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Prepare for the Coming Persecution
`Well, the Judeo-Masonic farce of naturalism continues to agitate those who permit themselves to fall prey to the seemingly endless stream of screaming headlines. This commentary will not contribute to the literature of hysteria and righteous indignation and will be a bit briefer that the last two original articles on this site, believe it or not. The sun rises and sets every day, and every day we spend permitting ourselves to be agitated by the manipulated events of a world that owes its current politics and “popular culture” to the anti-Incarnational spirit of Judeo-Masonry is another day wasted on “news” that retards rather than advances the sanctification and salvation of our immortal souls. The events of the world must be viewed through the eyes of the true Faith, which teaches us that disorder in the world is the result and a reflection of the state of disorder in the souls of men.
Doubt my word?
Permit me to remind you of the following words contained in Pope Pius XI’s first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:
14. Just as the smallest part of the body feels the effect of an illness which is ravaging the whole body or one of its vital organs, so the evils now besetting society and the family afflict even individuals. In particular, We cannot but lament the morbid restlessness which has spread among people of every age and condition in life, the general spirit of insubordination and the refusal to live up to one’s obligations which has become so widespread as almost to appear the customary mode of living. We lament, too, the destruction of purity among women and young girls as is evidenced by the increasing immodesty of their dress and conversation and by their participation in shameful dances, which sins are made the more heinous by the vaunting in the faces of people less fortunate than themselves their luxurious mode of life. Finally, We cannot but grieve over the great increase in the number of what might be called social misfits who almost inevitably end by joining the ranks of those malcontents who continually agitate against all order, be it public or private.
15. It is surprising, then, that we should no longer possess that security of life in which we can place our trust and that there remains only the most terrible uncertainty, and from hour to hour added fears for the future? Instead of regular daily work there is idleness and unemployment. That blessed tranquillity which is the effect of an orderly existence and in which the essence of peace is to be found no longer exists, and, in its place, the restless spirit of revolt reigns. As a consequence industry suffers, commerce is crippled, the cultivation of literature and the arts becomes more and more difficult, and what is worse than all, Christian civilization itself is irreparably damaged thereby. In the face of our much praised progress, we behold with sorrow society lapsing back slowly but surely into a state of barbarism.
16. We wish to record, in addition to the evils already mentioned, other evils which beset society and which occupy a place of prime importance but whose very existence escapes the ordinary observer, the sensual man — he who, as the Apostle says, does not perceive “the things that are of the Spirit of God” (I Cor. ii, 14), yet which cannot but be judged the greatest and most destructive scourges of the social order of today. We refer specifically to those evils which transcend the material or natural sphere and lie within the supernatural and religious order properly so-called; in other words, those evils which affect the spiritual life of souls. These evils are all the more to be deplored since they injure souls whose value is infinitely greater than that of any merely material object. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
Mind you, Pope Pius XI wrote those words in the aftermath of the immoral, unjust and needless war known then as the Great War or the World War and, since 1939, as World War I. That horrific war introduced a variety of evils, many of which were enumerated by Pope Pius XI in Ubi Carno Consilio and his subsequent encyclical letters, that have only multiplied in the past century. As the Holy Father noted later in his first encyclical letter:
21. Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man’s personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.
22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: “Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit.” (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)
23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. “From whence are wars and contentions among you?” asks the Apostle St. James. “Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?” (James iv, 1, 2)
24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.
25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism — the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ — becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is “justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.” (Proverbs xiv, 34)
26. Perhaps the advantages to one’s family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. “It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch.” (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)
27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: “They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed.” (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: “Without me you can do nothing” (John xv, 5) and again, “He that gathereth not with me, scattereth.” (Luke xi, 23)
28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law.
Authority itself lost its hold upon mankind, for it had lost that sound and unquestionable justification for its right to command on the one hand and to be obeyed on the other. Society, quite logically and inevitably, was shaken to its very depths and even threatened with destruction, since there was left to it no longer a stable foundation, everything having been reduced to a series of conflicts, to the domination of the majority, or to the supremacy of special interests.
29. Again, legislation was passed which did not recognize that either God or Jesus Christ had any rights over marriage — an erroneous view which debased matrimony to the level of a mere civil contract, despite the fact that Jesus Himself had called it a “great sacrament” (Ephesians v, 32) and had made it the holy and sanctifying symbol of that indissoluble union which binds Him to His Church. The high ideals and pure sentiments with which the Church has always surrounded the idea of the family, the germ of all social life, these were lowered, were unappreciated, or became confused in the minds of many. As a consequence, the correct ideals of family government, and with them those of family peace, were destroyed; the stability and unity of the family itself were menaced and undermined, and, worst of all, the very sanctuary of the home was more and more frequently profaned by acts of sinful lust and soul-destroying egotism — all of which could not but result in poisoning and drying up the very sources of domestic and social life.
30. Added to all this, God and Jesus Christ, as well as His doctrines, were banished from the school. As a sad but inevitable consequence, the school became not only secular and non-religious but openly atheistical and anti-religious. In such circumstances it was easy to persuade poor ignorant children that neither God nor religion are of any importance as far as their daily lives are concerned. God’s name, moreover, was scarcely ever mentioned in such schools unless it were perchance to blaspheme Him or to ridicule His Church. Thus, the school forcibly deprived of the right to teach anything about God or His law could not but fail in its efforts to really educate, that is, to lead children to the practice of virtue, for the school lacked the fundamental principles which underlie the possession of a knowledge of God and the means necessary to strengthen the will in its efforts toward good and in its avoidance of sin. Gone, too, was all possibility of ever laying a solid groundwork for peace, order, and prosperity, either in the family or in social relations. Thus the principles based on the spiritualistic philosophy of Christianity having been obscured or destroyed in the minds of many, a triumphant materialism served to prepare mankind for the propaganda of anarchy and of social hatred which was let loose on such a great scale.
31. Is it to be wondered at then that, with the widespread refusal to accept the principles of true Christian wisdom, the seeds of discord sown everywhere should find a kindly soil in which to grow and should come to fruit in that most tremendous struggle, the Great War, which unfortunately did not serve to lessen but increased, by its acts of violence and of bloodshed, the international and social animosities which already existed? (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
Believe as you want. Act as you will. Those who believe that the word of our next-to-last true pope do not apply even more today than over ninety-seven years ago are fools who are blinded by the agitations of the moment and the fear of “greater evils” that the supposed “lesser evils” enable by their incompetence and ignorance of First and Last Things.
The fact remains, however, the United States of America is realizing the miserable depths to which nations must fall when men persist in their sins unrepentantly and, worse yet, enshrine them as “rights” in their public laws and constitutions as well as celebrate them in “popular culture.” There is no naturalistic escape from the inevitable consequences of sins that have offended God, ruined souls for all eternity and have made a mockery of a just political order, which is being abused by the criminals of the “right” and the “left” for their own purposes without regard to the honor and glory of the Most Holy Trinity or to the eternal good of souls upon which a just temporal order is premised.
I. Sin and Illegal Immigration
One of the reasons that careerist Republicans have never wanted to do anything about illegal immigration other than vote for amnesty bills and/or procrastinate about it because the United States Chamber of Commerce and the leaders of its corporate entities contribute healthy sums of money to the careerists’ campaign coffers. Careerist Republicans have winked at illegal immigration as these campaign contributors depend upon illegal immigration for the workforce to fill jobs that go unfilled because of the effects of contraception and surgical baby-killing on the indigenous population of the United States of America.
Although they stood by as President Donald John Trump took a stand on border security that will result, absent a “deal” in Congress within the next sixteen days, in his issuing a presidential directive declaring a national emergency at the southern border with the United Mexican States, which is Mexico’s official name, that will be challenged in Federal courts immediately and stayed indefinitely thereafter, it was the Republican careerists who complained to Vice President Michael Richard Pence about how the government shutdown was affecting their constituents. Faced with this pressure, Trump, who had said on January 4, 2019, that he was willing to keep the Federal government closed until the Democrats agreed to funding for the border wall/fence/barrier/ (see Newly Empowered Democrats Pass Funding Bill Without Funds for the Border Wall), reversed himself and signed a bill to reopen the government. This dispirited some in the president’s political base initially, but the “true believers” have convinced themselves that this is all part of a grand strategy to set the stage for a declaration of a state of national emergency at the southern border that could have been issued last month in advance of the December 27, 2018, deadline for the Congress of the United States of America to fund the government and its variety of unconstitutional and even immoral programs for ninety days.
