Living Under the Adversary's Rules

If any man can be regarded as the Father of the American Church, it is John Carroll of Maryland. Bearer of a respected American name, ordained in a Society which had planted the faith on the shores of the Chesapeake, he took charge of the infant Church as naturally and firmly as a man bringing order to his own household. To the handful of ex-Jesuits demoralized by the suppression of their order he brought inspiration and direction, while guiding the Church from the Penal Age and into the sunlight of religious freedom. John Carroll organized the American Church. Under him, its diverse and disparate elements were unified, and by his establishment of a seminary and schools, its future was assured.

Although his administrative ability was indeed great, coming at a time when it was most needed, his insights into the American character may have been even of more value to the Church. He realized that in the matter of religion the genius of the new American political system was the separation of church and state. His writings and his speeches are full of encomiums not on behalf of toleration, for that presumes an established church, but for complete religious freedom. It may be that, like the Calverts before him, this attitude was born of expediency; that Catholicism had more to gain from religious freedom than any other American creed. True enough, but so also did the Founding Fathers of the United States have the most to gain from independence.

So it was John Carroll who gave the American Church, this congeries of European races forever in conflict over tastes and customs, yet joined together in the unity of the One Faith, its peculiar American stamp. Most astonishing, he foresaw its future, "To dissipate justice," he said in 1785, "time will be our best aid, as also will divine Providence and the experience of our fellow citizens in our devotion to our country and its independence." (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday and Company, pp. 88-89.)

There is a lot of truth contained in the three paragraphs cited above from the late Robert Leckie's American and Catholic, but not that intended by Mr. Leckie or by the man he praised so much, Archbishop John Carroll, who became the first bishop of the United States of America when he was consecrated on August 15, 1790, by Bishop Charles Walmseley, O.S.B., in Lulworth Castle, Dorsetshire, England. There is, I should say (apologies to Ralph McPherson Kiner for using this phrase that he repeated so much in the early days of broadcasting games for the New York Mets in the 1960s), a lot of unintended truth in the three paragraphs cited above.

Archbishop John Carroll did assure the future of the Catholic Church in the United States of America by his embrace of "religious freedom." Carroll's embrace of "religious freedom" in the belief that the civil rights of individual Catholics and the institutional rights of Holy Mother Church was erroneous as "religious freedom" for one is "religious freedom" for all. Lacking an ultimate arbiter ordained by God to resolve disputes between Church and State that were bound to emerge over the course of time as such disputes occurred frequently even during the period of Christendom itself.

Carroll, presaging the giddy optimism of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII concerning the need for an "opening to the world" (Roncalli/John XXIII's much vaunted "updating" or, in Italian, aggiornamento), could not foresee areas of conflict between Church and State in the framework of the "genius" of Constitution of the United States of America. Archbishop Carroll truly believed that the Catholic Church, though she might have suffer persecution from individual Protestants and unbelievers and in states where the roots of "religious liberty" had not yet taken root, would be respected by officials of the Federal government to carry out her apostolic duties without interference.

Quite instead, of course, religious liberty and separation of Church and State, both of which Carroll thought were guarantees of the life of the Church in the United States of America, opened the doors wide to the persecution that the current administration of Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus is waging against what he thinks are the true officials and institutions and agencies of the Catholic Church. Carroll's naive trust and full-throated endorsement of these twin errors came despite the fact that it was within his own lifetime that the first two of the papal condemnations of them were pronounced. Those pronouncements did not matter to him. The United States of America was "different." It was "special." It was "exceptional." The "good" and "tolerant" Protestants and Freemasons and others who just wanted to "live together" as Americans would never seek to the double-edged sword of "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" against the Catholic Church, right?

Wrong:

"Man should use his reason first of all to recognize his Sovereign Maker, honoring Him and admiring Him, and submitting his entire person to Him. For, from his childhood, he should be submissive to those who are superior to him in age; he should be governed and instructed by their lessons, order his life according to their laws of reason, society and religion. This inflated equality and liberty, therefore, are for him, from the moment he is born, no more than imaginary dreams and senseless words." (Pope Pius VI, Brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791; Religious Liberty, a “Monstrous Right").

The Catholic Church: For how can We tolerate with equanimity that the Catholic religion, which France received in the first ages of the Church, which was confirmed in that very kingdom by the blood of so many most valiant martyrs, which by far the greatest part of the French race professes, and indeed bravely and constantly defended even among the most grave adversities and persecutions and dangers of recent years, and which, finally, that very dynasty to which the designated king belongs both professes and has defended with much zeal - that this Catholic, this most holy religion, We say, should not only not be declared to be the only one in the whole of France supported by the bulwark of the laws and by the authority of the Government, but should even, in the very restoration of the monarchy, be entirely passed over? But a much more grave, and indeed very bitter, sorrow increased in Our heart - a sorrow by which We confess that We were crushed, overwhelmed and torn in two - from the twenty-second article of the constitution in which We saw, not only that "liberty of religion and of conscience" (to use the same words found in the article) were permitted by the force of the constitution, but also that assistance and patronage were promised both to this liberty and also to the ministers of these different forms of "religion". There is certainly no need of many words, in addressing you, to make you fully recognize by how lethal a wound the Catholic religion in France is struck by this article. For when the liberty of all "religions" is indiscriminately asserted, by this very fact truth is confounded with error and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, the Church, outside of which there can be no salvation, is set on a par with the sects of heretics and with Judaic perfidy itself. For when favour and patronage is promised even to the sects of heretics and their ministers, not only their persons, but also their very errors, are tolerated and fostered: a system of errors in which is contained that fatal and never sufficiently to be deplored HERESY which, as St. Augustine says (de Haeresibus, no.72), "asserts that all heretics proceed correctly and tell the truth: which is so absurd that it seems incredible to me." (Pope Pius VII, Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814, POST TAM DIUTURNAS)

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

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

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling." (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

Archbishop John Carroll believed that, far from being a threat to the life of the Catholic Church and the rights of her children, "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" were novel legal protections that should serve as the model for all nations in the "civilized" world. This is also, of course, the oft-stated belief of the fatigued and fatiguing apostate in Rome, Antipope Emeritus Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI:

In the 19th century under Pius IX, the clash between the Church's faith and a radical liberalism and the natural sciences, which also claimed to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make the "hypothesis of God" superfluous, had elicited from the Church a bitter and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age. Thus, it seemed that there was no longer any milieu open to a positive and fruitful understanding, and the rejection by those who felt they were the representatives of the modern era was also drastic.

