George Soros's Latest Sideshow

Those expecting to read a play-by-play account of the raging battle over to confirm Brett Michael Kavanaugh as the successor to the retired Anthony McLeod Kennedy, a pro-abortion and pro-sodomite Catholic, as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America will have to look elsewhere. This commentary will focus at length on a number of salient points that most of those who have expended verbiage on this sideshow have not made. 

Error Divides, Catholicism Unites

The United States of America is suffering from great divisions today because this nation’s founding principles were based upon a welter of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic errors that left no room for Christ the King and His true Church.

Men who believe that it is possible to know social order absent a due reverence for the King of Kings and a due submission to His Holy Church in all that pertains to the good of souls will come to reap the rotten fruit of such errors over the course of time. Men whose first priorities are material and carnal interests will be perpetually unsettled in their personal and social affairs, and the drive to retain and augment economic wealth and personal pleasure as the raison d’etre of human existence lead men to live in a delusional world shaped by the Pelagian lie that men live without suffering the consequences of their selfishness and their sins.

It is really as simple as this:

[34] Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable. (Proverbs 14: 34.) 

The United States of America has long sanctioned sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance under cover of the civil law and in every nook and cranny of what passes for popular culture, and those who are steeped in their sins will do everything imaginable, up to and including mob violence and anarchy, to enshrine the right to commit personal and social suicide by means of their unrepentant sins and to cast whatever stones, figurative and literal, necessary at anyone who is deemed, whether rightly or not, as a threat to an established order of vice.

What has been encapsulated during the candidacy presidency of Donald John Trump and during the surreal process by which Brett Michael Kavanaugh was confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 50-48 on Saturday, October 6, 2018, the Feast of Saint Bruno, is simply yet another manifestation of the inherent degeneracy of the American founding principles. You see, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour really meant it when He said:

I am the true vine; and my Father is the husbandman. [2] Every branch in me, that beareth not fruit, he will take away: and every one that beareth fruit, he will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit. [3] Now you are clean by reason of the word, which I have spoken to you. [4] Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in me. [5] I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. (John 15: 1-5.)

Citizens of the United States of America, a land of religious indifferentism and naturalistic materialism, are not exempt from these plain words of Our Lord Himself. Any nation founded on the false belief that it is possible to establish and maintain social order and to pursue justice and the common temporal good without a recognition that men must quit their sins and to do penance for them by relying upon the ineffable graces that Our Divine Redeemer won for them during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday is doomed to fates such as those afflicting the United States of America at present.

Pope Pius IX explained that powerful interests, especially those in control of secret societies, would come to supplant the moderating, magisterial and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church as the guiding forces of men and their nations:

To allow the masses, invariably uninformed and impulsive, to make decisions on the most serious matters, is this not to hand oneself over to chance and deliberately run towards the abyss? Yes, it would be more appropriate to call universal suffrage universal madness and, when the secret societies have taken control of it as is all too often the case, universal falsehood." (Pope Pius IX, Statement to French pilgrims, May 5, 1874, cited by Abbe Georges de Nantes, CCR # 333, p. 24.)

Behold the madness in which we find ourselves at this time.

Pope Pius IX understood that the tendency to mobocracy was inherent in the belief in universal suffrage, which leads ultimately to the sort of mob rule and tactics of smear and intimidation that have been used in the case of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings. The professional protestors who have been employed by the George Soros Central Casting Office (for documentation of this, please see George Soros's Marchon Washington) are simply exploiting national divisions over matters of moral truth about which no man, whether acting individually by himself or collective with others, is to free to debate and dispute. A nation that lacks the common bond of the true Faith will be forever torn by divisions, and any true reading of American history teaches that national “unity” has been forged principally during the manufactured wars into which our national leaders plunged the county. There were divisions during the time of the Revolutionary War, and there have been divisions, especially as pertains to First and Last Things, of one kind or another, ever since. This is not of God.

Certainly, it is true that we must make the best of bad circumstances. However, the situation in the America—and in other nations of the world—is only to get worse because the prophetic voice of the Catholic Church has been eclipsed by a counterfeit church that has made its reconciliation with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity and has produced barren liturgical rites that have dried up the wellsprings of the superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces that are necessary for men to resist and to refute error.

Pope Leo XIII himself made an effort, which was the subject of great controversy at the time, to help French Catholics to accept the Third Republic, which came into power violently in 1871, but he also noted that a recognition of reality must never be mistaken for an endorsement of false principles, especially that of separation of Church and State:

28. We shall not hold to the same language on another point, concerning the principle of the separation of the State and Church, which is equivalent to the separation of human legislation from Christian and divine legislation. We do not care to interrupt Ourselves here in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a separation; each one will understand for himself. As soon as the State refuses to give to God what belongs to God, by a necessary consequence it refuses to give to citizens that to which, as men, they have a right; as, whether agreeable or not to accept, it cannot be denied that man's rights spring from his duty toward God. Whence if follows that the State, by missing in this connection the principal object of its institution, finally becomes false to itself by denying that which is the reason of its own existence. These superior truths are so clearly proclaimed by the voice of even natural reason, that they force themselves upon all who are not blinded by the violence of passion; therefore Catholics cannot be too careful in defending themselves against such a separation. In fact, to wish that the State would separate itself from the Church would be to wish, by a logical sequence, that the Church be reduced to the liberty of living according to the law common to all citizens.... It is true that in certain countries this state of affairs exists. It is a condition which, if it have numerous and serious inconveniences, also offers some advantages - above all when, by a fortunate inconsistency, the legislator is inspired by Christian principles - and, though these advantages cannot justify the false principle of separation nor authorize its defence, they nevertheless render worthy of toleration a situation which, practically, might be worse.

29. But in France, a nation Catholic in her traditions and by the present faith of the great majority of her sons, the Church should not be placed in the precarious position to which she must submit among other peoples; and the better that Catholics understand the aim of the enemies who desire this separation, the less will they favor it. To these enemies, and they say it clearly enough, this separation means that political legislation be entirely independent of religious legislation; nay, more, that Power be absolutely indifferent to the interests of Christian society, that is to say, of the Church; in fact, that it deny her very existence. But they make a reservation fomulated thus: As soon as the Church, utilizing the resources which common law accords to the least among Frenchmen, will, by redoubling her native activity, cause her work to prosper, then the State intervening, can and will put French Catholics outside the common law itself. . . In a word: the ideal of these men would be a return to paganism: the State would recognize the Church only when it would be pleased to persecute her. (Pope Leo XIII, Au Milieu des Sollictudes, February 16, 1892.)

Pope Leo XIII believed that there was enough of the Catholic spirit left in France to use popular institutions for the true common temporal good. Unfortunately, however, the spirit of a militant Judeo-Masonic naturalism had become so institutionalized in France by 1892, one hundred years after the beginning of the Reign of Terror, that the passage of time has seen the true Faith marginalized and mocked in that country, the eldest daughter of the Church. No such common bond, however, ever characterized the United States of America, and it should be manifest to the relatively few readers of this site by now that the contest between the two organized crime families of the naturalism that are, despite their divisions on some matters, completely united in their rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King must result in the establishment of socialist “republic” that will cater to the agitators that have bought-and-for by tools of the devil such as George Soros and others. This is what happened in France in 1789. This is what happened to France in 1830. This is what happened to France in 1848. This is what happened to France in 1871. This is what happened to Russia in 1917. This is what happened in Cuba in 1958.

As nothing is ever “settled” for adherents of the false opposite of the naturalist left until and unless it is settled on their terms and thus made irreversible and beyond all legitimate criticism and dissent, so will it be the case that, following the delegitimizing of President Donald John Trump’s presidency, constant protests will become a regular feature of hearings conducted by the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in an effort to harass Associate Justice Kavanaugh off of the court.

Here is yet another reminder from Pope Leo XIII about what must happen to men and their nation that accept secularism/naturalism as the lowest common denominator of human existence and public policy:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established (by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Yet it is that most people alive today refuse to believe that what our true popes wrote long ago applies to our times. It is irresponsible for anyone to be blinded by the realities of the effects of over six hundred fifty years of the gradual gains made by moral and theological relativism, religious indifferentism, social egalitarianism, utilitarianism, evolutionism (in all of its forms—biological, philosophical, social, theological) and outright atheism and nihilism that date back to certain elements of the Renaissance and, as noted earlier, received “theological” impetus during the Protestant Revolution. To believe that we can turn back the tide that has been let loose by these demonic forces merely by secular means is to believe in the political equivalent of the tooth fairy, a point that I have made repeatedly on this site since its debut on February 20, 2004, and in the seven years that its eponymous print predecessor was in existence as a subscriber-based publication.

The Distraction That Has Been L’Affaire Kavanaugh

The adversary wants to keep Catholics agitated and distracted at all times. The nonstop news cycle and the omnipresence of radio and television talk show hosts, who know nothing about First and Last Things and whose insights are based entirely in Judeo-Masonic naturalism, is just one of the contemporary tools that the devil uses to keep people in general distracted to keep Catholics in particular from focusing on First and Last Things and from spending more time in prayer, especially from praying more of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary every day.

The distraction that has been L’Affaire Kavanugh has only entered a new phase now that he has been sworn-in by Chief Justice John Glover Roberts as the one hundred fourteenth justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Careerists of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist left, the Democratic Party, and their sycophantic supporters and globalist, Judeo-Masonic bankrollers will whip up quite a frenzy in the coming weeks prior to the midterm Congressional elections, on Tuesday, November 6, 2018, that will result, it appears at this writing, in a second tenure for the egregious pro-abortion, pro-homoesexualist, pro-everything bad demagogue and ignoramus named Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi as Speaker of the United States of States of Representatives. Such a turn of events would produce impeachment proceedings against Justice Kavanaugh and against President Donald John Trump, who, despite the overwhelming documentation of the coup d’etat that has been waged against him by the intelligence services of the United State of America and by the statist minions who are ensconced in the United States Ministry of Injustice, will be investigated endlessly in an effort to further paralyze his presidency as the investigations into the ongoing coup at the United States Ministry of Injustice will come to a screeching halt. In other words, the agitation never ends. The agitation can never end in a world divided by things upon which men should be united by the one bond of true charity that is produced solely by the Catholic Faith.

The effort to derail the confirmation of Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh included, of course, a thirty-six year-old accusation against him that was sat upon by the Ranking Minority Member of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Dianne Feinstein, and then happened to get leaked at a moment deemed propitious by those who had organized a very well-orchestrated effort to discredit and to defame him. This commentary will not engage in the recounting of the salacious accusations nor discuss the now Justice Kavanaugh’s refutation of them except to say that, without for one minimizing the evil of any kind of assault as alleged by the uncorroborated and unsubstantiated allegations in this case, it was curious that the very people who discounted the relevance of the very corroborated and highly substantiated behavior of the likes of former President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and the late United States Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) were reduced to finding some sort of clues in a high school yearbook about whether Brett Michael Kavanaugh could have been inclined to commit the assault that he has been alleged to have waged against a fifteen year-old girl, Christine Blasely, now Dr. Christine Blasely Ford, at a party at some unidentified location that she can not recall and at an time that she is unable to specify. 

William Jefferson Blythe Clinton assaulted Paula Broaddrick when he was the Governor of Arkansas and accosted Kathleen Willey in the White House when he was President of the United States of America. This was all irrelevant to Kavanaugh’s intense inquisitors, of course, as were the charges brought against him by Paula Jones for Clinton’s indecent behavior with her when he was Governor of Arkansas. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that Edward Moore Kennedy’s leaving a woman to drown on July 19, 1969, and not reporting the matter to the police for a full twelve hours thereafter as he plotted with his friend about how to save his political career matters not to Kavanaugh’s opponents, most of whom still refer to Kennedy as “the lion of the Senate” nine years after his death on August 25, 2009, the Feast of Saint Louis IX, King of France.