It was very hubristic of the self-styled deal-maker to think that he could convince enough Democrats to break ranks with the fascistic Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, Speaker of the United States of America, as the members of the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” are much more committed to their agenda of statism, globalism, baby-killing, deviancy and other assorted evils than their false opposites in the organized crime family of the naturalist “right” are even to their stated support for border security and fiscal constraint as they believe in only one thing firmly, namely, their own political survival. (For an analysis of how Pelosi’s power is so extensive that even Charles Ellis Schumer, who is known for being a camera-hog and publicity hound from the earliest days of his political career, is playing second fiddle to her, see Dem Duo Poses Test for Trump.)
While the distraction of the border wall has kept the statists/globalists/mutants/deviants/baby-killers of the “left” from pursuing campaign agenda items that will feed their own political base even though they have zero chance of being enacted by the United States or signed into law by the president, it is important to reiterate what I stated in “Sobering Truths at a Time Men Are Drunk With Naturalism (or, in other words, Sober Up, part 14, eight days ago: Addison Mitchell McConnell’s refusal to declare the filibuster could not be used on the budget resolution last month will not be reciprocated if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in 2020 or 2022. McConnell’s act of unilateral disarmament to preserve a Senate tradition that will be abolished sooner or later to impose the will of statist egalitarianism and collectivism weakened the president politically and put the security of the American border with Mexico in the blood-stained hands of Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Ellis Schumer.
This having been noted, therefore, I refer readers to a two-part series from nearly nine years, Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail, part 1 and Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail, part 2, that deal with the issue of illegal immigration from a Catholic perspective and contains recommendations for dealing with it.
There may be a “deal” acceptable to all parties at some point within the next fourteen days (see Deal-Makers Comprise Conference House-Senate Conference Committeetimes and The Stage Is Set For a Deal With Democrats), but it will not be what the president promised as the careerists in the organized crime family of the naturalist “right” have never been serious about securing the border or limiting the flow of cheap labor into the United States of America, which is why they gave him nothing but lip service on this issue from January 3, 2017, to January 3, 2019. This is why, as mentioned earlier, the president will issue a declaration of natinal emergency no later than Friday, February 15, 2019, which will be stayed immediately by some Federal district court judge, thereby removing the matter to the courts to be adjudicated while the invasion of foreign nationals, some coming with their Mohammedan prayer rugs, will continue pretty much unabated.
The destruction of national sovereignty, which is being enabled by those who believe that border walls are immoral but who support the destruction of the innocent preborn at any stage of their development, is just the logical consequence of the destruction of the Sovereignty of Christ the King over men and their nations that began on October 31, 1517, with Martin Luther’s revolution against the Divine Plan that God instituted to effect man’s return to him through His Catholic Church.
II. Using Civil Law as the Cloak for Injustice and Political Revolution by the “Educated”
Perpetual conflict must be the lot of men who are steeped in unrepentant sin that is protected under the cover of the civil law, which becomes a cloak for injustice over the course of time once men steeped in Protestantism’s sin of presumption about being “saved” or are simply unconcerned about God and His just Judgment upon their souls because they do not believe that He exists or has any role to play to in the course of the operation of the “real world.”
Obviously, this describes most, although not all, of the people who serve in elected or appointed office at all here levels of government (state, local, national). This applies in a special way, though, to the miscreants at the United States Ministry of Injustice who believe that they are more “enlightened” than others, including the American people, and have arrogated unto themselves to determine who is worthy of holding public office and to use their legal authority as a cloak for malice to persecute the innocent and to delegitimize and undermine a duly elected president of the United States of America. As will be noted shortly, such people will turn their attention soon enough from presidents they deem to be “unworthy” to those of us who dissent from the “received” political wisdom on baby-killing, “climate change,” sodomy and its related vices, socialism, et al.
These self-appointed high priests and priestesses, veritable “guardians” of the commonweal, believe themselves to be very well-educated. In fact, though, they are very miseducated and are living witnesses to the prophetic words of Father Frederick Faber that were quoted last on this website a few weeks ago but are very pertinent to reference once again:
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. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-54.)
Each of the political assassins serving in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a diabolical hatred of President Donald John Trump and is determined to crush anyone and everyone with whom he has been associated and can be caught in a perjury trap by asking the same questions repeatedly in hope of extracting at least one contradictory answer that can be used as the basis of an indictment for a false statement charge.
The latest to be caught up in this process is the truly detestable Roger Stone, who revels in his amoral tactics and is unabashed in his employing the same kind of Machiavellianism as his political mentor, the late President Richard Milhous Nixon. Stone, a baptized Catholic, is a thug and a reprobate who has long supported the surgical killing of the innocent preborn (see Transcript of Roger Stone Off-Message Interview), has a career of self-promotion and political tricksterism that is repulsive, which one proves yet again that Donald John Trump is not a stellar judge of character. While Stone has to answer to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for his many sins and promotion thereof, being detestable is not a civil crime, and to focus on his inconsistencies and thuggery while ignoring those of the contemptible and repulsive Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, Huma Abedin, James Brien Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lois Lerner, John Brennan and James Clapper, among others. (For a brief review of the inconsistent application of law, see Jeannine Pirro’s What Mueller's Heavy-Handed Takedown of Roger Stone Tells Us and Conrad Black’s Stone Arrest Exposes Cancer Eating American Criminal Justice.)
To be sure, Stone is in trouble in part because of the threats he sent via e-mail to some talk show host named Randy Credico that are horrific as well as stupid as one has to presume in this time when all personal communications are being monitored that a prosecutor intent on finding evidence to make a case against an associate of a person (Donald John Trump in this instance) under investigation is going to find and then use it to his advantage before a grand jury. It is not to indemnify Roger Stone or his modus operandi, including his efforts to get Dr. Jerome Corsi to “stonewall” investigators, to criticize the very fact that he was under investigation for his ham-handed to find out whether WikiLeaks had e-mails that could hurt Madame Defarge’s presidential campaign that were not illegal (see Byron York's Wht is Roger Stone Chargd With Doing?, Andrew McCarthy's Roger Stone Indictment Underscores No Trump-Russia Collusion and Gregg Jarrett's Stone Indictment Shows No Evidence of Collusion.) for commentaries on the Stone indictment).
Andrew Napolitano explained the draconian nature of the banana republic show of force that was used to arrest Roger Stone, whose attorneys had been in contact with Robert Mueller’s office periodically in the past few months:
Last Friday, on a quiet residential street at 6 in the morning, the neighborhood exploded in light, noise and terror. Seventeen SUVs and two armored vehicles arrived in front of one house. Each vehicle had sirens blaring and lights flashing. The house, which abutted a canal, was soon surrounded by 29 government agents, each wearing military garb, each carrying a handgun and most carrying high-powered automatic rifles.
In the canal were two amphibious watercrafts, out of which more heavily armed government agents came. Circling above all this was a helicopter equipped with long-range precision weaponry and high-powered spotlights.
Four agents approached the front door to the house. Two held a battering ram, and two pointed their rifles at the door. One of the agents shouted and banged on the front door until the terrified owner of the house emerged, barefoot and wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He was greeted in the dark at his open front door by two rifle barrels aimed at his head.
This was not a movie set; it was not a foreign city in a war zone; it was not the arrest of the Venezuelan opposition leader in Caracas. It was middle America, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The agents worked for the FBI, and the target of this operation was not a drug kingpin or a terrorist operative or a kidnapper of babies. It was a peaceful American in his own home -- a political operative and longtime friend of President Donald Trump's, named Roger Stone.
Why were there more FBI agents sent to arrest Stone than Navy SEALs sent to kill Osama bin Laden? Why jackboots in the morning in America? Here is the back story.
Stone has been both a paid formal adviser and an unpaid informal adviser to Trump for 40 years. He was fired from Trump's presidential campaign during the summer of 2015, but he continued to work on his own to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Some of that help -- according to the government -- involved the release of embarrassing Clinton emails that had probably been hacked by Russian agents.
Last Thursday, one of special counsel Robert Mueller's grand juries indicted Stone on five counts of lying to Congress, one count of witness intimidation and one count of obstruction of justice. His Gestapo-like arrest followed his indictment by just a few hours.