In the meantime, however, the modern age had also experienced developments. People came to realize that the American Revolution was offering a model of a modern State that differed from the theoretical model with radical tendencies that had emerged during the second phase of the French Revolution. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

John Carroll also believed that the American Revolution provided for the "modern" civil state that was indeed different from that of the French Revolution even though the truth of the matter is that both "models" were premised upon the rejection of the belief that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. The consequences of the American Revolution ate away at the integrity of the Catholic Faith over the course of time, producing an insidious, heresy, Americanism, that became the foundation of the false conciliar church's world view. The French Revolution was a direct and violent assault upon the Faith as the Cross of the Divine Redeemer had been implanted deeply into the soil of France for nearly sixteen hundred years. The devil had to attack the Faith in France directly, whereas it was not necessary to do so in the United States of America as he knew that Catholics would be lured into a false sense of "security" and "acceptance" over the course of time that would lead them to view the Church through the eyes of "democracy" and "rights" and "liberty" and "equality" rather than through the supernatural eyes provided by the Holy Faith.

Alas, it was only a matter of time before the Jacobins and Bolsheviks gained elected office in a land such complete "liberty" that error is considered to have more "rights" than the immutable truths of the true Faith. It was only a matter of time before civil rulers would say, "Our desire to protect the 'rights' of a 'persecuted minority' trumps religious freedom." It was only a matter of time before the men who all but a handful of warring Catholics, many of whom project their so-called "traditional movement" to be something big and consequential when it is so microscopically small and inconsequential that almost no one but no one outside of the rubber room of traditionalism knows anything about the "movement," believe are the Catholic bishops of the United States of America would be faced with one rear-guard effort after another to defend what little of Faith and Morals remain in the conciliar church.

These points have been made repeatedly on this site. However, they are important to stress repeatedly as we are immersed in a world of such pervasive naturalism that even well-meaning Catholics who are concerned about the temporal good of the country and the legitimate rights of Holy Mother Church get so caught up in the emotions of the prevailing moment that they are prone, at least now and again, to believe that statements made by various figures of Judeo-Masonic naturalism, especially President Donald John Trump at the present time as concerns the Executive Order on religious liberty he issued on Thursday, May 4, 2017, the transferred Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross and the Commemoration of Saint Monica, represent something to celebrate. They do not.

President Trump’s executive order, which will be challenged in the Federal courts, is premised upon the belief that “religious liberty” is a good in and of itself. It is not. It is evil as it is the very means by which the devil has been able to foment the seeds of error and confusion in the souls of men and thus in the laws and mores of modern nations, including its very birthplace, the United States of America.

This evil is further compounded by the fact that the adversary intended to use religious to entice the small number of Catholics living in the newly independent United States of America to have gratitude for being free to practice their religion openly without fear of state-sponsored persecution without realizing that it is impossible to prevent false religion from spreading their falsehoods. Practical atheism is what must result when the true religion, Catholicism, is not favored with the patronage of the civil state and is thus rendered to a plane of equality with false religions.

Pope Leo XIII made this point very explicitly in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

That is, no matter the impossibility of having created a Catholic state in 1776 and 1787, the fact remains that the premise of a religiously neutral civil state is false in and of itself and leads inevitably to the triumph of practical atheism over the course of time. Superstition and myth must take the place of the true religion in the lives of men and their nations when the true religion instituted by Christ the King Himself is ignored and despised as belonging to the age of the Crusades, which produced such great and valorous Catholic heroes who fought against the rutheless Mohammedans, and “The Inquisition,” whose "abuses" were denounced by a man whose life has been filled by as much licentiousness as the current president's, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, at the so-called "National Prayer Breakfast" on February 5, 2015 (see Caeasr Obamus Ignoramus Shows His Ignorance Once Again). I mean, Obama/Soetoro, who has contempt for his successor's intelligence and grasp of history, is actually much more ignorant than is Trump, and that is making quite a statement.

It is therefore impossible to use the devil’s very tool, religious liberty, to protect those who believe in the true religion and in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law from the evil consequences that must flow from that very same devil’s tool.

President Donald John Trump does not realize this. Then again, he is the product of American “religious liberty” and unbridled “freedom of speech” and “freedom of conscience.” It is truly laughable for a man who celebrates the “rights” of what he calls the “LGBTQ” community in numerous ways, including keeping Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro’s own 2014 Executive Order that sought to prevent “workplace discrimination” against those engaged in unspeakable acts of perversity in violation of the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

Trump is an “open minded” man who wants to help those who were persecuted by the minions of the Obama administration. Unfortunately for him, however, he is as much a product of the errors spread by “religious liberty” as his statist predecessor, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro. A nation founded on the anti-Incarnational errors of Protestant rationalism and Judeo-Masonic naturalism winds up producing various sets of false opposites who take their own respective turns in the naturalist sandbox known as the White House making and breaking their predecessors’ actions without realizing that everything they say and do is written in the sand of the uncertainty of a system that refuses to acknowledge Christ the King and the authority of His true Church.

The cauldron of confusion is such that Ryan Anderson, a Catholic in the conciliar structures who is enamored of religious liberty and works with the Heritage Foundation, which is heavily funded by a Talmudic family, the Mercers, believes that more Congressional legislation is needed to protect the very thing that has made it impossible for those who are opposed to various moral evils, especially those being promoted by sodomites and mutants, to conduct certain businesses (catering establishments, bakeries, floral shops, videographers and photographers), namely, religious liberty! (See Congress Must Act to Strengthen Trump's Executive Order on Religious Liberty.)

