Men and Nations Who Submit Not to Christ the King Must Always Live Under the Tyranny of the Adversary

There has been much coverage in the secular written media (I neither watch television nor videos and do not waste my time listening to the blathering of babbling naturalists on the radio who know nothing of First and Last Things and thus who have one blessed thing to teach anyone, but especially Catholic who are supposed to rise above the agitation of the moment to see the world clearly through the eyes of true Faith) about the tyrannical crackdown on the truckers who had been protested Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s totalitarian vaccine mandates.

The recent crackdown by Benito Trudeau, however, had nothing to do with public health as it was solely about ending political dissent and to make it possible for those who donate to the dissenters without losing access to their bank accounts. As an online adaptation of a monologue given by Tucker Carlson noted:

You have to feel a little bad for the many heads of western democracies. For them, the end of the coronavirus pandemic is really the worst thing they can imagine.  

Put yourself in their position. For two years you've wielded unprecedented power over your country. You've told citizens where and when they can work and shop and worship and go outside. You've controlled what they wear. You've decided how their children will be educated and what drugs they must put into their bodies. For a person with no useful skills and limited job prospects in the real economy, and that describes all of them, it's been an extraordinary experience: No democratic leader in history has ever been this powerful, as powerful as you are right now. You're like a god. Each morning, you wake up and survey your creation, and you revel in your omnipotence. You can hardly believe how far you've come. The last thing you want is for all of it to end. 

But of course, it is ending. The virus that gave you these powers is in retreat. It's no longer a public health emergency. The vaccine that you promised would be a panacea, didn't work in the ways you pledged they would. They didn't stop infection or transmission. Now you've done your best to hide that fact, but everybody knows it. So for you, the jig is up. The ball is over. It's almost midnight. Just a few hours from now, you will once again be merely a scullery maid. You'll be taking orders from your citizens rather than giving them and the thought of that sends you into a panic.  

What do you do next? How do you make this moment last forever? There's only one way. You must find a new emergency that justifies making your powers permanent. If you're going to remain god, you're going to need the devil to fight. So, if you're wondering why so many western leaders suddenly are vilifying their own populations, people they were supposed to represent, this is why. Find an enemy, create a crisis, stay in power forever. It's the oldest recipe for tyranny that there is. If we don't recognize it in our own age, it's only because nothing like this was supposed to happen in a democracy, but it is happening, most clearly in Canada.  

Last week, Justin Trudeau used a peaceful trucker strike to declare martial law. Trudeau seized control of the police. He shut down opposition media coverage. He declared himself the final arbiter of all financial transactions in the nation of Canada. These are dictatorial powers, but they were necessary, Trudeau explained, because this was an emergency. White supremacist and other sedition-minded forces, backed by foreign saboteurs (sound familiar?) threatened the very existence of Canada. The truckers were effectively an invading army.  

Well, over the weekend, Trudeau defeated that army. They were unarmed. He is not. Trudeau cleared the trucker strike by force. Yet his emergency powers remain. Today, Justin Trudeau explained that he will remain in full control of Canada indefinitely. And that's essential, he said, to keep Canada safe, but the video tells a very different story. In fact, it's Trudeau's crackdown on human rights that has put Canadians in danger. Trudeau's forces told one woman she's no longer allowed to record what happens in her own city.  

WOMAN: I just want to get a coffee, ok? 

POLICE: Why is the camera in my face right now? ...Right now you are in the red zone. 

WOMAN: I’m scared, I want to go for a coffee down there. 

POLICE: Where are you from?  

WOMAN: Alberta. 

 POLICE: We’ve been patrolling all day, if we see you again it will be different.  

OTHER POLICE OFFICER (GRABBING A HOLD OF THE CAMERA): Leave. Take your camera and get out of here.  

WOMAN: I’m walking away.  

OTHER POLICE OFFICER: Do you understand that?  

WOMAN: I’m walking away... 

OTHER POLICE OFFICER: Walk away. Your phone doesn’t need to be in our faces when you’re walking away.  

WOMAN: I’m walking away. 

 "I just want a cup of coffee." 

"Get out of here." 

Multiply what you just saw by an entire country, and that's Canada tonight. There's no longer any pretext that this is about the COVID pandemic. No one in Trudeau's government is trying to protect Canadians from anything much less a virus. This is political repression.  

If you doubt that, consider what happened to a place called the Ionic Cafe. That's a coffee shop in downtown Ottawa. On Sunday, riot police tried to break into the cafe and shut it down. Why? Because the proprietors had dared to serve coffee to the truckers during the protest. Under Justin Trudeau, that is now a crime. A man called Enrico, who works at the cafe, said he saw Trudeau's forces mistreat a civilian on the sidewalk, possibly like the mistreatment you just saw. When he told them to back off, "Hey, this is Canada," they turned on him.  

MAN FILMING: OK, share this out, you guys, get it out everywhere now. Get it out. They're saying they're going to break the window. They already walked around back, you guys. Here's your tax service. Here's your taxes at play, everyone. Welcome to absolute tyranny.  

So that kind of thing is happening all over the capital city of Canada. The virus is in retreat, but there's a new crisis and that crisis is disobedience. Last week we showed you the footage of Trudeau's forces trampling a woman with horses. Now, internal texts show the officers who rode those horses celebrated what they did.  

"Just watch that horse video. That is awesome," said one officer. 

Awesome. An elderly woman being trampled by a horse. The Canadian government has confirmed that those texts are real but none of the supposedly progressive politicians in Canada care in the least. No one on the Canadian left or the American left, for that matter, has condemned any of this or any other grotesque violation of human rights in Canada. State media aren't even reporting that it's happening. But it is happening. Over the weekend, the show obtained footage of a particularly brutal beating in Ottawa during the crackdown. When you watch it, you can see a man being kneed repeatedly by Trudeau's men.

DAVID PAISLEY: I can hear noises of people getting shoved around outside, being arrested, a man being kneed there. That's terrible.  

Kneeing him, again and again, and again. He wasn't resisting. And the man who shot that footage was called David Paisley. He runs a website called shedmedia.ca. Police have arrested Paisley and seized the camera equipment he used to shoot that— $5,000 worth. Now we thought that video was remarkable, so we alerted several Canadian media outlets over the weekend, including CBC and CTV to this footage. We gave them David Paisley's contact information, news organization to news organization. But none of them reported on it. So we looked into it ourselves.  

Several protesters who were there said that a trucker in an orange jacket called Csaba Vizi was attacked by police officers during the crackdown. We reached Csaba Vizi and he confirmed it and provided footage. It shows him exiting his cab calmly, kneeling down in front of his truck and clasping his hands behind his head. 

CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: I’m proud you’re here  

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (speaks French)  

CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: I don’t speak French. 

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It’s very hard, but, you don’t lose.  

CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: No, I am not.  

UNIDENTIFIED MAN:  Second battle.  

CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: As soon as they let me out, I’ll be back. … I’m going down. I’m going down by knee, hands behind my back. I am self-ready... I’m peacefully protesting.  

So the man surrenders, on camera, and then he's kneed repeatedly into submission. Now we'd love to have more footage, but it turns out none of Justin Trudeau's men was wearing a body camera at the time. That's pretty weird. No one in Canadian state media cares to follow up on that story, and so they're not. They don't care, either. 

The brutality is just one element of this crackdown. On Saturday, Ottawa's new police chief promised to hunt down the regime's enemies no matter where they are in coming months and ruin them financially. 

OTTAWA POLICE CHIEF: So, I will stand here today again and say this demonstration is over. Go home. If you don't go home, we will remove you from the streets. … If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges. Absolutely.  

If you were involved in a protest, you'll be sanctioned and charged. What does that mean exactly? Well, last night, Justin Trudeau's government announced that it's also going after anyone who "directly or indirectly participated in the protests." According to Mark Strahl, who is a member of Canada's parliament, the dragnet has ensnared one of his constituents. It's a woman called Briane. Her crime? Donating $50 to the truckers. In response "her bank account has now been frozen." Briane is a single mom from Chilliwack, working a minimum wage job. She now has no money at all. So under Trudeau's new order, she won't simply lose access to her bank account. She will also lose access to credit unions, co-ops, trusts and loan providers. (Actions Against Truckers in Canada are the Futre of the United States.Also see commentaries from other sources: Ottawa Police Chief Commends the Brutal Actions Use to Beat, Pepper Spay, and Trample Peaceful Protesters, Conservative Reporters Beaten and Shot with Tear Gas Cannisters, Canadian Officials Freeze Bank Accounts of Citizens Who Donated to the Freedom Convoy While Sate-Run Brags Media Brags Using Hacked GiveSendGo Data to Target Citizens, El Salvador President Says the Real War is in Canada, not in Ukarine.)

This is all very good as far as it goes. However, naturalist commentaries are always defective as none of these writers, including Tucker Carlson, have any sense of true history, no less the ability to see the world and everything in it through the supernatural eyes of the true Faith.

To See the Brutality of Men Toward Their Each Other in Perspective

None of the naturalistic commentators who made observed the brutality of the Canadian government towards the peaceful protesters in what has become a North American ape of Red China have a blessed clue that all the problems of the world, bar none, are caused by Original Sin and by the Actual Sins of men. Man’s propensity to be brutal and unjust to his fellow men was chronicled in the Book of Genesis.

Men have been battling with each other ever since Cain, upset that God had found father with his brother's sacrifice and not his own, slew his brother Abel and then sought to deny that he knew what had happened to him before he admitted to God what he had done:

[1] And Adam knew Eve his wife: who conceived and brought forth Cain, saying: I have gotten a man through God. [2] And again she brought forth his brother Abel. And Abel was a shepherd, and Cain a husbandman. [3] And it came to pass after many days, that Cain offered, of the fruits of the earth, gifts to the Lord. [4] Abel also offered of the firstlings of his flock, and of their fat: and the Lord had respect to Abel, and to his offerings. [5] But to Cain and his offerings he had no respect: and Cain was exceedingly angry, and his countenance fell.

[6] And the Lord said to him: Why art thou angry? and why is thy countenance fallen? [7] If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? but if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door? but the lust thereof shall be under thee, and thou shalt have dominion over it. [8] And Cain said to Abel his brother: Let us go forth abroad. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him.[9]And the Lord said to Cain: Where is thy brother Abel? And he answered, I know not: am I my brother's keeper? [10] And he said to him: What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth.

[11] Now, therefore, cursed shalt thou be upon the earth, which hath opened her mouth and received the blood of thy brother at thy hand. [12] When thou shalt till it, it shall not yield to thee its fruit: a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be upon the earth. [13] And Cain said to the Lord: My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon. [14] Behold thou dost cast me out this day from the face of the earth, and I shall be hidden from thy face, and I shall be a vagabond and a fugitive on the earth: every one, therefore, that findeth me, shall kill me. [15] And the Lord said to him: No, it shall not be so: but whosoever shall kill Cain, shall be punished sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him. (Genesis 4: 1-15.)

Husbands have battled wives, wives have battled husbands, parents and children have battled each other. King David himself was opposed by his own son Absalom. David, of whose own house Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born of His Most Blessed Mother, wept over his rebellious son's death because he was concerned over the state of the poor's soul when died, knowing that he had rebelled against the Fourth Commandment itself:

[31] And when he bad passed, and stood still, Chusai appeared: and coming up he said: I bring good tidings, my lord, the king, for the Lord hath judged for thee this day from the hand of all that have risen up against thee. [32] And the king said to Chusai: Is the young man Absalom safe? And Chusai answering him, said: Let the enemies of my lord, the king, and all that rise against him unto evil, be as the young man is. [33] The king therefore being much moved, went up to the high chamber over the gate, and wept. And as he went he spoke in this manner: My son Absalom, Absalom my son: would to God that I might die for thee, Absalom my son, my son Absalom.  (2 Kings 18: 31-33.)