Stone was represented by counsel throughout the time of his testimony before Congress last year. He was the recipient of grand jury subpoenas for his text messages, his emails and other records -- all of which, through his counsel, he surrendered. He claims that when asked by members of the House Intelligence Committee about certain aspects of these, he innocently forgot about them. Who could remember each of 1 million texts and emails?
In the real world -- where the influence of politics into law enforcement is kept to a harmless minimum -- defense counsel is generally known to prosecutors throughout their investigation of a target. According to Stone, federal prosecutors have known for a year who his lawyers are. Also in the real world, when a defendant has been indicted for a nonviolent crime, has no criminal record and is not a flight risk or an imminent danger to society, prosecutors inform defense counsel of the indictment, send the defense counsel a copy of it and request the peaceful and dignified surrender of the indicted person.
In the current, unreal world -- where politics deeply infuse law enforcement -- prosecutors use brute force to send a message of terror to innocent defendants. Like all defendants at the time of arrest, Stone is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
What message does brute force send? It is a message of terror, and it has no place in American life. As if to add embarrassment to terror, the feds may have tipped off CNN, which carried all this live in real time.
When I interviewed Stone on Fox Nation, after a judge released him without requiring any bail, he told me that he will not cave to this terror but he is willing to speak with the prosecutors. Stone wavered a bit when I pressed him on the nature and extent of any communication between his lawyers and Mueller's team and on the nature of any cooperation by him personally with Mueller. As a practical matter, his lawyers must communicate with Mueller's team to address the logistics of pretrial events, as well as their discovery of the evidence in the government's possession.
One item in the government's possession that is very problematic constitutionally is the transcript of the testimony Stone gave to the House Intelligence Committee, wherein the indictment accuses Stone of lying. Because that testimony is classified, Stone is not permitted to see it, and his lawyers -- who may view it only in a secret facility -- may not copy it.
How can they defend against these charges? How can it be that the government has a piece of paper that allegedly is proof of the crime charged and the defendant's lawyers may not copy it? Didn't the government waive the classified nature of this document by Stone's very presence at the hearing where the document was created? What remains of the constitutional guarantee of confronting one's accusers and challenging their evidence?
If Stone goes to trial, the soonest it could be held is early 2020 -- in the midst of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and 2 1/2 years after Mueller's appointment.
No innocent American merits the governmental treatment Stone received. It was the behavior of a police state where the laws are written to help the government achieve its ends, not to guarantee the freedom of the people -- and where police break the laws they are sworn to enforce. Regrettably, what happened to Roger Stone could happen to anyone. (An American Nightmare.)
This is very good, but what Judge Napolitano does not understand is that men and their nations that are indifferent to the Sovereignty of Christ the King over them in all that pertains to the good of souls must descend to the lawlessness of the sort we are witnessing at this time. “Soft” totalitarianism is upon us, and there is no way out save through Our Lady’s Fatima Message and the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart.
Nothing Robert Mueller has done thus far has shown that Donald John Trump and his cast of clownish naturalists had colluded with Russia to “steal” the 2016 election from a woman who had violated the Federal code, covered-up and destroyed evidence of her wrongdoing and then lied about it repeatedly, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, and it was the attempt to secure her election that most of the top echelon of the American national intelligence and law enforcement agencies misused the legal weapons at their disposal to discredit and delegitimize Trump.
One of the great ironies lost on even most Catholics today is that the elites who believe themselves to a veritable Praetorian Guard have contempt for anyone who adheres to the existence of immutable truths that have been revealed definitively by Our Lord and entrusted to His Holy Church for their infallible explication and safekeeping are themselves adherents of immutable “truths” from which none of us may dissent legitimately. These elites of the Deep State are not bashful about using their powers to subject us to their own inquisitions to intimidate us into silence and/or to send us to prison for our dissent.
One can expect no justice from those who are personally unjust and promote evil under the cover of the civil law. Those who are committed to the promotion of evils under cover of the civil law do not take prisoners, which is why the likes of Robert Mueller and his team of legal assassins are relentless in their creation of crimes when they can find no evidence of crimes otherwise. Those are offer but a weak resistance to moral evils because they are not really opposed to anything that can cost them support with “moderate” voters always want to place “nice” with actual criminals, which is why Republican investigations into Whitewater, Filegate, Chinagate, Pardongate, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Lois Lerner and the Federal Bureau of Investigation/United States Department of Justice’s indemnification of Madame Defarge and concurrent vilification of Donald John Trump (see Inside DOJ and FBI: Anatomy of a Bloodless Coup for a detailed summary of the DOJ/FBI bloodless coup aagainst Trump) almost always winds up without criminal charges being filed against actual malefactors who are enemies of the laws of God and the just laws of men.
III. Conciliar Officials Enable Killers in Public Life
One of the principal reasons that those in public life who support grave evils under the cover of the civil law have been able to promote their agendas of wickedness with such tremendous boldness is because they have been enabled and indemnified repeatedly as champions of “social justice” by the many of the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Not one politician—whether male or female, Democrat or Republican—who supports the surgical dismemberment of the innocent preborn and/or special “rights” for those are immersed in the sin of Sodom and its related vices of perversity and deviancy has ever been publicly sanctioned by a conciliar “bishop.” This refusal to apply the medicinal corrective of excommunication speaks volumes about the fact that the men who dress up as bishops and who are believed to be true Successors of the Apostles are not what they claim to be as a true bishop has the responsibility to condemn evil and to call to correction those who are in error and/or promote grave evils.
Pope Pius VI explained the duties of a true bishop as follows in his first encyclical letter, Inscrutabile, December 25, 1775:
We thought it useful to speak to you lovingly on these matters in order to strengthen your excellent resolve. But a much more serious subject demands that We speak of it, or rather mourn over it. We refer to the pestilent disease which the wickedness of our times brings forth. We must unite our minds and strength in treating this plague before it grows rife and becomes incurable in the Church through Our oversight. For in recent days, the dangerous times foretold by the Apostle Paul have clearly arrived, when there will be "men who love themselves, who are lifted up, proud, blasphemous, traitors, lovers of pleasure instead of God, men who are always learning but never arriving at the knowledge of truth, possessing indeed the appearance of piety but denying its power, corrupt in mind, reprobate about the faith." These men raise themselves up into "lying" teachers, as they are called by Peter the prince of the Apostles, and bring in sects of perdition. They deny the Lord who bought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction. They say they are wise and they have become fools, and their uncomprehending heart is darkened.
You yourselves, established as scouts in the house of Israel, see clearly the many victories claimed by a philosophy full of deceit. You see the ease with which it attracts to itself a great host of peoples, concealing its impiety with the honorable name of philosophy. Who could express in words or call to mind the wickedness of the tenets and evil madness which it imparts? While such men apparently intend to search out wisdom, "they fail because they do not search in the proper way. . . and they fall into errors which lead them astray from ordinary wisdom."[9] They have come to such a height of impiety that they make out that God does not exist, or if He does that He is idle and uncaring, making no revelation to men. Consequently it is not surprising that they assert that everything holy and divine is the product of the minds of inexperienced men smitten with empty fear of the future and seduced by a vain hope of immortality. But those deceitful sages soften and conceal the wickedness of their doctrine with seductive words and statements; in this way, they attract and wretchedly ensnare many of the weak into rejecting their faith or allowing it to be greatly shaken. While they pursue a remarkable knowledge, they open their eyes to behold a false light which is worse than the very darkness. Naturally our enemy, desirous of harming us and skilled in doing so, just as he made use of the serpent to deceive the first human beings, has armed the tongues of those men with the poison of his deceitfulness in order to lead astray the minds of the faithful. The prophet prays that his soul may be delivered from such deceitful tongues. In this way these men by their speech "enter in lowliness, capture mildly, softly bind and kill in secret." This results in great moral corruption, in license of thought and speech, in arrogance and rashness in every enterprise.
When they have spread this darkness abroad and torn religion out of men's hearts, these accursed philosophers proceed to destroy the bonds of union among men, both those which unite them to their rulers, and those which urge them to their duty. They keep proclaiming that man is born free and subject to no one, that society accordingly is a crowd of foolish men who stupidly yield to priests who deceive them and to kings who oppress them, so that the harmony of priest and ruler is only a monstrous conspiracy against the innate liberty of man.