Thus it was, though, that the hypocrites on the Senate Judiciary Committee who dance to whatever tunes George Soros and his funded stooges are singing at any given moment raked Brett Michael Kavanaugh over the coals and placed the onus of proving his innocence on his shoulders rather than forcing his accusers to present solid evidence. Kavanaugh may have been, it would appear, more than a little Clintonian in the way he parsed his answers about his drinking habits in high school and college, and one can be assured that such parsing will come back to haunt him during impeachment proceedings if the Democrats regain control of the United States House of Representatives in twenty-nine days. Nevertheless, however, the fact remains that the charges of assault leveled against Kavanaugh, though certainly serious and disqualifying if they had been substantiated with more than vague recollections and various contradictions, if not outright, dissembling (e.g., “fear of flying), by Dr. Christine Blasely Ford, were intended to do nothing more than to destroy him personally and to delegitimize his supports and his very presence on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

To be sure, the opposition of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist left would have been just as inflamed and vehement no matter which person President Trump had nominated to replace Anthony McLeod Kennedy, who told the president that Brett Michael Kavanaugh was his own personal preference. The agitation would have been especially fierce if Trump had nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who was the target of the sanctimonious Senator Feinstein’s and the demagogic Richard Durbin’s vicious anti-Catholicism during her confirmation hearings in 2017 to serve as a judge on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia:

The religious convictions of one of President Donald Trump’s appeals court nominees featured prominently during a Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The two nominees evaluated during the hearing, Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen and Notre Dame Law School Professor Amy Coney Barrett, are nominees to federal appeals courts based in Cincinnati, Ohio and Chicago, Ill. Barrett is a Roman Catholic who has previously written about faith in public life and spoken to Christian legal groups in her capacity as an academic.

A coalition of leftwing groups, including the Alliance for Justice (AFJ), allege that Barrett has advocated prioritizing religious views over established case law when the two conflict in her professional publications.

“Stunningly, Barrett has asserted that judges should not follow the law or the Constitution when it conflicts with their personal religious beliefs,” AFJ claims. Legal academics have strongly disputed this characterization of her position.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel, signaled sympathy with those concerns, and referenced a law review article that Barrett wrote in 1998 entitled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases,” which appeared in the Marquette Law Review. Barrett concluded that a Catholic trial judge who is a conscientious objector to the death penalty should recuse himself if asked to enter an order of execution against a convict.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Barrett emphasized that the set of circumstances considered in the article were narrow, and that she participated in death penalty cases as a law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court, but Feinstein remained unpersuaded.

When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said of Barrett’s writings regarding the professional obligations of Catholic practitioners. “And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.”

It is never appropriate for a judge to apply their personal convictions, whether it derives from faith or personal conviction,” Barrett said in response to those objections.

She added that she wrote the article 20 years ago as a third year law student in conjunction with a professor, and that she was the junior partner in the project.

Other Democrats were equally forthright in their questioning.

Ms. Barrett, I think your article is very plain in your perspective about the role of religion for judges, and particularly with regard to Catholic judges,” said Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who shared Feinstein’s concerns.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois took issue with Barrett’s use of the term “orthodox Catholics” as it appears in her article, to the extent that it brands Catholics who do not hold certain positions on capital punishment or abortion as heretical.

Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” Durbin asked.

“If you’re asking whether I’m a faithful Catholic, I am, although I would stress that my own personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge,” Barrett replied.

Durbin said that some individuals who embrace the term have criticized Pope Francis for alleged deviations from Catholic orthodoxy, prompting Barrett to express her admiration for the pontiff. (Nominee's Religious Faith Dominates Senate Judicial Confirmation Hearing. For my own commentary on this exercise of anti-Catholic bigotry in which Durbin, a pro-abortion, pro-sodomite Catholic, participated fully, please see Dianne Feinstein Leads A New Inquisition, Aided by Richard Joseph Durbin.)

The identity of anyone nominated by President Donald John Trump matters not to the adherents of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” as it is their own singular purpose at this time to make it appear that nothing proposed and no one nominated by Trump carries any legitimacy as they view him—and never cease telling anyone in their willing cadre of water boys in the mainslime media—as an illegitimate pretender to the presidency, sort of an anti-president, if you will. This is all a perverse charade and sideshow that is designed to keep people at odds with each other and, if necessary, to use brute force and tactics of harassment and intimidation to force elected members of Congress to cower in fright of their supposed infallibility and invincibility. The next part of the current show is, as noted above, to impeach President Trump and Justice Kavanaugh and, failing that, the plan may be to militate for a Democratic president who would sign a bill into law that had been passed by a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress to pack the Supreme Court with however many “progressive” judges may be need to “offset” “conservative” judges. This is a farcical show that never ends.

The adherents of the false opposite of the “left” do not believe that anyone who is suspected of being opposed to abortion and sodomy, no less actually is opposed to these sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, is unworthy of the due process of law that was enshrined in the Magna Carta in 1215 and has served the basis of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, at least in a de jure if not always in a de facto sense, ever since. The rule of the mob, which was the rule of the French Revolution and is what Jorge Mario Bergoglio wants those attending his “youth synod” to implement in their home dioceses so that they can be “agents of change, knows no law except the passions of the moment.

United States Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who, as noted in the news story from last year quoted just above, is a virulent anti-Catholic and showing herself to be one of the leaders of the Equal Rights for Dimwits of America Association, said last month that Brett Michael Kavanaugh was not entitled to any presumption of innocence because he is a “conservative” who has an “ideological” view of the law, meaning, I suppose, that the notoriously political and stunningly repulsive Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a paragon of judicial impartiality. Herewith is an excerpt from a report about Hirono’s declaration of independence from the Magna Carta and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America:

Sen. Mazie Hirono on Sunday suggested that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's "outcome-driven" conservative judicial philosophy directly undermines the credibility of his denials that he sexually assaulted California professor Christine Ford at a house party more than three decades ago.

Speaking to CNN's "State of the Union," Hirono, D-Hawaii, called for an independent FBI investigation of Ford's claims, before explaining why the presumption of innocence and due process should not apply to Kavanaugh's case.

"I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases," Hirono told host Jake Tapper, in response to a question about whether Kavanaugh was entitled to a presumption of innocence. "His credibility is already very questionable in my mind. ...  When I say that he's very outcome-driven, he has an ideological agenda, and I can sit here and talk to you about some of the cases that exemplify his, in my view, inability to be fair."

Hirono went on to say Kavanaugh is "very much against women's reproductive choice," characterizing his legal views as one of "many indications of lack of credibility." (Top Democrat Cites Kavanaugh's "Outcome Drive" Legal Philsophy to Deny Him Due Process.)

This calls to mind what the demagogic Governor of the State New York, Andrew Mark Cuomo, said in 2014 concerning his belief that those who oppose abortion and special rights for sodomite were not wanted as residents of my native state, the Empire State:

In conversation with Susan Arbetter on “The Capitol Pressroom” Friday morning, Cuomo said:

You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.

… You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

If they’re moderate Republicans like in the Senate right now, who control the Senate — moderate Republicans have a place in their state. George Pataki was governor of this state as a moderate Republican; but not what you’re hearing from them on the far right.”

The governor’s suggestion that, for example, those who hold anti-abortion views have no place in the state prompted Dennis Poust, spokesman for the state Catholic Conference, to observe on Twitter, “My governor thinks there’s no place in NY for people like me. Can I get a state grant to relocate?” (And where to — New Hampshire, maybe?) (Capitol Confidential: Cuomo: ‘Extreme conservatives … have no place in the state of New York’).

Although Figlio di Sfachim tried to walk back his comments in an open letter to the New York Post on Sunday, January 19, 2014, the Second Sunday after the Epiphany and the Commemoration of Saints Marius and his Companions and the Commemoration of Saint Canute, King of Denmark, the quotation above came from the Albany Times-Union newspaper website, not from the New York Post, and represented a direct quotation of his remarks. Although Andrew Mark Cuomo was discussing the plight of the Republican Party in the State of New York and in Washington, District of Columbia, the remarks he made on Friday, January 17, 2014, the Feast of Saint Antony of the Desert, clearly state his desire for all pro-life New Yorkers to leave the state. Try as he might, there was no way for Figlio di Sfachim to walk those comments back.

Yes, we have returned to the days of the caesars and their minions who wanted our spiritual ancestors to bow down and scrape before them as demigods whose every word must be obeyed without question. Figlio di Sfachim has spoken, and that is supposed to be that.

Cuomo’s fellow New Yorker, Charles Ellis Schumer, the smarmy Minority Leader of the United State Senate, echoed this fascistic view during L’Affaire Kavanaugh when he agreed with Mazie Hirono’s belief that Brett Michael Kavanaugh was not entitled the presumption of innocence:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that “there’s no presumption of innocence” for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, because a Senate hearing is not a legal proceeding.

“It’s not a legal proceeding, it’s a fact-finding proceeding…this is standard operating procedure,” Schumer said. “There is no presumption of innocence or guilt when you have a nominee before you.”

Indeed, Kavanaugh is not under criminal investigation, because his accusers and those to whom the accusations were reported, have chosen not to follow standard procedure for criminal prosecutions. If they had, the Constitution, specifically the Sixth Amendment, would have allowed Schumer to achieve his desire to “find the facts.”

The Sixth Amendment explains the framework for a just fact-finding mission and the rights of the accused:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

According to Schumer, the constitution doesn’t apply to Supreme Court Justice Nominees who have a track record of adhering to the Constitution. (Chuckie Schumer Says No Presumption of Innocence for Kavanaugh.)

There is no getting this “toothpaste” back in the tube as a nation founded by error and most of whose citizens are steeped in errors and commit one unrepentant sin after another is bound to decay to anarchy, thus creating the conditions under which most people will see the Antichrist as the savior of secular society, if not of their own eternal salvation. Atheism is rampant among so-called “millennials,” who are the products of America’s concentration camps of ideological brainwashing and programming (public schools) that is aped to large extent in formerly Catholic schools under the control of the conciliar robber barons, and it with atheism comes hatred of Catholicism and a willingness to believe everything except it, including, of course, Antichrist when he comes to take his earthly throne.

Using Roe v. Wade as a Fund-Raising and Vote-Getting Smokescreen

The battle over the confirmation of Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh has been all about using the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, as a smokescreen to raise funds and to garner votes. Only one jurist, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, is clearly in favor of reversing these decisions, a reversal that is never going to happen. As noted in , it is my considered judgment that Chief Justice John Glover Roberts will never cast a vote to overturn those decisions as he does not want to be known as the chief justice who did away with “women’s rights.” Roe v. Wade is as here to say as ObamaDeathCare, which is here to stay because John Glover Roberts did not want to undo the singular legislative achievement of the first black president, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro.

The telltale sign that Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh is not any kind of threat to the established of chemical and surgical baby-killing in the United States of America is the fact that the pro-abortion, pro-sodomite Catholic named Susan Collins, the senior senator from the State of Maine, would never have supported Brett Michael Kavanaugh if he was such a threat. Indeed, Senator Collins’s speech on the floor of the United States Senate on Friday, October 5, 2018, the Feast of Saint Placidus and Companions, demonstrated that the analysis of Justice Kavanaugh’s legal opinions that was offered in Don't Place Your Bets on Brett was quite correct. Anthony McLeod Kennedy has been replaced by a slightly more “conservative” version of Anthony McLeod Kennedy.

Here are a few passages from Senator Collins’s floor address of three days ago:

Others I met with have expressed concerns that Justice Kennedy’s retirement threatens the right of same sex couples to marry. Yet, Judge Kavanaugh described the Obergefell decision, which legalized same gender marriages, as an important landmark precedent. He also cited Justice Kennedy’s recent Masterpiece Cakeshop opinion for the Court’s majority stating that: “The days of treating gay and lesbian Americans or gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens who are inferior in dignity and worth are over in the Supreme Court.”  

