised, and each man will seek his own particular advantage; the taste for virtue will be lost when the honour which is normally the reward of virtue is accorded to all. Hence, in such a city civil life cannot fail to grow corrupt."

When these words are understood, and we bear in mind the ideal of a Catholic society and the aspirations of capitalism, we can easily see why the friar noted a tendency to reason only in a "venal" manner and ("despising the general good") to seek only "particular advantage."

The characteristics of capitalism are precisely the following: the adoption of an economic criterion as criterion of order; failure to consider third persons; a quest for purely individual profit. Nor did Aquinas exaggerate when he saw in the merchant the greatest danger in "civil life," as he understood it. It is not by chance that the first capitalistic figures presented to us are merchants--Godric, later St. Godric, presented by Pirenne; the Mariano by Heynen; the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Del Bene by Sapori; Datini by Bensa; the Fugger by Sreider. Nor is it by chance that though opinions differ as to whether capitalism sprang from land-owners or traders, all agree that even land-owners first showed themselves capitalistic in the quality of merchants. In mediaeval economic society the only individual who could easily and often find himself in a position to act otherwise than in conformity with pre-capitalistic ideals was the merchant. Having left his city, exposed to risks of every kind, free from such ties as the laws of country or the opinion of his acquaintances, surrounded by intriguing people who saw in him only someone to be cheated, he had to defend himself against the cheaters by cheating, against competitors by sharpening his wits to find new methods of competition, and against adverse circumstances by learning to overcome them. Although he may have been a God-fearing man, if it was urgent for him to take back to the warehouse at least the equivalent of what he had brought away, he was obligated to throw overboard something of his pre-capitalistic ideas, even if in paradaisal conditions they might have appealed to him.

In another part of the present work we have pointed out that in a pre-capitalistic society if a single individual breaks away from the norm, the others will be forced to follow his example if only in self-defence. Let the reader then consider the vast significance of encounters either with merchants of another religion, or with subtle, equivocal, and unscrupulous merchants, always ready to take advantage of any opportunity. Faced with these, men's faithfulness to their own ideals will have begun to waver; their consequent actions will have produced such remarkable results that we doubt whether their conviction of wrong-doing will have been reinforced. To reason in terms of utility means a tangible result; to reason in terms of Paradise means hope of a result of which the certainty vanishes if faith weakens. We must not forget how much the capitalistic ideal has the advantage in being concrete, and, remembering this, we can more easily understand how a profitable infraction of pre-capitalist normality would rather lead men to repeat such infractions than arouse in them such remorse as to lead them back to the old path. We hold it a very significant fact that among mediaeval merchants remorse led to notable conversion even when in no danger of death. It is enough to quote St. Godric, St. Francis, Blessed Colombini. It led also to death-bed restitutions, often complete, and which were the more wonderful the harder it had been for the dying man to scrape together his hoard, and the more reluctant he had been in his life to give a penny to anyone who had not earned it twice over. Such conversions, implying a return to pre-capitalistic modes of life, continue so long as there is faith, but when faith weakens there is no longer thought of reparation.

It is the waning of faith that explains the establishment of a capitalistic spirit in a Catholic world, but in a certain sense it is the establishment of the capitalistic spirit that brings about a waning of faith. The effect of the weakening of faith is that the material factors we have mentioned change from momentary circumstances to permanent ones. With the weakening of faith, remorse becomes rare; the "is" is no longer compared with the "should-be," and that which is accepted and exploited in accordance with its own standards; the world is judged by purely worldly criteria.

All the circumstances that, in the Middle Ages, led to a waning of faith explain the progressive establishment of the capitalistic spirit, for the pre-capitalistic spirit rests on facts that are not seen, but must be held by faith. Those faithful to it sacrifice a certain result for a result that is not guaranteed by faith; they eschew a certain mode of action in the certainty of losing riches, but believing that they will gain a future reward in heaven. Let man lose this belief, and nothing remains for him, rationally speaking, but to act in a capitalistic manner. If there are no longer religious ties uniting man to man, there will be a growing number of audacious men whose sole end, in the words of Villari, is to be ahead of their fellows. Such men existed before the modern era began, and of such men it has been said that they showed "a complete lack of scruples and contempt for every moral law."

Men were particularly encouraged to sharpen their wits to acquire wealth, and moral obstacles were removed by the fact that, by a subversion of ancient custom, the highest offices no longer fell to those summoned to them by law or custom, but to those who could win them either by their own or others' wit, by their own or others' material strength, or by their own ability and others' baseness. In each case the stair of ascent was provided by economic means, from the moment that economic difficulties made all feel the need of goods. The Emperor no longer sought homage but money, the Cities widened their domains more by gold than by arms. Bankers became masters of cities without striking a blow. Gold paved the way and opened the gates to the new tyrants. Even the man who, from lofty motives, had no need of money could not do without it, if he did not wish to cut a poor figure at banquets and ceremonies, or be behind hand in public largesse.

It is a vicious circle. A man seeks goods because he no longer believes in a faith that bounded his desires, and he no longer believes  because he has experienced the pleasures of possession and influence. We need not enquire at what moment the former or the latter of these causes came into operation; we know that their working varied from country to country, from individual to individual, and that now a man might be tempted to discount morality by the attraction of goods, and now might be tempted to enrich himself because, he is no loner believed in divine penalties and rewards. And if in the case of an individual it would be hard to say which cause came first, it would be impossible in the case of society. We may take it for granted that in society as a whole both causes worked simultaneously, each stimulated by the other.

There were other phenomena that encouraged either acquisition action or incredulity. Leaving aside the less important and local ones, and confining ourselves to those of which the action was most general at the close of the pre-capitalistic period, we may say that the greatest contribution to the new economic spirit informing fifteenth-century men was brought by the humanist conception of life, of which the exponents, such as Alberti, took the most significant step towards the capitalist spirit by detaching their conception of wealth from its moral setting, and withdrawing the acquisition and use of goods from the influence of the rules and restrictions of religious morality. The advent of similar tendencies in the political field had the result that the State ceased to oppose the new mode of thought and life, and instead itself threw off the influence of Catholic ideals, often in order to exploit human vices, as we see in legislation on gambling. (Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, published originally by Sheed and Ward, 1935, republished in 2002 by IHS Press, pp. 135-138.)

Fanfani went on to note how Protestantism exploited this weakening of the Catholic Faith and built an entire economic system to suit its own heretical purposes:

Protestantism encouraged capitalism inasmuch as it denied the relation between earthly action and eternal recompense. From this point of view there is no real difference between the Lutheran and Calvinistic currents, for while it is true that Calvin linked salvation to arbitrary divine predestination, Luther made it depend on faith alone. Neither of the two connected it with works. Nevertheless, Calvin's statement was the more vigorous, and therefore better able to bear practical fruit in a capitalistic sense.