Conflict between human beings is just part of the consequences of Original Sin and of the Actual Sins of men.

There was conflict aplenty even during the years of Christendom. Intrigue fueled by personal ambitions, rivalries of one sort or another or by motivations of revenge were all too common in royal courts, including the most important royal court on the face of the earth, the papal household. Christian kings and emperors made war upon each other. Infighting among generals and their officers of the same army shaped the outcome of battles. Indeed, as depicted fairly accurately in For Greater Glory there was great mistrust among the leaders of the Cristeros in Mexico.

Additionally, of course, human nature being what it is, sloth, one of the seven deadly or capital sins, manifested itself all too frequently even during the High Middle Ages as those who served at court or in various administrative capacities in the service of the crown and the enforcement of laws preferred to exert the least possible effort just to "get through" a given day.

All of this having been noted, however, it is also true that men in the era of Christendom were not divided on matters of Faith and Morals, on matters of First and Last Things. While they may have had great difficulties on occasion in keeping God's laws and thus of practicing the Holy Faith well, they nevertheless knew what was right and wrong and were united in their beliefs in the tenets of the Catholic Faith.

Pope Pius XII noted this in Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939:

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.)

It was Martin Luther's rebellion against the Divine Plan that God Himself had instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church that divided men over First and Last Things, thus paving the way for the triumph of secular substitutes for religious faith in general just as Luther had substituted his own heretical views of Christianity in the place of the true Faith, which is the only foundation of personal and social order.

Pope Leo XIII explained this very succinctly in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

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

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

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

Amongst these principles the main one lays down that as all men are alike by race and nature, so in like manner all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men. In a society grounded upon such maxims all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people, and the people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. It does choose, nevertheless, some to whose charge it may commit itself, but in such wise that it makes over to them not the right so much as the business of governing, to be exercised, however, in its name.

The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a State becomes nothing but a multitude which is its own master and ruler. And since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God. Moreover. it believes that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire which of the very many religions is the only one true; or to prefer one religion to all the rest; or to show to any form of religion special favor; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief.

And it is a part of this theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each one's conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks.

Now, when the State rests on foundations like those just named -- and for the time being they are greatly in favor -- it readily appears into what and how unrightful a position the Church is driven. For, when the management of public business is in harmony with doctrines of such a kind, the Catholic religion is allowed a standing in civil society equal only, or inferior, to societies alien from it; no regard is paid to the laws of the Church, and she who, by the order and commission of Jesus Christ, has the duty of teaching all nations, finds herself forbidden to take any part in the instruction of the people. With reference to matters that are of twofold jurisdiction, they who administer the civil power lay down the law at their own will, and in matters that appertain to religion defiantly put aside the most sacred decrees of the Church. They claim jurisdiction over the marriages of Catholics, even over the bond as well as the unity and the indissolubility of matrimony. They lay hands on the goods of the clergy, contending that the Church cannot possess property. Lastly, they treat the Church with such arrogance that, rejecting entirely her title to the nature and rights of a perfect society, they hold that she differs in no respect from other societies in the State, and for this reason possesses no right nor any legal power of action, save that which she holds by the concession and favor of the government. If in any State the Church retains her own agreement publicly entered into by the two powers, men forthwith begin to cry out that matters affecting the Church must be separated from those of the State. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The modern state has become a sort of secular church replete with its own creedal beliefs and possessing an insatiably voracious appetite to exercise a near total control over its citizens, who are subjected to a level of slavery by means of confiscatory tax powers. However, the modern state is a corruption of the true nature of the state, which is not the same thing as a particular form of government that happens to constitute its civil authority, which must be founded on right principles in order for it to work properly in the pursuit of the common good here on Earth and to aid the true Church in the promotion of a cultural environment in which its citizens can best save their souls.

Pope Saint Pius X summarized the entirety of the duties of just governance and statecraft as he condemned the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic precept of the “separation of Church and State” in Paragraph Three of Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

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. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

Human societies have, sadly, become criminal because most people, including those who govern, do indeed “act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion.” The consequences of such disorder are deadly to men and their nations. As has been noted many times previously in this website, we are witnessing the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the false, naturalistic, Pelagian and religiously indifferentist principles of the American founding. Disorder in the souls of men leads to disorder in one’s nation and hence in the world. No nation will ever know a just social order domestically and the world-at-large will never enjoy a genuine peace as long most men are at war with the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, by means of unrepented sins and by enshrining grave sins as a “civil right” in public law and celebrating them throughout the nooks and crannies of “popular culture.”

As Silvio Cardinal Antoniano noted in the Sixteenth Century:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

No, no one on the naturalist "right" understands this, which makes it impossible to turn back the tide of evil advance by their opposite numbers among the ranks of the naturalist "left," most of whom are proud to boast of their support for the very evils that undermine justice in their nations and peace in the world.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, taught that it is impossible to produce a just social order if the civil law permits all kinds of licentiousness:

Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from life, from laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and moralsThe Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

What is happening at the present time in the so-called “civilized world,” which has never been as “free” as people have believed, is the direct, inevitable result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution, which made possible the rise of Judeo-Masonry and thus of the totalitarianism that exists in Canada and in many states here in the United States of America that can never (as it never) be reversed by means merely natural.

From 1534 to 1776 to 2022

The triumph of abject evil as an institutionalized feature of the once proudly Catholic kingdoms of Europe occurred long the events of recent decades.

The recent state-sponsored violence by the government and the person of the pro-abort Justin Trudeau is simply one of the many consequences that the modern world has been suffering since the bloody revolution against the Catholic Church and the Social Reign of Christ the King that was launched by the lecherous, adulterous and bigamous drunkard King Henry VIII in 1534.

Henry Tudor, who could have obtained his decree of nullity from “Pope Francis” if he had not died on January 28, 1547, commenced a bloody campaign against Catholics who refused to recognize his completely illegitimate claim to be the supreme head of the Church in England that resulted in the deaths of over 72,000 Catholics, fully three percent of the English population at that time, including, of course, Saints John Fisher and Thomas More. The tyrant ordered persecutions in Ireland, of course, and engaged in grotesque acts of social engineering that were designed to make his revolution against Christ the King and the Catholic Church irreversible.

Indeed, the kind of state-sponsored social engineering that has created the culture of entitlement in England and elsewhere in Europe has its antecedent roots in Henry's revolt against the Social Reign of Christ the King and His Catholic Church in the Sixteenth Century.

Henry had Parliament enact various laws to force the poor who had lived for a nominal annual fee on the monastery and convent lands (as they produced the food to sustain themselves, giving some to the monastery or convent) off of those lands, where their families had lived for generations, in order to redistribute the Church properties, he had stolen to those who supported his break from Rome. Henry quite cleverly created a class of people who were dependent upon him for the property upon which they lived and the wealth they were able to derive therefrom, making them utterly supportive of his decision to declare himself Supreme Head of the Church in England. Those of the poorer classes who had been thrown off of the monastery and convent lands were either thrown into prison (for being poor, mind you) or forced to migrate to the cities, where many of them lost the true Faith and sold themselves into various vices just to survive. The effects of this exercise of state-sponsored engineering are reverberating in the world today, both politically and economically.

Indeed, many of the conditions bred by the disparity in wealth created by Henry's land grab in the Sixteenth Century would fester and help to create the world of unbridled capitalism and slave wage that so impressed a German emigre in London by the name of Karl Marx. Unable to recognize the historical antecedents of the real injustices he saw during the Victorian Era, Marx set about devising his own manifestly unjust system, premised on atheism and anti-Theism, to rectify social injustice once and for all. In a very real way, Henry Tudor led the way to Lenin of Russia and to the European Union as the sterile substitute for the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Father Edward Cahill provided a very good summary of the effects of King Henry VIII’s revolution in The Framework of A Christian State:

Results of the Plunder of the Church.—Not only is the Protestant Revolt mainly responsible for the unsocial character of Britain’s economic system but it was the immediate cause of much of the degrading pauperism that has disfigured British civilisation for the past four centuries. We have already alluded to the plunder of the Church and the alienation of the revenues devoted to charitable and educational purposes, which took place as a result of the religious revolt. This led directly to dreadful hardship in the case of the poor, to whose benefit most of the ecclesiastical revenue had previously been applied. The confiscated wealth, which according to the law under which the confiscations were carried out should have been to the service of the State, was in very large measure appropriated by lawyers, court favourites and other greedy and avaricious adventurers. These henceforth formed a new class of wealthy and unscrupulous plutocrats who in the following centuries dominated the political and social life of their several countries. Nowhere did these robbery of Church goods produce such disastrous results as in Ireland and Britain. In both these countries the Protestant Reformation laid the foundations secure and deep, of extreme individualistic capitalism, with its hideous counterpart of pauperism and oppression of the poor, which forms one of the chief characteristics of their social history during the following centuries. On this aspect of the question, Cardinal Gasquet writes:

“Viewed in its social aspect the English Reformation was in reality an uprising of the rich against the poor. . . . Those in place and power were enabled to grow greater in wealth and position, while those who had before but a small share of the good things of this world came in the process to have less. . . . The supposed purification . . . of doctrine and practice was brought about . . .  at the cost of driving a wedge well into the heart of the nation, which . . . established the distinction which still exists and the masses.” (Preface to Cobbett’s History of the Reformation, p. 6.)

The history of this lamentable revolution in England, by which the whole face of a great Catholic nation became permanently disfigured, the great majority of her once happy children plunged in ever-increasing degradation and misery, and her ideals and principles conformed to a non-Christian instead of a Christian standard, is graphically told by the Protestant writer Cobbett, in his History of the Protestant Reformation. “Never,” he writes, “since the world began was there so rich a harvest of plunder.” He tells how gold and silver, books and manuscripts, ornaments, paintings and statuary of priceless value equally with church, monastery and convent fell a prey to the satellites of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell:

“The whole country was thus disfigured: it had the appearance of a land recently invaded by the most brutal barbarians: and this appearance it has . . . even to the present day. Nothing has ever come to supply the place of what has been destroyed.” (Cobbett—History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, edited by Cardinal Casquet (Art and Book Co., London, 1899), chap. vii, no. 182.)

Explaining the social effects of the plunder of the Church, Cobbett writes:

“The Catholic Church included in itself a great deal more than the business of teaching religion . . . and administering the Sacraments. It had a great deal to do with the temporal concerns of the people. It provided  . . . for all the wants of the poor and distressed. . . .  It contained a great body of land proprietors, whose revenues were distributed in various ways amongst the people upon terms always singularly favourable to the latter. It was a great and powerful estate, and naturally siding with the people. . . . By its charity and its benevolence towards its tenants it mitigated the rigour of proprietorship, and held society together by the ties of religion rather than by the trammels and terrors of the Law. (Cobbett, History of the Protestant Reformation, chap. vii, no. 206.)

Dissolution of the Monasteries.—The dissolution of the monasteries, with the resulting confiscation of their property, immediately produced overwhelming distress amongst the multitudes who had been maintained by the resources that the religious bodies had administered. It proved disastrous also to the tenants on the monastic lands, which were probably more than 2,000,000 statute acres in extent. The tenants who had been accustomed to an easy and sympathetic mode of treatment at the hands of the monks, now passed under the power of harsh and exacting landlords. Rack-rents were too often exacted and the numerous exemptions and privileges to which the tenants had been accustomed were withdrawn.