Others have suggested that the judge holds extreme views on birth control. In one case, Judge Kavanaugh incurred the disfavor of both sides of the political spectrum for seeking to ensure the availability of contraceptive services for women while minimizing the involvement of employers with religious objections. Although his critics frequently overlook this point, Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent rejected arguments that the government did not have a compelling interest in facilitating access to contraception. In fact, he wrote that the Supreme Court precedent “strongly suggested” that there was a “compelling interest” in facilitating access to birth control(Susan Collins' Speech Supporting the Confirmation of Brett Michael Kavanaugh to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Unied States of America.)

Interjection Number One:

This is entirely correct and is very similar to what I wrote three months ago in Don’t Place Your Bets on Brett:

No government of any kind or at any level has any kind of “compelling interest” to assure that women have access to contraceptives. Once one concedes that there such a “compelling interest” exists, however, then one becomes trapped in a never-ending series of legal sophisms to “balance” “religious liberty” claims against the nonexistent “right” of women to frustrate the natural end for which God has given to rational beings the generative powers. Additionally, to call to mind the words of the late Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., the founder of Human Life International, most contraceptives abort, and most contraceptives abort most of the time.

The “conservative” creature of Washington, District of Columbia, Brett Michael Kavanaugh, thus used a tortured line of sophistic reasoning to reach a conclusion about a matter that is beyond the power of human beings to decide.

All right, let us return to Susan Collins’s defense of Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s respect for precedent: 

There has also been considerable focus on the future of abortion rights based on the concern that Judge Kavanaugh would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. Protecting this right is important to me. 

To my knowledge, Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself. He believes that precedent “is not just a judicial policy … it is constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to rules of precedent.” In other words, precedent isn’t a goal or an aspiration; it is a constitutional tenet that has to be followed except in the most extraordinary circumstances. 

The judge further explained that precedent provides stability, predictability, reliance, and fairness. There are, of course, rare and extraordinary times where the Supreme Court would rightly overturn a precedent. The most famous example was when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, correcting a “grievously wrong” decision--to use the judge’s term--allowing racial inequality. But, someone who believes that the importance of precedent has been rooted in the Constitution would follow long-established precedent except in those rare circumstances where a decision is “grievously wrong” or “deeply inconsistent with the law.” Those are Judge Kavanaugh’s phrases. (Susan Collins' Speech Supporting the Confirmation of Brett Michael Kavanaugh to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Unied States of America.)

Interjection Number Two:

The decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton established a “precedent” that is at variance with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and is thus worthy of nothing but contempt. No piece of legislation or judicial decision that sanctions the surgical slaughter of innocent preborn children has any binding effect on anyone.

Also, as one trained in constutional and administrative law, I should note that Susan Collins is wrong in her belief that the decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, May 17, 1954, was an explicit overturning of the wrongly-decided case of Plessy v. Ferguson, May 18, 1896, as the unanimous decision of the Court in Brown “rejected” the “psychological knowledge”  at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson. The injustice of segregation of the races under cover of the civil law did not end with the Brown case as it applied only to public schools, not to transportation, hotels and restaurants:

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Text of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, May 17, 1954)

One can argue with the preponderance of sociological and psychological arguments in the Brown decision as what would become typical of the Supreme Court of the United States of America under the stewardship of the thirty-third degree Freemason, Earl Warren. However, it is an oversimplification to say that Brown v. Board of Education overturned the unjust “separate but equal” standard established in Plessy v. Ferguson as that decision, though it had a broader impact, to be sure, applied to public schooling alone. (States’ righters, please spare me your notes. No human legislature has any authority to use race as a means of unjust discriminatory treatment than it does to endorse any kind of baby-killing, whether chemical or surgical, or to declare that people of the same gender may get “married” with the blessing of the civil law.)

Sure, this a minor point to some. Nevertheless, exactitude is important. The word “overturned” was not used in the text of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Collins's use of the word "overturn" is true only in a colloquial sense and not in a legal sense as the decision in the Brown case had the effect of aiding a process to end segregation in all facilities. However, the ruling itself did not do so.

All right, back to Susan Collins’s explication of why she did not consider Brett Michael Kavanaugh a threat to Roe v. Wade

As Judge Kavanaugh asserted to me, a long-established precedent is not something to be trimmed, narrowed, discarded, or overlooked. Its roots in the Constitution give the concept of stare decisis greater weight such that precedent can’t be trimmed or narrowed simply because a judge might want to on a whim. In short, his views on honoring precedent would preclude attempts to do by stealth that which one has committed not to do overtly. 

Noting that Roe v. Wade was decided 45 years ago, and reaffirmed 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, I asked Judge Kavanaugh whether the passage of time is relevant to following precedent. He said decisions become part of our legal framework with the passage of time and that honoring precedent is essential to maintaining public confidence. 

Our discussion then turned to the right of privacy, on which the Supreme Court relied in Griswold v. Connecticut, a case that struck down a law banning the use and sale of contraceptives. Griswold established the legal foundation that led to Roe eight years later. In describing Griswold as “settled law,” Judge Kavanaugh observed that it was the correct application of two famous cases from the 1920s, Meyer and Pierce, that are not seriously challenged by anyone today. Finally, in his testimony, he noted repeatedly that Roe had been upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, describing it as “precedent on precedent.” When I asked him would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said “no.” (Susan Collins' Speech Supporting the Confirmation of Brett Michael Kavanaugh to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Unied States of America.)

Interjection Number Three:

Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, invented a judicial “right to privacy” out of whole cloth by claiming that the Bill of Rights contained “penumbras” or emendations that are hidden within in its text, sort of like the “find the squirrel” page of Highlights Magazine for Children. The invention, excuse me, the “discovery” of the theretofore unheard of “penumbras” that guaranteed a marital “right” to contraception was also similar to Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s “discovery” of an Heglian process by which the dogmatic statements of the past can become “obsolete in the particulars they contain” over the course of time. Thus, you see, it should not be encouraging to any Catholic that Brett Michael Kavanaugh accepts the finding in Griswold v. Connecticut as a precedent without question as it was the “discovery” of a “right to privacy” that led to the jurisprudential foundation, such as it was, in Roe v. Wade.

No one has a "right" to frustrate the natural end of human conjugal relations, and human institution has any authority from God to declare that such a "right" exists. As has been demonstrated numerous times on this site, including in Planned Barrenhood: Evil From Its Very Inceptions, contraception is at the root of the destablization of the family and thus the rise and institutionalization of welfare state. Contraception is a denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and leads of its nature to the spread of carnal pleasure as the sole aim of human existence and thus the acceptance of every kind of degrading practice and perversion that have been championed as "human rights." 

A "right to privacy"?

Says who?

Not the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity.

We return now to the Susan Collins speech: 

Opponents frequently cite then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to nominate only judges who would overturn Roe. The Republican platform for all presidential campaigns has included this pledge since at least 1980. During this time, Republican presidents have appointed Justices O’Connor, Souter, and Kennedy to the Supreme Court. These are the very three justices—Republican president appointed justices—who authored the Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe. Furthermore, pro-choice groups vigorously opposed each of these justices’ nominations. Incredibly, they even circulated buttons with the slogan “Stop Souter Or Women Will Die!” Just two years later, Justice Souter coauthored the Casey opinion, reaffirming a woman’s right to choose. Suffice it to say, prominent advocacy organizations have been wrong. (Susan Collins' Speech Supporting the Confirmation of Brett Michael Kavanaugh to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Unied States of America.)

Senator Susan Collins, who is a little more than a year my junior in age, made a point about the Supreme Court nominees of Republican presidents that I have made repeatedly dating back to he time that President Ronald Wilson Reagan nominated the pro-abortion Sandra Day O’Connor to replace Associate Justice Potter Stewart on the Supreme Court of the United States of America on July 7, 1981, something that won me few friends among “conservatives” at the time. The appendix below will remind readers that the pro-abortion positions of Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony McLeod Kennedy and David Souter were well known at the time of their nominations

Senator Collins believes that baby-killing is a “right.” 

She is wrong.

Nonetheless, though, Susan Collins made valid points, albeit for the wrong reasons, to demonstrate that Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh is not a threat to Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade or Obergefell v. Hodges. She is not wrong about her conclusions. Indeed, she is quite correct. The mania about overturning or retaining Roe v. Wade is simply a sideshow.

Contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose mortal bodies are destined for the corruption of the grave do not “decide” anything about the binding precepts of the Divine Law and the Natural Law. There are no “decisions” to be made about contraception, surgical abortion and special “rights” for sodomites, only God’s Commandments to be obeyed.

The whole specter of overturning Roe v. Wade has been a political gambit used by Republicans and Democrats for over forty-five years. What little progress has been made in curbing the surgical execution of the innocent preborn has occurred at the state level, but most of what has been done there has come with the usual “hard cases exceptions,” which is how the whole business of “expanding” access to surgical baby-killing began in the early-1960s.

Progress?

Although Donald John Trump has taken a number of initiatives that have been considered to be “pro-life,” he said recently that it is up to the courts to “decide” the matter and that he had been told, without specifying by whom, not to talk about the issue. Moreover, most Catholics are perhaps unaware of the fact that the thrice-married “pro-life” and “pro-family” president has appointed a lot of sodomites to positions in his government, including one recently to the Federal judiciary:

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 24, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Pro-family advocates have considered Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to be one of the highest points of his presidency, but his latest pick of Judge Mary Rowland is a notable exception.

Rowland, a federal magistrate judge in Illinois who spent 12 years in private practice and 10 years in the Chicago federal defender’s office, is Trump’s nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the Washington Blade reports. She stands out among the rest of the president’s selections for being an open lesbian who is “married” to a woman and has two adult children.

hen asked during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings about the contrast of being a judge as opposed to a lawyer, she called it a “pleasure of being in a position of being unbiased and giving parties, both sides a fair shake, listening to what they have to say, and actually being in a position of helping them resolve the case.”

Her professional associations raise doubts as to whether Rowland would separate her homosexuality from her jurisprudence, however. In praising Rowland’s qualifications, pro-abortion Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-IL, specifically highlighted her membership in the Lesbian & Gay Bar Association of Chicago and pro bono work for the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, a left-wing group that calledJustice Neil Gorsuch “dangerous” for defending Hobby Lobby’s conscience rights and has sued to attempt to force Catholic Charities to place children in lesbian foster homes.

“Mary Rowland is well-respected by the LGBTQ community in Illinois and we are pleased that someone with her experience and integrity was nominated,” LGBTQ Victory Institute CEO Annise Parker said, calling her a “bright exception” to Trump’s pattern of “judges with strong anti-LGBTQ records.”

Remarkably, the Blade reports that no senators, Republican or Democrat, asked her any questions about LGBT issues.

While Trump has overwhelmingly pleased pro-life activists, his record on LGBT issues is more mixed. Pro-family advocates have been heartened by his ban on transgender soldiers, support for religious liberty, rejection of “pride month,” and nominations of pro-family conservatives such as Mike Pompeo and Howard Nielson, Jr.

On the other hand, Trump has nominated a variety of pro-homosexual officials to various government posts and continued a number of Obama-era pro-LGBT policies, such as an executive order adding “gender identity” to federal workforce nondiscrimination criteria, and U.S. support for international recognition of homosexual relations at the United Nations Human Rights Council.

He publicly praised the pro-LGBT group Log Cabin Republicans in January, and declared after the election that the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling forcing all fifty states to recognize same-sex “marriage” was “settled law.” (Trump Nominates Lesbian Judge Tied to LGBT Groups for Federal Bench.)

Progress?