Such an assertion invalidates any supernatural morality, hence also the economic ethics of Catholicism, and opens the way to a thousand moral systems, all natural, all earthy, all based on principles inherent in human affairs. Protestantism by this principle did not act in a positive sense, as [Max] Weber believes, but in a negative sense, paving the way for the positive action of innumerable impulses, which--like the risks entailed by distant markets,  in the pre-Reformation period, the price revolution at the time of the Reformation, and the industrial revolution in the period following—led man to direct his action by purely economic criteria. Catholicism acts in opposition to capitalism by seeking to restrain these impulses and to bring various spheres of life into harmony on an ideal plane. Protestantism acted in favor of capitalism, for its religious teaching paved the way for it. (Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, published originally by Sheed and Ward, 1935, republished in 2002 by IHS Press, p. 151.)

The belief that social life is defined solely by economic criteria is what unites the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and right” even though they do not realize this. As I have noted so many times in the past on this site, the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and “left,” despite their differences on the margins of the errors of Modernity, are united in their belief that men can order their lives without any reference to religion at all, no less the true religion, and that men can do anything they want by means of their own unaided powers. In others, the adherents of the “left” and the “right” believe that men do not need Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or His true Church and that it is not necessary for men to have belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to create a better and more just world. The adherents of the “left and the “right” believe that the “better world” is defined by economics and not by the state of the souls of men.

The late Dr. George O'Brien stressed the fact that there is only one institution that can reorder the world properly, and it is not a secular, naturalistic international organization or a secular, naturalistic political party:

There is one institution and one institution alone which is capable of supplying and enforcing the social ethic that is needed to revivify the world. It is an institution at once intra-national and international; an institution that can claim to pronounce infallibly on moral matters, and to enforce the observance of the its moral decrees by direct sanctions on the individual conscience of man; an institution which, while respecting and supporting the civil governments of nations, can claim to exist independently of them, and can insist that they shall not intrude upon the moral life or fetter the moral liberty of their citizens. Europe possessed such an institution in the Middle Ages; its dethronement was the unique achievement of the Reformation; and the injury inflicted by that dethronement has never since been repaired. (George O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation, first published in 1923, republished by IHS press in 2003, p. 132.) 

Father Edward Cahill, S.J., writing in The Framework of a Christian State, wrote the following about Luther and his revolution against the Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope: 

The assertion that Protestantism has introduced into Europe, or promoted, democratic freedom or real liberty of conscience is still more patently untrue. It is a fact, indeed, that at the beginning of the revolt Luther's professions were radically democratic. He promised to benefit the people at large by curtailing the power of both Church and State. But he and his followers ended up by supporting an irresponsible despotism such as Europe had not known since the days of the pagan Emperors of Rome.

Inspired by Luther's democratic professions and his denunciations of the "tyranny and oppression" of the rulers, the knights and the lesser nobility of many of the German States, and later on, the peasants rose in open revolt against the princes. When the revolution was crushed in blood (1525) the victorious princes, now without a rival and no longer kept in check by the moderating influence of the Catholic Church, used their augmented power to establish a despotism which they exceeded for their own personal advantage, in opposition to the interests of the people; while Luther, with unscrupulous inconsistency, now proclaimed the doctrine of the unlimited power of rulers. 

Soon even the Church in the Protestant States fell completely under the control of the ruling princes, who were thus established as the absolute masters of both Church and State. The wealth of the Church, which hitherto had been the patrimony of the poor; its authority; all the ecclesiastical institutions, including hospitals, schools, homes of refuge, etc., passed into the hands of the kings, princes, and the town magistrates. At the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which ended the first phase of the revolution in Germany, the principle was formally adopted that the prince of each state was free to dictate the religion of each and all of his subjects." (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., The Framework of a Christian State, published in 1932 in Ireland and republished by Roman Catholic books, pp. 93-94. William Cobbett, a Protestant historian who never converted to the Holy Faith, wrote a remarkably full and honest account of the plunder of monasteries and convents under King Henry VIII in England, thus beginning the rise of all economic miseries since that time as this plunder threw off the poor from their lands and consigned them to pauperism and vagabondage..)

Thus began the rise of the statism that is upon us at this time. There is no way to regard the growth of statism by making advertence to some kind of “generic” Christianity and/or by relying upon the Judeo-Masonic principles of naturalism and its religious indifferentism. Catholicism is but the one and only foundation of personal and social order, which is why the devil worked very hard to plant the seeds of corruption in the two centuries leading up to Martin Luther’ revolution against God and His true Church. And far from being “peaceful,” Luther’s revolution was born in blood as Catholic churches and convents were plundered and ransacked.

Contemporary Capitalism Produced Socialism

Pope Leo XIII, writing at the very beginning of Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891, explained how the "new things" of Modernity had invaded the precincts of economics, resulting in crushing conditions for workers. He rejected the false foundations of Calvinist capitalism while at the same time rejecting categorically the "alternative" of Socialism and its attack upon the Natural Law right of private property. Pope Leo understood that it is the right conduct of men in due submission to the laws of God and in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace that are at the foundation of a justly ordered economic system:

That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; in the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it -- actually there is no question which has taken a deeper hold on the public mind.

Therefore, venerable brethren, as on former occasions when it seemed opportune to refute false teaching, We have addressed you in the interests of the Church and of the common weal, and have issued letters bearing on political power, human liberty, the Christian constitution of the State, and like matters, so have We thought it expedient now to speak on the condition of the working classes. It is a subject on which We have already touched more than once, incidentally. But in the present letter, the responsibility of the apostolic office urges Us to treat the question of set purpose and in detail, in order that no misapprehension may exist as to the principles which truth and justice dictate for its settlement. The discussion is not easy, nor is it void of danger. It is no easy matter to define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labor. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators are intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men's judgments and to stir up the people to revolt.

In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community. (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.)

The abuses associated with Calvinist capitalism, which are the result of fallen human nature uninformed by the Deposit of Faith and unreformed by Sanctifying Grace, are not to be repaired by mythical, "self-correcting" "market forces" or by Socialism. The capitalist system, which places an emphasis upon the expansion of wealth as the means to personal happiness and national prosperity, reduce men ultimately to the acquisitive level, concerned mostly, if not exclusively, with the securing of "wealth" in this life without any regard to the life that lasts forever. How many of those involved in the ongoing "credit crisis" caused by a combination of forces (among these being the reckless policies of quasi-government lenders--Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and commercial lenders who encouraged and approved the issuance of subprime mortgages in a housing market that could not sustain itself) considered for a moment how any of their actions would be judged by Christ the King as the moment of their Particular Judgments? Most of these men and women were motivated only by greed and their desire to enjoy to excess more and more of this world's good no matter whose assets they put at risk in doing so.

Pope Pius XII, writing in his last encyclical letter, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958, explained that the Catholic Church does indeed have the right to lay down the principles that govern human conduct in the realm of economics:

Assuming false and unjust premises, they are not afraid to take a position which would confine within a narrow scope the supreme teaching authority of the Church, claiming that there are certain questions -- such as those which concern social and economic matters -- in which Catholics may ignore the teachings and the directives of this Apostolic See.