Enclosures and Confiscations.—Again, the common lands, in which the poor of the neighbourhood had from time immemorial possessed common rights, were seized and enclosed in the lords’ demenses; and numberless other hardships, hitherto unknown, now began to press upon the people.

The wanton confiscation of the property of the guilds, hospitals and almshouses, unjust and indefensible even form the Protestant standpoint, was also disastrous to the interests of the poor. The destruction of the religious schools and colleges, in which so many children were educated free of cost, was still another blow. Even the introduction of married clergy, which diverted into another channel the energies and resources that would otherwise be expended on charity, aggravated further the lot of the poor.

Vagabondage in England.—Hence it was that the destruction of Catholicism in England gave rise to the sordid pauperism which has since disfigured English civilisation. Cobbett describes in his own eloquent and vigorous style how England, “once happy and hospitable, became a den of famishing robbers and slaves.” As a result of the plunder of the Church and the destruction of the institutions which had grown up under its influence, the country quickly became filled with the destitute. Immense numbers of these were drive to live as professional robbers. “There were,” writes Hume, “at least 300 or 400 able-bodied vagabonds in every country who lived by theft and rapine, and who sometimes met in troops to the number of sixty and committed spoil on the inhabitants.” As many as five hundred of this expropriated class were sometimes executed in a single year during the reign of Elizabeth.

English Poor Laws.—This state of affairs—a direct result of the Protestant revolt—gave rise to the celebrated Elizabethan leglsation on pauperism, “as novel as it was harsh,” which for the first time standardized pauperism as distinct from poverty. The former was henceforth the status of those who, being destitute of the prime necessities of life, are maintained at the public expense in the parish poorhouses. They are no longer “God’s poor,” to whom as the special representatives of Him Who became poor for men’s sake, special sympathy and even reverence are due. They are now despised outcasts, the pariahs of society. They usually live, or are supposed to live, in the poorhouses, segregated form their wives and children, under a harsh discipline, deprived of the franchise and compelled to wear a special uniform.

The following extracts from Pelgrave will convey a general idea of the spirit which animated the English post-Reformation legislation on mendicancy and poverty:

“It was only towards the middle and end of the 16th century that measures against it [viz., mendicancy] were enforced, possibly in part owing to the sounder (sic) teachings of the Reformers on the subject. Then we find Southampton ordering that beggars should have their hair cut, and Parliament decreeing punishments on a progressive scale of severity. Whipping, branding, cutting off the gristle of the ear, even death, were the penalties assigned (!) . . . A Consolidating Act of 1713 lays it down that any person wandering about the country, on any one of a long list of pretences, is to be summarily arrested and removed to his settlement, or, if he have one, to be dealt with by the poor law authorities of the parish in which he is apprehened; but previously he may be flogged or set to hard labour, or committed for seven years to the custody of any person who will undertake to set him to work in Great Britain or the Colonies. By the Act of 1744 even women are to flogged for vagrancy and late as 1824 flogging is retained as punishment  for “incorrigible rogues.” (Palgrave—Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. iii. Art “Poor Law” p. 154; also art. “Pauperism,” p. 81.)

Such was the spirit introduced by Protestantism into the legislative system of a country that was once the “Dowry of Mary.” (Cahill, pp. 97-101.)

Consider this for a moment.

Henry VIII threw the poor off the lands on which their ancestors had lived for centuries, and that his wretched, murderous daughter, Elizabeth, by his partner in adultery and bigamy, Anne Boleyn, made sure when she acceded to the throne in 1558 that the penal laws he had enacted against the poor were enforced with vigor that can only be described as diabolically conceived.

The social injustices that prompted many in England to support “Leave” in the Brexit referendum three days ago will not be cured by reclaiming some of their country’s national sovereignty from the European Union as the European Union is the result of what Martin Luther started on the continent of Europe and that Henry VIII started in England in the Sixteenth Century. Modernity was founded on the blood of faithful Catholics, and it has been sustained on the blood of faithful Catholics ever since.

An exaggeration?

Hardly.

Consider the fact it was over two centuries after the death of King Henry VIII that the British Governor of Nova Scotia, which had been the French colony of Acadia prior to the British takeover in 1710:

The British "Final Solution" for the Acadians was deportation. It all started at 3 PM on September 5, 1755 at the Catholic Church in Grand Pre. Following the orders and plan of the Lieutenant General, Governor Lawrence, following the decree of the King of England, the British Council at Halifax unanimously decided to begin deporting the Acadians immediately to various British Colonies outside of Canada. The vessels needed for this were to be commandeered in the King's name. By this time, the Acadians numbered some 13,000 on the Acadian peninsula alone. More and more British troops had been arriving and the Acadians were acutely aware that big trouble was brewing.

A proclamation was issued accordingly to "all the inhabitants of the district of Grand Pre, Minas, River Canard, etc. ..... to attend the Church at Grand Pre on Friday the fifth instant, at three of the clock in the afternoon, that we may impart to them what we are ordered to communicate to them; declaring that no excuse will be admitted, on any pretense whatever, on pain of forfeiting goods and chattels, in default of real estate. - Given at Grand Pre 2d September, 1755."

That Friday, 418 of the residents presented themselves at the Church as ordered. Colonel John Winslow, having tricked them into this assembly, announced to them that they were to be immediately deported outside of the Province and that all their properties and goods with the exception of their cash monies and personal belongings were hereby confiscated by and to the benefit of the British Crown. Soldiers surrounded the church to prevent any escapes.

The news of this spread quickly and those who could escaped to the woods, but in vain. Their country was laid to waste. Deported from Grand Pre alone were 2,242 Acadians. The Acadians were lined up and driven to the transport ships. Women and children were loaded on boats as fast as could be provided. As if to deprive the exiles of even the hope of return, the British burned to the ground 255 of their homes, 276 barns, 11 mills, and one church while the transport vessels were still in sight. Despite the promises of Colonel Winslow to keep families together, most families were separated immediately - parents from their children, wives from their husbands, children from their siblings - many to never see each other again. The Acadians were placed under arrest and were loaded on the ships with no choice in the manner. They took only what they were wearing and what little monies they had on their person at the time. Some of the ships used as transports were not seaworthy. Consequently, two of the ships, the Violet and the Duke William, with two groups of 650 Acadians went to a watery grave in the icy mid-Atlantic on December 10 of that year. Only one lifeboat with 27 survivors lived to tell what happened. "I do not know," observes 19th century American historian George Bancroft, " if the annals of the human race keep the record of sorrows so wantonly inflicted, so bitter and so lasting as fell upon the French inhabitants of Acadia."

How ironic it must seem for the living descendants of those expelled Acadians who now live in the town of Winslow - a town so named in honor of the same British officer, General John Winslow, who was directly responsible for carrying out those dastardly deeds in the darkest hour in the history of the Acadians.

About 2,000 Acadians managed to escape arrest and they wandered through the woods like hunted animals, half-clad and half-starved, in ever search of some near relative. Some made it safely into Quebec where they established new lives in such towns as l'Acadie, Becancour, Nicolet, and others. Of those escapees was one of my own 6th generation paternal ancestors, Laurent Doucet, son of Paul Doucet (a direct descendant of Acadia's first governor, Germain Doucet) and Anne LeBrun. How they survived this terrible ordeal is almost miraculous. Today, the direct descendants of these escaped Acadians number over 230,000 souls, including one-third of the present population of New Brunswick.

The deportation continued unabated over a period of 8 years. Between 1755 and 1763, Governor Lawrence kept unloading the Acadians along the American coast - over 2,000 to Boston, where the Bostonians treated them like slaves, 700 from Grand Pre and Port Royal to Connecticut, and about 250 poor, naked, and destitute to New York. New York rid the major part of her Acadian exiles by persuading them to emigrate to Santo Domingo, where most of them perished miserably from the torrid sun. Lawrence exiled 754 to Philadelphia where, being held captive aboard the ships in the harbor for three months, smallpox killed 237 of them. Some 2,000 more were removed to Maryland where several hundred of them escaped to Louisiana, Quebec, and the West Indies. To North Carolina, Lawrence sent 500, and to South Carolina, 1,500 Acadians. The Carolinians cleverly enticed them to leave in some old boats for Acadia. Of these, only 900 arrived at the River St. John. Another 400 were banished to Georgia where, preferring death anywhere in the tropics to slavery with the blacks in the cotton fields and sugar plantations, they fled. Wherever they went, the Acadians were unwanted, shunned, cheated, despised, and heartlessly allowed to die without even the care and affection given to pet animals. Only Connecticut was prepared to receive the exiles sent to her and treated them as a group humanely. In all, nearly 3,700 Acadians were dispersed along the coast in the British colonies of America. There is no doubt that every Acadian would have preferred exile in France to banishment to any other place.

The method of dispersing the Acadians has scarcely an equal in history. Said Edmund Burke, "We did, in my opinion, most inhumanely, and upon the pretenses that, in the eye of an honest man, are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate." How right was his judgement. There were many pitiful separations in families. One case is particularly well-known. Due to the small number of transports, Rene Leblanc, notary-public of Grand Pre, his wife, and their two youngest children were put on one ship and landed in New York, but their eighteen other children and 150 grandchildren were loaded aboard different ships and dispersed among the colonies. There were deliberate separations of husbands from their wives and fathers from their children. Men would come back home from their work in the woods or fishing boats only to find their families gone, their homes burned to the ground, and the British soldiers waiting to arrest them and force them aboard ships for permanent banishment from their lands. Yet others were taken to various ports in England as prisoners of war and placed in concentration camps such as at Liverpool. (Acadia and the Acadians, by Robert Chenard.) 

If this moving account does not break your Catholic heart, my friends, I do not know what will.

Unlike Latin America, where Catholic missionaries interceded in behalf of the indigenous peoples in the face of the cruelty and excesses of some of the Spanish conquistadors and colonizers, there was no one to plead for the Acadians, no one to remonstrate with the bloodthirsty English who had lost their sensus Catholicus and had become as mad the lustful man who plunged England into darkness of blood and cruelty and greed and hatred and bigotry in 1534. The violence that we see expanding exponentially in our cities and in workplaces and in schools and on university campuses is but the all-too-logical consequence of a world founded on the false premises that man can know social order in the pursuit of his "ultimate" end, that is, material prosperity as a sign of 'divine election," while spitting in the face of the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and plaiting Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ anew with a Crown of Thorns as His Social Kingship is mocked and vilified as "outdated," unnecessary and even harmful by Catholic conservative quislings and by the entire ethos of conciliarism-at-large.

Yes, fallen human nature has wreaked havoc throughout history, even during the period of the Catholic Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the frailties of Catholics in the Middle Ages pale into insignificance when one looks at the savagery of the barbaric tribes of Europe before their Catholicization in the First Millennium and that of the barbarism and abject hedonism of the supposedly “civilized” West today. 

Unlike Latin America, where Catholic missionaries interceded in behalf of the indigenous peoples in the face of the cruelty and excesses of some of the Spanish conquistadors and colonizers, there was no one to plead for the Acadians, no one to remonstrate with the bloodthirsty English who had lost their sensus Catholicus and had become as mad the lustful man who plunged England into darkness of blood and cruelty and greed and hatred and bigotry in 1534. The violence that we see expanding exponentially in our cities and in workplaces and in schools and on university campuses is but the all-too-logical consequence of a world founded on the false premises that man can know social order in the pursuit of his "ultimate" end, that is, material prosperity as a sign of 'divine election," while spitting in the face of the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and plaiting Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ anew with a Crown of Thorns as His Social Kingship is mocked and vilified as "outdated," unnecessary and even harmful by Catholic conservative quislings and by the entire ethos of conciliarism-at-large.