Well, I have long said, to the dismay of many of those who think that somehow Sisyphus is going to move that boulder to the top of that hillside, one of the ways that the adversary uses the supposedly “lesser evil” to advance evil is to make people so afraid of the “greater evil” that they will accept the evils done by the “lesser evil” without complaint and, most usually, with a righteous exclamation that “things would be far worse” under, say, an in-the-face promoter of evil such as Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. Sure, things would be worse. However, that reality does not obviate the necessity of calling the evils done by the “lesser evil” by their proper names and opposing their advancement with great vigor and industry. Instead, though, most people, including most Catholics, buy into the illusion of conflict that is but a means of the ancient tempter to use the different factions of the synagogue to advance evils at a greater or lesser pace depending upon which faction of the synagogue is in power.

The Forces Behind the Protestant Revolution and the Rise of the Anti-Incarnational Modern Civil State

Too strong?

No, it is not as the entirety of Modernity is based on the influences of the synagogue upon the minds of “reformers” such as Father Martin Luther, O.S.A.:

In the Protestant Revolt there was something more than the mere breaking away of the northern communities from the jurisdiction of Rome; much more that the nationalism to which Professor Carlton Hayes ascribes perhaps too much importance. There was a spirit of Protestantism in its first phase that sought something more than freedom; it sought nothing less (and this was more evident in Calvinism than in Lutheranism) than the utter destruction of the Catholic Church. Here was a hatred that began manifesting itself by the burning of churches and convents, the violation of nuns, the torture and execution of priests, the defiling of the Cross and the unspeakable desecration of the Blessed Sacrament.

It was an old and international hatred. It was the hatred of the church-burning Donatist, the hatred of Islam, the hatred that had opposed Saint Paul in Rome and Saint James in Jerusalem, the hatred of Annas and the scribes and pharisees crying, “Come down from the Cross, and we will believe!” There was nothing new about it except the form it took; but the preparation and organization were better, and the time was ripe.

Nor was this Protestant phase of the revolt a peculiarly northern or German product, though it has been convenient to make it appear so. It might have happened in southern Europe. In fact, it almost did happen in France, especially in southern France, before it happened in Germany. Lefevre, under the patronage of Marguerite of Angouleme and other of the anti-Catholic House of Navarre, taught justification by grace before Luther did, and profoundly influenced Beza, Farel, Rousel, and other leaders who passed quickly through a Lutheran phase to the more radical organization of Calvinism. The roots of the revolution went deeper that the German affair. It was not local, but international.

If we may believe Graetz and other Jewish historians, the Jews played a much more important part in all this than Christians, for some mysterious reason, have generally admitted. Incalculable was the number of this virile and gifted race who had settled in all countries of Europe during the so-called Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; incalculable the number who were assimilated as sincere Catholics, or who, as pretended Catholics, formed the nucleus for any international revolt. They were everywhere, in communication with one another and with the Jews of the Synagogue. There were so many of the latter in England and France that one Jewish writer of the sixteenth century, often cited by modern Jews, attributed to this fact, “the inclination of the English and the French” to Protestantism. Dispersion, secrecy and organization gave them a power out of all proportion to their numbers, a power so remarkable that Napoleon Bonaparte suspected that the political structure of the Jewish State had survived under cover for eighteen centuries. Was there any historical foundation for such a theory? . . . .

What is equally certain, but strangely kept well in the background of most historical research, is that the Protestant Revolt, far from being an “advance” or a “progressive step,” was a long retrogression toward the moribund Judaism of the Pharisees of the time of Christ. Its multitudinous offspring of more than 200 sects would lead in the course of time to a return of the dismal skepticism of the Sadducees. Caiaphas was a Pharisee, Annas a Sadducee. It was old Annas, the Nasi, who would have the last word.

If there is exaggeration in that astonishing but almost unnoticed statement of Cabrera, himself of a Spanish Marrano family, that “most of the heresiarchs and heretics of this present century have been of those people.” it is beyond question, as a Jewish historian says, that the first leaders of the Protestant sects were called semi-Judaei, or half-Jews, in all parts of Europe.and that men of Jewish descent were as conspicuous among them as they had been among the Gnostics and would later be amog the Communists.

The origin of Calvin (whose real name was Chaurvin) is obscure, as is that of his chief aide and successor, Theodore Beza. But Farel, Rousel and others of the stormiest preachers who carried their propaganda through Europe were of Jewish descent. Michael Servetus may have been, and was certainly influenced by Jews. At Antwerp in 1566 the chief minister of the Calvinist synod, which was the center of the most telling Protestant intrigue and propaganda in the Netherlands, was a Spanish Jew.

Modern research by Jewish historians has made it clear that in the sixteenth century large numbers of the English Protestants (and doubtless the most active in propaganda and organization) were Jews who had put on the convenient mask of Calvinism at Antwerp. For example, “from an early period,” says Dr. Lucien Wolf, “the Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism. The change will readily be understood. The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition. It helped them in their fight against the Holy Office, and for that reason was very welcome to them. Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism. The result was that they became zealous and valuable allies of the Calvinists.”

There was something more in most Calvinists teaching than the desire for religious freedom and the reform of abuses. It was more like the ancient hatred which had followed the Catholic Church from her cradle, seeking not her reform but her utter destruction. Calvin himself was as ruthless in this regard as Mohammed. One of his letters to English Protestants declares that those who refuse to give up the Roman Catholic faith must be put to the sword. Calvinism quickly became an international movement, with a world capital at Geneva and with Calvin as a Pope ruling over a city with a regimentation uncomfortably suggestive of some totalitarian state of the future.

The most active intelligence, liaison officers and propagandists of this international army were the Jews. Only four years after Luther's first outburst, Cardinal Aleander, papal nuncio, reported that Jews were printing and circulating the German monk's books in Flanders. From the Netherlands they sent Bibles even to Spain, concealed in double-bottomed wine-casks. In Ferrara, a great Jewish financial center, they printed heretical bibles for distribution in Italy and elsewhere. No less a person than Carranza, now languishing in the prisons of the Inquisition in Spain, said that this was the reason why the church had to discourage the reading of the Bible in the vernaculars, save in approved versions. Even Jewish physicians and men of business were spies and propaganda agents. In the very year after Philip returned to Spain to stamp out Protestantism there, the Jewish Doctor Rodrigo Lopez, who was to find so unhappy an end in England, was passing over from Antwerp to London as a good Protestant.

A new spirit was abroad in the world, surely. It was not the regenerated Christian thing that Luther imagined it to be. It was the reappearance, in the most formidable array, of something older and far more terrible. The Cambridge Modern History tells us its effect was “to transfer the allegiance of the human spirit from clerical to civil authority,” or to put it more bluntly, to deliver Christ once more into the hands of Caesar. The Jewish historian Graetz expresses it otherwise: “the interest of the marketplace had driven the interests of the church into the background.” Is this not a way of saying that after the great betrayal the money changers were flocking back into the Temple from which they had been ousted by the medieval Church when she was most free and vigorous.

That was the thing, the old and evil thing, the insidious and destructive thing, that Philip was resolved to destroy, if possible, before it ruined the world. It would be far-fetched to say that he saw all its potentialities in 1559. He could hardly have seen what Pope Pius IX saw in 1849, when he declared that all the evils of the modern world (including Communism and its attendant miseries) had their origin in the tragic sixteenth-century assault on the Catholic Faith in the name of Protestantism.

Did Philip imagine, then, that the Jews were to blame for all the ills of humanity? Not even his bitterest enemies could fairly accuse him of that. A Jew-baiter in the vulgar sense he certainly was not. When an attempt was made to introduce into Spain an organization know as the Order of the White Sword aimed against Jews as Jews, he put his foot down against it.  He knew and employed too many excellent men of Jewish ancestry to be taken in by any stupid and vicious theory of “Nordic” or “Aryan” superiority. It must have been apparent to a man of his shrewd common sense (in most matters) that even those Jews who persisted in the iniquity of attempting to destroy the Church could have accomplished very little without collaboration from within, from unworthy Christians. It always takes a Judas to complete the work of Annas and Caiaphas. (William Thomas Walsh, Philip II, published originally in 1937 by Sheed and Ward and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1987, pp. 239-252.)

What we are witnessing at present in the United States of America had its roots in the synagogues of Europe and it is being orchestrated by synagogues today, which means we have a great obligation to pray for the conversion of today’s Annases and Caiphases as well as to pay for our conversion. Representative governments are inherently unstable given the shifting vagaries of majority sentiment. Without the Catholic Faith to undergird republican self-rule, however, such governments are bound to give way to mob rule sooner or later. After all, the French First Republic did give way to the Directory. The American founding fathers did not understand this as believed that "civic virtue" would prevail with the various checks and balances they constructed to place restraints on unfiltered popular sentiment (a bicameral legislature, a Senate whose members were elected by state legislatures and who served staggered terms as to prevent the biennial turnovers of the Senate's membership, the presidential veto power and, implicitly, judicial review). Fallen men, though, need the support of the teaching offices and the supernatural helps of the Catholic Faith to sustain virtue and to rise to the heights of personal sanctity. Absent this, however, all must all into chaos and ruin over time.

Pope Leo XIII explained the necessity of Sanctifying Grace to provide those vested with governmental authority and those in the economic realm with the quickness of mind and prudence to make wise decisions in pursuit of the common temporal good, which must be undertaken in light of man's last end, the possession of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven:

Indeed it is greatly to be desired that those men would rightly esteem and would make due provision for life everlasting, whose industry or talents or rank have put it in their power to shape the course of human events. But alas! we see with sorrow that such men too often proudly flatter themselves that they have conferred upon this world as it were a fresh lease of life and prosperity, inasmuch as by their own energetic action they are urging it on to the race for wealth, to a struggle for the possession of commodities which minister to the love of comfort and display. And yet, whithersoever we turn, we see that human society, if it be estranged from God, instead of enjoying that peace in its possessions for which it had sought, is shaken and tossed like one who is in the agony and heat of fever; for while it anxiously strives for prosperity, and trusts to it alone, it is pursuing an object that ever escapes it, clinging to one that ever eludes the grasp. For as men and states alike necessarily have their being from God, so they can do nothing good except in God through Jesus Christ, through whom every best and choicest gift has ever proceeded and proceeds. But the source and chief of all these gifts is the venerable Eucharist, which not only nourishes and sustains that life the desire whereof demands our most strenuous efforts, but also enhances beyond measure that dignity of man of which in these days we hear so much. For what can be more honourable or a more worthy object of desire than to be made, as far as possible, sharers and partakers in the divine nature? Now this is precisely what Christ does for us in the Eucharist, wherein, after having raised man by the operation of His grace to a supernatural state, he yet more closely associates and unites him with Himself. For there is this difference between the food of the body and that of the soul, that whereas the former is changed into our substance, the latter changes us into its own; so that St. Augustine makes Christ Himself say: "You shall not change Me into yourself as you do the food of your body, but you shall be changed into Me" (confessions 1. vii., c. x.).