This is of the essence of Lockean liberalism, which contends that human beings can ameliorate social problems by the creation of structures that are sanctioned by a majority of “reasonable” men. Those structures are subject to repeal or revision whenever the original majority or some subsequent majority of “reasonable men” decide to do so. Everything depends upon “man,” not upon the true God of Divine Revelation and the authority of His true Church. In this instance, therefore, we are supposed to accept the premise that a heretical proposition is a human “birthright” and that we simply need to have a greater freedom to exercise this “birthright” in order to protect us from abuses that are its inevitable consequences. This is absurd. Absurdity, though, is what pass for “normal” in a world where the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ has been overthrown by the “reign of man,” which is nothing other than a deception of the devil by whose tempting man acts as though he is God.

“Religious liberty” is thus the precise means used by the adversary to create the conditions whereby Catholics are expected to be “grateful” to practice their Faith without complaining about the fact that others, including atheists and outright Satanists, share that same “freedom.”

Moreover, the definition of what constitutes “religious liberty” is subject to the arbitrary whims of whoever happens to be in power at a given point in time. Nothing can be stable or secure in world created by the rationalism of Protestantism that had to give way in due course to the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry.

It is with this in mind that one must view President Donald John Trump’s executive order of May 4, 2017, as little more than a reaffirmation of a general statement of principles that can be changed at the whim of some future administration absent the enactment of various acts by Congress that could make the President’s desired protections harder to change.

Here are the provisions of the executive order on “religious liberty”:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to guide the executive branch in formulating and implementing policies with implications for the religious liberty of persons and organizations in America, and to further compliance with the Constitution and with applicable statutes and Presidential Directives, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Policy.  It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce Federal law's robust protections for religious freedom.  The Founders envisioned a Nation in which religious voices and views were integral to a vibrant public square, and in which religious people and institutions were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by the Federal Government.  For that reason, the United States Constitution enshrines and protects the fundamental right to religious liberty as Americans' first freedom.  Federal law protects the freedom of Americans and their organizations to exercise religion and participate fully in civic life without undue interference by the Federal Government.  The executive branch will honor and enforce those protections. (Presidential Executive Odrer Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.)

Brief Comment Number One: Herein lies exposed one of the many fatal flaws of the Constitution of the United States of American, namely, that it is good for there to be a multiplicity of “religions” competing in the “public square.” It is not.

Many, although not all, of the founders were deists who did not believe in a living God, no less the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, who wanted “religious freedom” as a means to appease “believers” while they spread irreligion. Some. Such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were not at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (May 25, 1787 to September 17, 2017, but who served, respectively, as the first and second vice presidents and as the second and third presidents. 

The true intentions of what these hideous anti-Catholic bigots thought of religious faith in general and in the Incarnation of Our Lord in particular were spelled out in their own words at the end of the Eighteenth Century and in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century:

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. (President John Adams: "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787-1788)

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594).

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."—James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr„ April I, 1774

". . . Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."—James Madison, spoken at the Virginia convention on ratification of the Constitution, June 1778

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."—-James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance," addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December, 1813.)

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death. This letter is quoted in its entirety in Dr. Paul Peterson’s now out-of-print Readings in American Democracy. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1979, pp. 28-29. )

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

As noted above, John Adams was the first vice president and second president of the United States of America.

James Madison was the secretary of the Constitutional Convention, which met from May 25, 1787, to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (and it is in that capacity that he is considered to be the “Father of the Constitution”), and the fourth president of the United States of America after having served as Jefferson's Secretary of State.

Jefferson’s letter to Roger Weightman, written just ten days before his death on July 4, 1826, precisely fifty years to the day after the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence (a date of death his shared with his one-time friend turned adversary and then friend again, John Adams), demonstrates clearly this wretched naturalist’s hope for a world freed from the shackles of what he believed to be “monkish superstition.” It is generally not a good thing to go before Christ the King at the moment of one’s Particular Judgment after having written about “monkish superstition.”

It is clear that some of the leading founders wanted irreligion to triumph over the supposed superstitions of the true Faith as men became used to the "new ways" of a democratic republic and the "protections" afforded to "free thinkers" by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Absent the uniting force represented by the true Faith, men must fall into a veritable "Tower of Babel" of false beliefs and ideas as being of equal value to the truth, which must be relativized at all times according to the "needs" of the "people."

The second part of the Trump executive order on "free speech" and "religious liberty" hereby follows:

Sec. 2.  Respecting Religious and Political Speech.  All executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall, to the greatest extent practicable and to the extent permitted by law, respect and protect the freedom of persons and organizations to engage in religious and political speech.  In particular, the Secretary of the Treasury shall ensure, to the extent permitted by law, that the Department of the Treasury does not take any adverse action against any individual, house of worship, or other religious organization on the basis that such individual or organization speaks or has spoken about moral or political issues from a religious perspective, where speech of similar character has, consistent with law, not ordinarily been treated as participation or intervention in a political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) a candidate for public office by the Department of the Treasury.  As used in this section, the term "adverse action" means the imposition of any tax or tax penalty; the delay or denial of tax-exempt status; the disallowance of tax deductions for contributions made to entities exempted from taxation under section 501(c)(3) of title 26, United States Code; or any other action that makes unavailable or denies any tax deduction, exemption, credit, or benefit. (Presidential Executiuve Order Promotinf Free Speech and Religious Liberty.)

Brief Comment Number Two:

This is an effort by President Donald John Trump to do an executive “end run” around the “Johnson Amendment, July 2, 1954, that was attached to a general revision of the tax code under the administration of President Dwight David Eisenhower.