This opinion -- it seems entirely unnecessary to demonstrate its existence -- is utterly false and full of error because, as We declared a few years ago to a special meeting of Our Venerable Brethren in the episcopacy:

"The power of the Church is in no sense limited to so-called 'strictly religious matters'; but the whole matter of the natural law, its institution, interpretation and application, in so far as the moral aspect is concerned, are within its power.

"By God's appointment the observance of the natural law concerns the way by which man must strive toward his supernatural end. The Church shows the way and is the guide and guardian of men with respect to their supernatural end."

This truth had already been wisely explained by Our Predecessor St. Pius X in his Encyclical Letter Singulari quadam of September 24, 1912, in which he made this statement: "All actions of a Christian man so far as they are morally either good or bad -- that is, so far as they agree with or are contrary to the natural and divine law -- fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church."

Moreover, even when those who arbitrarily set and defend these narrow limits profess a desire to obey the Roman Pontiff with regard to truths to be believed, and to observe what they call ecclesiastical directives, they proceed with such boldness that they refuse to obey the precise and definite prescriptions of the Holy See. They protest that these refer to political affairs because of a hidden meaning by the author, as if these prescriptions took their origin from some secret conspiracy against their own nation. (Pope Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958.) 

And those Catholics, whether attracted to libertarianism or to some variant of Socialism, including Communism, who believe that they are exempt from the Catholic Church's social encyclical letters as the Church, according to their own dissenting "lights," do not bind them. They are most wrong, as Pope Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII noted conclusively:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.

It is necessary ever to keep in mind these teachings and pronouncements which We have made; it is no less necessary to reawaken that spirit of faith, of supernatural love, and of Christian discipline which alone can bring to these principles correct understanding, and can lead to their observance. This is particularly important in the case of youth, and especially those who aspire to the priesthood, so that in the almost universal confusion in which we live they at least, as the Apostle writes, will not be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive." (Ephesians iv, 14) (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Most men alive today, including even most believing Catholics, sadly, believe that Holy Mother Church has no role to play in the guiding of a just economic order, and thus it is that we have a conflict between a “free market” system that is not as “free” as is thought and the contemporary version of socialism that is serving as but yet another preparation for the coming of Antichrist. Greed and pride, two of the Seven Deadly Sins, must be triumphant when Our Lord and His true Church are banished from the hearts and minds of men and from the institutions and laws of their nations.

The combination of Pride and Greed are what make it absolutely poisonous for the latter day captains of industry and banking, many of whom have souls that steeped in the ravages of Original Sin and have contempt for the true Faith as they fund abortion and contraception and perversity in the United States and around the world, to be placed in positions of unbridled economic power without any understanding of their accountability to God for their actions. Any economic system, be it Calvinist capitalism or the variant of Socialism, that denies the authority of the Catholic Church over men and their nations is bound to make men prisoners of materialism by various means (profit and usury in the capitalist system; state control over private property and most aspects of the economy in socialism).

As Pope Pius XI noted in Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931, issued on the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the capitalist error of individualism cannot be "fixed" by the socialist error of collectivism. Men need the true Faith to guide them as they conduct their temporal affairs in light of their Last End:

But it is only the moral law which, just as it commands us to seek our supreme and last end in the whole scheme of our activity, so likewise commands us to seek directly in each kind of activity those purposes which we know that nature, or rather God the Author of nature, established for that kind of action, and in orderly relationship to subordinate such immediate purposes to our supreme and last end. If we faithfully observe this law, then it will follow that the particular purposes, both individual and social, that are sought in the economic field will fall in their proper place in the universal order of purposes, and We, in ascending through them, as it were by steps, shall attain the final end of all things, that is God, to Himself and to us, the supreme and inexhaustible Good. . . .

If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist. (Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.)

There is no such thing as Christian socialism. “No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”

Pope Pius XI reminded the world's bishops in Quadragesimo Anno of the simple, plain truth that naturalists of the “left” and the “right” refuse to accept as they wonder why an economic system built on falsehoods and outright thefts (both from the corporate and governmental sectors) of what belongs rightly to the people, their private property.

The world in which we live, the world that is shaped by the aftereffects of Protestantism and the continuing influences of Judeo-Masonry and all of the naturalistic ideologies and theories spawned thereby, is one that is in desperate need of hearing the prophetic voice of the Catholic Church in calling all men and their nations to return to Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who is Our Queen and Our Mother. Alas, the conciliarists no longer call men and their nations to conversion, content to wax  about the "civilization of love" and a "healthy secularity" as the false foundations of the modern civil state with which it has reconciled itself are producing nothing but chaos, destruction and disarray in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world.

None of the adherents of the “left” or the “right” can admit that the modern world has been shaped by the forces unleashed by Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, John Wesley, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant,  Maximilian Robespierre and James Madison, who believed that the best way to guard against the "vice of factions" was to create the extended “commercial” republic. We must, however, listen to the sage analysis offered by Catholics about the shape of the modern world, which convinces men that they must be separated from their families for most of hours of the weeks and attempts to convince women that it unnatural for them to stay at home with their children, thereby maladjusting their children who want and need and deserve the loving attention of their mothers.

The late Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., writing in The Church and the Land, noted this exact phenomenon of the world created by the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King:

(3) How many mothers (women?) go out to work?

Stated in terms of industrialism, the home is the most important factory in the Commonwealth. Other factories make commodities called (often by a courtesy title) boots, hose furniture, jam, margarine (the Lord preserve us!), Boxo, and the whole inferno of tinned beastliness whose name is legion. The home alone makes boys and girls, men and women, good men and women, good Englishmen and good Englishwomen. And without these human commodities of what use are even the finest "canned goods".

(4) How many children are in the average family?

Read (3) over again. You will see that this efficient factory called the Home is the more efficient the more commodities it can produce, and the better the finish it can give them. Now the best of all training in the three essential civic virtues of Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, is in the large family. Experto credite Roberto. Trust Bob, at his job.

(5) How many mothers suckle their offspring?

To appreciate this question, read 3 and 4 over again. Then read a second time. If you don't see the point at the second reading—consult a doctor. (Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., The Church and the Land, published originally in London in 1925, republished in 2003 by IHS Press, pp. 40-41.)

There were many far-seeing Catholics a century ago who understood the road of destruction upon which the world had been set. However, not even many Catholics paid any attention then, and they continue to believe in the political and economic equivalent of the tooth fairy by genuflecting at the altars of their political champions, who are see as something approaching secular saviors.