Moreover, in this most admirable Sacrament, which is the chief means whereby men are engrafted on the divine nature, men also find the most efficacious help towards progress in every kind of virtue. And first of all in faith. In all ages faith has been attacked; for although it elevates the human mind by bestowing on it the knowledge of the highest truths, yet because, while it makes known the existence of divine mysteries, it yet leaves in obscurity the mode of their being, it is therefore thought to degrade the intellect. But whereas in past times particular articles of faith have been made by turns the object of attack; the seat of war has since been enlarged and extended, until it has come to this, that men deny altogether that there is anything above and beyond nature. Now nothing can be better adapted to promote a renewal of the strength and fervour of faith in the human mind than the mystery of the Eucharist, the "mystery of faith," as it has been most appropriately called. For in this one mystery the entire supernatural order, with all its wealth and variety of wonders, is in a manner summed up and contained: "He hath made a remembrance of His wonderful works, a merciful and gracious Lord; He hath given food to them that fear Him" (Psalm cx, 4-5). For whereas God has subordinated the whole supernatural order to the Incarnation of His Word, in virtue whereof salvation has been restored to the human race, according to those words of the Apostle; "He hath purposed...to re-establish all things in Christ, that are in heaven and on earth, in Him" (Eph. i., 9-10), the Eucharist, according to the testimony of the holy Fathers, should be regarded as in a manner a continuation and extension of the Incarnation. For in and by it the substance of the incarnate Word is united with individual men, and the supreme Sacrifice offered on Calvary is in a wondrous manner renewed, as was signified beforehand by Malachy in the words: "In every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to My name a pure oblation" (Mal. i., 11). And this miracle, itself the very greatest of its kind, is accompanied by innumerable other miracles; for here all the laws of nature are suspended; the whole substance of the bread and wine are changed into the Body and the Blood; the species of bread and wine are sustained by the divine power without the support of any underlying substance; the Body of Christ is present in many places at the same time, that is to say, wherever the Sacrament is consecrated. And in order that human reason may the more willingly pay its homage to this great mystery, there have not been wanting, as an aid to faith, certain prodigies wrought in His honour, both in ancient times and in our own, of which in more than one place there exist public and notable records and memorials. It is plain that by this Sacrament faith is fed, in it the mind finds its nourishment, the objections of rationalists are brought to naught, and abundant light is thrown on the supernatural order.

 

But that decay of faith in divine things of which We have spoken is the effect not only of pride, but also of moral corruption. For if it is true that a strict morality improves the quickness of man's intellectual powers, and if on the other hand, as the maxims of pagan philosophy and the admonitions of divine wisdom combine to teach us, the keenness of the mind is blunted by bodily pleasures, how much more, in the region of revealed truths, do these same pleasures obscure the light of faith, or even, by the just judgment of God, entirely extinguish it. For these pleasures at the present day an insatiable appetite rages, infecting all classes as with an infectious disease, even from tender years. Yet even for so terrible an evil there is a remedy close at hand in the divine Eucharist. For in the first place it puts a check on lust by increasing charity, according to the words of St. Augustine, who says, speaking of charity, "As it grows, lust diminishes; when it reaches perfection, lust is no more" (De diversis quaestionibus, Ixxxiii., q. 36). Moreover the most chaste flesh of Jesus keeps down the rebellion of our flesh, as St. Cyril of Alexandria taught, "For Christ abiding in us lulls to sleep the law of the flesh which rages in our members" (Lib. iv., c. ii., in Joan., vi., 57). Then too the special and most pleasant fruit of the Eucharist is that which is signified in the words of the prophet: "What is the good thing of Him," that is, of Christ, "and what is His beautiful thing, but the corn of the elect and the wine that engendereth virgins" (Zach. ix., 17), producing, in other words, that flower and fruitage of a strong and constant purpose of virginity which, even in an age enervated by luxury, is daily multiplied and spread abroad in the Catholic Church, with those advantages to religion and to human society, wherever it is found, which are plain to see. (Pope Leo XIII, Mirae Caritatis, May 28, 1902.)

Who was right? 

The American founding fathers or Pope Leo XIII?

Events of the past month have shown us the answer, have they not?

 

William Thomas Walsh wrote that perhaps no one other than Pope Paul IV had recognized the fact that the singularly most important “accomplishment” for which Emperor Charles V woul be remembered was his failure to act against Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, thus setting the stage for the divisions at work in the world today:

Men spoke of the great things Charles (V) had done: he had put down conspiracies in Flanders, Spain, Naples, and Peru; he had fought several wars with the French for the sovereignty of Italy and the overlordship of Europe; he had fought with the great Sultan, Solyman the Magnificent, and had been victorious and defeated in Africa; he had invaded Rome; he had increased his father's estates in the Netherlands; he had built cities there; he had added Mexico and Peru to his estates in the New World; he had kept the Empire intact, especially in Germany, by compromising and tactful statesmanship. These were the chief things that preachers and eulogies were saying about the great man who had vanished.

Hardly anyone, except Pope Paul IV and a few other discerning religious, said the one truly important thing about the reign of Charles which gives it its peculiar significance in history: under him Christendom was divided into hostile camps, and the heresy to which Charles had given political freedom would envelop and poison the whole world. Protestantism was destined to lead to Capitalism and Communism, as surely as Judaism was bound to fulfill itself, with the coming of Christ, in the Catholic Church. Charles himself saw the cleavage and the danger only in his last days. One of his bitterest reflection on his bed of pain was that he had not had Luther put to death when the monk was in his power at the Diet of Worms some thirty-seven years before. Now it was too late. The world on which Philip ruefully gazed from his dispatch-littered table in Brussels was very different from what he had expected.  (William Thomas Walsh, Philip II, published originally in 1937 by Sheed and Ward and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1987, pp. 207.)

Error leads to division and conflict. Catholicism alone leads to true national unity. Nothing else.

Need a reminder?

Sure, here it is:

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreantsOmnia instaurare in Christo.

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. The new Sillonists cannot pretend that they are merely working on “the ground of practical realities” where differences of belief do not matter. Their leader is so conscious of the influence which the convictions of the mind have upon the result of the action, that he invites them, whatever religion they may belong to, “to provide on the ground of practical realities, the proof of the excellence of their personal convictions.” And with good reason: indeed, all practical results reflect the nature of one’s religious convictions, just as the limbs of a man down to his finger-tips, owe their very shape to the principle of life that dwells in his body. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

I wrote just above that Catholicism alone can bring true social order and national unity as the Holy Faith alone has the infallible teaching and the supernatural helps necessary to convert the souls of men and thus make them disposed to scale the heights of personal sanctity, making them at peace at God and with each other.

This does not mean, however, that there will not be conflicts among men within and among nations as human nature is wounded by Original Sin and thus inclines fallen men to such conflicts even in the best of circumstances. Alas, the world was vastly different during the High Middle Ages than today as men throughout Christendom had the bond of the Holy Faith and looked forward to the expectation of life in Heaven. There is no such expectation today, something that Pope Pius XII noted seventy-nine years ago in the first encyclical letter of his pontificate, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939:

The denial of the fundamentals of morality had its origin, in Europe, in the abandonment of that Christian teaching of which the Chair of Peter is the depository and exponent. That teaching had once given spiritual cohesion to a Europe which, educated, ennobled and civilized by the Cross, had reached such a degree of civil progress as to become the teacher of other peoples, of other continents. But, cut off from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, not a few separated brethren have gone so far as to overthrow the central dogma of Christianity, the Divinity of the Savior, and have hastened thereby the progress of spiritual decay.

The Holy Gospel narrates that when Jesus was crucified "there was darkness over the whole earth" (Matthew xxvii. 45); a terrifying symbol of what happened and what still happens spiritually wherever incredulity, blind and proud of itself, has succeeded in excluding Christ from modern life, especially from public life, and has undermined faith in God as well as faith in Christ. The consequence is that the moral values by which in other times public and private conduct was gauged have fallen into disuse; and the much vaunted civilization of society, which has made ever more rapid progress, withdrawing man, the family and the State from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear, in regions in which for many centuries shone the splendors of Christian civilization, in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, the signs of a corrupt and corrupting paganism: "There was darkness when they crucified Jesus" (Roman Breviary, Good Friday, Response Five).

Many perhaps, while abandoning the teaching of Christ, were not fully conscious of being led astray by a mirage of glittering phrases, which proclaimed such estrangement as an escape from the slavery in which they were before held; nor did they then foresee the bitter consequences of bartering the truth that sets free, for error which enslaves. They did not realize that, in renouncing the infinitely wise and paternal laws of God, and the unifying and elevating doctrines of Christ's love, they were resigning themselves to the whim of a poor, fickle human wisdom; they spoke of progress, when they were going back; of being raised, when they groveled; of arriving at man's estate, when they stooped to servility. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it; "they became vain in their thoughts" (Romans i. 21). 

With the weakening of faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the darkening in men's minds of the light of moral principles, there disappeared the indispensable foundation of the stability and quiet of that internal and external, private and public order, which alone can support and safeguard the prosperity of States.

It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939.)

The errors of pluralism divide people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order, vie for political power So many Americans live from election to election, always believing that "change," whether it be in the direction of "progress" for naturalists of the "left" or in the direction of "constitutionalism" or "liberty" or "limited government" for naturalists of the "right." Although divisions on some matters will always occur until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day at the Second Coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is also true that men today have been needlessly divided about matters pertaining to First and Last Things, oblivious to the fact that they have been given a spotless mother, Holy Mother Church, to serve as their mater and magister (mother and teacher) in this passing, mortal vale of tears. Most men today believe that they are automatons, either independent of any concept of God or "free" from the "dictates" of a hierarchical church.

Personal and social disaster cannot but be the result of such a brew of error. Men resort more and more to violence today because they do not know of the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. They do not know that they have a Blessed Mother who made possible their salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the father at the Annunciation. They do not realize that the supernatural helps they need to overcome all sin in their lives and to pray for the conversion of those who are promoting evil in society flow through the loving hands of that same Blessed Mother, who gave the Rosary with her own blessed hands to Saint Dominic de Guzman so that we could be more closely united to her Divine Son, Christ the King, through the mysteries contained in her psalter, the Rosary, and it is upon that same Holy Rosary that we must rely in our day as never before:

The Remedy for Our Age: Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary

Pope Leo XIII issued encyclical letters on Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary almost annually. He explained in Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893, that the weapon that the Mother of God gave to Saint Dominic de Guzman to fight the Albigensian heresy promises us a cure for the evils of an age when men have enthroned themselves in power after having dethroned Christ the King:

3. For We are convinced that the Rosary, if devoutly used, is bound to benefit not only the individual but society at large.No one will do Us the injustice to deny that in the discharge of the duties of the Supreme Apostolate We have laboured - as, God helping, We shall ever continue to labour - to promote the civil prosperity of mankind. Repeatedly have We admonished those who are invested with sovereign power that they should neither make nor execute laws except in conformity with the equity of the Divine mind. On the other hand, we have constantly besought citizens who were conspicuous by genius, industry, family, or fortune, to join together in common counsel and action to safeguard and to promote whatever would tend to the strength and well-being of the community. Only too many causes are at work, in the present condition of things, to loosen the bonds of public order, and to withdraw the people from sound principles of life and conduct.

Dislike of Poverty - The Joyful Mysteries

4. There are three influences which appear to Us to have the chief place in effecting this downgrade movement of society. These are-first, the distaste for a simple and labourious life; secondly, repugnance to suffering of any kind; thirdly, the forgetfulness of the future life.

5. We deplore - and those who judge of all things merely by the light and according to the standard of nature join with Us in deploring that society is threatened with a serious danger in the growing contempt of those homely duties and virtues which make up the beauty of humble life. To this cause we may trace in the home, the readiness of children to withdraw themselves from the natural obligation of obedience to the parents, and their impatience of any form of treatment which is not of the indulgent and effeminate kind. In the workman, it evinces itself in a tendency to desert his trade, to shrink from toil, to become discontented with his lot, to fix his gaze on things that are above him, and to look forward with unthinking hopefulness to some future equalization of property. We may observe the same temper permeating the masses in the eagerness to exchange the life of the rural districts for the excitements and pleasures of the town. Thus the equilibrium between the classes of the community is being destroyed, everything becomes unsettled, men's minds become a prey to jealousy and heart-burnings, rights are openly trampled under foot, and, finally, the people, betrayed in their expectations, attack public order, and place themselves in conflict with those who are charged to maintain it.