United States Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas), who was the Senate Minority Leader at the time, desired to muzzle tax-exempt conservative and anti-Communist organizations who were distributing handbills and other publications against him in his bid to be re-elected for a second term as a United States senator from the State of Texas. The amendment attracted little attention and thus was not in the least controversial at the time. However, the crafty, amoral Johnson was able to use the tax code to bludgeon political opponents.

Since that time, of course, there has been much hypocrisy over the enforcement of the Johnson Amendment in the past nearly sixty-three years.

Various personages from the false opposite of the naturalist “left” have threatened repeatedly to remove the Catholic Church’s tax-exempt status as a result of anti-abortion preaching, which was especially strong in some conciliar-held parishes during the false “pontificate” of Karol Josef Wojtyla/Joh Paul II in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fearful that such threats would come true, the statist apparatchiks who were employed by the then-named National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) in the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) helped to devise a policy whereby pastors were instructed to explain to the laity not to be “single issue” voters. This was to make it possible for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion statists who took the supposedly “correct” view on matters of “social justice” (socialism, that is) and pacifism and to denigrate the importance of the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn under the cover of the civil law without any qualm of conscience. This was at a time when the conciliar “pope,” Wojtyla/John Paul II, was outspoken in his opposition to abortion, albeit couched in conciliarspeak terms of “human dignity” and “human rights.”

Obviously, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has ended all such controversy now as he has embraced all manner of pro-abortion, pro-perversity public officials while leaving it to his “bishops” to punish priests and presbyters who use the pulpit to speak out about the horrors of abortion and sodomy. Such priests and presbyters, Bergoglio and his minions believe, are not being “merciful” in their refusal to “accompany” women who have had to make “difficult” decisions and to those who live in “irregular situations” that are nevertheless said to have “elements” of “true marriage.”

It was, though, during the Wojtyla/John Paul II era in the 1990s at a time when some conciliar “bishops” and many priests and presbyters were expressing opposition to the anti-life, anti-family policies of the administration of President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., that I wrote an article for The Wanderer to explain that the Johnson Amendment is unconstitutional on its face.

Why is this so?

Ah, I have a most inquisitive readership.

This is so because, as a matter of pure constitutional law, the First Amendment guarantees the right of the free exercise of religion, which is an implicit recognition that religious institutions have a right to exist. As such, therefore, these institutions are not created by the Constitution of the United States of America, they are merely recognized as having the “freedom” to exist and that Congress cannot interfere with their free exercise.

This is so because of argument advanced by Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, March 6, 1819, which dealt with the unconstitutionality of a transactions tax imposed by the State of Maryland upon the Baltimore, Maryland, branch bank of the Second Bank of the United States of America. Marshall argued that the Constitution of the United States of America was created by the “people,” not by the state governments (a proposition that is quite debatable). Therefore, according to Marshall, no state government could tax any agency of the Federal government as it has no authority to tax what it did not create. Marshall explained as follows:

That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create; that there is a plain repugnance in conferring on one Government a power to control the constitutional measures of another, which other, with respect to those very measures, is declared to be supreme over that which exerts the control, are propositions not to be denied. But all inconsistencies are to be reconciled by the magic of the word CONFIDENCE. Taxation, it is said, does not necessarily and unavoidably destroy. To carry it to the excess of destruction would be an abuse, to presume which would banish that confidence which is essential to all Government.

But is this a case of confidence? Would the people of any one State trust those of another with a power to control the most insignificant operations of their State Government? We know they would not. Why, then, should we suppose that the people of any one State should be willing to trust those of another with a power to control the operations of a Government to which they have confided their most important and most valuable interests? In the Legislature of the Union alone are all represented. The Legislature of the Union alone, therefore, can be trusted by the people with the power of controlling measures which concern all, in the confidence that it will not be abused. This, then, is not a case of confidence, and we must consider it is as it really is.

If we apply the principle for which the State of Maryland contends, to the Constitution generally, we shall find it capable of changing totally the character of that instrument. We shall find it capable of arresting all the measures of the Government, and of prostrating it at the foot of the States. The American people have declared their Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof to be supreme, but this principle would transfer the supremacy, in fact, to the States. (McCulloch v. Maryland, March 6, 1819.) 

All right.

As religious institutions are recognized by the First Amendment as having a right to exist, it stands to reason, therefore, that they are inherently tax-exempt as the power to tax is the power to destroy. To seek to threaten such institutions with taxation and the possible loss of their very properties for the preaching of their clergy is to say that there are limits to their First Amendment right to “free speech.” Thus it is that the Johnson Amendment is completely unconstitutional as applied to religious institutions.

Just an aside, I sent my Wanderer piece to the chief counsel of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose name I do not recall. The gentleman wrote back to say that I had raised an interesting question, but the line of reasoning was never used as the statist minions in the USCC and the “social justice” “bishops” of the NCCB had a vested interest in hiding behind the fear of losing their tax-exempt status in order not to oppose pro-abortion politicians, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who were said to be for the “poor” and for “peace.”          

Mind you, the argument that I made was based solely upon the application of principles enunciated by John Marshall, not an endorsement of the First Amendment and its false “freedoms.” Although I will make each of the necessary distinctions later in this commentary, suffice it to say for the moment that Holy Mother Church permits her children to afford themselves of the legal protections that exist in a particular constitutional framework without conceding the legitimacy of false premises such as “religious liberty” and “separation of Church and State.”

This having been noted, however, the very same members of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” who howled at the moon like ravenous wolves when Catholic priests and presbyters opposed abortion from the pulpit never said a word when pro-abortion public officials and candidates for public office spoke from the pulpits of black “churches,” many of whose ministers have openly endorsed such candidates and have worked in tandem with operatives of the organized crime family of the naturalist “left,” the Democratic Party, to “get out the vote” on election day.

Indeed, we passed by a black “congregationalist” church a few days after the election on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, and saw that the “pastor” there had put the following message on a sign outside of his facility of false worship:

9/11 was America’s worst day. 11/9 was America’s second worst day. (November 9, 2016, is when Madame Defarge, aka Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, conceded the election to Donald John Trump, although she had to be coaxed into doing so by Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro.)