The Popes Speak Against Socialism

Pope Leo XIII used his first encyclical letter, Quod Apostolicis Muneris, December 28, 1878, to condemn the growth of incipient socialism that would, in its Marxist-Leninist form, gain its first real foothold in Russia. His Holiness knew very clearly the dangers that socialism posed as the supposed “remedy” for the abuses engendered by Judeo-Calvinist capitalism:

4. But it is to be lamented that those to whom has been committed the guardianship of the public weal, deceived by the wiles of wicked men and terrified by their threats, have looked upon the Church with a suspicious and even hostile eye, not perceiving that the attempts of the sects would be vain if the doctrine of the Catholic Church and the authority of the Roman Pontiffs had always survived, with the honor that belongs to them, among princes and peoples. For, “the church of the living God, which is the pillar and ground of truth,”[6] hands down those doctrines and precepts whose special object is the safety and peace of society and the uprooting of the evil growth of socialism.

5. For, indeed, although the socialists, stealing the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary, have been accustomed to distort it so as to suit their own purposes, nevertheless so great is the difference between their depraved teachings and the most pure doctrine of Christ that none greater could exist: “for what participation hath justice with injustice or what fellowship hath light with darkness?”[7] Their habit, as we have intimated, is always to maintain that nature has made all men equal, and that, therefore, neither honor nor respect is due to majesty, nor obedience to laws, unless, perhaps, to those sanctioned by their own good pleasure. But, on the contrary, in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel, the equality of men consists in this: that all, having inherited the same nature, are called to the same most high dignity of the sons of God, and that, as one and the same end is set before all, each one is to be judged by the same law and will receive punishment or reward according to his deserts. The inequality of rights and of power proceeds from the very Author of nature, “from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.”[8] But the minds of princes and their subjects are, according to Catholic doctrine and precepts, bound up one with the other in such a manner, by mutual duties and rights, that the thirst for power is restrained and the rational ground of obedience made easy, firm, and noble. (Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolicis Muneri, December 28, 1878.)

One of the greatest myths propagated by socialists, starting with the proto-socialists of Judeo-Masonry’s own French Revolution two hundred years ago, through the last nearly two centuries is that of egalitarianism, which rejects all authority above that which a “majority” of “reasonable men” decided is best for the unwashed masses. This egalitarianism, however, places authority in an elite who always seem to know “better” than the masses, thereby establishing a new class of high priests and priestesses from whom no one can dissent legitimately. Pope Leo XIII addressed the myth that is egalitarianism, explaining that inequality exists in the nature of things, starting with the very fact the created beings are inferior to their Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier:

6. Assuredly, the Church wisely inculcates the apostolic precept on the mass of men: “There is no power but from God; and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves damnation.” And again she admonishes those “subject by necessity” to be so “not only for wrath but also for conscience’ sake,” and to render “to all men their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.”[9] For, He who created and governs all things has, in His wise providence, appointed that the things which are lowest should attain their ends by those which are intermediate, and these again by the highest. Thus, as even in the kingdom of heaven He hath willed that the choirs of angels be distinct and some subject to others, and also in the Church has instituted various orders and a diversity of offices, so that all are not apostles or doctors or pastors,[10] so also has He appointed that there should be various orders in civil society, differing indignity, rights, and power, whereby the State, like the Church, should be one body, consisting of many members, some nobler than others, but all necessary to each other and solicitous for the common good.

9. But Catholic wisdom, sustained by the precepts of natural and divine law, provides with especial care for public and private tranquillity in its doctrines and teachings regarding the duty of government and the distribution of the goods which are necessary for life and use. For, while the socialists would destroy the “right” of property, alleging it to be a human invention altogether opposed to the inborn equality of man, and, claiming a community of goods, argue that poverty should not be peaceably endured, and that the property and privileges of the rich may be rightly invaded, the Church, with much greater wisdom and good sense, recognizes the inequality among men, who are born with different powers of body and mind, inequality in actual possession, also, and holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God, the Author and Defender of right, that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another, and that thieves and despoilers, no less than adulterers and idolaters, are shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven. But not the less on this account does our holy Mother not neglect the care of the poor or omit to provide for their necessities; but, rather, drawing them to her with a mother’s embrace, and knowing that they bear the person of Christ Himself, who regards the smallest gift to the poor as a benefit conferred on Himself, holds them in great honor. She does all she can to help them; she provides homes and hospitals where they may be received, nourished, and cared for all the world over and watches over these. She is constantly pressing on the rich that most grave precept to give what remains to the poor; and she holds over their heads the divine sentence that unless they succor the needy they will be repaid by eternal torments. In fine, she does all she can to relieve and comfort the poor, either by holding up to them the example of Christ, “who being rich became poor for our sake,[18] or by reminding them of his own words, wherein he pronounced the poor blessed and bade them hope for the reward of eternal bliss. But who does not see that this is the best method of arranging the old struggle between the rich and poor? For, as the very evidence of facts and events shows, if this method is rejected or disregarded, one of two things must occur: either the greater portion of the human race will fall back into the vile condition of slavery which so long prevailed among the pagan nations, or human society must continue to be disturbed by constant eruptions, to be disgraced by rapine and strife, as we have had sad witness even in recent times.

10. These things being so, then, venerable brethren, as at the beginning of Our pontificate We, on whom the guidance of the whole Church now lies, pointed out a place of refuge to the peoples and the princes tossed about by the fury of the tempest, so now, moved by the extreme peril that is on them, We again lift up Our voice, and beseech them again and again for their own safety’s sake as well as that of their people to welcome and give ear to the Church which has had such wonderful influence on the public prosperity of kingdoms, and to recognize that political and religious affairs are so closely united that what is taken from the spiritual weakens the loyalty of subjects and the majesty of the government. And since they know that the Church of Christ has such power to ward off the plague of socialism as cannot be found in human laws, in the mandates of magistrates, or in the force of armies, let them restore that Church to the condition and liberty in which she may exert her healing force for the benefit of all society.

11. But you, venerable brethren, who know the origin and the drift of these gathering evils, strive with all your force of soul to implant the Catholic teaching deep in the minds of all. Strive that all may have the habit of clinging to God with filial love and revering His divinity from their tenderest years; that they may respect the majesty of princes and of laws; that they may restrain their passions and stand fast by the order which God has established in civil and domestic society. Moreover, labor hard that the children of the Catholic Church neither join nor favor in any way whatsoever this abominable sect; let them show, on the contrary, by noble deeds and right dealing in all things, how well and happily human society would hold together were each member to shine as an example of right doing and of virtue. In fine, as the recruits of socialism are especially sought among artisans and workmen, who, tired, perhaps, of labor, are more easily allured by the hope of riches and the promise of wealth, it is well to encourage societies of artisans and workmen which, constituted under the guardianship of religion, may tend to make all associates contented with their lot and move them to a quiet and peaceful life. (Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolicis Muneris, December 28, 1878.)

One of the corollary proofs of the apostasies facing us at this time is the man who claims to be “Pope Francis,” is entirely supportive of socialism and its goals. His kinship with world leaders who embrace socialist policies and with George Soros, the world’s leading financier of all things wicked (contraception, abortion, “palliative care,” sodomy and all its related perverse vices, “open borders,” violence against opponents of the “enlightened” Soros agenda, socialism, statism, globalism, feminism, environmentalism, evolutionism, etc.) and his words of praise for them speak loudly about the fact that he is a fellow traveler who has as much contempt for papal condemnations of socialism and communism as his predecessors have had for the very immutable nature of dogmatic truth, noting that belief in biological evolutionism would lead to social and theological evolutionism. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is one of those hypocritical egalitarians who believe that the “enlightened” are more “equal” than all the rest. 