Luther's own embrace of amorality in statecraft made it possible for the triumph of amorality in commerce and all other aspects of social life, something that was noted by Father Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., and Dr. George O'Brien in the Twentieth Century.

This teaching had its economic repercussion in the current that led to the doctrine laid down in Daniel Defoe's The Complete Tradesman, according to which a man must keep his religious and his business life apart and not allow one to interfere with the other.

"There is some difference," wrote Defoe, "between an honest man and an honest tradesman. . . . There are some latitudes, like poetical licences in other cases, which a tradesman must be and is allowed, and which by the custom and usage of a trade he may give himself a liberty in, which cannot be allowed in other cases to any men, no, nor to the tradesman himself out of the business." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

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

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

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

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

Dr. O'Brien went on to state that true pope after true pope has stated concerning the necessity of men and their nations subordinating themselves to the Catholic Church as they pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End:

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

This is a point that was made thirty years later by Father Edward Leen in The Holy Ghost, to explain that our own form of naturalism is just a different kind of expression in the penultimate naturalist ideology, Bolshevism, as the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity must wind produce a situation of total state control over men as there is no naturalist means on the face of this earth (no, not constitutions or laws or elections or this or that naturalist or secularist or nondenominational ideology or "philosophy) that can stop it. Here are Father Leen's words of wisdom:

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

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

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

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

A Long History of Repressing and Censoring Political Dissent in the Land of the “Free”

As an initial overview, it must be remembered that tyrants have sought to silence Catholics from the very birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday, starting with the thugs who composed the Sanhedrin. Roman Emperors and the kings of barbaric tribes tried with all of their might to get Catholics to deny the Faith during the early part First Millennium. Mohammedans have tried to do so from the Seventh Century to this very day. Protestants and Freemasons and social revolutionaries have tried to do so with varying degrees of ferocity since 1517. The names of these perpetrators have ranged from Nero to Trajan to Diocletian to Mohammed to Luther to Henry to Cranmer to Calvin to Cromwell to Danton to Robespierre to Garibaldi and Bismarck to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Ho to Castro to Ortega and to all of the petty little men and women, many of them apostate Catholics, who have served in our own government in the past thirty to forty years, ever eager to sell out the Faith for their thirty pieces of silver of popularity and political power.

Tyrants never learn their lessons. Inspired by the adversary, who hates God and who hates us because our souls made in the image and likeness of God, new generations of tyrants arise to try to silence the voice of Catholics. This is why the accommodation of the Church in her human elements to the spirit of the world has made it more possible for the witches' brew of forces that has been coalescing and mutating and re-coalescing since the Sixteenth Century to be victorious in all aspects of the popular culture of most of the countries in the so-called "developed" world. The devil and his minions grow bolder when Catholics begin to speak with the voice of the world, something that the conciliar “popes” and their “bishops” have done for over sixty years now.

In particular, of course, the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King that began five hundred three years ago on October 31, 1517, was an effort to “provide” “evangelical liberty” to those who had been “enslaved” by a supposedly “dictatorial” hierarchical Church that had “corrupted” the Gospel message for her own purposes. This “evangelical liberty,” however, quickly descended into rank libertinage to the extent that even Martin Luther himself was aghast at what the decline in morals that took place once he had “liberated” men from the true Church, the Catholic Church, and set them “free” as “equals” to decide for themselves the meaning of Sacred Scripture and to sack and pillage Catholic churches, monasteries and convents. 

King Henry VIII, of course, was so intent on crushing all opposition to his taking England out of the Catholic Faith that he engaged in a bloodbath of 72,000 Catholics between 1534 and the tyrant's death in 1547, a little over three percent of the population of England at that time. The killing of over 72,000 people, the seizure of the monastery and convent lands and the other discriminatory measures imposed upon Roman Catholics in the wake of the English Protestant Revolt were undertaken done quite legally, thank you. Judges sentenced Catholics to death quite routinely. The England of the Anglican Church just went about its business as though anyone who resisted the new order of things was a disloyal extremist.

This lawless desire to crush opposition transcended the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and infected many of those who believed that the English colonies situated upon and down the Atlantic seaboard of the United States of America should break from England. Those arguing against such a break did so frequently at the very threat of their lives.

To wit, Jonathan Boucher, a Anglican preacher in England and in the Colony of Virginia in the years before the Revolutionary War in the Eighteenth Century, argued in very eloquent terms against a break of the thirteen English colonies from the British Crown by reminding his listeners that true freedom comes only from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour. Boucher made some very fine points in his sermon (On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience and Nonresistance), which should be studied if for no other reason than to realize that there was some effort made by "conservative" colonists to stem the tide of rebellion and to prevent a war for "independence," which was, after all, an act of high treason against King George III.

Boucher, who sometimes packed two single-shot pistols and kept them in his pulpit when he preached so that "patriots" would not attack him, argued against what could be called "liberation theology," urging Anglicans and other colonists to accept whatever sufferings were being imposed by King George III and to offer them up to God, stating that one should not seek to rebel from the authority which God has seen fit in His Providence to provide for the governance of men. The "disconnect" of Protestantism was such, however, that Boucher could not see that his own false "church" was born in a violent, bloody rebellion against the true authority given by God Himself over men in the form of the Church that He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. It was incongruous to argue that a rebellion against civil authority was unjust when one's very "church" was created as a result of a rebellion against God Himself.

Similarly, Americans have long fashioned their nation to be one of laws, not of men. However, this is simply not true. This is a fantasy. This is delusional.

The laws of God have been broken on these shores by the proliferation of unbridled error under the false slogans of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" from the very beginning.

President after president has engaged in activities designed to suppress legitimate dissent and opposition.

It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of America, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials.

The sixteenth President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannis!" as he jumped onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.

Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)

Just as an aside, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted to use the unconstitutional Federal Reserve System, created in an act passed by the Congress of the United States of America and signed into law by Wilson on December 23, 1913, as the means to centralize the banking and monetary systems under the authority of the government of the United States of America in order to restrict the legitimate freedom of Americans to control their own private property and to make private industry dependent upon the "direction" provided it by governmental regulators and overseers. Wilson was a fascist. It was for this reason as well that Wilson saw to it that Congress enacted legislation, following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, to create our current system of confiscatory taxation on our incomes. And it was Wilson, of course, who believed that the Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico, aping the "example" established by the French Revolutionaries, could "build" or "engineer" the "better" society in Our Lady's country by the killing of thousands upon thousands of Catholics:

Wilson replied [in 1915, to Father Francis Clement Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries. All efforts of Catholic to succor their coreligionists across the border were to prove fruitless, as they were to prove once again in 1924, when the fiercest persecution of all was begun by Plutarco Calles. In this systematic pogrom, all public worship came to an end in Mexico an priests were methodically hunted down and executed like outlaws. It was of this travail which Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory. Generally, however, the world press ignored the Calles persecution in a “conspiracy of silence” which the American hierarchy and Pope after Pope were powerless to break. (Robert Leckie American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 274.)

In other words, Thomas Woodrow Wilson really believed that it was "necessary" for the Freemasonic/Communist Mexican government that enjoyed his favor to kill Catholics, whose "backward" beliefs were impediments to the institutionalization of "liberal values" that required him to suppress all opposition to his policies right here in the United States of America.

It was a scant twelve years after the stroke-disabled Wilson left office on March 4, 1921, that the thirty-third Freemason named Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service to audit his "enemies." He contravened the law in numerous ways as he used the legislative powers illicitly given to regulatory agencies by Congress during the Great Depression and during World War II to set the stage for Barack Hussein Obama's rule by decree and presidential fiat. Roosevelt, the fifth cousin of the Republican statist and fellow thirty-third degree Freemason, Theodore Roosevelt, the uncle of Eleanor Roosevelt, even ordered his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to engage in domestic espionage. Roosevelt’s directive took the form of a memorandum dated May 21, 1940.

Robert Jackson, who was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America on July 11, 1941, did not like the directive as he believed that Franklin Roosevelt had authorized domestic surveillance on anyone suspected of being subversive. Jackson’s successor, however, Francis Biddle, who took office as the Attorney General of the United States of America on August 25, 1941, had no qualms about the directive, delegating the task of carrying it out to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, John Edgar Hoover, who was more than happy to run with this new expansion of his authority to investigate anyone at any time for any reason. The history of the Federal government’s surveillance since that time is one of completely unchecked growth.

Do not think for a single moment that abuses of deep state bureaucrats being exposed at this time is anything new. Illegal surveillance by the Federal government has been on the rise since World War II and the establishment of permanent intelligence agencies. Modern technology has advanced to such a point that these agencies, acting both legally and illegally, monitor every means of human communication today save for those done with an old-fashioned typewriter that has not connection of any kind to the internet or to a telephone line.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself, as noted just above, has long seen itself as a “check” upon elected officials, and John Edgar Hoover, who served as Director of the Bureau of Investigation from May 10, 1924, to March 22, 1935, and then as the founding Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from March 23, 1935, until the time of his death on May 2, 1972, believed in the suppression of political dissent dating back to his days as the head of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s “War Emergency Division’s” “Alien Enemy Bureau” one hundred years ago. Please, what is going on now, although certainly shocking to those not conversant with the darker sides of American history, is really nothing new at all.

Although Presidents Harry S. Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy each considered firing Hoover, the latter had amassed too much information on too many people. This information, most of it gathered quite illegally and/or by the improper use of Federal Bureau of Investigation field agents, was Hoover’s own kind of “insurance policy.”

President Lyndon Baines Johnson, on the other hand, knowing what kind of “insurance policy” that Hoover had on him, whetted Hoover’s appetite for domestic surveillance under the thinnest of legal pretexts, including wiretapping his own vice president, the garrulous spendthrift with taxpayer dollars named Hubert Horatio Humphrey:

Resigned to Humphrey's candidacy [in 1968], Johnson pressed his Vice President throughout the campaign not to stray too far from the Administration's position on Vietnam.

Humphrey largely complied. But at the end of September, when he showed greater flexibility than the White House on how to end the war, Johnson reacted angrily. He told Clark Clifford that he doubted Humphrey's ability to be President. He lacked the guts for the job. After Humphrey had become Vice President and expressed doubts about the war, the White House, according to a Humphrey aide, Ted Van Dyk, had arranged for wiretaps on Humphrey's office phones. Van Dyk learned this from two Secret Service agents on the vice-presidential detail. Neither Van Dyk nor Humphrey was surprised. Though Johnson in principle disliked taping and wiretaps, he secretly taped more than 7,500 of his own telephone conversations as President. Moreover, during the 1964 campaign, after a visit to the White House, Richard Russell wrote, "Hoover has apparently been turned loose and is tapping everything.... [Johnson] stated it took him hours each night to read them all (but he loves this)." The speed with which Johnson had information about Humphrey's presidential campaign suggested to Van Dyk that the White House was still tapping Humphrey's phones in 1968. Johnson apparently wanted the taps to gain advance notice and a chance to dissuade him should Humphrey decide to break away on the war. (Three New Revelations about Lyndon Baines Johnson.)

It should be noted, however, that the liberal Robert Dallek, who authored the synopsis of his own book about Lyndon Baines Johnson, did not include the following fact about Johnson’s wiretapping in 1968 that is covered in another book:

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson ordered Hoover to tap the phone of Republican vice- presidential nominee Spiro Agnew on the suspicion that Agnew was telling the South Vietnamese that they would get a better peace agreement from Nixon if he were elected president. The taps did not reveal that Agnew ever made such a deal. (Henry M. Holden, FBI 100 Years: An Unofficial History, Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008, p. 218.)