This does not mean that Catholic priests or presbyters should endorse candidates for public office. However, they have an obligation to explain that no one who supports abortion-on-demand is qualified to hold any position of public trust, whether elected or appointed, and they must fulfill this obligation regardless of any threats to their church’s tax-exempt status. After all, the Apostles and martyrs throughout the history of the Catholic Church were willing to give up everything, including their lives, to defend the Holy Faith.

It is therefore quite ironic that the lie of “religious liberty” has been used to silence opposition to moral evils for fear of losing a material benefit that no civil state has any right to confer or to take away. The Catholic Church, the one and only true Church, alone has the right to exist, and she has the right to be supported in her work by the civil state, something that Pope Leo XIII noted in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, and by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1907:

The main factor, no doubt, in bringing things into this happy state were the ordinances and decrees of your synods, especially of those which in more recent times were convened and confirmed by the authority of the Apostolic See. But, moreover (a fact which it gives pleasure to acknowledge), thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority. (Pope Leo XIII, Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895.)

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

The fact that the conditions favorable to a Catholic state do not exist at this time does nothing to detract from the immutability of the Catholic teaching explicated so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X.

Indeed, the fact that the conditions favorable to a Catholic state do not exist at this time is the result of the proliferation of a deliberate, planned attack by the adversary himself upon it by using the combined, interrelated errors of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry to uproot the Holy Cross as the foundation of personal and social order in Europe and to make sure it was not the foundation of such order here in the United States of America.

Father Denis Fahey made this exact point in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

By the grace of the Headship of the Mystical Body, our Lord Jesus Christ is both Priest and King of redeemed mankind and, as such, exercises a twofold influence upon us. Firstly, as a Priest, He communicates to us the supernatural life of grace by which we, while ever remaining distinct from God, can enter into the vision and love of the Blessed Trinity. We can thus become one with God, not, of course, in the order of substance or being, but in the order of operation, of the immaterial union of vision and love. The Divine Nature is the principle of the Divine Vision and Love, and by grace we are ‘made partakers of the Divine Nature.’ This pure Catholic doctrine is infinitely removed from Masonic pantheism. Secondly, as King, our Lord exercises an exterior influence on us by His government of us. As King, He guides and directs us socially and individually, in order to dispose all things for the reception of the Supernatural Life which He, as Priest, confers.

Society had been organized in the thirteenth century and even down to the sixteenth, under the banner of Christ the King. Thus, in spite of deficiencies and imperfections, man’s divinization, through the Life that comes from the sacred Humanity of Jesus, was socially favoured. Modern society, under the influence of Satan, was to be organized on the opposite principle, namely, that human nature is of itself divine, that man is God, and, therefore, subject to nobody. Accordingly, when the favourable moment had arrived, the Masonic divnization of human nature found its expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789The French Revolution ushered in the struggle for the complete organization of the world around the new divinity–Humanity. In God’s plan, the whole organization of a country is meant to aid the development of a country is meant to aid the development of the true personality of the citizens through the Mystical Body of Christ. Accordingly, the achievement of true liberty for a country means the removal of obstacles to the organized social acceptance of the Divine Plan. Every revolution since 1789 tends, on the contrary, to the rejection of that plan, and therefore to the enthronement of man in the place of God. The freedom at which the spirit of the revolution aims is that absolute independence which refuses submission to any and every order. It is the spirit breathed by the temptation of the serpent: ‘For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened; and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ Man decided then that he would himself lay down the order of good and evil in the place of God; then and now it is the same attitude. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 27.)   

The era of modernity has given us the likes of men who hated Christ the King such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, each of whom helped to plant the seeds for the triumph of the deification of “man” and his “rights.” The degeneration has been such that we are now governed by various shades of statists who do not believe that it is necessary to govern according to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted to the Catholic Church for their authoritative explication.

One must keep in mind that Donald John Trump knows nothing about the truths of Divine Revelation. He knows even less than nothing about genuine Catholic social teaching concerning the nature of the civil state and its obligations to the true religion. He thinks that it is the job of men and women he believes to be “pastors” (his own “pastor” in Florida is a woman) to preach about politics from the pulpit. The second part of his executive order on “free speech and religious liberty” is thus about making it more possible for the evangelical “pastors” who supported him from the pulpit last year to operate without fear of losing their tax-exempt status. As he sees it, Trump is simply leveling the playing field to indemnify the “pastors” who supported him just as the Democrats have long scoffed at the application of the Johnson Amendment to “pastors,” especially those of historically black churches. In other words, Trump is providing “payback” to those who supported him.

Trump is essentially telling the United States Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service to ignore the Johnson Amendment in all cases, not only in those involving open clerical support from the pulpit for members of the organized crime family of the naturalist “left.”

Trump’s executive order, however, will not affect the operation of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in this country at a time when Jorge Mario Bergoglio is more concerned about the “rights” of Mohammedan “refugees” and “climate change” than he is about Catholic Faith and Morals. Well, obviously, Jorge’s only concern about Catholic Faith and Morals is to deride, demean and undermine everything taught by the Catholic Church during its over nineteen hundred year “captivity” prior to the “uncaging” of the “holy spirit” at the “Second” Vatican Council. The false “pontiff” is making sure that to cement his derisive view of the Catholic Faith by appointing “bishops” around the world, including here in the United States of America who are Jacobins/Bolsheviks after his own apostate heart.

Alas, this entire business is but the result of the false premises of the American founding, and what Trump does now will undone later if God does not intervene before then to put an end to the present madness by the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and his fulfillment of Our Lady’s Fatima Message

It is time now to examine the third part of President Trump’s executive order, which deals with protecting the consciences of those who object to the contraception mandate, termed euphemistically as the “preventive-care mandate”:

Sec. 3.  Conscience Protections with Respect to Preventive-Care Mandate.  The Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall consider issuing amended regulations, consistent with applicable law, to address conscience-based objections to the preventive-care mandate promulgated under section 300gg-13(a)(4) of title 42, United States Code.