Everyone must understand that such ravings and others like them, concealed in many deceitful guises, cause greater ruin to public calm the longer their impious originators are unrestrained. They cause a serious loss of souls redeemed by Christ's blood wherever their teaching spreads, like a cancer; it forces its way into public academies, into the houses of the great, into the palaces of kings, and even enters the sanctuary, shocking as it is to say so.
Consequently, you who are the salt of the earth, guardians and shepherds of the Lord's flock, whose business it is to fight the battles of the Lord, arise and gird on your sword, which is the word of God, and expel this foul contagion from your lands. How long are we to ignore the common insult to faith and Church? Let the words of Bernard arouse us like a lament of the spouse of Christ: "Of old was it foretold and the time of fulfillment is now at hand: Behold, in peace is my sorrow most sorrowful. It was sorrowful first when the martyrs died; afterwards it was more sorrowful in the fight with the heretics and now it is most sorrowful in the conduct of the members of the household.... The Church is struck within and so in peace is my sorrow most sorrowful. But what peace? There is peace and there is no peace. There is peace from the pagans and peace from the heretics, but no peace from the children. At that time the voice will lament: Sons did I rear and exalt, but they despised me. They despised me and defiled me by a bad life, base gain, evil traffic, and business conducted in the dark." Who can hear these tearful complaints of our most holy mother without feeling a strong urge to devote all his energy and effort to the Church, as he has promised? Therefore cast out the old leaven, remove the evil from your midst. Forcefully and carefully banish poisonous books from the eyes of your flock, and at once courageously set apart those who have been infected, to prevent them harming the rest. The holy Pope Leo used to say, "We can rule those entrusted to us only by pursuing with zeal for the Lord's faith those who destroy and those who are destroyed and by cutting them off from sound minds with the utmost severity to prevent the plague spreading." In doing this We exhort and advise you to be all of one mind and in harmony as you strive for the same object, just as the Church has one faith, one baptism, and one spirit. As you are joined together in the hierarchy, so you should unite equally with virtue and desire.
The affair is of the greatest importance since it concerns the Catholic faith, the purity of the Church, the teaching of the saints, the peace of the empire, and the safety of nations. Since it concerns the entire body of the Church, it is a special concern of yours because you are called to share in Our pastoral concern, and the purity of the faith is particularly entrusted to your watchfulness. "Now therefore, Brothers, since you are overseers among God's people and their soul depends on you, raise their hearts to your utterance," that they may stand fast in faith and achieve the rest which is prepared for believers only. Beseech, accuse, correct, rebuke and fear not: for ill-judged silence leaves in their error those who could be taught, and this is most harmful both to them and to you who should have dispelled the error. The holy Church is powerfully refreshed in the truth as it struggles zealously for the truth. In this divine work you should not fear either the force or favor of your enemies. The bishop should not fear since the anointing of the Holy Spirit has strengthened him: the shepherd should not be afraid since the prince of pastors has taught him by his own example to despise life itself for the safety of his flock: the cowardice and depression of the hireling should not dwell in a bishop's heart. Our great predecessor Gregory, in instructing the heads of the churches, said with his usual excellence: "Often imprudent guides in their fear of losing human favor are afraid to speak the right freely. As the word of truth has it, they guard their flock not with a shepherd's zeal but as hirelings do, since they flee when the wolf approaches by hiding themselves in silence.... A shepherd fearing to speak the right is simply a man retreating by keeping silent." But if the wicked enemy of the human race, the better to frustrate your efforts, ever brings it about that a plague of epidemic proportions is hidden from the religious powers of the world, please do not be terrified but walk in God's house in harmony, with prayer, and in truth, the three arms of our service. Remember that when the people of Juda were defiled, the best means of purification was the public reading to all, from the least to the greatest, of the book of the law lately found by the priest Helcias in the Lord's temple; at once the whole people agreed to destroy the abominations and seal a covenant in the Lord's presence to follow after the Lord and observe His precepts, testimonies and ceremonies with their whole heart and soul." For the same reason Josaphat sent priests and Levites to bring the book of the law throughout the cities of Juda and to teach the people. The proclamation of the divine word has been entrusted to your faith by divine, not human, authority. So assemble your people and preach to them the gospel of Jesus Christ. From that divine source and heavenly teaching draw draughts of true philosophy for your flock. Persuade them that subjects ought to keep faith and show obedience to those who by God's ordering lead and rule them. To those who are devoted to the ministry of the Church, give proofs of faith, continence, sobriety, knowledge, and liberality, that they may please Him to whom they have proved themselves and boast only of what is serious, moderate, and religious. But above all kindle in the minds of everyone that love for one another which Christ the Lord so often and so specifically praised. For this is the one sign of Christians and the bond of perfection. (Pope Pius VI, Inscrutabile, December 25, 1775.)
To accept these beautiful words of Pope Pius VI means rejecting the entire ethos of conciliarism and its perverse "accommodation" to the world (viz. Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humane, December 7, 1965). The necessity of beseeching, accusing, correcting and rebuking those in error enters not into the minds of those who are steeped in the errors of conciliarism. There is thus no spirit of Saint John the Baptist to be found amongst most of the false shepherds of the counterfeit church of conciliarism as they reaffirm contemporary Herods and their subjects in sacramentally invalid marriages. There is only the spirit of Antichrist, which has manifested itself for all those who have the intellectual honesty to see the truth for what it is.
The conciliar approach of engaging in “dialogue” with committed agents of evil has not only borne any good fruit, it has made these wicked agents even bolder than the generation of arrogant public officials that had come before them. This is certainly the case of the egregious, arrogant and despicable moral reprobate and public sinner, Andrew Mark Cuomo, who is the son of a self-righteous, arrogant and defiant public official, the late Mario Matthew Cuomo, who had many run-ins with the conciliar “archbishop” of New York from March 19, 1984, to May 3, 2000, and with auxiliary bishop Austin Vaghan, who once said that Cuomo the Elder risked the fires of hell for his support of abortion. Cuomo the Lesser is no less a demagogue than his late father.
It was as early as Figlio di Sfachim’s third year in office, 2013, that he proposed a monstrous law to cement the surgical execution of the innocent preborn under the laws of the State of New York, especially in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court of the United States of America reverses Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is flexing his political muscle to give abortion advocates their biggest state victory in 40 years since Roe v. Wade: a sweeping expansion of abortion law that, if enforced, would put Catholic hospitals and many state-funded ministries out of business.
Cuomo’s approval ratings have topped 70% for six straight months, and, with just two years in office, he has already pushed through controversial same-sex “marriage” legislation and the most restrictive gun-control law in the nation.
Cuomo, who is Catholic, now is setting his sights on succeeding where governors for the past six years have failed: passing the proposed Reproductive Health Care Act.
But Cuomo has included the act as part of his 10-point “women’s equality” agenda, which includes a raise in the minimum wage, tougher anti-housing discrimination laws and measures against domestic violence and sex-trafficking.
Catholic bishops in New York’s Catholic Conference and pro-life groups are raising the alarm that Cuomo’s proposals are both “radical” and “dangerous” to unborn children, women and religious freedom.
“Gov. Cuomo’s bill elevates abortion to a fundamental right and says New York state can’t discriminate on abortion in benefits or services or anything else it provides,” said Kathleen Gallagher, the conference’s director of pro-life activities.
Cuomo’s legislation, she said, would make illegal abortion restrictions, such as parental-notification laws, informed-consent laws, restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion bans of any kind.
The law will allow licensed medical professionals other than a physician to perform first-trimester abortions.
The Democratic governor announced in his Jan. 9 State of the State address that he would expand legal abortion as part of a comprehensive women’s-equality bill, declaring three times, “It’s her body, her choice” to thunderous applause.
“Gov. Cuomo vociferously declared that women’s equality, safety and reproductive rights will be a priority for New York state in 2013,” Andrea Miller, president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, confirmed in a press release. Miller said the last election results showed New Yorkers recognized that without a right to abortion a woman “cannot participate fully in society.”
Late-Abortion Green Light
Cuomo’s bill removes criminal penalties for third-trimester abortions after 24 weeks by adding a broad health exception. Current state law allows such late-term abortions if there is a danger to the mother’s life.
Chris Slattery, director of the Expectant Mother Care (EMC) pregnancy centers in New York City, said the new law will make New York City the late-term abortion capital of the world.
“It’s going to open up the third-trimester market,” Slattery said. “It’s going to be huge, and people all over the world, not just out of state, are going to be coming to New York to have and perform these abortions.”