As the abuses caused by the Judeo-Calvinist capitalism grew in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and as the agitation caused by socialists against those abuses grew louder and louder and attracted many Catholics to their cause, Pope Leo XIII elaborated on the relationship between labor and capital in his landmark encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891, that once again stressed that inequality exists in the very nature of things and that pain and suffering will have no end in this life, discussing the desire of socialists to gain control of children by placing them on a level of equality with the authority of their parents

14. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them.

But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. “The child belongs to the father,” and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that “the child belongs to the father” it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.”[4] The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.

15. And in addition to injustice, it is only too evident what an upset and disturbance there would be in all classes, and to how intolerable and hateful a slavery citizens would be subjected. The door would be thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation.

Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. This being established, we proceed to show where the remedy sought for must be found.

16. We approach the subject with confidence, and in the exercise of the rights which manifestly appertain to Us, for no practical solution of this question will be found apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church. It is We who are the chief guardian of religion and the chief dispenser of what pertains to the Church; and by keeping silence we would seem to neglect the duty incumbent on us. Doubtless, this most serious question demands the attention and the efforts of others besides ourselves — to wit, of the rulers of States, of employers of labor, of the wealthy, aye, of the working classes themselves, for whom We are pleading. But We affirm without hesitation that all the striving of men will be vain if they leave out the Church. It is the Church that insists, on the authority of the Gospel, upon those teachings whereby the conflict can be brought to an end, or rendered, at least, far less bitter; the Church uses her efforts not only to enlighten the mind, but to direct by her precepts the life and conduct of each and all; the Church improves and betters the condition of the working man by means of numerous organizations; does her best to enlist the services of all classes in discussing and endeavoring to further in the most practical way, the interests of the working classes; and considers that for this purpose recourse should be had, in due measure and degree, to the intervention of the law and of State authority.

17. It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition. As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would not have remained wholly idle; but that which would then have been his free choice and his delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience. “Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life.”[5]

18. In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on earth; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must accompany man so long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let them strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there are who pretend differently — who hold out to a hard-pressed people the boon of freedom from pain and trouble, an undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment — they delude the people and impose upon them, and their lying promises will only one day bring forth evils worse than the present. Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek elsewhere, as We have said, for the solace to its troubles.

19. The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice. (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.)

In other words, Catholicism is the sole source of human sanctification and the legitimate teacher of men, and thus possesses the sole ability to provide the foundation for a social order that can be as just as possible in a world filled with fallen men, a point that Pope Pius XI reiterated in his encyclical letter commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the issuance of Rerum Novarum, Quadregesimo Anno, May 15, 1931:

127. Yet, if we look into the matter more carefully and more thoroughly, we shall clearly perceive that, preceding this ardently desired social restoration, there must be a renewal of the Christian spirit, from which so many immersed in economic life have, far and wide, unhappily fallen away, lest all our efforts be wasted and our house be builded not on a rock but on shifting sand.[62]

128. And so, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Sons, having surveyed the present economic system, We have found it laboring under the gravest of evils. We have also summoned Communism and Socialism again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified, to wander far from the precepts of the Gospel.

129. "Wherefore," to use the words of Our Predecessor, "if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it."[63] For this alone can provide effective remedy for that excessive care for passing things that is the origin of all vices; and this alone can draw away men's eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixed on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven. Who would deny that human society is in most urgent need of this cure now?

130. Minds of all, it is true, are affected almost solely by temporal upheavals, disasters, and calamities. But if we examine things critically with Christian eyes, as we should, what are all these compared with the loss of souls? Yet it is not rash by any means to say that the whole scheme of social and economic life is now such as to put in the way of vast numbers of mankind most serious obstacles which prevent them from caring for the one thing necessary; namely, their eternal salvation. (Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.)

Most men today are more concerned about the acquisition or possible loss of wealth once attained than they are about their immortal souls as they have “excessive care passing things that” are “the origin of all vices.” Only the true Faitih can draw “men’s eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixated on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven.” Unfortunately, most men today, including many Catholics, do indeed deny that human society is in urgent need of the remedy that only Holy Mother Church can provide. Men who believe that they are descended from apes will come to act like them over the course of time. The ideology of biological evolutionism leads inexorably to the devolution of men and their societies into conditions of chaos, violence and the worst kind of self-seeking that the world has ever seen.

Pope Pius XI also explained in the degree of degradation to which men must fall once they are fixed on temporal goals to the exclusion of all supernatural considerations.

131. We, made Shepherd and Protector by the Prince of Shepherds, Who Redeemed them by His Blood, of a truly innumerable flock, cannot hold back Our tears when contemplating this greatest of their dangers. Nay rather, fully mindful of Our pastoral office and with paternal solicitude, We are continually meditating on how We can help them; and We have summoned to Our aid the untiring zeal of others who are concerned on grounds of justice or charity. For what will it profit men to become expert in more wisely using their wealth, even to gaining the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their souls?[64] What will it profit to teach them sound principles of economic life if in unbridled and sordid greed they let themselves be swept away by their passion for property, so that "hearing the commandments of the Lord they do all things contrary."[65]

32. The root and font of this defection in economic and social life from the Christian law, and of the consequent apostasy of great numbers of workers from the Catholic faith, are the disordered passions of the soul, the sad result of original sin which has so destroyed the wonderful harmony of man's faculties that, easily led astray by his evil desires, he is strongly incited to prefer the passing goods of this world to the lasting goods of Heaven. Hence arises that unquenchable thirst for riches and temporal goods, which has at all times impelled men to break God's laws and trample upon the rights of their neighbors, but which, on account of the present system of economic life, is laying far more numerous snares for human frailty. Since the instability of economic life, and especially of its structure, exacts of those engaged in it most intense and unceasing effort, some have become so hardened to the stings of conscience as to hold that they are allowed, in any manner whatsoever, to increase their profits and use means, fair or foul, to protect their hard-won wealth against sudden changes of fortune. The easy gains that a market unrestricted by any law opens to everybody attracts large numbers to buying and selling goods, and they, their one aim being to make quick profits with the least expenditure of work, raise or lower prices by their uncontrolled business dealings so rapidly according to their own caprice and greed that they nullify the wisest forecasts of producers. The laws passed to promote corporate business, while dividing and limiting the risk of business, have given occasion to the most sordid license. For We observe that consciences are little affected by this reduced obligation of accountability; that furthermore, by hiding under the shelter of a joint name, the worst of injustices and frauds are penetrated; and that, too, directors of business companies, forgetful of their trust, betray the rights of those whose savings they have undertaken to administer. Lastly, We must not omit to mention those crafty men who, wholly unconcerned about any honest usefulness of their work, do not scruple to stimulate the baser human desires and, when they are aroused, use them for their own profit.  (Pope Pius XI, Quadregesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.)