Brief Comment Number Three:

Although this is seen as a victory for the Little Sisters of the Poor, several of whose members were present in the Rose Garden at the White House six days ago for the signing of the executive order, accompanied by the reprobate who masquerades as the conciliar “archbishop” of Washington, District of Columbia, Donald Wuerl, the reality is much more complex.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America unanimously (8-0) voted in the case Zubik v. Burwell, May 23, 2016, to remand (send back) the issues presented before the Court by the Little Sisters of the Poor (and other petitioners in a combination of six other cases) to the respective United States Circuit Courts of Appeals for an “acceptable” resolution that respects the “free exercise of religion” while at the same time provides contraceptives to female employees in accord with the “contraception mandate.” In other words, the Court, issuing a per curiam (by the order of the court), was telling the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religiously affiliated organizations to get a third party provider to cover the cost of health insurance for contraceptives and other “family planning services” without their doing so directly.

Moreover, it was only on April 25, 2017, that the United States Department of Justice filed notice with the Fifth United States Circuit Court of Appeals that it was going to continue its court battle with East Texas Baptist University, Marshall, Texas, and other religiously affiliated organizations to work out a solution that respects religious beliefs on the one hand and the “contraceptive mandate” on the other. Trump’s executive order came just nine days after the Justice Department had filed the notice with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mind-boggling.

The provision of Trump’s executive order concerning the “preventive care mandate” is simply a restatement of what had been decided by the Supreme Court in the case of Zubik v. Burwell. Although Dr. Thomas Edmunds Price, the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, is directed by Trump’s executive order to “consider issuing amended regulations, consistent with applicable law, to address conscience-based objections to the preventive-care mandate promulgated” by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there is nothing in the order that suggests any repeal of the contraception mandate itself.

The Little Sisters of the Poor will not to have face the monstrous, crippling fines with which they had faced by the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro. This is very good. However, the fact that the repeal of the entire contraception mandate is not on Trump administration’s “to do” list is entirely unsurprising, something that I discussed last week in It's Still "Wait Until Next Time" for the Innocent Preborn. It is also not on the “to do” list of the Republican Party’s congressional leadership, which has made its peace with an unconstitutional program that has transferred control of health insurance to the Federal government. 

ObamaCare is here to stay, and so is the contraception mandate. Such insanity is the result of the very falsehoods of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of religion” that were designed by the devil and his minions to make it possible for licentiousness to triumph over the course of time as a human “right” that is beyond question.

The other three provisions of President Trump’s executive order on free speech and religious liberty deal with procedural matters authorizing the Attorney General of the United States of America, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, to issue guidance interpretation “religious liberty protections in Federal law” (Section Four) and boilerplate language in Sections Five to state that the invalidating of one part of the executive order shall not affect the other parts. Section Six outlined various procedures to maintain the authority of various department heads and the director of the Office of Management and the Budget.

We have reached such a level of absurdity as a result of the anti-Incarnational, naturalistic and Pelgian errors of the founding of the first religiously indifferentist state in the history of mankind, the United States of America, that the very thing that helped to produce the mess that we find ourselves in now is said to be the solution to the mess. 

From A Toleration of False Principles To Their Embrace and Exaltation

Although it is certainly true that the forces of Protestantism, aided and abetted by Talmudists who desired the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church, let loose the chaos that was exploited by Judeo-Masonic revolutionaries in the past five hundred years, it is also true that the counterfeit church of conciliarism has embraced and celebrated the errors responsible for bringing mankind into the depths of the abyss.

Our true popes saw how Catholics in pluralistic states that had been founded upon the false principles of Modernity were being coopted into viewing the world through the lens of “pluralistic democracy” and egalitarianism rather than through the eyes of the true Faith. Pope Leo XIII, in particular, attempted to make the proper distinctions between the mere toleration of error in those circumstances where Catholics constituted a minority of the population and the embrace of those errors as worthy of praise and emulation universally. 

Pope Leo XIII noted in Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888, that Holy Mother Church will accommodate herself to the concrete realities in which her children find themselves in the modern civil state in order to continue her work of sanctification and instruction. Holy Mother Church, however, never concedesas a matter of principle the false premises of the modern civil state as she seeks to exhort her children to know their obligations to pray and to work for the conversion of their nations to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order:

But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.

And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless license of which We have spoken, they exceed all limits, and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty. And because the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, and the unerring teacher of morals, is forced utterly to reprobate and condemn tolerance of such an abandoned and criminal character, they calumniate her as being wanting in patience and gentleness, and thus fail to see that, in so doing, they impute to her as a fault what is in reality a matter for commendation. But, in spite of all this show of tolerance, it very often happens that, while they profess themselves ready to lavish liberty on all in the greatest profusion, they are utterly intolerant toward the Catholic Church, by refusing to allow her the liberty of being herself free. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)

The heresy of religious liberty, which is at the heart of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, devastates souls, and this heresy blossomed right here in the United States of America and was championed by the likes of James Cardinal Gibbons, the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore from 1877 to 1921, who gave an impassioned defense of religious liberty in the Church of Sancta Maria in Trastevere in Rome, Italy, in 1887, a year before Pope Leo XIII issued Libertas Praestantissimum by way of refuting it.  

A writer for the National Catholic Reporter by the name of Michael Sean Winters commented favorably upon Cardinal Gibbons's speech as a precursor to the "Second" Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae, December 7, 1965, which indeed it was:

Pope Pius IX’s 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura, which included the promulgation of the Syllabus of Errors, began as a reply to a speech by Charles de Montalembert calling for the reconciliation of the church with democracy. Montalembert titled his speech “A Free Church in a Free State.” None could question the religious devotion of this noble Frenchman, but the pope saw nothing but ruin coming from the French Revolution and its progeny. Pope Leo XIII declared in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei that the church was not committed to any particular form of government and that she could work with all, but he also went on to condemn freedom of religion and freedom of the press as threats to civil society and true religion.