Late-term abortions generally cost more than $2,000.
“It’s the fight of the pro-life movement’s life in New York,” Slattery said. “This is worse than Roe v. Wade itself, and everyone needs to focus on defeating this bill.”
The Guttmacher Institute’s New York state abortion data showed that 33% of New York pregnancies end in abortion — nearly twice the national rate of 19%. Only 53% of New York pregnancies resulted in live births, with the remaining 14% ending with miscarriage.
New York City itself has an average abortion rate of 41%, with some areas as high as 67%, according to New York Health Department data gathered by the Chiaroscuro Foundation.
A 2011 poll, conducted for the Chiaroscuro Foundation by McLaughlin and Associates, found 64% of New Yorkers — including 57% of women identifying as “pro-choice” — believe New York City’s abortion rate is too high; 74% believe the overall 60% abortion rate among minorities is too high.
The poll also found 69% of New Yorkers support informed-consent laws, 59% support mandating parental consent for minors seeking abortion, and 51% support having a 24-hour waiting period for abortion.
State Senate Battle
Cuomo’s legislation is expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Assembly, but pro-life advocates are focusing on the Senate, which Republicans control in a coalition with six independent Democrats.
Pro-life state Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., D-Bronx, predicts the abortion battle will happen in the next few weeks and not toward the end of the legislative session in June. He said pro-life prospects look grim if the Reproductive Health Care Act comes up for a vote.
“I’m the only solid pro-life vote among the Democrats,” he said. “But if the Republicans allow this to come to the floor, then it is a done deal.”
Diaz expressed doubts that Majority Leader Dean Skelos, R-Rockville Centre, would keep the 30-member GOP caucus in line and predicted that one or two Republicans would join 32 Democrat senators to vote for the bill — a replay of voting patterns that resulted in the legalization of same-sex “marriage” in 2011.
Under a power-sharing agreement, Skelos and state Sen. Jeff Klein, D-Bronx, alternate leadership of the Senate every week.
“The week in which Sen. Jeff Klein becomes leader of the chamber — that week he will bring the bill to the floor,” Diaz said.
Diaz said he had no hope the bill could be stopped in the Senate without personal lobbying from Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.
In a Jan. 9 letter to Cuomo, Cardinal Dolan forcefully denounced the governor’s push for increased access to abortion.
“Dolan has a very powerful voice in the state,” said Diaz. “I’m hoping he comes to Albany now and lobbies — and lobbies hard. I think he’s the only hope we have to convince people to not bring this bill to the floor.”
Gallagher warned that the state bill has no conscience protections for religious institutions and that the New York Catholic Conference’s legal analysts fear the state could use the law to shut down any Catholic institution (including Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities and schools) that gets state licensing or funding.
“State regulators, such as the state health department or state insurance department, could say, ‘We cannot give you that license to operate’ or ‘We cannot give you that funding’ because our pro-life mission means we’re discriminating against a woman’s fundamental right to an abortion,” Gallagher said.
Bishop William Murphy confirmed that the Diocese of Rockville Centre is home to six hospitals on Long Island that could be crippled if the state simply withheld Medicaid dollars. The clash would be inevitable, because Catholic hospitals will neither perform nor refer people for abortions under any circumstances.
“It is another blow against a pro-life position, making that position officially ‘unacceptable’ or ‘bigoted’ or ‘intolerant,’” Bishop Murphy said, adding that the situation was “a very strange fruit in our society, where the majority of Americans, however they define it, call themselves pro-life.”
If the bill expanding access to abortion is passed, pro-life medical professionals could also find their practices at risk.
“All the legal mechanisms are in place so that doctors are forced to abandon their practices,” said Dr. Katherine Lammers, a Catholic obstetrician-gynecologist in Rochester, who has delivered 4,000 babies in her 25-year career. Lammers’ practice does not perform or refer for abortions.
She noted that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published an ethical memo in 2008 that directed doctors to provide abortion referrals if they are unable to perform the procedure.
“So it could happen this way: ACOG could say that this doctor is violating Ethical Bulletin 899. They could take your board certification away for ethical violations. The state board could then say, ‘This doctor is not medically licensed.’ So, theoretically, a doctor could be forced out of her business,” Lammers said. (Andrew Cuomo's Brave New Roe.)
This was the direct and only result possible of the conciliar penchant to use "dialogue" to "persuade" miscreants to change when they have needed the rod of correction and chastisement for their own good and for the edification and right instruction of the faithful.
Indeed, emboldened by the demons that surround him in his scandalous life with his paramour as he treats her as the veritable First Lady of the State of New York, Andrew Mark Cuomo, said five years ago that he did not want “right-to-life,” “anti-gay” people living in the Empire State:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo says the current “schism” in the state Republican party is a smaller version of the split causing so much damage in Washington, D.C., and that “conservative Republicans … have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”
In conversation with Susan Arbetter on “The Capitol Pressroom” Friday morning, Cuomo said:
You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.
… You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.
If they’re moderate Republicans like in the Senate right now, who control the Senate — moderate Republicans have a place in their state. George Pataki was governor of this state as a moderate Republican; but not what you’re hearing from them on the far right.”
The governor’s suggestion that, for example, those who hold anti-abortion views have no place in the state prompted Dennis Poust, spokesman for the state Catholic Conference, to observe on Twitter, “My governor thinks there’s no place in NY for people like me. Can I get a state grant to relocate?” (And where to — New Hampshire, maybe?) (Capitol Confidential: Cuomo: ‘Extreme conservatives … have no place in the state of New York’).
Cuomo handily won reelection in 2014, and he did so again in 2018 despite—or maybe because of—his shamelessly bold attacks upon people who take seriously the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, and he has made good on this promise to do what he had proposed six years ago now that the New York State Senate is controlled by the Democratic Party. This truly wicked human being has signed into law a bill that makes the State of New York, already the abortion capital of the United States of America, a global leader in providing full legal “access” to the killing of the innocent preborn up to and including the day of birth:
ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) - The Reproductive Health Act passed in the New York State Senate and Assembly on Tuesday.
When it passed, the gallery erupted into cheers for about 20 seconds. After it died down, some protesters screamed out as well.
The bill protects abortion rights in the state's health law as opposed to penal codes. It allows for late-term abortions after 24 weeks if the mother's life is at risk or if the fetus is nonviable.
This has been a goal of the legislature now that the Senate is no longer Republican controlled. Similar bills had failed in the past.
The previous law was passed in 1970, three years before Roe v Wade. NEWS10 ABC has been told this is an update to the outdated law.
Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law Tuesday evening and reaction continues to pour in.
“If we as a New York State don't value life in the womb does your life matter, does my life matter?”
Liz Joy with the Republican Women of Schenectady County says the law will mean more late term abortions.
Emma Corbett with Planned Parenthood says 89-percent of abortions happen before the 12 week mark. The new law maintains abortions are legal up to 24 weeks and after in rare and circumstantial cases.
“Often, when we look at late term abortions, it’s often a very wanted pregnancy, some other health crisis or extenuating health circumstances come up where that care needs to be administered. To kind of look at these isolate incidences as thoughh they’re going to become the norm is really inaccurate and not something that we’re seeing at our health centers,” she said
The New York State Catholic Conference saying, “Let us all pray for the conversion of heart for those who celebrate this tragic moment in the history of our state. And we pray in a special way for the lives that will be lost, and for the women of our state who are made less safe under this law.” (NY Lawmakers Cheer Upon Passing Monstrous Baby-Killing Law.)
Members of the New York State Senate stood up and cheered upon passing a bill crafted by agents of the devil and his demons who dwell in the lowest reaches of hell. They cheered. They applauded.
That’s right. Elected officials, including not a few Catholics who are in “good standing” within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, cheered for a bill that permits the vivisection of living human beings in the birth canal up to the moment of birth.
Although each abortion is infanticide, a point lost on many Americans who can themselves “pro-life” as the killing of a preborn child at any stage of his development is the same crime morally as his killing on the day of birth or at any time thereafter, it is nonetheless quite a telling commentary that Catholics in public life have become so shameless as to cheer evil in the name under the slogan of “reproductive rights” that is used to mask the reality that each surgical abortion kills a living human being. After all, why is it necessary to kill an innocent child in the womb if he, a distinct human being with his own rational, immortal soul and a unique DNA, is not alive? It is not necessary to kill a person who is not alive. The only way to do this is to dehumanize the innocent child and to glorify his execution as an exercise of “women’s rights” and “reproductive health care.” There is no such thing as “potential” life, and the fact of one’s humanity comes from his creation in his mother’s womb, not from the recognition or lack thereof afforded him by the civil law.