Mind you, this is only a partial listing of abuses that have been committed in this alleged land of "laws and not men," a land where over fifty-five million innocent babies have been butchered by surgical means (hundreds of millions more by chemical means) since, most of those having taken place in the forty-seven years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. That staggering figure does not include those babies who were killed by surgical means in their mothers' wombs between 1967 and 1973 when various states, including Colorado, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Alaska, and Washington (and Washington, District of Columbia) decriminalized surgical baby-killing in some or all cases at various stages of a baby's development in his mother's womb.

A "civilized" nation of "laws." I don't think so.

The lawless imposition of policies even in violation of constitutions and civil code or statutory law and the suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.

The Police Came with Brutality for Operation Rescue Long Before They Came for the Truckers

Many earnest pro-life Americans believed that the election of former California Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan to the presidency of the United States in 1980 augured good things for the babies. I was one of those people, as I related in "We Have Learned Nothing" in The Remnant eighteen years ago.

Reagan's first appointee to the United States Supreme Court was Sandra Day O'Connor, whose pro-abortion position was made quite clear in her days as the Majority Leader of the Arizona State Senate. None of the supposedly "pro-life" senators, each of whom supported abortion in some cases, on the Senate Judiciary Committee cared to take seriously the testimony about O'Connor's pro-abortion stance given by the American Life League's Judie Brown and the Conservative Caucus Foundation's Howard Phillips.

Although the late President Reagan did issue a proclamation about the personhood of all preborn children in January of 1988, babies were still being killed in the same monstrous numbers each year by surgical abortion in the 1980s, to say nothing of those killed by chemical abortifacients, as they had been before Reagan took office in 1981. A lot of anxious Americans believed that "something" had to be done to remind their fellow citizens that a silent holocaust was taking place in a country they considered "civilized."

The "something" that simultaneously galvanized and polarized the pro-life community was Operation Rescue. Rescue galvanized many in the pro-life community as it held out the hope that massive sit-ins and blockages of abortuaries might singe the conscience of the nation. It polarized others in that same community, especially those who believed that we had been making "progress" in the 1980s and that we had to work through the electoral system to effect change incrementally, pragmatically.

Some Catholics were critical of the whole concept of Rescue, arguing that it was wrong to adopt the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, worse yet to entrust the leadership of such an enterprise to evangelical Protestants who believed that they had the responsibility to take Catholics out of the Church to "save" them.

Despite the polarizing aspects of Rescue, however, many thousands of Catholics were among those who were arrested at rescues between late 1987 and 1994, the time that Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Bill (FACE), with the help, it should be noted, of a few supposedly "pro-life" senators and representatives (could you imagine them voting for a "Freedom of Access to a Concentration Camp Bill").

A lot of Catholics were involved in the high-level leadership of local rescues. Indeed, it can be argued that Operation Rescue itself was an outgrowth of the solitary actions of Catholics such as Joan Andrews Bell, who had spent a considerable amount of time in prison for attempting to rescue the preborn in the 1980s, and the late John Arena, a fierce fighter for the inviolability of innocent human life in the Utica, New York, area. Mention must be made also of Joe Wall, a pro-life advocate from the Philadelphia area who had placed himself on the front lines for a long time.

That Catholics participated in an effort that was largely, although not exclusively, under the direction of evangelical Protestants was very ironic. The very evil attempting to be addressed by Operation Rescue, abortion, was the ultimate, natural, inexorable result of the division of Christendom wrought by Martin Luther and John Calvin and Henry VIII and John Knox and John Wesley and scores upon scores of others. As is noted in , which made so many Catholics comfortable in their embrace of the world, was an effort to empty the Sacred Liturgy of the Roman Rite of its distinctly Catholic features in order to appeal to Protestants

Despite the irony of the origins of Operation Rescue and that its efforts were bound to be circumscribed by the limits that exist in a nation that does not subordinate itself to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it should be exercised by the Catholic Church, the courage, and the love of those who participated in it must never be overlooked or minimized. Many thousands upon thousands of ordinary Americans, most of them Catholics, mind you, prayed Rosaries and offered up the sufferings and indignities of arrest and fingerprinting in order to bear a visible, tangible witness to the binding nature of the Fifth Commandment.

As a counterpoint to the indifference to the plight of the unborn on the part of so many bishops and priest, the late “Bishops” Austin Vaughan and George Lynch participated in rescues regularly. The late "Bishop" Paul Dudley, who was the long time conciliar “bishop” of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was dragged away by the police in one rescue. Hundreds of priests, from those with international reputations, such as the late Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., the founder of Human Life International, and the late Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., to the ordinary pastors and curates and seminarians who prayed the Rosary as they were handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

Apart from the spiritual bouquets that were given to Our Lord through Our Lady by Catholics during rescues, Operation Rescue was useful in that it showed the full fury of demonic hatred for the innocent preborn and their defenders on the part of police officers and court officers and prosecutors and judges. Police brutality was visited upon rescuers as a matter of routine.

One of the few journalists to write about this brutality was the late Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, who noted that there would be all manner of sanctimonious outcries from left-leaning columnists if the same sort of brutality was used by police officers against black Americans or "peace" demonstrators. The rescuers who were brutalized included “bishops,” priests/presbyters, and elderly men and women. (The demonic fury of pro-abortion activists was displayed throughout the counterdemonstrations during rescues. Some of those activists used the courts to try to break the back of the entire pro-life movement, including those who did not participate in rescues, by using the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act to bring costly lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in damages from key rescue leaders. This led directly to the aforementioned F.A.C.E. Act, which was accompanied by sloganeering rhetoric that termed all opposition to abortion as "violent" and "intolerant.")

One of the worst incidents of police brutality occurred in West Hartford, Connecticut, on June 17, 1989. A videotape taken by a rescuer who had hidden a camera after having trespassed into an abortuary showed the police barging into a room in the abortuary without wearing their badges and nameplates, which were turn backwards in some instances. The force used was quite plain. I was told by people who experienced it first-hand that the force was used in a corridor of a courtroom of a judge who must have heard the screams of those being assaulted. The subject of what some have called a "police riot" in West Hartford, Connecticut, became a topic of some interest in the mainstream media for a while, including being Patrick J. Buchanan's "Outrage of the Week" on The Capitol Gang, a program he originated on Cable News Network (CNN) in 1989. Pat would later have an entire Crossfire devoted to the matter, during which program the videotape referred to above was shown on international satellite television. The images shown were simply unforgettable.

Alas, the same courts that gave us child-killing on demand proved to be of little avail to those who were assaulted in West Hartford in 1989. After fifteen years and all manner of legal wrangling and debates about legal strategy, the following press release was issued on June 25, 2004, by John Kladde of the Connecticut Pro-Life Action Network:

On June 1, rescuers from the infamous 1989 West Hartford pro-life rescues took the Town of West Hartford to task for police brutality in the case of Waugh v. West Hartford . The plaintiffs were arrested on April 1, 1989, and June 17, 1989, at the Summit Women's Center where abortions are performed.

They sued the Town contending that it had a de facto policy of using excessive force in the arrest, transport and custody of the rescuers. The relief sought was compensatory damages for inflicting unreasonable force upon the plaintiffs in violation of their rights under the Fourth Amendment.

The jury voted unanimously Monday, June 14, in 2 hours that there was no excessive force used by the WHPD against any of the plaintiffs at either rescue.

Details an be found at www.geocities.com/connplan [The website gives the full history of what took place during the past fifteen years, including the legal wrangling.]

The images on the videotape taken on June 17, 1989, are quite clear.  A jury decided that excessive force was not used. Just as in Canada at this time, those responsible for using such a level of force to arrest trespassers engaged in a non-violent demonstration who did not in any way threaten the bodily safety of the arresting officers will have to answer to God Himself at the moment of their Particular Judgments if they do not repent of their actions. The same Judgment, from which there is no appeal, awaits all judges and prosecutors who participate in the perpetuation of the American genocide of the preborn, and it awaits the “woke” prosecutors and mayors of the Cities of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, District of Columbia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and elsewhere who are indemnifying violent criminals while ignoring the pleas of victims and/or their surviving relatives to enforce the law upon those who break it.

This is not even to mention William Jefferson Blythe Clinton's aggressive promotion of the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn and the role played by Attorney General Janet Reno, a Catholic, mind you, in organizing the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy (VAAPCON) Task Force under the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  to intimidate pro-life Americans, including a woman in Toledo, Ohio, who was visited by FBI agents after she had written to a baby-killer to tell her that she was praying for her conversion, an act that was deemed by the agents to have constituted a "violent threat" against the baby-killer (see FBI's VAAPCON Spies on Pro-Lifers for more information about the Clinton-Reno war against pro-lifers).

Then again, it is easy for tyrants to order and then execute assaults upon their political “enemies” and/or to go soft of crime when they do not see the Divine impress in the souls of others, starting wit the innocent preborn, and thus have no regard whatsoever for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive and the Natural Laws.

They Come for Us All Now

You see, good readers, those who believe in the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.

This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their world view shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes that are contrary to the Catholic Faith and thus to the good of both men and their nations.

Remember, the caesars of yore came for the first Catholics in first three centuries of the Church.

The Arians came for faithful Catholics during some of that some time and for a time thereafter.

The barbarians came for faithful Catholics during the First Millennium.

The Visigoths and the Ostrogoths came for Catholics on the Iberian Peninsula.

The Mohammedans came for Catholics in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and in southern France as early as the Eighth Century, and then stayed in Spain until Ferdinand and Isabella drove them out in 1492.

The Tartars came for the Catholics of Eastern Europe in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.

The Albigensians came for Catholics in southern France and elsewhere while their compatriots, the Cathari, came for Catholics on the Italian Peninsula around the same time.

The Lutherans and Calvinists came for the Catholics of continental Europe in the Sixteenth Century while Henry VIII and his daughter/granddaughter, Elizabeth I, imposed a bloody reign of terror upon faithful Catholics from 1534 through much of the Seventeenth Century and even at times after that.

The Japanese pagans came for the Catholics of Japan at the end of the Sixteenth and the beginning of the Seventeenth Centuries.

The French Revolutionaries came for Catholics who refused to have anything to do with their “Constitutional Church” as they ushered in the first anti-Theistic revolution in history, presaging the later attacks upon Catholics by the Soviet, Mexican, Red Chinese, North Vietnamese, North Korea, Cuban, Cambodian, and Nicaraguan revolutionaries in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Perhaps even more tellingly, the nationalistic, imperialistic, Masonic hater of Catholicism named Otto von Bismarck, used the full power of the civil state against Holy Mother Church and faithful Catholics during his Kulturkampf that earned the immediate scorn and constant opposition of Pope Pius IX, who also had to deal with the anti-Catholic attacks and anti-Catholic laws of the Italian Risorgimento in the 1860s and especially after the overthrow of the Papal States in 1870.

Those peace and fun loving Buddhists came for Catholics in Thailand in 1943.

Korean pagans came for Catholics in 1839, 1846, and 1866, while Vietnamese pagans came for Catholics in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

Communist agents came for Catholics in Spain and Ukraine in the Twentieth Century.

Hitler sent his goons to kill Catholic priests and others in Germany and had his troops engage in the indiscriminate killing of Catholics in Poland.

Stalin ordered the butchery of over twenty Ukrainian priests and bishops in 1941 while others were martyred during the reigns of Nikita Khruhschev and Leonid Brezhnev. 

In our day, of course, believing Catholics are under siege by the combined forces of “democratic” tyrants, who believe all opposition is the equivalent of seditious activity, which is a little peculiar as the United States of America was born as a result of an armed rebellion against the British Crown for abuses that were far, far less egregious, less numerous and less comprehensive than exist today, and by the globalist Vatican in its conciliar captivity.