The world around us continues to fall deeper and deeper into the abyss because most men alive today are controlled by the forces of the world, the flesh and the devil, ignoring any thought of divinely-revealed truths and a single means by which their actions may be rendered meritorious in the sight of God and thus redound to their eternal salvation. Even most Catholics rush headlong to one side or the other of the false opposites of naturalism and refuse to consider the simple truth that to see the world as it truly as it is we must see it exclusively through the eyes of the Holy Faith. The only kind of “realism” is Catholic realism, Catholic truth. Everything else is but an illusion, a mirage. 

Pope Pius XI’s Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937, continued the fifty-nine year-old papal condemnation of socialism that began with Pope Leo XIII in 1878 and explained yet again that socialism and communism are but the products of failure of liberalism and laicism. Indeed, the social consequences of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King are vast, starting with the destruction of the family, which has been rent asunder by divorce and contraception and feminism and materialism and positivism and utilitarianism and the organized forces of naturalism. The atomistic individualism of Calvinist capitalism and Lockean liberalism thus produce the same sort of societies as that produced by all forms Socialism, including that wrought by Bolshevism:

Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse. There is no recognition of any right of the individual in his relations to the collectivity; no natural right is accorded to human personality, which is a mere cog-wheel in the Communist system. In man's relations with other individuals, besides, Communists hold the principle of absolute equality, rejecting all hierarchy and divinely-constituted authority, including the authority of parents. What men call authority and subordination is derived from the community as its first and only font. Nor is the individual granted any property rights over material goods or the means of production, for inasmuch as these are the source of further wealth, their possession would give one man power over another. Precisely on this score, all forms of private property must be eradicated, for they are at the origin of all economic enslavement .

Refusing to human life any sacred or spiritual character, such a doctrine logically makes of marriage and the family a purely artificial and civil institution, the outcome of a specific economic system. There exists no matrimonial bond of a juridico-moral nature that is not subject to the whim of the individual or of the collectivity. Naturally, therefore, the notion of an indissoluble marriage-tie is scouted. Communism is particularly characterized by the rejection of any link that binds woman to the family and the home, and her emancipation is proclaimed as a basic principle. She is withdrawn from the family and the care of her children, to be thrust instead into public life and collective production under the same conditions as man. The care of home and children then devolves upon the collectivity. Finally, the right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community, in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right.

What would be the condition of a human society based on such materialistic tenets? It would be a collectivity with no other hierarchy than that of the economic system. It would have only one mission: the production of material things by means of collective labor, so that the goods of this world might be enjoyed in a paradise where each would "give according to his powers" and would "receive according to his needs." Communism recognizes in the collectivity the right, or rather, unlimited discretion, to draft individuals for the labor of the collectivity with no regard for their personal welfare; so that even violence could be legitimately exercised to dragoon the recalcitrant against their wills. In the Communistic commonwealth morality and law would be nothing but a derivation of the existing economic order, purely earthly in origin and unstable in character. In a word. the Communists claim to inaugurate a new era and a new civilization which is the result of blind evolutionary forces culminating in a humanity without God. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937.) 

A world devoid of God and of submission to His true Church is the only possible consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ King. Naturalist liberals disagree with naturalist socialists, including communists, only about a few details. All forms of naturalism produce the godless world, which makes possible barbarism in "liberal" states and totalitarianism in "socialist" states. Indeed, the degree to which men fall into the naturalist trap will be the degree to which all states, liberal and socialist, get to increase their power over the lives of ordinary citizens in the name of "law and order" and "national security," you understand. The heresy of religious liberty makes it impossible for anyone to find any one overarching means by which social evils can be retarded, resulting in a new caste of dictators whose "infallible" pronouncements must be accepted without criticism or dissent. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, for example, eviscerates the First Commandment by stating unequivocally that no religion, including the Catholic Faith, must be recognized by the civil state as indispensable for personal and social order, thus resulting in the triumph of the false religion of statism. A neat little trick of the devil, wouldn't you say?

Pope Pius XI alluded to some of these points in Divini Redemptoris:

But the enemies of the Church, though forced to acknowledge the wisdom of her doctrine, accuse her of having failed to act in conformity with her principles, and from this conclude to the necessity of seeking other solutions. The utter falseness and injustice of this accusation is shown by the whole history of Christianity. To refer only to a single typical trait, it was Christianity that first affirmed the real and universal brotherhood of all men of whatever race and condition. This doctrine she proclaimed by a method, and with an amplitude and conviction, unknown to preceding centuries; and with it she potently contributed to the abolition of slavery. Not bloody revolution, but the inner force of her teaching made the proud Roman matron see in her slave a sister in Christ. It is Christianity that adores the Son of God, made Man for love of man, and become not only the "Son of a Carpenter" but Himself a "Carpenter."[19] It was Christianity that raised manual labor to its true dignity, whereas it had hitherto been so despised that even the moderate Cicero did not hesitate to sum up the general opinion of his time in words of which any modern sociologist would be ashamed: "All artisans are engaged in sordid trades, for there can be nothing ennobling about a workshop."

Faithful to these principles, the Church has given new life to human society. Under her influence arose prodigious charitable organizations, great guilds of artisans and workingmen of every type. These guilds, ridiculed as "medieval" by the liberalism of the last century, are today claiming the admiration of our contemporaries in many countries who are endeavoring to revive them in some modern form. And when other systems hindered her work and raised obstacles to the salutary influence of the Church, she was never done warning them of their error. We need but recall with what constant firmness and energy Our Predecessor, Leo XIII, vindicated for the workingman the right to organize, which the dominant liberalism of the more powerful States relentlessly denied him. Even today the authority of this Church doctrine is greater than it seems; for the influence of ideas in the realm of facts, though invisible and not easily measured, is surely of predominant importance.

It may be said in all truth that the Church, like Christ, goes through the centuries doing good to all. There would be today neither Socialism nor Communism if the rulers of the nations had not scorned the teachings and maternal warnings of the Church. On the bases of liberalism and laicism they wished to build other social edifices which, powerful and imposing as they seemed at first, all too soon revealed the weakness of their foundations, and today are crumbling one after another before our eyes, as everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus.

This, Venerable Brethren, is the doctrine of the Church, which alone in the social as in all other fields can offer real light and assure salvation in the face of Communistic ideology. But this doctrine must be consistently reduced to practice in every-day life, according to the admonition of St. James the Apostle: "Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves." The most urgent need of the present day is therefore the energetic and timely application of remedies which will effectively ward off the catastrophe that daily grows more threatening. We cherish the firm hope that the fanaticism with which the sons of darkness work day and night at their materialistic and atheistic propaganda will at least serve the holy purpose of stimulating the sons of light to a like and even greater zeal for the honor of the Divine Majesty. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937.)