This, then, was the context for Gibbons’ heroic address at Santa Maria in Trastevere. Despite the condemnations found in papal teaching, he held that the constitutional arrangements in America, specifically the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment, were a blessing to the Catholic church in the United States. In America, liberalism was not anti-clerical, as attested to by the many letters of congratulations Gibbons had received upon his elevation to the Sacred College from non-Catholics. The president of the United States, Grover Cleveland, had received Gibbons at the White House immediately before his departure for Rome.

As Gibbons descended the pulpit in Santa Maria he had set down a marker. “Here was the gauntlet of the benefit of American religious liberty thrown down by the new world to the old, which could not understand it until the Second Vatican Council,” writes Jesuit Fr. Gerald Fogarty. (Freedom and Catholics.)  

What do I keep telling you, huh?

The Modernists are very proud of their "accomplishments." They openly boast about how their ideological forebears paved the way for the "Second" Vatican Council. Thus it is that our current descent into the abyss of Modernity's false premises was enabled by the Americanist bishops before the "Second" Vatican Council, whose own exaltation of those false premises has become the very basis of life and pastoral practice in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Each of the postconciliar "popes" has championed the very falsehoods of separation of Church and State and and religious liberty that were the handiwork of Protestantism and the means by which the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry would become the foundation of civil law and social life to such an extent that even most fully traditional Catholics have permitted themselves to accept uncritically.

The late Dr. Justin Walsh understood James Cardinal Gibbons’s 1887 sermon in the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere for exactly what it was: heresy in the making. Dr. Walsh explained in an article in The Angelus magazine how Pope Leo XIII's Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, was a complete repudiation of the Gibbons view of religious liberty: 

It was clear by 1895 that Americanist views were incompatible with orthodox Catholicism. In the spiritual realm Keane was hell-bent on fostering interdenominational congresses. In the temporal realm Ireland, and to a lesser extent Gibbons, had peculiar penchants for meddling in things better left alone by Churchmen. In such a situation action by Rome was inevitable. It came on January 6 when Leo XIII addressed Longinqua Oceani to American bishops.

The Pope began by noting that the United States had a "good Constitution" and as a result Catholicism was unhindered, protected alike by law and the impartial administration of justice. Nonetheless the Holy Father warned...:

...it would be an error to conclude that America furnishes an example of the ideal condition for the Church or that it is always lawful and expedient that civil and religious affairs should be disjoined and kept apart....

According to the Pope, in a formal letter addressed to all American bishops, it would be an error to say that religious liberty and the separation of Church and State were beneficial to the Catholic Church. In explicit refutation of Gibbons's notion that American liberty caused the Church to "blossom like a rose," the Pope asserted that if the Catholic religion "is safe among you and is even blessed with increase" it was "entirely due to the divine fruitfulness of the Church." He concluded tellingly that "the fruit would be still more abundant if the Church enjoyed not only liberty but the favor of...laws and...protection of the public power."13

Few, if any, heeded the Holy Father's warnings. They redoubled their efforts, with immediately dire consequences for Denis O'Connell and John Keane. O'Connell fell first when, in the summer of 1895, he was removed as rector of the North American College. His cohorts unsuccessfully defended him, although Gibbons did succeed in keeping him in Rome as rector of the Cardinal's titular church. From this vantage point O'Connell became "a kind of liaison officer of the American hierarchy, and more particularly its left wing" until he returned to the US in 1903.14 Catholic liberals claim that "the suppositious liberalism of the Catholic University" was responsible for the dismissal in 1896 of John J. Keane. In fact the liberalism of neither the CUA nor its rector was "suppositious." As the California Volksfreund noted, "It was clear enough from the beginning that Americanism was interwoven with the plan for the...University." This newspaper called instead for something that Keane could never provide: "a Catholic University with Catholic professors [where] the doctrine of the Catholic, and not of an American Church, is taught. (Dr. Justin Walsh, Heresy Blossoms Like a Rose.)

The late Mrs. Solange Hertz, writing in her landmark The Star Spangled Heresy: How the Catholic Church in America became the American Catholic Church, discussed how Pope Pius IX warned the progenitor of Americanism, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, the founder of the Society of Saint Paul (the Paulist Fathers), that Americans were too busy immersed in the pursuit of material wealth, a warning that the proud Americanist could simply not accept as being true as the Church had to made an "accommodation" to the modern world:

In a private audience Pius IX tactfully suggested to him, "The Americans are so engrossed in worldly pursuits and in getting money, and these things are not favorable to religion. It's not I who say this, but our Lord in the Gospel. In the United States there exists a liberty too unrestrained; all the refugees and revolutionaries gather there." Hecker persisted nonetheless in tailoring the Gospel to American vices in order to spread the Faith, while [Bishop John Joseph] Keane [who was born in Ireland and a staunch Americanist] lectured at the Brussels Congress on "the ultimate religion of the future," speaking to all who would listen (and would who would not) of "letting down the bars" and "development of dogma" following on a "grand opening of windows" such as we now have. A great admirer of [German Chancellor and virulently anti-Catholic Otto von) Bismarck, he had the effrontery to toast the enemy of Christianity along with Leo XIII and Gladstone at a banquet in Washington. (Solange Hertz, The Star Spangled Heresy: How the Catholic Church in America became the American Catholic Church, Veritas Press, 1992, p. 151.)