Mind you, the decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, itself permitted surgical baby-killing up to and including the day of birth, something that is lost on many people who have not read the majority opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States of America that was authored by Associate Justice Harry Blackmun. The only restriction that placed upon baby-killing in the later stages of a baby’s life in his mother’s womb was to acknowledge that state legislatures might have an interest in mandating that late-term baby-killing be done in certain types of medical facilities. Not even the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Carhart v. Gonzales, April 17, 2007, ended all late-term baby-killing as Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy specifically cited the availability of methods other than crushed skill abortion (aka “partial birth abortion) that would remain perfectly legally in those latter stages. States may seek to regulate late-term abortions, but other states may choose to do as New York has done, and Vermont is about to follow my native state’s monstrous example (Vermont introduces radical bill to protect 'fundamental right of baby-killing.)
The death-dealing legislation that was signed into law by Governor Andrew Mark Cuomo on Wednesday, January 23, 2019, the Feast of Saint Raymond of Pennafort and the Commemoration of Saint Emerentiana, also stripped preborn children of any rights under the state’s homicide laws, meaning that those attack expectant mothers and cause the deaths of their babies will not be charged with the babies’ deaths. This opens the way to the wholesale legal sanctioning of Planned Barrenhood’s trafficking of the bodily organs of preborn babies as well as subjecting those babies to experiments of the sort that the eugenicists of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich could never have conjured up.
Cuomo’s bold, open support for a piece of legislation that sanctioned the killing of an innocent baby up to and including the day of his birth has emboldened those who care only for their only carnal pleasures to become so desensitized to the killing of the innocent that some legislators are without any kind of remorse over the killing of a child as he is being born or immediately thereafter. Such barbarians—and there is no other word for them—believe the slogan of “choice” endows a mother with the “right” to kill a child she does not want even after his birth:
Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam came under fire Wednesday after he waded into the fight over a controversial abortion bill that one sponsor said could allow women to terminate a pregnancy up until the moment before birth -- with critics saying Northam indicated a child could be killed after birth.
Northam, whose office is now pushing back on those claims, appeared on WTOP to discuss The Repeal Act, which seeks to repeal restrictions on third-trimester abortions. Virginia Democratic Del. Kathy Tran, one of the sponsors, sparked outrage from conservatives when she was asked at a hearing if a woman about to give birth and dilating could still request an abortion. The bill was tabled in committee this week.
“My bill would allow that, yes,” she said.
Northam, a former pediatric neurologist, was asked about those comments and said he couldn’t speak for Tran, but said that third-trimester abortions are done with “the consent of obviously the mother, with consent of the physician, multiple physicians by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities or there may be a fetus that’s not viable.”
“So in this particular example if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
The intent of his comments was not clear. But some conservative commentators and lawmakers took his remarks to mean he was discussing the possibility of letting a newborn die -- even "infanticide."
“This is morally repugnant,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said in a statement to National Review. “In just a few years pro-abortion zealots went from ‘safe, legal, and rare’ to ‘keep the newborns comfortable while the doctor debates infanticide.’ I don’t care what party you’re from — if you can’t say that it’s wrong to leave babies to die after birth, get the hell out of public office.”
Northam Communications Director Ofirah Yheskel said GOP critics were "trying to play politics with women's health" -- and sought to clarify:
"No woman seeks a third trimester abortion except in the case of tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities, and the governor's comments were limited to the actions physicians would take in the event that a woman in those circumstances went into labor. Attempts to extrapolate these comments otherwise is in bad faith and underscores exactly why the governor believes physicians and women, not legislators, should make these difficult and deeply personal medical decisions." (Virginia Baby-Butcher Moonlighting as Governor Faces Backlash and Killing Babies in the Third Trimester.)
The monstrous utilitarian who is the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Dr. Ralph Northam, is of the twisted mind that a mother, in consultation with her physicians, can determine whether to let her newborn baby who survives her attempt to her to be put to death if he suffers from some kind of physical deformity. So much for the following words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:
And when the Son of man shall come in his majesty, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon the seat of his majesty. [32] And all nations shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: [33] And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. [34] Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. [35] For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in:
[36] Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. [37] Then shall the just answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? [38] And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? [39] Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee? [40] And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.
[41] Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. [42] For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink. [43] I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you covered me not: sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. [44] Then they also shall answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee? [45] Then he shall answer them, saying: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me.
[46] And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just, into life everlasting. (Matthew 25: 31-46.)
A mother is called to care for her child whether he is healthy or if he is to die within a short time after birth because of some affliction or if he is to suffer for the rest of his life from some malady. As is the case with each person, a mother is love and to serve her children as she would serve Our Lord Himself in the very Flesh. The graces won for us by Our Lord during His Passion and Death and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, are sufficient to bear whatever crosses we are asked to bear, including helping others, especially their own flesh and blood, to carry their own crosses. Indeed, none of us should consider it any kind of cross to serve our own family members with the loving tenderness and merciful compassion shown to us by the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Which beats with burning love for each of us personally in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
No mother can guarantee to her child that he will have a life free of pain, disappointment, heartbreak, disease, injury or injustice. Men such as Dr. Ralph Northam, who are a dime a dozen in hospitals and medical centers and hospices, have no care for the Cross of the Divine Redeemer and they do not believe in redemptive suffering as befits sinners who are in need of making satisfaction for their sins.
A world without the Holy Faith and that has spat upon and worked remove the Holy Cross from being displayed publicly must shun inconvenience, suffering and sacrifice an the altar of personal comfort, convenience and pleasure. Thus, you see, the pro-abortion movement no longer has any use for the “safe, legal, and rare” slogan that was used incessantly by the forty-second President of the United States of America, William Jefferson Clinton, and other pro-aborts in public life. Confident that the American public has become so used to the surgical of over three thousand innocent preborn babies in their mothers’ wombs every day, many in the pro-death camp believe that the time is right to start speaking about what is already being done on a de facto basis in many places in this country (and is a de jure practice in The Netherlands and Belgium, namely, killing children after birth for eugenic reasons. We are eyewitnesses to the prophetic words of Bishop Clemens von Galen by which he condemned the Nazi eugenics program as follows:
We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self-defence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy.
No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”.
The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?
I will not pursue the comparison to the end, so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.
But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function.
No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as productive?
If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm! If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients ” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!
Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.
Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished! (Three Sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen.)
Lost on so many of those who are rightly shocked by the developments in New York, Vermont and Virginia, whose House of Delegates has, thankfully killed the efforts of Kathy Tran, a Buddhist, which means she is a pagan, to start applying the slogan of “choice” to children as they are being born and at any time thereafter, the killing of innocent human beings at all stages after birth is taking place every day in hospitals under the aegis of the medical industry’s manufactured, profit-making myth of “brain death” as they are vivisected to death for their vital bodily organs and in hospices, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and even in the comfort of one’s own home in order to show “compassion” on those whose “quality of life” is said to be deficient. (See Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry.)
I will let Pope Pius XII have the final word about Dr. Ralph Northam’s utilitarianism:
We have, in recent years, taken every opportunity to expose the one or the other essential point of the moral law, and more recently to indicate it as a whole, not only by refuting the errors that corrupt it, but also showing in a positive sense, the office the importance, the value for the happiness of the spouses, children and all family, for stability and the greater social good from their homes up to the State and the Church itself.
At the heart of this doctrine is that marriage is an institution at the service of life. In close connection with this principle, we, according to the constant teaching of the Church, have illustrated a argument that it is not only one of the essential foundations of conjugal morality, but also of social morality in general: namely, that the direct attack innocent human life, as a means to an end - in this case the order to save another life - is illegal.
Innocent human life, whatever his condition, is always inviolate from the first instance of its existence and it can never be attacked voluntarily. This is a fundamental right of human beings. A fundamental value is the Christian conception of life must be respected as valid for the life still hidden in the womb against direct abortion and against all innocent human life thereafter. There can be no direct murders of a child before, during and after childbirth. As established may be the legal distinction between these different stages of development life born or unborn, according to the moral law, all direct attacks on inviolable human life are serious and illegal.