There can be no room for compromise: socialism is as antithetical to a just order on true Christian principles as are all forms of political ideology, including liberalism and conservatism.

Yet it is that the conciliar “popes,” starting with Angelo Roncalli/John XIII in Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963, who, without precisely saying so, backed away from Pope Pius XI’s statement that no one could a sincere Catholic and a true socialist and from Pope Pius XI’s 1937 admonition against all association and cooperation with communism that was reiterated by the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII in 1949 (see Appendix A below):

159. It is, therefore, especially to the point to make a clear distinction between false philosophical teachings regarding the nature, origin, and destiny of the universe and of man, and movements which have a direct bearing either on economic and social questions, or cultural matters or on the organization of the state, even if these movements owe their origin and inspiration to these false tenets. While the teaching once it has been clearly set forth is no longer subject to change, the movements, precisely because they take place in the midst of changing conditions, are readily susceptible of change. Besides, who can deny that those movements, in so far as they conform to the dictates of right reason and are interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?

160. For these reasons it can at times happen that meetings for the attainment of some practical results which previously seemed completely useless now are either actually useful or may be looked upon as profitable for the future. But to decide whether this moment has arrived, and also to lay down the ways and degrees in which work in common might be possible for the achievement of economic, social, cultural, and political ends which are honorable and useful: these are the problems which can only be solved with the virtue of prudence, which is the guiding light of the virtues that regulate the moral life, both individual and social. Therefore, as far as Catholics are concerned, this decision rests primarily with those who live and work in the specific sectors of human society in which those problems arise, always, however, in accordance with the principles of the natural law, with the social doctrine of the church, and with the directives of ecclesiastical authorities. For it must not be forgotten that the Church has the right and the duty not only to safeguard the principles of ethics and religion, but also to intervene authoritatively with Her children in the temporal sphere, when there is a question of judging the application of those principles to concrete cases.[67] (Angelo Roncalli/John XIII, Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963.)

Roncalli/John XXIII’s handpicked successor, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Montini/Paul VI, began the push in the direction of socialism and a “World Fund” in its infamous “encyclical” letter of March 25, 1967, Populorum Progressio, which is a magna carta, if you will, for Jorge the Red, and endorsed what he called the "preferential option for the poor" when addressing the CELAM conference on August 24, 1968, in Medellin, Colombia and when he issued Octagesima Adveniens, May 15, 1971:

23. Through the statement of the rights of man and the seeking for international agreements for the application of these rights, progress has been made towards inscribing these two aspirations in deeds and structures (16). Nevertheless various forms of discrimination continually reappear-ethnic cultural, religious, political and so on. In fact, human rights are still too often disregarded, if not scoffed at, or else they receive only formal recognition. In many cases legislation does not keep up with real situations. Legislation is necessary, but it is not sufficient for setting up true relationships of justice and equity. In teaching us charity, the Gospel instructs us in the preferential respect due to the poor and the special situation they have in society: the more fortunate should renounce some of their rights so as to place their goods more generously at the service of others. If, beyond legal rules, there is really no deeper feeling of respect for and service to others, then even equality before the law can serve as an alibi for flagrant discrimination, continued exploitation and actual contempt. Without a renewed education in solidarity, an overemphasis of equality can give rise to an individualism in which each one claims his own rights without wishing to be answerable for the common good.

In this field, everyone sees the highly important contribution of the Christian spirit, which moreover answers man's yearning to be loved. "Love for man, the prime value of the earthly order" ensures the conditions for peace, both social peace and international peace, by affirming our universal brotherhood (17).  (Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, Octagesima Adveniens, May 15, 1971.)

This was nothing other than an attempt to graft a Marxist diatribe onto the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, and it had nothing to do with commemorating the eightieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.

Love for "man, the prime value of the earthly order," not love of Christ the King as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church, the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

"Love for man," of course is one of the chief tenets of Marxism, something that the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn noted at his famous commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978, just fifty-nine days before the earthly demise of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI:

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "communism is naturalized humanism.'     

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism). Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.   

The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)  

Solzhenitsyn, who is should be pointed out, was a Russian nationalist and thus had a bias against the Catholic Church and her teaching authority, especially as pertains to Papal Primacy and to her constant condemnation of contraception, which he, Solzhenitsyn supported in the name of “population control,” explained forty-one years that his condemnation of socialism did not mean that he could recommend the Western culture of consumerism and materialism as the model for his own country should Communism end there (as it supposedly did on December 25, 1992, as the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was lowered and the tri-color flag of Russia was raised up a flagpole in its place):

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being.

Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?  (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts .)

The Nobel Laureate gave this address nearly eleven months after riots had broken out in the Borough of Brooklyn in the City of New York, New York, when the inept utility company, Consolidated Edison, suffered an outage at a power plant in Astoria in the Borough of Queens on Wednesday, July 13, 1977. Solzhenitsyn was saying in his address, in effect, that Americans are in trouble if the only thing keeping the masses from rioting and looting is Consolidated Edison, known colloquially in New York and environs as “Con Ed.”

Neither liberalism or its variants nor socialism and its variants are the foundation of social order. Catholicism, though not a guarantor of order given the vagaries of fallen human nature, is alone the only means that can provide men and their nations with the foundation for a just social order.

The Argentine Apostate is but the product of a false conflict between different sides of the same anti-Incarnational, naturalistic and Pelagian coin, something that has been noted several times previously in this commentary and touched upon by Father Edward Leen, S.J., in The Holy Ghost:

A shudder of apprehension is traversing the world which still retains its loyalty to Jesus expressing Himself through the authority of His Church. That apprehension has not its sole cause the sight of the horrors that the world has witnessed in recent years in both hemispheres. Many Christians are beginning to feel that perhaps all may not be right with themselves. There is solid reason for this fear. The contemplation of the complete and reasoned abandonment of all hitherto accepted human values that has taken place in Russia and is taking place elsewhere, causes a good deal of anxious soul-searching. It is beginning to be dimly perceived that in social life, as it is lived, even in countries that have not as yet definitely broken with Christianity, there lie all the possibilities of what has become actual in Bolshevism. A considerable body of Christians, untrained in the Christian philosophy of life, are allowing themselves to absorb principles which undermine the constructions of Christian thought. They do not realise how much dangerous it is for Christianity to exist in an atmosphere of Naturalism than to be exposed to positive persecution. In the old days of the Roman Empire those who enrolled themselves under the standard of Christ saw, with logical clearness, that they had perforce to cut themselves adrift from the social life of the world in which they lived--from its tastes, practices and amusements. The line of demarcation between pagan and Christian life was sharp, clearly defined and obvious. Modern Christians have not been so favorably situated. As has been stated already, the framework of the Christian social organisation has as yet survived. This organisation is, to outward appearances, so solid and imposing that it is easy to be blind to the truth that the soul had gradually gone out of it. Under the shelter and utilising the resources of the organisation of life created by Christianity, customs, ways of conduct, habits of thought, have crept in, more completely perhaps, at variance with the spirit of Christianity than even the ways and manners of pagan Rome.