There is no need to be agitated, though, as we are in Our Lady’s loving hands. The world as it exists is being punished for its sins, for the refusal of so many people and almost every nation in the world to submit to Christ the King as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which depends the fate of entire nations and thus of the whole world.

V. Our True Popes Warned Us of the Consequences of Protestant Rationalism and Judeo-Masonic Naturalism

Yes, fallen human nature has wreaked havoc throughout history, even during the period of the Catholic Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the frailties of Catholics in the Middle Ages pale into insignificance when one looks at the savagery of the barbaric tribes of Europe before their Catholicization in the First Millennium and that of the barbarism and abject hedonism of the supposedly “civilized” West today. Consider this very cogent summary of the history of the Middle Ages, that is, Christendom, written by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

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

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

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

Yes, the glory of the Middle Ages, which saw the transformation of barbarous nations into Catholic nations where rulers ruled in many, although certainly not all, instances according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer as He has discharged It exclusively in the Catholic Church, was undermined and attacked by the "deplorable passion for innovation" of Martin Luther and John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and John Knox and John Wesley and Richard Topcliffe and Oliver Cromwell, theological revolutionaries who wrought their work in the blood of innocent Catholics as they sacked Catholic Churches and denied her perennial rites of worship and teaching, paved a path of blood for the likes of the social revolutionaries of the English colonies in North America and in France and Latin America and Italy and Germany.

The Protestant Revolution and the so-called “Enlightenment” ushered a true dark age of proud men who refuse to submit in a humble and docile spirit to the true Church that Our Lord founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, in all that pertains to the good of souls. It is no accident that the American founders, sons of the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent spread of Judeo-Masonry during the so-called “enlightenment,” are said to be exemplars of how to govern according to alleged “interests” rather than according to objective standards of moral truth.

Writing in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939, Pope Pius XII explained how the world was suffering as result of rejecting the unity effected by the Chair of Saint Peter, the papacy:

28. The present age, Venerable Brethren, by adding new errors to the doctrinal aberrations of the past, has pushed these to extremes which lead inevitably to a drift towards chaos. Before all else, it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which We deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined; the voice of conscience is stilled or at any rate grows very faint, that voice which teaches even to the illiterate and to uncivilized tribes what is good and what is bad, what lawful, what forbidden, and makes men feel themselves responsible for their actions to a Supreme Judge.

29. 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.

30. 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).

31. 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).

32. 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.)

Error leads to the collapse of nations over time, and the American founding was based on the error that men could pursue civic virtue on the basis of self-interest without regard to the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His true Church for Its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping and without a firm reliance upon Sanctifying Grace to over the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin in order to scale the heights of personal sanctity.

Many of the founders of the United States of America, of course, hated Our Lord and His true Church as they spared no mockery and considered no blasphemy to be beneath the reach of their poisonous rhetoric:

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

These men blamed the Catholic Church for the abuses of power by English monarchs in the Eighteenth Century even though it was precisely because King Henry VIII had broken from the true Church that despotism of the sort that he embodied to murder over three percent of his ow people who remained faithful to the true Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, became so institutionalized. The very abuses they contended had been committed by King George III were made possible by what Henry VIII had wrought two hundred years before. The Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer is the one and only standard of genuine human liberty, not the "multiplicity of sects," almost each of which is the result of Martin Luther's revolution that began on October 31, 1517.

To be sure, most of the four million people who lived in the United States of America were practicing Protestants of one stripe or another. Protestantism, however, is not “religion.” There is only one true religion, Catholicism.

Amorality and religious indifferentism were deemed “necessities” in the pluralist state that itself is but the product of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrew over the Social Reign of Christ the King. A method was thus devised whereby men could avoid any public reference to the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who has the right to rule over men and their nations.

Pope Leo XIII explained that a generic belief in God leads to the acceptance of religious indifferentism, which is one of the chief goals of Judeo-Masonry:

But the naturalists go much further; for, having, in the highest things, entered upon a wholly erroneous course, they are carried headlong to extremes, either by reason of the weakness of human nature, or because God inflicts upon them the just punishment of their pride. Hence it happens that they no longer consider as certain and permanent those things which are fully understood by the natural light of reason, such as certainly are -- the existence of God, the immaterial nature of the human soul, and its immortality. The sect of the Freemasons, by a similar course of error, is exposed to these same dangers; for, although in a general way they may profess the existence of God, they themselves are witnesses that they do not all maintain this truth with the full assent of the mind or with a firm conviction. Neither do they conceal that this question about God is the greatest source and cause of discords among them; in fact, it is certain that a considerable contention about this same subject has existed among them very lately. But, indeed, the sect allows great liberty to its votaries, so that to each side is given the right to defend its own opinion, either that there is a God, or that there is none; and those who obstinately contend that there is no God are as easily initiated as those who contend that God exists, though, like the pantheists, they have false notions concerning Him: all which is nothing else than taking away the reality, while retaining some absurd representation of the divine nature.

When this greatest fundamental truth has been overturned or weakened, it follows that those truths, also, which are known by the teaching of nature must begin to fall -- namely, that all things were made by the free will of God the Creator; that the world is governed by Providence; that souls do not die; that to this life of men upon the earth there will succeed another and an everlasting life.

When these truths are done away with, which are as the principles of nature and important for knowledge and for practical use, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality. We say nothing of those more heavenly virtues, which no one can exercise or even acquire without a special gift and grace of God; of which necessarily no trace can be found in those who reject as unknown the redemption of mankind, the grace of God, the sacraments, and the happiness to be obtained in heaven. We speak now of the duties which have their origin in natural probity. That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained, and forbids that it be disturbed; that the last end of men is a destiny far above human things and beyond this sojourning upon the earth: these are the sources and these the principles of all justice and morality.

If these be taken away, as the naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. But, how insufficient such teaching is, how wanting in soundness, and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already begun to appear. For, wherever, by removing Christian education, this teaching has begun more completely to rule, there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. All this is commonly complained of and deplored; and not a few of those who by no means wish to do so are compelled by abundant evidence to give not infrequently the same testimony. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

To Remain Calm in the Midst of the Agitation

In the midst of all this, however, we must remain ever in the hands of Our Lady and ever reliant upon her Most Rosary as the consecrated slaves of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. This is a time for Catholic heroes who are willing to pray and fast for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order, and for the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter.

Although it may sound trite as I have repeated this endlessly in my writing over the past few decades, this is the time that God has known from all eternity that we would be alive. The graces His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal Divine Son won for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday in atonement for our sins and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, are more than sufficient for us to prosper under the yoke of overt persecution and censorship.

Remember, the Sanhedrin demanded that the Apostles be silent about the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They refused to do and rejoiced that we were deemed worthy to suffer for sake of His Holy Name.

What are we afraid of now?

Remember, the first Catholics were told by Roman emperors and their minions to make sacrifices to idols and abandon the Catholic Faith. According to Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, nearly eleven million Catholics gave up their lives in order to avoid even the appearance of doing apostatizing.

What’s wrong with us?

As noted a short while earlier in this commentary, Catholics in England and Ireland hid priests in priest-holes and were willing to lose everything they hand, including their lives, to remain faithful to the true Church during the persecutions of King Henry VIII and his own daughter and granddaughter, Elizabeth I, whose mother, Anne Boleyn, was Henry’s illegitimate daughter.

We are afraid of the Red Chinese-bought and paid for high priests and priestesses of Silicon Valley?

To quote the “big guy” whose wallet got very fat from Chinese Communist Party front companies, “Come on, man.”

Remember, Catholics suffered during the French Revolution, under Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Germany, and the suffered at the hands of the Soviet Bolsheviks, the Chinese Maoists, the Cuban Castroists and the Mexican Freemasons.

With Our Lady and Saint Joseph so near to us every day, why are we so agitated and afraid?

As courageous as the truckers were in Canada before they were brutalized by the forces unleashed by Deng Xiaoping Trudeau, the commendable battle they waged was not for Christ the King and His Holy Church. While Catholics who participated in the effort certainly gained merit for enduring injustices and even violence wrought upon their own person, the coming battles will be about the Holy Faith, and that alone is condition for martyrdom as we the minions of the world have always required believing Catholics to deny the Faith before men or face severe consequences.

Living A World Devoid of a Superabundance of the Merits of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus:  Prophetic Words from Father Frederick Faber and Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.

We are looking at what happens in a world where most people, including most baptized Catholics, are devoid of contact with the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as Father Frederick Faber made this exact point in The Precious Blood:

It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are hindered by the Precious Blood; and this is not merely a hindering of so many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights. Falsehood would become so universal as to dissolve society; and the homes of domestic life would be turned into wards either of a prison or a madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But without the Precious Blood, such men would abound in the world. They might even become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we have in our souls. Civilization increases these possibilities. Education multiplies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Refinement adds a fresh malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad, until at last earth would be a hell on this side of the grave. There would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region of the unnatural. All highly-refined and luxurious developments of heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a highly-educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal.

The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose.

An earth, from off which all sense of justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes. The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way; and the same is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been just as it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this? All our struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no reason why we should not give ourselves up to that kind of enjoyment which our corruption does substantially find in sin. The gratification of our appetites is something; and that lies on one side, while on the other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser--is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness? Yet it would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world where there was no Precious Blood. Whatever relics of moral good we might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the most miserable; for they would be drawn away from the enjoyment of this world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and shame; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the allurements of sense are so vivid and strong.

What sort of love could there be, when we could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other, what a separation death would be! We should commit our dead to the ground without a hope. Husband and wife would part with the fearfullest certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation. Mothers would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to offend God with their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of our nature would become unnatural, and the most honorable ties be dishonored. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our hearts would have to learn to beat another way, in order to avoid the dismal consequences which our affections would bring upon ourselves and others. But it is needless to go further into these harrowing details. The world of the heart, without the Precious Blood, and with an intellectual knowledge of God, and his punishments of sin, is too fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity.

But how would it fare with the poor in such a world? They are God's chosen portion upon the earth. He chose poverty himself, when he came to us. He has left the poor in his place, and they are never to fail from the earth, but to be his representatives there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood, would any one love them? Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot? If the stream of almsgiving is so insufficient now, what would it be then? There would be no softening of the heart by grace; there would be no admission of of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our incomes; there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large;and yet even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with skilful concentration to different acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. Vocation is a blossom to be found only in the gardens of the Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God. Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining.

Even in countries professing to be Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel, the poor grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be supported by compulsory taxes; and they are in other ways a continual subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due to the Precious Blood that the principle of supporting them is acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history--even the history of nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation, and for literary and artistic refinement--it would not be extravagant for us to conclude that, if the circumstances of a country were such as to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves, so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition.

Such would be the condition of the world without the Precious Blood. As generations succeeded each other, original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to themselves. Every thing which makes life tolerable, which counteracts any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness, which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which consoles any sadness--is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in heathen as well as in Christian lands. It changes the whole position of an offending creation to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such a matter to speak of change, the aspect of God's immutable perfections toward his human children. It does not work merely in a spiritual sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We are all of us every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden, so imperceptible, so unsuspected? Perhaps because it is so universal and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents if it pressed sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of all his attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out?

Men would be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him; but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.

Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather than that of holinessThese men will consider the foregoing picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which made life unbearable to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)

Father Faber described the very world in which we live today,

Father Faber noted in his The Precious Blood is characterized by the Pelagian spirit of human self-redemption and the libertinage that flows forth as a result merely from the pull of the world, which is so strong and very difficult for so many to resist in these days of apostasy and betrayal:

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.)

Those words are even truer now than when Father Faber wrote them one hundred fifty-nine years ago.