This principle applies to the child's life, like that of mother's. Never, under any circumstances, has the Church has taught that the life of child must be preferred to that of the mother. It would be wrong to set the issue with this alternative: either the child's life or that of mother. No, nor the mother's life, nor that of her child, can be subjected to an act of direct suppression. For the one side and the other the need can be only one: to make every effort to save the life of both, mother and child (see Pious XI Encycl. Casti Connubii, 31 dec. 1930, Acta Ap. Sedis vol. 22, p.. 562-563).
It is one of the most beautiful and noble aspirations of medicine trying ever new ways to ensure both their lives. What if, despite all the advances of science, still remain, and will remain in the future, a doctor says that the mother is going to die unless here child is killed in violation of God's commandment: Thou shalt not kill! We must strive until the last moment to help save the child and the mother without attacking either as we bow before the laws of nature and the dispositions of Divine Providence.
But - one may object - the mother's life, especially of a mother of a numerous family, is incomparably greater than a value that of an unborn child. The application of the theory of balance of values to the matter which now occupies us has already found acceptance in legal discussions. The answer to this nagging objection is not difficult. The inviolability of the life of an innocent person does not depend by its greater or lesser value. For over ten years, the Church has formally condemned the killing of the estimated life as "worthless', and who knows the antecedents that provoked such a sad condemnation, those who can ponder the dire consequences that would be reached, if you want to measure the inviolability of innocent life at its value, you must well appreciate the reasons that led to this arrangement.
Besides, who can judge with certainty which of the two lives is actually more valuable? Who knows which path will follow that child and at what heights it can achieve and arrive at during his life? We compare Here are two sizes, one of whom nothing is known. We would like to cite an example in this regard, which may already known to some of you, but that does not lose some of its evocative value.
It dates back to 1905. There lived a young woman of noble family and even more noble senses, but slender and delicate health. As a teenager, she had been sick with a small apical pleurisy, which appeared healed; when, however, after contracting a happy marriage, she felt a new life blossoming within her, she felt ill and soon there was a special physical pain that dismayed that the two skilled health professionals, who watched her with loving care. That old scar of the pleurisy had been awakened and, in the view of the doctors, there was no time to lose to save this gentle lady from death. The concluded that it was necessary to proceed without delay to an abortion.
Even the groom agreed. The seriousness of the case was very painful. But when the obstetrician attending to the mother announced their resolution to proceed with an abortion, the mother, with firm emphasis, "Thank you for your pitiful tips, but I can not truncate the life of my child! I can not, I can not! I feel already throbbing in my breast, it has the right to live, it comes from God must know God and to love and enjoy it." The husband asked, begged, pleaded, and she remained inflexible, and calmly awaited the event.
The child was born regularly, but immediately after the health of the mother went downhill. The outbreak spread to the lungs and the decay became progressive. Two months later she went to extremes, and she saw her little girl growing very well one who had grown very healthy. The mother looked at her robust baby and saw his sweet smile, and then she quietly died.
Several years later there was in a religious institute a very young sister, totally dedicated to the care and education of children abandoned, and with eyes bent on charges with a tender motherly love. She loved the tiny sick children and as if she had given them life. She was the daughter of the sacrifice, which now with her big heart has spread much love among the children of the destitute. The heroism of the intrepid mother was not in vain! (See Andrea Majocchi. " Between burning scissors," 1940, p. 21 et seq.). But we ask: Is Perhaps the Christian sense, indeed even purely human, vanished in this point of no longer being able to understand the sublime sacrifice of the mother and the visible action of divine Providence, which made quell'olocausto born such a great result? (Pope Pius XII, Address to Association of Large Families, November 26, 1951; I used Google Translate to translate this address from the Italian as it is found at AAS Documents, p. 855; you will have to scroll down to page 855, which takes some time, to find the address.)
How sad it is that men such as Dr. Ralph Northam consider it their duty to kill babies at any stage, no less on the day of birth, and that almost every supposed “pro-life” politician supports at least the so-called “life of the mother” exception.”
There are no “exceptions” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment.
It will not come as news to longtime readers of this site that these barbarous developments are the manifestation of what must happen to men and their nations absent a due submission to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by His Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.
None of the possibilities raised by Cuomo’s monstrous law and none of the reality of the killing caused by “brain death” and “palliative care” seems to catch the ever-sensitive eye of Timothy Michael Dolan, who wants to appear “reasonable” at a time when men have cast aside reason and have thrown themselves willingly to the arms of the devil, who is actually being feted publicly now to the delight of many in the entertainment and news industries.
IV. Timothy Dolan Prefers More of What Has Failed: “Dialogue” With the Catholic Merchants of Death
None of the possibilities raised by Andrew Mark Cuomo’s monstrous law and none of the reality of the killing caused by “brain death” and “palliative care” seems to catch the ever-sensitive eye of Timothy Michael Dolan, who wants to appear “reasonable” at a time when men have cast aside reason and have thrown themselves willingly to the arms of the devil, who is actually being feted publicly now to the delight of many in the entertainment and news industries.
As per usual, therefore, Timothy Michael “Cardinal” Dolan is refusing to consider excommunicating Cuomo, who is living in sin with his paramour, Sandra Lee, and those members of the New York State Senate and New York State Assembly who voted for the bill as he fears that to do so would make them “martyrs” in the eyes of the public:
NEW YORK, January 25, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan responded to calls for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's excommunication for his role in enshrining a “fundamental right” to virtually-unlimited abortion in the state, saying via a spokesperson that excommunication is "not an appropriate response."
Asked by CNN Religion Editor Dan Burke about the calls for Gov. Cuomo to be excommunicated over New York's new abortion bill, Dolan’s spokesman said he would “not discuss any individual,” but that “excommunication should not be used as a weapon.”
“Too often, I fear, those who call for someone's excommunication do so out of anger or frustration,” Dolan's spokesman said in the statement.
Two Catholic bishops, however, are calling for the excommunication of Cuomo for championing and signing the so-called Reproductive Health Act (RHA), earlier this week on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The radical abortion bill codified legal abortion up to birth in New York state law, an act of preservation by pro-aborts should Roe v. Wade be overturned by the Supreme Court.
Knoxville, Tennessee, Bishop Richard Stika and Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland both indicated that if Cuomo lived in their jurisdiction they would take action. Strickland urged Cuomo’s ordinaries to do so.
“Someone asked me today if I would issue an excommunication of a Catholic Governor under my jurisdiction if the Governor did the same as in New York,” Stika tweeted Thursday afternoon. “I think I might do it for any Catholic legislator under my jurisdiction who voted for the bill as well as the Governor.”
“Enough is enough,” said Stika. “Excommunication is to be not a punishment but to bring the person back into the Church. It's like medicine for them. But this vote is so hideous and vile that it warrants the act. But thankfully I am not in that position. Very sad.”
Bishop Strickland followed up in the early hours of Friday, and mincing no words he said the radical abortion law amounts to legalized "infanticide."
“I’m with Bishop Stika,” he said. “I’m not in a position to take action regarding legislation in New York but I implore bishops who are to speak out forcefully. In any sane society this is called INFANTICIDE!!!!!!!!!!”
Catholic commentator Thomas Peters said that Dolan's statement indicates that some Church leaders are more concerned about public image than shepherding souls.
Thomas Peters
@AmericanPapist
“We don’t want to excommunicate people who will wear excommunication as a public badge of honor” is an admission that leaders of the church see themselves as PR managers not the shepherds of souls.
Withholding excommunication when it should be applied is actually uncharitable!
Daniel Burke
@BurkeCNN
I asked @CardinalDolan's spokesman about the calls for Gov. Cuomo to be excommunicated over NY's new abortion bill. While emphasizing that this should not be considered a comment on any specific person, he said excommunication "should not be used as a weapon." Full statement:
After years of campaigning by pro-abortion activists, the New York state legislature - now under Democrat super majority since last November’s midterm elections - passed the so-called “Reproductive Health Act” (RHA) Tuesday, preserving a supposed “fundamental right” to abortion in state law and eliminating protections for the unborn until birth.
Washington D.C. priest Monsignor Charles Pope also called for Cuomo to face penalties.
“There comes a time when something is so egregious and boldly sinful that it must be met with strong ecclesial and canonical penalties and remedies,” Pope wrote Wednesday at the National Catholic Register.