This infiltration of post-Christian paganism has been steady but slow, and at each stage is imperceptible. The Christian of to-day thinks that he is living in what is to all intents and purposes a Christian civilisation. Without misgivings he follows the current of social life around him. His amusements, his pleasures, his pursuits, his games, his books, his papers, his social and political ideas are of much the same kind as are those of the people with whom he mingles, and who may not have a vestige of a Christian principle left in their minds. He differs merely from them in that he holds to certain definite religious truths and clings to certain definite religious practices. But apart from this there is not any striking contrast in the outward conduct of life between Christian and non-Christian in what is called the civilised world. Catholics are amused by, and interested in, the very same things that appeal to those who have abandoned all belief in God. The result is a growing divorce between religion and life in the soul of the individual Christian. Little by little his faith ceases to be a determining effect on the bulk of his ideas, judgments and decisions that have relation to what he regards as his purely "secular" life. His physiognomy as a social being no longer bears trace of any formative effect of the beliefs he professes. And his faith rapidly becomes a thing of tradition and routine and not something which is looked to as a source of a life that is real. 

The Bolshevist Revolution has had one good effect. It has awakened the averagely good Christian to the danger runs in allowing himself to drift with the current of social life about him. It has revealed to him the precipice towards which he has was heading by shaping his worldly career after principles the context of which the revolution has mercilessly exposed and revealed to be at variance with real Christianity. The sincerely religious--and there are many such still--are beginning to realise that if they are to live as Christians they must react violently against the milieu in which they live. It is beginning to be felt that one cannot be a true Christian and live as the bulk of men in civilised society are living. It is clearly seen that "life" is not to be found along those ways by which the vast majority of men are hurrying to disillusionment and despair. Up to the time of the recent cataclysm the average unreflecting Christian dwelt in the comfortable illusion that he could fall in with the ways of the world about him here, and, by holding on to the practices of religion, arrange matters satisfactorily for the hereafter. That illusion is dispelled. It is coming home to the discerning Christian that their religion is not a mere provision for the future. There is a growing conviction that it is only through Christianity lived integrally that the evils of the present time can be remedied and disaster in the time to come averted. (Father Edward Leen, The Holy Ghost, published in 1953 by Sheed and Ward, pp. 6-9.)

Father Leen was overly optimistic about the ability of Catholics to reject the effects of Bolshevism, which have indeed made their way to our own shores (have you noticed?), as he could never have envisioned that Modernists would come up from the underground after the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, and effect a coup against the Catholic Church while representing themselves to be Catholics despite the fact that they had expelled themselves from the bosom of Holy Mother Church by their embrace, no less public promotion of, one heretical proposition after another, including an overt "reconciliation" with the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Father Leen did, of course, see very well the dangers in a world shaped by naturalism as it is very easy for Catholics to become so immersed in the world and its distractions and agitations as to lose the sensus Catholicus over the course of time. Thanks to the conciliar revolutionaries, of course, the genuine sensus Catholicus has been destroyed by the effects of the "reconcilation" between Modernism and Modernity.

The very basis of the “reconciliation between the conciliar revolutionaries and “the world” was condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in his encyclical letter condemning The Sillon, August 15, 1910, that prophesied socialism as the only end that could come from the principles that were admired by Father Angelo Roncalli at the time even after their condemnation and were later incorporated into Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, and the “magisteria” of the postconciliar antipopes:

Alas! yes, the double meaning has been broken: the social action of the Sillon is no longer Catholic. The Sillonist, as such, does not work for a coterie, and “the Church”, he says, “cannot in any sense benefit from the sympathies that his action may stimulate.” A strange situation, indeed! They fear lest the Church should profit for a selfish and interested end by the social action of the Sillon, as if everything that benefited the Church did not benefit the whole human race! A curious reversal of notions! The Church might benefit from social action! As if the greatest economists had not recognized and proved that it is social action alone which, if serious and fruitful, must benefit the Church! But stranger still, alarming and saddening at the same time, are the audacity and frivolity of men who call themselves Catholics and dream of re-shaping society under such conditions, and of establishing on earth, over and beyond the pale of the Catholic Church, "the reign of love and justice" with workers coming from everywhere, of all religions and of no religion, with or without beliefs, so long as they forego what might divide them - their religious and philosophical convictions, and so long as they share what unites them - a "generous idealism and moral forces drawn from whence they can" When we consider the forces, knowledge, and supernatural virtues which are necessary to establish the Christian City, and the sufferings of millions of martyrs, and the light given by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and the self-sacrifice of all the heroes of charity, and a powerful hierarchy ordained in heaven, and the streams of Divine Grace - the whole having been built up, bound together, and impregnated by the life and spirit of Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God, the Word made man - when we think, I say, of all this, it is frightening to behold new apostles eagerly attempting to do better by a common interchange of vague idealism and civic virtues. What are they going to produce? What is to come of this collaboration? A mere verbal and chimerical construction in which we shall see, glowing in a jumble, and in seductive confusion, the words Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Love, Equality, and human exultation, all resting upon an ill-understood human dignity. It will be a tumultuous agitation, sterile for the end proposed, but which will benefit the less Utopian exploiters of the people. Yes, we can truly say that the Sillon, its eyes fixed on a chimera, brings Socialism in its train.  

We fear that worse is to come: the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion (for Sillonism, so the leaders have said, is a religion) more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men become brothers and comrades at last in the "Kingdom of God". - "We do not work for the Church, we work for mankind."  

And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon? Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity,would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.) 

Human dignity?

What about the sacred rights of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

The world has heard enough of the so-called "rights of man." Let it hear something of the rights of God. That the time is suitable is proved by the very general revival of religious feeling already referred to, and especially that devotion towards Our Saviour of which there are so many indications, and which, please God, we shall hand on to the New Century as a pledge of happier times to come. But as this consummation cannot be hoped for except by the aid of divine grace, let us strive in prayer, with united heart and voice, to incline Almighty God unto mercy, that He would not suffer those to perish whom He had redeemed by His Blood. May He look down in mercy upon this world, which has indeed sinned much, but which has also suffered much in expiation! And, embracing in His loving-kindness all races and classes of mankind, may He remember His own words: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself" (John xii., 32).  (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.) 

Most of the people who are alive today do indeed want to hear about the “rights of man,” and most of those others who profess some kind of generic or inchoate belief in God have no understanding that His own Divine Son made Incarnate in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary must reign over men and their nations and that every religion other than Catholicism is false and is loathsome in His sight. Moreover, anyone who believes that there can be some “shortcut” to a respite from the conflicts that are taking place in the United States of America are badly mistaken as those conflicts are but the logical consequence of the needless divisions among men and nations engendered by the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the subsequent rise of Judeo-Masonry and all of its naturalist errors, including liberalism and socialism.