A similarly prophetic reading of the signs of the times was made about eight later by Father Henry James Coleridge in Father Faber’s beloved England. A careful reading of this essay, which was delivered as a series of sermons, will reveal that Father Coleridge understood perfectly the destructive trajectory of Modernity, a world moored on the rocky shoals of the rationalism of Protestantism and the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry:

But yet the Son of Man when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth.

(Words taken from the 8th verse of the 13th chapter of St. Luke's Gospel.)

We have this description chiefly in two great documents – in St. Paul's speech at Athens to the philosophers, (Acts xivv. 22-31.) and in his account of the miseries of the heathendom in the Epistle to the Romans. (Rom. I. 18-32) I shall speak presently of a third great passage which I mean to compare with these, in which, years after his Epistle to the Roman, he describes the men of the latter times. Let us first deal with the account given by the Apostle of the heathenism among which he lived and worked. In his speech, then, at the Areopagus, St. Paul describes in brief God's ways of dealing with the world. He tells the Athenians, as you know, of the “unknown God,” whom they worshipped in ignorance, Who, nevertheless, was the Creator and the Father of all. He had made of one blood, of one stock, of one nature, all nations on the face of earth. He had given them, as is implied in this, one moral law, one promise, one primeval tradition, one common hope of future salvation. Then He had, as it were, withdrawn, and left them themselves, though still His providence ruled them appointing the whole course of what is called the world's history, the rise, and fall, and character, and vicissitudes of nations and empires, and giving to all men, as St. Paul had said before at Iconium, abundance of good gifts, “Giving rains and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” (Acts xiv. 14-17) And the Apostle tells his hearers how the heathen had, as it were, to grope like blinded men, after God, although He was all the time so near to them, as to all of us – “for in Him we live and move and be.” (Acts xiv. 14-17) And he speaks in the same place, though gently and reservedly, of those terrible and lamentable errors into which the nations left to themselves had falling  touching upon the crown and consummation of them all, the idolatrous worship of false gods.

And now we must turn to the other great passage, which must be compared with this of which I have been speaking, where, at the beginning of his Epistle to the Romans, the same Apostle gives what we may call a companion picture to the former, describing the manner in which the heathen nations had in return treated God, and the consequence to themselves in which that treatment had issued. He speaks of the inexcusable ingratitude of the heathen to so good and wonderful a Creator, of their refusal to acknowledge Him, notwithstanding the strong evidences concerning Himself which He had imprinted on the face and on the course of nature; of the punishment which fell on them – that of being given over to idolatry: and then again of the further punishment of this judicial delusion, by which they became the slaves of lusts which in their abominable degradation went even beyond the extreme indulgence of all natural animal appetites. You may remember, my brethren, that fearful picture, on the details of which it is not necessary that we should linger for any space of time this afternoon. The character of heathendom, as he describes it, is based, of course, on intense selfishness, woking itself out in an eager grasping after all the object of concupiscence, and so in avarice, in the reckless pursuit of pleasure at whatever cost to others, in the passionate love of earthly honour and position; then rising, as was only natural after this, into intense pride and haughtiness, into unending stubbornness of will and judgment, and, further still, wreaking itself on all who came across its path, in envy, contentiousness, violence, contumely, in malignant craft, or insolent and reckless cruelty. By the side of these save features of debased humanity, we find placed, as is always the case in reality, a voluptuousness and licentiousness that knew no bound. And these two great passions of lust and pride combine in the character of the heathen world, as drawn by St. Paul, to smother and destroy all those instincts of natural piety and goodness which are implanted in man by his Creator, to which his conscience witnesses, and which animate and sustain all that social and domestic life which is the fundamental condition of our being and our happiness as men. Hence we find in St. Paul's description of heathenism a number of traits which point to the want of all natural affection. The tie which binds parents to children, and children to parents, was dissolved; so again, the law of faithfulness and truthfulness, which is essential in order that we may trust one another in the common intercourse of life, was set aside, as also the rule of gratitude and honest, the law of respect for the characters of others in men's language, the observance of obligations, the habit of peaceableness, the practice of kindness, even the instinct of mercy to the conquered, the weak, the helpless, the afflicted – mercy, the one provision of God for the numberless and otherwise inconsolable miseries to which the world is given up !

Such, in brief, is this great description of the heathenism of his own time given us by St. Paul. And now I come to the point of our argument concerning the latter days. This great Apostle as I have already said, has dwelt in more than one place on the characteristics of the men of those future times, as he has so often dwelt on the characteristics of the old heathen. We have already had occasion to examine what he has said in some of these passages; but one great description remains, written, moreover, as I have said, at the very end of St. Paul's life, on the eve of his martyrdom, in his last Epistle to his beloved child Timothy. (2 Tim. iii. I seq.) This is the longest and most particular description given us by the Apostle, and striking as it is in itself, it is perhaps still more striking when it is compared with the earlier passage in the Epistle to the Romans, to which I have referred. If you will take that passage, in which the vices and degradation of the unconverted heathen world are described with so much indignant severity, and yet with a certain discriminating tenderness and largesness of sympathy, and if you will put it side by side with the other account which, by way of prophecy, St. Paul gives, so many years afterwards, of the corruptions of the latter days, you will find that with one or two striking differences, which I shall point out, the two passages tally exactly. The differences that exist are important in themselves, as we shall see; and they are precious also on another ground, because they show us, if that be needed, that St. Paul has weighed his every word, that he has nowhere made one single charge, either against the ancient heathenism or against its modern revival, without the fullest knowledge and the calmest deliberation. Bear with me, then, if I dwell for a few moments on the points of agreement and of differences between the two,.

IV

In that old heathenism of the Roman world, into which it was the will of God that the Christian religion should be introduced by the Apostles, there were three diverse and often conflicting elements. There was a good element, which came from God; there was a thoroughly bad element, which came from Satan; and there was a corrupt element, which was the fruit of the workings of unregenerate human nature upon society, and upon the objects of sense and intelligence with which man is placed in relations. The good element we see embodied in great part of the laws and institutions of the ancient world, as also in much of the literature, the poetry, the philosophy of Greece and Rome, which literature consequently – after having been purified and as it were, baptized – has always been used by the Christian Church in the education of her children. This element, I say, was originally the gift of God, the Author of nature, to man, the offspring of reason and consicence, the tradition of a society of which God was Himself the founder. It enshrined whatever fragments of primeval truth as to God, the world, and man hiself, still lingered, in whatever shape among the far-wandering children of Adam. St. Paul alludes to this element in the first passage on which we dwelt to-day, and his words altogether seem to imply that God watched over it, supported it, and fostered it, as far as men were worthy of it, and that it might even have been expanded into a perfect system of natural religion and of reasonable virtue, had men been grateful enough to earn larger measure of grace from God, Who left not Himself without witness in His daily providence, and was “not far from” any one of His children.

But now we come to another element which just now I place the last of the three, the working of which we may distinguish in the heathen world. All flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth, and man had shut out the knowledge of God from his soul, and had let his passions lead him instead of his conscience. The unregenerate instincts of nature gradually overpowered the moral law in the heart of man, and their victory reflected itself in the rules of society, in the customs and maxims by which human life was guided. In proportion as man became more and more the master of the world, as wealth and power and knowledge and experience increased, as civilization (so to call it) and means of communication advanced, there grew up that great system of cruelty and immorality, of the godless pursuit of pleasure and worldly ends, which we call paganism. For paganism is not properly a religion, so much as a system of human life and human society, according to the impulses and unbridled lust of the natural man, checked only by what remained of strength in the law of right as written in men's hearts, in the voice of conscience, and in the old traditions of better days, and also by the law of necessity which made it imperative that society should in some way or other be kept alive and held together. St. Paul, in the passage to the Romans on which we have dwelt, has described to us, my brethren, what sort of men they were who were penetrated by this pagan spirit. And now, as I have already said, when the same Apostle comes to describe the men of the latter days, he paints them, as to all moral degradation, in the same colours as the pagans of his own time. The two passages correspond as to this word for word; the latter text is almost a repetition of the former. Thus far, the, we have St. Paul's authority for saying that the apostacy of the latter days will be a return to heathenism, understanding by the word that godless system of life and manners which is the fruit of the unrestrained development and reign of the lower instincts of human nature.

These thoughts bring us to the third element of paganism – that which I call the work of Satan, the enemy of God and man. As to this, also, we have St. Paul's authority, in that passage where in a few short words he tells us that the gods of the heathen were devils (I Cor. x. 20) We, my brethren, are often inclined to look upon the personages of which the heathen mythology is made up, as a number of poetic creations, as the powers of nature symbolized, or perhaps, at worst, as great men and famous heroes of fabulous times raised by a sort of natural canonization to the thrones of a higher world. This is the human part of the heathen religions, skillfully used by the authors of evil to disguise their own work for the delusion of men. But there was more behind the forms of apparent grace and beauty than the imagination of earthly poets. This might have been seen, we might truly say, by the base impurities in which they were steeped. No, my brethren, unless St. Paul is mistaken, unless thousands of Christian martyrs were mistaken who treated the heathen idols as the forms under which the apostate angels were adored, the gods of the heathen were Satan and his associates, permitted by the just judgment of God to draw to themselves the adoration which men had denied to Him; and taking care to deify in themselves every shape of human vice and passion, and to exact from their worshippers impure rites and filthy mysteries, that man made in the image God, might learn from them to degrade himself even beneath the level of the beasts of the field. Or, if we want a still more clear proof of the Satanic agencies which underlay the pagan religion we may find it in that other kind of worship which it exacted in the ancient world, and is still found to exact – in the ancient world, and is still found to exact – I mean the frightful tribute of human sacrifice, a custom widely spread and almost universal among pagan nations, some of whom have astonished even their Christian discoverers by their mildness and gentleness, their courtesy and simplicity, and yet have been found to be penetrated to the core by corruption, and to be in the habit of honouring their gods by the frightful homage of the tombs of human victims, a homage enough of itself to proclaim as its author the hater alike of man, and of God Who created him! (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 28-40. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Father Coleridge made the proper distinctions about the pagan world in which our spiritual ancestors lived and, all too frequently, shed their blood to plant the seeds for the rise of Holy Mother Church from the catacombs.

It is true, of course, that Holy Mother Church “baptized,” if you will, what was naturally good in pagan cultures. It is also true that human weakness, which is always at work in the lives of fallen men, undermined the naturally good and beautiful.

This having been noted, however, pagan cultures always do the bidding of satan and his legion of cohorts to seek both the temporal ruin of men and their nations, and it is this third aspect that is at work so fiercely in the world even more than it was in ancient times.

Father Colerdige continued:

Here, then my brethren, we have come to that part of the comparison as to which it need not be said that St. Paul's two descriptions are identical. We need not exaggerate the miseries of our own time, nor draw in darker colours than St. Paul the evil features of the last great apostacy. The Son of God, as another Apostle tells us, was “manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil,” (I St. John iii, S.) and I do not find, in any of the prophetic descriptions of the restored paganism of modern days, that the system of the worship of false gods is to revive, with its abominable rites of blood and its mysteries of licentiousness. Wherever the Cross has been once firmly planted, we may surely hope that the world has seen the last of the public worship of Satan. In St. Paul's description of the latter days, I find the blasphemy of the true God substituted for the worship of devils. But, my brethren, the Son of God was not manifested altogether to destroy the works of man. He came to raise man, change him, regenerate him, sanctify him, by uniting him to Himself. He did not come to take away man's free will, or to tear out of his nature those seeds of possible evil which produced all the human part of the paganism on which we have been reflecting. The empire of Satan has been overthrown, but alas!  Man is still his own great enemy, and though our Lord has armed him against himself, He has still left him the power to mar the work of God in his own soul, and this power, which each one of us possesses in his own case, is always fearfully active in the corruption of the Christian society, the character of which is the result and the reflection of that of the parts of which it is made up.