6. For evils such as these let us seek a remedy in the Rosary, which consists in a fixed order of prayer combined with devout meditation on the life of Christ and His Blessed Mother. Here, if the joyful mysteries be but clearly brought home to the minds of the people, an object lesson of the chief virtues is placed before their eyes. Each one will thus be able to see for himself how easy, how abundant, how sweetly attractive are the lessons to be found therein for the leading of an honest life. Let us take our stand in front of that earthly and divine home of holiness, the House of Nazareth. How much we have to learn from the daily life which was led within its walls! What an all-perfect model of domestic society! Here we behold simplicity and purity of conduct, perfect agreement and unbroken harmony, mutual respect and love - not of the false and fleeting kind - but that which finds both its life and its charm in devotedness of service. Here is the patient industry which provides what is required for food and raiment; which does so "in the sweat of the brow," which is contented with little, and which seeks rather to diminish the number of its wants than to multiply the sources of its wealth. Better than all, we find there that supreme peace of mind and gladness of soul which never fail to accompany the possession of a tranquil conscience. These are precious examples of goodness, of modesty, of humility, of hard-working endurance, of kindness to others, of diligence in the small duties of daily life, and of other virtues, and once they have made their influence felt they gradually take root in the soul, and in course of time fail not to bring about a happy change of mind and conduct. Then will each one begin to feel his work to be no longer lowly and irksome, but grateful and lightsome, and clothed with a certain joyousness by his sense of duty in discharging it conscientiously. Then will gentler manners everywhere prevail; home-life will be loved and esteemed, and the relations of man with man will be loved and esteemed, and the relations of man with man will be hallowed by a larger infusion of respect and charity. And if this betterment should go forth from the individual to the family and to the communities, and thence to the people at large so that human life should be lifted up to this standard, no one will fail to feel how great and lasting indeed would be the gain which would be achieved for society. (Pope Leo XIII, Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893. The entire encyclical letter is appended below in Appendix B.)

What’s it going to be, watching FOX News or praying another Rosary?

What’s more important and pleasing to God, watching or listening to Sean Hannity or praying another Rosary?

Listening to Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin about the “latest” in the ongoing and never-ending battle between two factions of the synagogue who deny the relevance of Christ the King and His true Church to civil society or praying another Rosary.

How can anyone learn anything of true substance about the events of the day that are but the consequence, remotely, of Original Sin and, proximately of the Protestant Revolution and the rise and institutionalization of Judeo-Masony?

Writing in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, Pope Pius XI summarized the need that men have in all countries and in all ages of pursuing sanctity as the basis of good citizenship and thus of a genuine and enduringly just social order:

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.)

The evils of our times can be fought only with the supernatural weapons at our disposal, starting with Holy Mass and Eucharistic piety, if this is at all possible in one's area of residence in this time of apostasy and betrayal, and, of course, including frequent Confession, and deep devotion to the Mother of God, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, as we fast and make sacrifices to separate ourselves from the world as we attempt to make reparation for our sins that contribute in no small measure to the disorder that surrounds us.

If you a better idea, then, by all means, go watch FOX News or listen to Hannity, Levin, Limbaugh and the rest.

It is my prayer that the readers of this site will remember that Our Lady wants us to give her more and more Rosaries every day.

 

Why do we tarry?

Today is the Feast of Saint Bridget of Sweden. This wonderful mystic, who wrote so movingly and graphically as to what our sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death, must be invoked in these challenging times as she lived at a time when Holy Mother Church was riven by political (as opposed to doctrinal) disputes that set Catholic against Catholic. Dom Prosper Gueranger described the scene for us in The Liturgical Year:

'Who, O Lord, has treated Thee thus?' 'They that despise Me and forget My love.' This was the first revelation of the Son of God to Bridget of Sweden. Francis of Assisi, raising before he world the standard of the cross, had announced that Christ was about to recommence the dolorous way; not now in His own Person, but in the Church, who is flesh of His flesh. The truth of this declaration Bridget experienced from the very opening that fatal fourteenth century, during which such innumerable disasters, the results of crime, fell at once upon the west.

Born in the year when Sciarra Colonna, a new Pilate's servant, dared to strike the Vicar of Christ, Bridget's childhood was contemporaneous with those sad falls, which caused the Church to be despised by her enemies. There were no saints in Christendom comparable to the great ones of old; in the preceding age the Latin races had exhausted their vitality in producing flowers; but where were the promised fruits? Ancient Europe had nought but affronts for the Word of God; this feast, this apparition of Jesus in cold Scandinavia, seems to point to His flight from the habitual centre of His predilection. Bridget was ten years old, when the Man of sorrows sought a resting-place in her heart: and at that very time, the death of Clement V and the election of John XXII in a foreign land, fixed the papacy in its seventy years' exile.

Rome meanwhile, widowed of her Pontiff, appeared the most miserable of cities: 'The ways of Sion mourn, because there are none that come to the solemn feast.' Sacked by her own sons, she was daily losing some remnant of her ancient glory; her public roads were scenes of bloodshed; solitude reigned amid the ruins of her crumbling basilicas; sheep grazed in St. Peter's and the Lateran. From the seven hills anarchy has spread throughout Italy, transforming the towns into haunts of brigands, and the country parts into deserts. France was doomed to expiate, in the horrors of a hundred years' war, the captivity of the sovereign pontiff.

Unfortunately, the captivity was loved; the court of Avignon did not mourn like the Hebrews by the rivers in Babylon; richer in gold than in virtues, it were well, had they not, for a long time, shaken the influence of Holy See over the nations. The German empire and Louis of Bavaria could easily refuse obedience to the ward of the Valois; the Fratricelli accused the Pope of heresy; while, countenanced by the doctors of the law, Marsillus of Padua attacked the very principle of the papacy. Benedict XII discouraged by the troubles of Italy, abandoned his design of returning to Rome; and built upon the rock of Doms the famous castle, at once fortress and palace, which seemed to fix the residence of the Popes for ever on the banks of the Rhone. The misery of Rome, and the splendour of Avignon, reached their height under Clement VI who entered into a contract with Jane of Naples, Countess of Provence, securing to the Church the definitive possession of Avignon. At that time the papal court surpassed all others in luxury and worldliness. God in His justice visited the nations with the scourge of the black death; while in His mercy He sent warnings from heaven to Pope Clement:

'Arise; make peace between the kings of France and England; and go into Italy to preach the year of salvation, and to visit the places watered by the blood of saints. Consider how, in the past, thou hast provoked My anger, doing thy own will and not thy duty; and I have held My peace. But now my time is at hand. If you wilt not obey, I shall require of thee an account of the unworthiness wherewith thou hast passed through all the degrees by which I permitted thee to be exalted in glory. Thou wilt be answerable for all the avarice and ambition that have been rife in the Church in thy days. Thou couldst have done much towards a reformation, but being carnal-minded thou wouldst not. Repair the pat by zeal during the rest of thy life. Had not My patience preserved thee, thou wouldst have fallen lower than any of thy predecessors. Question thy conscience, and thou wilt see that I speak the truth.'

This severe message, dictated by the Son of God to the prophetess Bridget of Sweden, came from that northern land where sanctity seemed to have taken refuge during the past half century. Though incurring such reproaches, the Pope still had great faith, and he accordingly received with generous courtesy the messengers from the princess of Nericia. But, though he promulgated the celebrated Jubilee of the half-century, Clement VI allowed the holy year to pass away without going himself to prostrate at the tombs of the apostles, to which he convoked the entire world. The patience of God was at an end. The judgment of that soul was revealed to Bridget; she saw its terrible chastisement, which however was not eternal, and was tempered by hope.

Hitherto wholly engaged with the supernatural interests of her own country, Bridget suddenly found her mission embrace the whole world. In vain, by her prayers of God, by her warnings to princes, had the saint striven to avert from Sweden the trials that were to end in the union of Calmar. Neither Magnus II nor his consort Blanche of Dampierre, took to heart the menaces of their noble relative; 'I saw the sun and the moon shining together in the heavens, until both having given their power to the dragon, the sky grew pale, reptiles filled the earth, the sun sunk into the abyss, and the moon disappeared, leaving no trace behind.

The criminal coldness of the south had been the occasion of grace for the north; but the latter in tis turn did not profit by the time of its visitation: and Bridget quitted it forever. She herself was a cit of refuge to our Lord. Taking up her abode in Rome, she there, by her holiness, prepared the way for the return of Christ's vicar. There for twenty years she, as it were, personified the eternal city, enduring all its bitter sufferings, knowing all its moral miseries, presenting its tears and prayers to our Lord; continually visiting the tombs of the apostles and martyrs throughout the peninsula; and at the same time never ceasing to transmit to Pontiffs and kings the messages dictated to her by God.

At length the horizon appeared to be brightening; while the just and inflexible Innocent VI reformed the papal court, Albornoz was restoring peace in Italy. In 1367 Bridget had the great joy of receiving in the Vatican the blessing of Urban V. Unhappily, in three short years Urban quitted the threshold of the apostles to return to his native land; but, as Bridget had foretold, he re-entered Avignon only to die. He was succeeded by the nephew of Clement VI, Roger de Beaufort, under the name of Gregory XI, who was destined to put an end to the exile and break the chains of the Roman Pontiffs.

But Bridget's hour had come. Another was to reap in joy what she had sown in tears; Catharine of Siena was to bring back to the holy city the vicar of our Lord. As to the valiant Scandinavian, who had never lost courage or faltered in faith through the failure of her missions, she was inspired by her divine Spouse to visit the holy places, the scenes of His Passion. It was on her return from this last pilgrimage, that, far from her native land, in that desolate Rome whose widowhood she had striven in vain to terminate, she was called to her heavenly reward. Her body was carried back to Scandinavia by her daughter St. Catharine of Sweden. It was laid in the yet unfinished monastery of Vadstena, mother-house of that projected Order of our Saviour, the foundations of which, like all the undertakings imposed by God upon Bridget, was not to be completed until after her death. Twenty-five years before, she had received almost simultaneously the command to found, and the command to quit, this holy retreat, as thought he Lord would give her a glimpse of its blessed peace, only to crucify her the more in the very different path into which He immediately led her. Such is God's severity towards His dear ones and such His sovereign independence with regard to His gifts. In the same manner, He had allowed the saint, in her early years, to be attracted to the beautiful lily of virginity, and then signified His will that the flower should not be hers. 'When I cry,' said the prophet, in a captivity figurative of that whereof Bridget felt all the bitterness, 'when I cry and entreat, He hath shut out m prayer. He hath shut up my ways with square stones, He hath turned my paths upside down.'

Before reading the liturgical legend, let us call to mind that St. Bridget died on July 23, 1373; October 8 is the anniversary of the first Mass celebrated in her honour by Pope Boniface IX on the day following her canonization [October 7 and 8, 1391]. Martin V confirmed the Acts of Boniface IX in her honour; and approved her Revelations, which had been violently attacked in the Councils of Constance and Basle, only to come forth with a higher recommendations to the piety of the faithful. Man indulgences are attached to the rosary which bears the saint's name. These are now, by the favour of the apostolic See, frequently applied to ordinary rosaries; but it must be remember that the true rosary of St. Bridget is composed of the Ave Maria recited sixty-three times, the Pater noster seven times and the Credo seven times, in honour of the supposed number of our Lady's years on earth, and of her joys and sorrows. It was also from a desire of honouring our Lady, that the saint vested in the abbess the superiority over the double monasteries in the Order of our Saviour. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year: Time After Pentecost: Book V, pp. 360-365.)

We need to invoke the heavenly intercession of Saint Bridget at a time when the papacy itself is in chains, when imposters who deny even the very nature of revealed truth and who break the First and Second Commandments while consorting with and taking advice the agents of Antichrist in the world of Modernity have muted the voice of what is thought to be the Catholic Church, thus getting the agents of error in the world free rein to spread their falsehoods in the name of “justice” and “love.”

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted these difficult times to His Most Blessed Mother, to whom Saint Bridget was so tenderly devoted, and her Fatima Message, the essence of which for us as members of the laity is to be devoted to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and to pray her Most Holy Rosary faithfully and meditatively every day without fail. 