Who wrote about the necessity of "demolition of the bastions," a variation of "letting down the bars"? Um, let me see. Ah, yes, I've got it. I remember now just in the event that you have forgotten:

Does this mean that the Council should be revoked? Certainly not. It means only that the real reception of the Council has not yet even begun. What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it. This becomes clear precisely in the history of the influence of Gaudium et spes. What was identified with the Council was, for the most part, the expression of an attitude that did not coincide with the statements to be found in the text itself, although it is recognizable as a tendency in its development and in some of its individual formulations. The task is not, therefore, to suppress the Council but to discover the real Council and to deepen its true intention in the light of the present experience. That means that there can be no return to the Syllabus, which may have marked the first stage in the confrontation with liberalism and a newly conceived Marxism but cannot be the last stage. In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that the "demolition of the bastions" is a long-overdue task. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 391)

Ratzinger/Benedict's demolition of the bastions, which is being completed by the madman from Argentina, has meant embracing errors by claiming that prior condemnations by our true popes and true general councils had been conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they were pronounced, making it possible to declare them to be "obsolete" at a later time. This is precisely the sort of "development of dogma" that was desired by Bishop John Keane in the late-Nineteenth Century even though such a "development" is actually nothing other than Modernism's own evolution of dogma that has turned truth on its head and made it possible for heretics posing as "popes" and "bishops" to extol the "virtues" of the 

Erroneous principles can never be the foundation of protecting anyone over the course of the long term as they institutionalize falsehood as something acceptable and good in and of itself. Naturalism thus accustoms even believing Catholics into acting as naturalists, and it was an immersion in the belief of human self-redemption that caused Father Frederick Faber to write as follows in The Precious Blood:

All devotions have their characteristics; all of them have their own theological meanings. We must say something, therefore, upon the characteristics of the devotion to the Precious Blood. In reality the whole Treatise has more or less illustrated this matter. But something still remains to be said, and something will bear to be repeated. We will take the last first. Devotion to the Precious Blood is the devotional expression of the prominent and characteristic teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul is the apostle of redeeming grace. A devout study of his epistles would be our deliverance from most of the errors of the day. He is truly the apostle of all ages. To each age doubtless he seems to have a special mission. Certainly his mission to our is very special. The very air we breathe is Pelagian. Our heresies are only novel shapes of an old Pelagianism. The spirit of the world is eminently Pelagian. Hence it comes to pass that wrong theories among us are always constructed round a nuclear of Pelagianism; and Pelagianism is just the heresy which is least able to breathe in the atmosphere of St. Paul. It is the age of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, of the acquired as opposed to the infused, of the active as opposed to the passive. This is what I said in an earlier chapter, and here repeat. Now, this exclusive fondness for the natural is on the whole very captivating. It takes with the young, because it saves thought. It does not explain difficulties; but it lessens the number of difficulties to be explained. It takes with the idle; it dispenses from slowness and research. It takes with the unimaginative, because it withdraws just the very element in religion which teases them. It takes with the worldly, because it subtracts the enthusiasm from piety and the sacrifice from spirituality. It takes with the controversial, because it is a short road and a shallow ford. It forms a school of thought which, while it admits that we have an abundance of grace, intimates that we are not much better for it. It merges privileges in responsibilities, and makes the sovereignty of God odious by representing it as insidious. All this whole spirit, with all its ramifications, perishes in the sweet fires of devotion to the Precious Blood.

The time is also one of libertinage; and a time of libertinage is always, with a kind of practical logic, one of infidelityWhatever brings out God's side in creation, and magnifies his incessant supernatural operation in it, is the controversy which infidelity can least withstand. Now, the devotion to the Precious Blood does this in a very remarkable way. It shows that the true significance in every thing is to be found in the scheme of redemption, apart from which it is useless to discuss the problems of creation. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, written in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 258-259.)

Father Faber was entirely correct in his description of the world nearly one hundred sixty years ago, a description that is even more true today as Catholics take it for granted that "religious liberty" is a means to protect them when it is nothing other than a means used by the devil for Talmudists to control those who govern. The loser in all of this is the Social Reign Christ the King, and the dethroning of Our King means that we all lose no matter who is in power and what kind of blandishments they try to bestow upon us. It is that simple.

The late Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, France, put the matter as follows in the Nineteenth Century:

Neither in His Person," Card, Pie said in a celebrated pastoral instruction, "nor in the exercise of His rights, can Jesus Christ be divided, dissolved, split up; in Him the distinction of natures and operations can never be separated or opposed; the divine cannot be incompatible to the human, nor the human to the divine. On the contrary, it is the peace, the drawing together, the reconciliation; it is the very character of union which has made the two things one: 'He is our peace, Who hat made both one." (Eph. 2:14). This is why St. John told us: 'every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God. And this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh: and is now already in the world' (1 John 4:3; cf. also 1 John 2:18, 22; 2 John: 7). "So then, Card. Pie continues, "when I hear certain talk being spread around, certain pithy statements (i.e., 'Separation of Church and State,' for one, and the enigmatic axiom 'A free Church in a free State,' for another) prevailing from day to day, and which are being introduced into the heart of societies, the dissolvent by which the world must perish, I utter this cry of alarm: Beware the Antichrist." (Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, pp. 21-23.)

Yes, we are living in a time when figures of Antichrist abound in the world and in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. We must not fall for their rhetoric or become their cheerleaders. We must be advocates of Christ the King and His true Church as His consecrated slaves through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, Our Most Blessed Mother, whom nations have the solemn duty to honor with Rosary processions, pilgrimages and acts of thanksgiving for making possible our salvation.

This time of apostasy and chaos will pass, although many of us may be long dead when it does. What is in our power to do, though, is to cooperate with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, to help us to plant the seeds for the day when men and their nations will no longer live under the adversary’s rules and thus pledge their heart’s oblation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady told Jacinta and Francisco Marto and their cousin Lucia dos Santos that “in the end” her Immaculate Heart would triumph. Isn’t this enough to inspire us to plant seeds for this triumph?

It will then—and only then—that men and their nations can be liberated from the falsehoods of the present day and thus live as truly free men who lift high the standard of the Holy Cross as they pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and exclaim:

Viva Cristo Rey!

Vivat Christus Rex!

We must remember these words that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Our King, spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

Our Lady of Fatima, prary for us.

Saint Joseph, whose octave we celebrate today, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Antoninus, O.P., pray for us.

Saints Gordian and Epimachus, pray for us.