V.

And now, my brethren, what need have we of any subtlety of inquiry or refinement of speculation to tell us that this modern heathenism of which the prophecies speak is around us on every side? Mankind are in many sense far mightier, and the resources and enjoyments at their command are far ampler, than in the days of old. We are in possession of the glorious but intoxicating fruits of that advanced civilization and extended knowledge which has sprung up from the seeds which the Church of God has, as it were, dropped on her way through the world. Society has been elevated and refined, but on that very account it has become capable of a more penetrating degradation, of a more elegant and a more poisonous corruption. Knowledge has been increased, but on the increase of knowledge has followed the increase of pride. Science has unravelled the laws of nature and the hidden treasures of the material universe, and they place fresh combinations of power and new revelations of enjoyment in the hands of men who have not seen in the discovery increased reasons for self-restraint or for reverence for the Giver of all good gifts. The world, the home of the human race, has been opened to civilised man in all its distant recesses, and he has taken, or is taking, possession of his full inheritance; but his onward path is the path of avarice and greed, of lust and cruelty, and he seizes on each new land as he reaches it in the spirit of the merchant or the conqueror, not in that of the harbinger of peace, the bearer of the good tidings of God. At home, in Christendom itself, we hear, as our Lord said, of wars and rumours of wars, nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. In the Apostles' time, it was an unheard of thing that the majestic peace and unity of the Roman Empire should not absorb and keep in harmony a hundred rival nationalities. In our time it is not to be thought of that the supernatural bond of the christian church should be able to keep nations which are brethren in the faith from devouring one another.

Or, again, my brethren, let us turn from public to private life. Look at social life, look at domestic manners; consider the men and women of the present day in their amusements, their costumes, the amount of restraint they put upon the impulses of nature; compare them at their theatres and their recreations, compare them as to their treatment of the poor and the afflicted classes; compare them, again, as to the style of art which they affect, or the literature in which they delight, with the old heathen of the days of St. Paul. I do not say, God forbid! That there is not a wide and impassable gulf between the two, for that would be to say that so many centuries of Christendom had been utterly wasted, and that the Gospel law has not penetrated to the foundations of society, so that it is not true that our Lord rules as the Psalmist says, “in the  midst of His enemies,” (Psalm cix, 2)  even over the world, which would fain emancipate itself from His sway. But I do say, that if a Christian of the first ages were to rise from the dead, and examine our society, point by point, on the heads which I have intimated, and compare it, on the one hand, with the polished refined heathen whom he may have known at the courts of Nero or Domitian, and, on the other, with the pure strict holiness of his own brethren in the faith, who worshipped with him in the catacombs, he might find it difficult indeed to say that what he would see around him in London or Paris was derived by legitimate inheritance rather from the traditions of the martyr Church than from the customs of the persecuting heathen. He would miss the violence, the cruelty, the riotous and ruffianly lust, the extraordinary disrespect for humanity and human life which distinguished the later Roman civilization; but he would find much of its corruption, much of its licentiousness, much of its hardness of heart. The unregenerate instincts of human nature are surging up like a great sea all around us, society is fast losing all respect for those checks upon the innate heathenism of man which have been thrown over the surface of the world by the Church. It is becoming an acknowledged law that whatever is natural is right, and by nature is meant nature corrupted by sin, nature unilluminated by faith and unassisted by grace – that is, the lower appetites of man in revolt against conscience, looking for no home but earth and no satisfaction but in the present “having no hope of the promise, and without God in this world.” . . . .  (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 28-40. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Time has proven Father Coleridge wrong on one point as a Christian from the first ages who would rise from the dead would indeed find “the violence, the cruelty, the riotous and ruffianly lust, the extraordinary disrespect for humanity and human life which distinguished the later Roman civilization.”

Over three thousand babies are killed surgically every day under cover of law in the United States of America alone, thousands more are killed “silently” by means of chemical abortifacients. Thousands of innocent human beings are dispatched every week in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and even in the comfort of their homes by those who want to give them a “compassionate death” rather than to accept the death that God has willed for them from all eternity to endure, replete with all of its pains sufferings with which they can make final satisfaction for their sins.

Blasphemy is rampantly uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable.

All that is holy and just is mocked and reviled.

Believing Catholics are persecuted and denied employment and/or promotions because they are said to be “haters” who deny the “rights” of women to kill their babies or of those immersed in the sin of Sodom and its related vices to celebrate their iniquity publicly.

The world is awash with the blood of the innocent.

Yes, a visitor from Holy Mother Church’s first three centuries would recognize this world as being worse than that of Roman antiquity, because men, having heard the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer, have rejected the Holy Faith and prefer to live as brutes.

Father Coleridge’s remarkable essay concludes:

So then, in these our days, can we too often remind ourselves of the points of attack chosen by the enemies of faith and of society? Can we forget with what a wearisome sameness of policy the war is waged year after year, first in one place and then in another; how certain it is that as soon as we hear that some nation hitherto guided by Catholic instincts has become a convert to the enlightened ideas of our times, the next day will bring the further tidings that in that nation marriage is no longer to be treated as a sacrament and that education is to be withdrawn from the care of the church and her ministers? And, indeed, my brethren, we know not how soon we ourselves may be engaged in a deadly conflict, on one at least, of these points. Up to this time we, at least in England, have been able to train our children for ourselves. And, to give honour where honour is due, we have owed our liberty in great measure to the high value which certain communities outside the Church set upon distinctively Christian and doctrinal instruction. But we know not how soon the tide of war may come to our homes. We hear cry in the air – it says that the child belongs to the State, and that it is the duty of the State to take his education to itself. The cry is false; the child belongs to the parent, belongs to the Church, belongs to God. In that cry speaks the reviving paganism of our day. Surely it should teach us, if nothing else can, the paramount importance of Christian education. If we give in to that cry we are lost. Train up your children, my brethrenin the holy discipline and pure doctrine of the Church, and they are formed thereby to be soldiers of Jesus Christ in the coming conflict against the powers of evilTrain them up in indifference to religion and Christian doctrine, and if they are not at once renegades from their faith, at least they are far too weak and faint-hearted in their devotion to the Church, to range themselves courageously among her champions in her terrible battle against the last apostacy. (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 28-40. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Anyone who does not see we are living at a time when the consequences of the dreadful errors set upon the world by Niccolo Machiavelli, Martin Luther, et al. is a fool. The conditions described by Father Coleridge describe our conditions today. Sadly, there are still Catholics today who permit themselves to become agitated over the events of the world without realizing that there is no getting the “toothpaste back into the tube” by natural means. Men revel in their sins and they are evangelistic in behalf of their errors. Worse yet, obviously, is the fact that the false “pope” and his equally false “bishops” reaffirm them in their sins and are even more evangelistic than they in the spread of errors and heresies that fulfill the very prophecy of Saint Paul to Saint Timothy:

[1] I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming, and his kingdom: [2] Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine[3] For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: [4] And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables. [5] But be thou vigilant, labour in all things, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill thy ministry. Be sober. (2 Tim. 4: 1-15.)

Men prefer to have others tickle their itching ears rather than to consider the sweet entreaties of Christ the King and to respond to the motherly intercession of Our Blessed Mother in their behalves.

Men prefer to believe in naturalism of one sort or another, not Catholicism.

Men prefer to pursue material pleasure and well-being to the exclusion of all considerations of futurity, of where they will spend eternity, Heaven or Hell.

Men prefer to submit to the statists of Modernity rather than to the sweet yoke of Christ the King and to His true Church.

Men prefer to walk in the darkness rather than in the light of Christ the King.

To Flee from the Deceptions and Snares of a World Gone Mad

Catholics must reject the deceptions of a world gone mad, a world that has no more place for Christ the King than it did when He was born in a stable in a cave in Bethlehem as He was warmed by the breath of stable animals.

We must, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, offer up the sacrifices of the moment, recognizing that this is the time that God has appointed for us from all eternity in which to live and to sanctify our souls.

We have been given the weapon of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and the shield of her Brown Scapular.

Conscious of our need to make reparation for our own many sins and to live in the world but without being of the world, we take seriously this instruction that Our Lady gave to the Venerable Mary of Agreda about the public manifestation of her Divine Son to Saint John the Baptist, His cousin, herald and precursor, at the Jordan River prior to embarking upon His Public Ministry to accept the sufferings of this time as redeemed creatures eager to make satisfaction in this life for how our sins have offended Divine Justice and thus worsened the state of the Church Militant and of the world-at-large:

272. My daughter, since in relating to thee the works of my most holy Son I so often remind thee how gratefully I appreciated them, thou must understand how pleasing to the Most High is the most faithful care and correspondence on thy part, and the hidden and great blessings enclosed within it. Thou art poor in the house of the Lord, a sinner, insignificant and useless as dust; yet I ask thee to assume the duty of rendering ceaseless gratitude for all the incarnate Word has done for the sons of Adam, and for establishing the holy and immaculate, the powerful and perfect law for their salvation. Especially must thou be grateful for the institution of Baptism by which He frees men from the tyranny of the devil, regenerates them as his children (Jn. 3:5), fills them with grace, clothes them with justice, and assists them to sin no more. This is indeed a duty incumbent upon all men in common, but since creatures neglect it almost entirely I enjoin thee to give thanks for all of them as if thou alone wert responsible for them. Thou art bound to special gratitude to the Lord for other things as well because He has shown Himself so generous to no one among other nations as He has with thee. In the foundation of his holy law and of his Sacraments thou wert present in his memory; He called and chose thee as a daughter of his Church, proposing to nourish thee by his own blood with infinite love.

 273. And if the Author of grace, my most holy Son, as a prudent and wise Artificer, in order to found his evangelical Church and lay its first foundations in the sacrament of Baptism, humiliated Himself, prayed, and fulfilled all justice, acknowledging the inferiority of his human nature, and if, though at the same time God and man, He hesitated not to lower Himself to the nothingness of which his purest soul was created and his human being formed, how much must thou humiliate thyself, who hast committed sins and art less than the dust and despicable ashes? Confess that in justice thou dost merit only punishment, the persecution and wrath of all the creatures, and that none of the mortals who has offended his Creator and Redeemer can say in truth that any injustice or offense is done to them if all the tribulations and afflictions of the world from its beginning to its end were to fall upon them. Since all sinned in Adam (I Cor. 15:22), how deeply should they humiliate themselves when the hand of the Lord visits them (Job 19:21)? If thou dost suffer all the afflictions of men with the utmost resignation, and at the same time fulfill all that I enjoin upon thee by my teachings and exhortations with the greatest fidelity, thou nevertheless must esteem thyself as a useless and unprofitable servant (Lk. 17:10). How much then must thou humiliate thyself when thou dost fail in thy duty and in the return due to all the blessings received from God? Since I desire thee to make a proper return both for thyself and for others, think well how much thou art obliged to annihilate thyself to the very dust, not offering any resistance, nor ever being satisfied until the Most High receives thee as his daughter and accepts thee as such in his own presence and in the celestial vision of the triumphant Jerusalem. (New English Edition of The Mystical City of God: Book Five, The Transfixion, Chapter XXIV)

The Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph in the end, and it will be upon this triumph that the words Our Lord spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque will be fulfilled:

"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.)

 

Vivat Christus Rex!

Ave Maria! Salve Regina! Vivat Maria ReginaVivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us, especially on your feast day today!

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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