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady, Help of Christians, 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 Andrew the Apostle, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

Appendix A

Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter Had Pro-Abortion Track Records When They Were Nominated

(Excerpted from "Confirmations of a Different Sort")

It is quite a statement about the naturalist farce that passes for governance and politics in the United States of America that the pro-death forces of the naturalist “left” are more consistent, more courageous and most outspoken in their support of evil than are their false opposites in the naturalist “right” in opposing it.

Indeed, one need only remember that opposition to the surgical execution did not matter to President Ronald Wilson Reagan when he nominated Judge Sandra Day O’Connor to replace the pro-abortion Associate Justice Potter Stewart in 1981, and it did not matter to President George Herbert Walker Bush when he nominated Judge David Souter to replace the pro-abortion Catholic William Brennan in 1990. It is thus nothing other than maddening to hear the “George Herbert Walker Bush did not about David H. Souter” line that is being repeated once again after Anthony McLeod Kennedy’s retirement notice four days ago.

The myth that “Reagan did not know about Sandra Day O’Connor” and that “Bush 41 did not know about David H. Souter” was exploded contemporaneously by the late Howard Phillips, the founder and longtime chairman of the Conservative Caucus Foundation, in testimony he gave testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate against both the O'Connor and Souter nominations, as he explained in an interview. Although I disagreed with the late Mr. Phillips's support for the philosophy of the founders of the United States of America and his Calvinist view of the world, his work exposing the fraudulent nature of various "pro-life" Republican administrations was admirable and stands the test of time on its well-documented merits:

Let me put this into context. People say you can't tell how a Supreme Court nominee will turn out once on the bench. I respectfully disagree. In most cases, it'' very clear. I opposed the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor because it was very clear that she had a pro-abortion record in the Arizona state senate and as a judge in Arizona. She was also allied with Planned Parenthood. I opposed David Souter because I read his senior thesis at Harvard in which he said he was a legal positivist and one of his heroes was Oliver Wendell Holmes and that he rejected all higher law theories, such as those spelled out in our Declaration of Independence. In addition, he was a trustee of two hospitals: Dartmouth Hitchcock and Concord Memorial. He successfully changed the policy of those two hospitals from 'zero abortion' to 'convenience abortion.' I testified against Ruth Bader Ginsburg because her record was clear. She saw the Supreme Court as a Supreme Legislature. She was on the far Left of virtually every issue. Yet, only three members of the U.S. Senate voted in opposition to her confirmation. Only eight voted in opposition to Breyer. With respect to Judge Roberts, I'm in the midst of an extensive and intensive study of his record. Several things become clear, although I'm not ready to reach a final conclusion. It is clear that while he claims to have no overarching judicial philosophy he does have a point of view on most of the big issues. But that point of view is overshadowed by his pragmatism and his desire to stay within what is perceived as the mainstream. (Flynn Files - Howard Phillips Interview Part I.) 

Wasn’t that an accurate observation of John Glover Roberts ten years ago now?

Here is a brief excerpt from the late Mr. Phillips's actual testimony against Ronald Wilson Reagan's nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981:

As an Arizona State Senator, she voted twice for abortion on demand through the ninth month of pregnancyshe co-sponsored a proposal to permit abortion without parental consent; she promoted ERA; she opposed the Human Life Amendment; and she failed to oppose abortions at a taxpayer-funded facility." (The Supreme Court Watch - A Public Service of The Conservative Caucus.) 

Judie Brown, the founder and President of the American Life League, similarly testified against Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination in 1981, also documenting O'Connor's solid pro-abortion record as the majority leader of the Arizona State Senate. Anyone who claims that they were "surprised" by O'Connor's opinions, summarized below by a pro-abortion organization, is dealing in a world of fanciful delusions. Howard Phillips and Judie Brown documented Sandra Day O'Connor's pro-abortion record openly and publicly. The documentation provided by Mr. Phillips and Mrs. Brown meant nothing to Ronald Wilson Reagan or Attorney General William French Smith or to the "pro-life" Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee or in the rest of the United States Senate.

Here is that summary of the retired Sandra Day O'Connor's pro-abortion record a found on a pro-abortion website:

Justice Sandra O'Connor has played a very influential role on the Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. In both Planned Parenthood v. Casey andStenberg v. Carhart (Carhart I), O'Connor's single vote in support of a woman's right to choose ensured the survival of Roe v. Wade.

Justice O'Connor, with Justices Kennedy and Souter, wrote the controlling plurality opinion in Casey which upheld a woman's right to a safe and legal abortion in a case many feared would overturn Roe v. Wade:

"After considering the fundamental constitutional questions resolved by Roe, principles of institutional integrity, and the rule of stare decisis, we are led to conclude this: the essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed."

"Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."

While Justice O'Connor's opinions have changed in the way abortion cases are analyzed, lowering the standard of review from strict scrutiny to an undue burden analysis, she has prevented the conservative members of the Supreme Court from destroying the central provisions of Roe.

In Stenberg v.Carhart (Carhart I), the Court's most recent decision concerning abortion rights, Justice O'Connor joined Justice Breyer's majority opinion affirming Roe and Casey:

"...[t]his Court, in the course of a generation, has determined and then redetermined that the Constitution offers basic protection to the woman's right to choose. We shall not revisit those legal principles."

In Hill v. Colorado, Justice O'Connor voted uphold Colorado's law creating a buffer zone around health facilities. Inside the 100-foot buffer zone, a patient cannot be approached within eight feet without consent for the purpose of leafleting, displaying a sign, or engaging in conversation. (National Abortion Federation: O'Connor's Legacy.)

Here is Howard Phillips’s actual testimony against David Souter before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on September 19, 1990, the Feast of Saint Januarius:

In considering David Souter’s suitability to cast what, in many cases, will be the deciding opinion on the Supreme Court of the United States, it is necessary to go beyond Mr. Souter’s intellectual capacity and his stated opinions, and to assess his character and moral courage in their relationship to the responsibilities of a Supreme Court Justice. 

DAVID SOUTER His pro-abortion record was there for those who wanted to know the truth. One moment of truth for Mr. Souter came in February, 1973 when, as a member of the board of trustees of Concord Hospital, he participated in a unanimous decision that abortions be performed at the hospital. 

Advocacy of, or even acquiescence in, such a decision is morally distinguishable from the judicial conclusion, profoundly incorrect in my view, that women have a constitutional right to destroy their unborn children. 

It is also distinguishable from and far more troubling than the political argument by politicians who maintain that they are “personally opposed” to abortion, even as they advocate its decriminalization. 

It is one thing to intellectually rationalize the case for permitting legal abortions, while still opposing the exercise of such legal authority. It is quite another - something far more invidious, morally - to actually join in a real-world decision to cause abortions to be performed, routinely, at a particular hospital. 

Those abortions whose performance was authorized by David Souter were not mandated by law or court opinion. In fact, laws have remained to this day on the books in New Hampshire which provide criminal penalties for any “attempt to procure miscarriage” or “intent to destroy quick child.” Indeed, section 585:14 of the New Hampshire Criminal Code establishes the charge of second degree murder for the death of a pregnant woman in consequence of an attempted abortion. Nor were those abortions which Mr. Souter authorized performed merely to save the life of the mother, nor were they limited to cases of rape or incest. 

If the unborn child is human, and if innocent human life is to be defended and safeguarded, why did Mr. Souter acquiesce in those abortions? Why did he not speak out against them? Why did he, through twelve years on the Concord Hospital board, in a position of responsibility, help cause those abortions to be performed, and invest his personal reputation in clearly implied approval of those abortions?

The overarching moral issue in the political life of the United States in the last third of the 20th Century is, in my opinion, the question of abortion. Is the unborn child a human person, entitled to the protections pledged to each of us by the Founders of our Nation?
The issue is much more than one of legal or judicial philosophy. There are men and women in the legal profession, in elected office, and on the bench who acknowledge abortion to be morally repugnant, but who assert that, in present circumstances, it cannot be constitutionally prohibited. 

Whatever Mr. Souter’s legal and judicial philosophy may be - and, on the record, it seems to be one which rejects the higher law theories implicit in the Declaration of Independence - it is a chilling fact which the Senate must consider that Judge Souter has personally participated in decisions resulting in the performance of abortions, where such abortions were in no way mandated or required by law or court decision. 

By his own account, Mr. Souter served as a member of the board of trustees for the Concord Hospital from 1971 until 1985. Following service as board secretary, he was president of the board from 1978 to 1984. 

In 1973, shortly after the Supreme Court’s January 22 Roe v. Wade decision, the Concord Hospital trustees voted to initiate a policy of performing abortions at Concord Hospital. 

Similarly, Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital, which is associated with the Dartmouth Medical School, of which Judge Souter has been an overseer, has performed abortion up to the end of the second trimester. 

During the period of Mr. Souter’s tenure as a decision-maker of these two institutions, many hundreds of abortions were performed under his authority, with no indication that he ever objected to or protested the performance of these abortions. Even though the Roe v. Wade decision did, in fact, authorize abortions through the ninth month of pregnancy, nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision required or obliged any hospital to conduct abortions, whether in the ninth month, the sixth month, or even in the first month of pregnancy. 

If Judge Souter is confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, he will, in all likelihood, be given the opportunity to address not only the issue of Roe v. Wade, but broader issues involving the sanctity of innocent human life.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the 1986 Thornburgh case, “there is a fundamental and well-recognized difference between a fetus and a human being. Indeed, if there is not such a difference, the permissibility of terminating the life of a fetus could scarcely be left to the will of the State legislatures.” 

Justice Stevens was wrong in a very deadly way. If an unborn child is not human, I would ask Justice Stevens, what is he, what is she? But as least Mr. Stevens was logical in defending his support for the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that, “If the personhood of the unborn child is established, the pro-abortion case collapses, for the fetus’s right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the Fourteenth Amendment.” 

As Notre Dame law professor Charles Rice has pointed out, “This is so, because the common law does not permit a person to kill an innocent non-aggressor, even to save his own life.”

Does David Souter believe that the unborn child - the fetus in the mother’s womb - is a human person, deserving of all the protections which are guaranteed to human beings after the moment of birth? 

Seemingly, Mr. Souter’s answer is an unequivocal “no.” by agreeing that abortions be performed at institutions under his authority, Mr. Souter established clearly that he did not recognize the personhood of the unborn child. For surely, if he did acknowledge the unborn child to be a human person, Mr. Souter would not have agreed to authorize the extinguishment of so many precious lives at medical facilities for which he bore responsibility. 

One must conclude that either Mr. Souter accepts the view that the life of the unborn child is of less value than the convenience and profit of those who collaborate in the killing of that child, or that, despite his recognition of the fact that each unborn child is human, a handiwork of God’s creation, he lacked the moral courage or discernment to help prevent the destruction of so many innocent human lives when he had the authority, indeed, the responsibility, to do so. 

Either way, in such circumstances, unless there are mitigating factors or extenuating considerations which have not yet been brought to public attention, it is difficult to regard Mr. Souter as one suitable for participation in judicial decisions at the highest level of our Nation. 

If, during his years of responsibility at Concord Hospital and Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital, Mr. Souter believed each fetus to be a human person, and failed to act against the performance of abortion, he was morally delinquent. 

If, on the other hand, he justified himself by denying the human qualities of the unborn child, then he placed himself in the ambit of those who have argued against the very philosophy which his sponsor, President George Bush, purported to embrace during his 1988 presidential campaign. 

On the basis of the information now available, Mr. Souter, in my opinion, should not be confirmed. (Testimony of: HOWARD PHILLIPS Chairman, The Conservative Caucus Foundation.)  

Did this factual presentation matter to any of the "pro-life" senators, including two future Republican presidential nominees, Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., and John Sidney McCain III?

Not one little bit.

 

To this day, these craven careerists have hidden behind the abject lie that they were "misled" by then President George Herbert Walker Bush's White House Chief of Staff, John Sununu, the former Governor of the State of New Hampshire, about David Souter. This is a lie. An abject lie. Howard Phillips presented incontrovertible evidence about David Souter's support for abortion. This did not matter one little bit to Bob Dole or to John McCain. Not one little bit. The facts were presented. They did not care. Not one little bit.   

 

 

Appendix B

 

Excerpts From Pope Leo XIII’s Laetitiae Sanctae, December 8, 1893

To Our Venerable Brethren the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Ordinaries, having Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See.

Venerable Brethren, Greeting and Apostolic Benediction.

The sacred joy which it has been given to Us to feel in attaining the fiftieth anniversary of Our Episcopal Consecration has been deepened by the knowledge that it was shared by the people of the whole Catholic world, and that as a father in the midst of his children We have been consoled by the touching testimonies of their loyalty and love. We gratefully accept it and record it as a fresh proof of God’s special providence, and one which is markedly full of bounty to Ourselves, and of blessing to the Church.

2. At the same time We love to offer Our thanks for this signal benefit to the august Mother of God, whose powerful intercession We feel to have been exercised in Our behalf. For hers is the loving kindness which, during the length of years and the vicissitudes of life, has never failed Us, and which day by day seems to draw nearer to Us than ever, filling Our soul with gladness, and strengthening Us with a confidence of which the surety is higher than the things of time. It is as if the voice of the heavenly Queen made itself heard to Us, at one moment graciously consoling Us in the midst of trials; at another guiding Us by her counsel in directing the great work of the salvation of souls; at another, urging Us to admonish the Christian people to advance in piety and in the practice of every virtue. For Us it is once more a joy as well as a duty to respond to her inspirations. Amongst the happy results which have already rewarded Our exhortations which were due to her prompting, We have to reckon the remarkable impulse given to the Devotion of the Most Holy Rosary. This awakening has made itself felt in the increased number of Confraternities instituted for the purpose, the voluminous literature of pious and learned works written upon the subject, and the manifold tributes which Christian art has not failed to bring to its service. And now, as if for yet another time, listening to the voice of the same zealous Mother, who calls upon Us to “cry out and cease not,” We rejoice once more to address you, Venerable Brethren, upon the subject of the Rosary, standing as We do upon the eve of that month of October which, by the award of special Indulgences, We have deemed it well to dedicate to this most popular devotion. Our appeal to you, however, will not be directed so much to add any further recommendation of a method of prayer so praiseworthy in itself, nor yet to press upon the faithful the necessity of practicing it still more fervently, but rather to point out how we may draw from this devotion certain advantages which are especially valuable and needful at the present day.

 

 

3. For We are convinced that the Rosary, if devoutly used, is bound to benefit not only the individual but society at large. No one will do Us the injustice to deny that in the discharge of the duties of the Supreme Apostolate We have labored -- as, God helping, We shall ever continue to labor -- to promote the civil prosperity of mankind. Repeatedly have We admonished those who are invested with sovereign power that they should neither make nor execute laws except in conformity with the equity of the Divine mind. On the other hand, we have constantly besought citizens who were conspicuous by genius, industry, family, or fortune, to join together in common counsel and action to safeguard and to promote whatever would tend to the strength and well-being of the community. Only too many causes are at work, in the present condition of things, to loosen the bonds of public order, and to withdraw the people from sound principles of life and conduct.

4. There are three influences which appear to Us to have the chief place in effecting this downgrade movement of society. These are -- first, the distaste for a simple and laborious life; secondly, repugnance to suffering of any kind; thirdly, the forgetfulness of the future life.

5. We deplore -- and those who judge of all things merely by the light and according to the standard of nature join with Us in deploring-that society is threatened with a serious danger in the growing contempt of those homely duties and virtues which make up the beauty of humble life. To this cause we may trace in the home, the readiness of children to withdraw themselves from the natural obligation of obedience to the parents, and their impatience of any form of treatment which is not of the indulgent and effeminate kind. In the workman, it evinces itself in a tendency to desert his trade, to shrink from toil, to become discontented with his lot, to fix his gaze on things that are above him, and to look forward with unthinking hopefulness to some future equalization of property. We may observe the same temper permeating the masses in the eagerness to exchange the life of the rural districts for the excitements and pleasures of the town. Thus the equilibrium between the classes of the community is being destroyed, everything becomes unsettled, men's minds become a prey to jealousy and heart-burnings, rights are openly trampled under foot, and, finally, the people, betrayed in their expectations, attack public order, and place themselves in conflict with those who are charged to maintain it.

6. For evils such as these let us seek a remedy in the Rosary, which consists in a fixed order of prayer combined with devout meditation on the life of Christ and His Blessed Mother. Here, if the joyful mysteries be but clearly brought home to the minds of the people, an object lesson of the chief virtues is placed before their eyes. Each one will thus be able to see for himself how easy, how abundant, how sweetly attractive are the lessons to be found therein for the leading of an honest life. Let us take our stand in front of that earthly and divine home of holiness, the House of Nazareth. How much we have to learn from the daily life which was led within its wallsWhat an all-perfect model of domestic society! Here we behold simplicity and purity of conduct, perfect agreement and unbroken harmony, mutual respect and love -- not of the false and fleeting kind -- but that which finds both its life and its charm in devotedness of service. Here is the patient industry which provides what is required for food and raiment; which does so "in the sweat of the brow," which is contented with little, and which seeks rather to diminish the number of its wants than to multiply the sources of its wealth. Better than all, we find there that supreme peace of mind and gladness of soul which never fail to accompany the possession of a tranquil conscience. These are precious examples of goodness, of modesty, of humility, of hard-working endurance, of kindness to others, of diligence in the small duties of daily life, and of other virtues, and once they have made their influence felt they gradually take root in the soul, and in course of time fail not to bring about a happy change of mind and conduct. Then will each one begin to feel his work to be no longer lowly and irksome, but grateful and lightsome, and clothed with a certain joyousness by his sense of duty in discharging it conscientiously. Then will gentler manners everywhere prevail; home-life will be loved and esteemed, and the relations of man with man will be loved and esteemed, and the relations of man with man will be hallowed by a larger infusion of respect and charity. And if this betterment should go forth from the individual to the family and to the communities, and thence to the people at large so that human life should be lifted up to this standard, no one will fail to feel how great and lasting indeed would be the gain which would be achieved for society.

7. A second evil, one which is specially pernicious, and one which, owing to the increasing mischief which it works among souls, we can never sufficiently deplore, is to be found in repugnance to suffering and eagerness to escape whatever is hard or painful to endure. The greater number are thus robbed of that peace and freedom of mind which remains the reward of those who do what is right undismayed by the perils or troubles to be met with in doing so. Rather do they dream of a chimeric civilization in which all that is unpleasant shall be removed, and all that is pleasant shall be supplied. By this passionate and unbridled desire of living a life of pleasure, the minds of men are weakened, and if they do not entirely succumb, they become demoralized and miserably cower and sink under the hardships of the battle of life.

8. In such a contest example is everything, and a powerful means of renewing our courage will undoubtedly be found in the Holy Rosary, if from our earliest years our minds have been trained to dwell upon the sorrowful mysteries of Our Lord's life, and to drink in their meaning by sweet and silent meditation. In them we shall learn how Christ, "the Author and Finisher of Our faith," began "to do and teach," in order that we might see written in His example all the lessons that He Himself had taught us for the bearing of our burden of labor -- and sorrow, and mark how the sufferings which were hardest to bear were those which He embraced with the greatest measure of generosity and good will. We behold Him overwhelmed with sadness, so that drops of blood ooze like sweat from His veins. We see Him bound like a malefactor, subjected to the judgment of the unrighteous, laden with insults, covered with shame, assailed with false accusations, torn with scourges, crowned with thorns, nailed to the cross, accounted unworthy to live, and condemned by the voice of the multitude as deserving of death. Here, too, we contemplate the grief of the most Holy Mother, whose soul was not merely wounded but "pierced" by the sword of sorrow, so that she might be named and become in truth "the Mother of Sorrows." Witnessing these examples of fortitude, not with sight but by faith, who is there who will not feel his heart grow warm with the desire of imitating them?

9. Then, be it that the "earth is accursed" and brings forth "thistles and thorns," -- be it that the soul is saddened with grief and the body with sickness; even so, there will be no evil which the envy of man or the rage of devils can invent, nor calamity which can fall upon the individual or the community, over which we shall not triumph by the patience of suffering. For this reason it has been truly said that "it belongs to the Christian to do and to endure great things," for he who deserves to be called a Christian must not shrink from following in the footsteps of Christ. But by this patience, We do not mean that empty stoicism in the enduring of pain which was the ideal of some of the philosophers of old, but rather do We mean that patience which is learned from the example of Him, who "having joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame" (Heb. xvi., 2). It is the patience which is obtained by the help of His grace; which shirks not a trial because it is painful, but which accepts it and esteems it as a gain, however hard it may be to undergo. The Catholic Church has always had, and happily still has, multitudes of men and women, in every rank and condition of life, who are glorious disciples of this teaching, and who, following faithfully in the path of Christ, suffer injury and hardship for the cause of virtue and religion. They reecho, not with their lips, but with their life, the words of St. Thomas: "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John xi., 16).

10. May such types of admirable constancy be more and more splendidly multiplied in our midst to the weal of society and to the glory and edification of the Church of God!

11. The third evil for which a remedy is needed is one which is chiefly characteristic of the times in which we live. Men in former ages, although they loved the world, and loved it far too well, did not usually aggravate their sinful attachment to the things of earth by a contempt of the things of heaven. Even the right-thinking portion of the pagan world recognized that this life was not a home but a dwelling-place, not our destination, but a stage in the journey. But men of our day, albeit they have had the advantages of Christian instruction, pursue the false goods of this world in such wise that the thought of their true Fatherland of enduring happiness is not only set aside, but, to their shame be it said, banished and entirely erased from their memory, notwithstanding the warning of St. Paul, "We have not here a lasting city, but we seek one which is to come" (Heb. xiii., 4).

12. When We seek out the causes of this forgetfulness, We are met in the first place by the fact that many allow themselves to believe that the thought of a future life goes in some way to sap the love of our country, and thus militates against the prosperity of the commonwealth. No illusion could be more foolish or hateful. Our future hope is not of a kind which so monopolizes the minds of men as to withdraw their attention from the interests of this life. Christ commands us, it is true, to seek the Kingdom of God, and in the first place, but not in such a manner as to neglect all things else. For, the use of the goods of the present life, and the righteous enjoyment which they furnish, may serve both to strengthen virtue and to reward it. The splendor and beauty of our earthly habitation, by which human society is ennobled, may mirror the splendor and beauty of our dwelling which is above. Therein we see nothing that is not worthy of the reason of man and of the wisdom of God. For the same God who is the Author of Nature is the Author of Grace, and He willed not that one should collide or conflict with the other, but that they should act in friendly alliance, so that under the leadership of both we may the more easily arrive at that immortal happiness for which we mortal men were created.

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.

16. These considerations will explain what We have already laid down concerning the fruitful advantages which are to be derived from the use of the Rosary, and the healing power which this devotion possesses for the evils of the age and the fatal sores of society. These advantages, as we may readily conceive, will be secured in a higher and fuller measure by those who band themselves together in the sacred Confraternity of the Rosary, and who are thus more than others united by a special and brotherly bond of devotion to the Most Holy Virgin. In this Confraternity, approved by the Roman Pontiffs, and enriched by them with indulgences and privileges, they possess their own rule and government, hold their meetings at stated times, and are provided with ample means of leading a holy life and of laboring for the good of the community. They are, are so to speak, the battalions who fight the battle of Christ, armed with His Sacred Mysteries, and under the banner and guidance of the Heavenly Queen. How faithfully her intercession is exercised in response to their prayers, processions, and solemnities is written in the whole experience of the Church not less than in the splendor of the victory of Lepanto. (Pope Leo XIII, Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893.)