After detailing of the “terrible bill,” Pope said, “Even worse, the “Catholic” governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, not only signed the bill on the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but decreed a celebration.”
I will not discuss any individual. Anything that follows is a statement of some general principles, and should not be considered to be a comment on any specific person.
First, excommunication should not be used as a weapon. Too often, I fear, those who call for someone's excommunication do so out of anger or frustration.
Second, notable canon lawyers have said that, under canon law, excommunication is not an appropriate response to a politician who supports or votes for legislation advancing abortion.
Third, from a pastoral perspective, if a pastor - and a bishop is certainly a pastor of a diocese - knows of a grave situation involving a parishioner, it is his duty to address that issue personally and directly with the parishioner. That was the approach of Cardinal O'Connor and Cardinal Egan (both of whom I served), and it is Cardinal Dolan's approach as well.
Fourth, and finally, from a strategic perspective, I do not believe that excommunication would be effective as many politicians would welcome it as a sign of their refusal to be "bullied by the Church", thinking it would therefore give them a political advantage. (See, for example, the case of Bishop Leo Maher and Lucy Killea). (Dolan Says Excommunicating Pro-Abortion Politicians Not An Options.)
As for Dolan’s initial reaction to the New York State baby-killing bill, it is not unfair to ask the following question: What kind of “political advantage” can Andrew Mark Cuomo obtain after winning the governorship of the State of New York in 2010, 2014 and 2018 by overwhelming margins?
Timothy Michael Dolan’s self-serving excuse for not discipling those who support the destruction of innocent human life, whether by surgical and/or chemical means, is reflective of the apostate spirit of conciliariam’s “official reconciliation” with the “principles” of the “new era inaugurated in 1789, admitting that there are some, including “Bishop” Richard Stika of Knoxville, Tennessee, and “Bishop” Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, who have said that they would excommunicate pro-abort Catholics in their own jurisdictions. Strickland is to be commended for saying that those who voted for New York’s baby-killing law will reap the whirlwinds of hell, although one wonders if Jorge Mario Bergoglio will disown such a statement of Catholic truth.
This is not the first time that Timothy Michael Dolan has washed his hands of the duty that befalls one who considers himself to be a true Successor of Saint Peter. He did so in early-2010 just two months after Andrew Mark Cuomo succeeded the pro-abortion, pro-perversity profligate named David Paterson (see Little Caesars All (Pizza! Pizza!):
Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York told an Albany television reporter on March 9 that he does not favor denying Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion and same-sex marriage.
“NEWS10's John McLoughlin asked Archbishop Dolan if he favored denying the Church's Sacraments to politicians, like Governor David Paterson, who are Roman Catholic but also pro-choice and pro-gay marriage,” WTEN-TV reported. “The prelate acknowledged that some of his fellow bishops might favor such a ban, but Dolan said he does not, preferring to follow the lead of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who said it was better to try to persuade them than to impose sanctions.”
Archbishop Dolan was in Albany to lobby on behalf of Catholic schools, which face increasing financial strain because of unfunded government mandates.
In Milwaukee, Archbishop Jerome Listecki said that he, too, would be averse to the idea of denying the Eucharist to a prominent abortion advocate, although he did exclude the possibility. The newly installed archbishop told an audience at the Milwaukee Press Club that his decision would take into account "the impact of whatever that person is doing." Before taking disciplinary action, he said, he would want to "help them come to an understanding of the teaching."
Archbishop Listecki said: "It's very difficult for me to see how somebody can be pro-choice knowing the teachings of the church" (Timothy Dolan Will Not Refuse "Communion" to Pro-Abortion Pols.)
Dolan’s spiel this time around is the same as it has ever been, and it is entirely self-serving and helps to embolden pro-aborts in office currently and to communicate to those who aspire to office that they can do almost anything without being criticized or punished by the conciliar officials save for supporting the death penalty, opposing globalism’s agenda of open borders and opposing socialized medicine and other statist programs of coercive income redistribution. Note also the language used nine years ago by "Archbishop" Jerome Listecki. He referred to those who support the slaughter of the preborn under cover of the civil law as "pro-choice," not "pro-death" or "pro-abortion." Using the devil's language is not in the service of truth. Yet it is that many conciliar "bishops" and presbyters use the language of the pro-death lobby.
Timothy Michael Dolan's fear of making "martyrs" out of pro-death Catholics in public life by refusing them what purports to be Holy Communion is entirely misplaced. He believes that he is a Catholic bishop (he is neither a bishop or a priest). He believes that Our Lord comes down on the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo tables. He has an obligation to defend the integrity of what believes to be the Most Blessed Sacrament no matter who is made out to be "martyr" by the secular media or by other dissenting Catholics.
So what?
Saint Tarcisius laid down his very life to protect the Blessed Sacrament that he was carrying on his person. Shouldn't this inspire man who believes to be a Catholic bishop want to do the same? That Timothy Dolan believes it is "prudent" to keep giving what he thinks is Holy Communion to pro-abortion Catholics is just another sign of the era of apostasy that is upon us.
Then again, although it is said that John "Cardinal" O'Connor told this Governor Cuomo's father, former three-term Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo, who died on January 1, 2015, not to receive what purports to be Holy Communion at the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo service, this was never made public.
A former pastor of the Cuomo the Elder, the late Monsignor Michael J. Wrenn, told me in April of 1997 as I drove him back to Manhattan after we had both appeared as speakers at a Wanderer Forum in Albany, New York, that he surmised that this was the case as the pro-death politician, by then two years a private citizen after being defeated by the pro-abortion Catholic Republican named George Elmer Pataki, on November 8, 1994, sat in the rear of his church and did not present himself to receive what is thought to be Holy Communion. Even Monsignor Wrenn, a prominent figure in the Archdiocese of New York and in "conservative" Catholic circles nationwide, did not know for sure.
Indeed, George Elmer Pataki himself remained in perfectly "good standing" in the conciliar structures throughout his three pathetic terms as Governor of the State of New York (January 1, 1995, to January 1, 2007).
Rudolph William Giuliani also maintained his public good standing in the conciliar structures throughout his two terms as Mayor of the City of New York (January 1, 1994 to January 1, 2002) despite his open support for baby-killing under cover of the civil law. The late Edward "Cardinal" Egan, the conciliar "archbishop" of New York from 2000 to 2009. It was only Giuliani did receive what purported Holy Communion at a staging of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo at the Cathedral of Saint Patrick on Saturday, April 19, 2009, that was presided over by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict, that Egan issued the following statement:
“The Catholic Church clearly teaches that abortion is a grave offense against the will of God. Throughout my years as Archbishop of New York, I have repeated this teaching in sermons, articles, addresses, and interviews without hesitation or compromise of any kind. Thus it was that I had an understanding with Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, when I became Archbishop of New York and he was serving as Mayor of New York, that he was not to receive the Eucharist because of his well-known support of abortion. I deeply regret that Mr. Giuliani received the Eucharist during the Papal visit here in New York, and I will be seeking a meeting with him to insist that he abide by our understanding.” (Statement of "Cardinal" Egan.)
This is what I wrote at the time that "Cardinal" Egan issued the above statement ten years ago:
"An understanding"? Public scandal is never a private matter. The faithful have a right to know that a public sinner is being sanctioned by those who appear to them to be the ecclesiastical officials of the Catholic Church. Edward Egan said nothing back in 2003 when Giuliani entered into his sacramentally invalid marriage to his third wife, Judith Nathan, thereby depriving Catholics who believe that divorce and remarriage is no "big problem" of an opportunity to learn that Giuliani was not entitled to "congratulations" on this bogus marriage, that, indeed, he was further jeopardizing the salvation of his immortal soul. There was nothing but silence from Egan's offices at 1011 First Avenue in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York. Silence.
One wonders if Egan had or his successor in the conciliar structures, Timothy "I am to a happy bishop" Dolan, has "understanding" with the thirty-third degree Mason named Charles Rangel, a Democrat who serves as the United States Representative from the Fifteenth Congressional District in the State of New York and a militant supporter of baby-killing, who remains a Catholic in "good standing" in the conciliar structures.
One wonders if Egan had or Dolan has or "understanding" with former New York Governor George Pataki, a pro-abortion Republican who lives within the confines of the Archdiocese of New York. Does any such "understanding" exist with former New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo, a pro-abortion Democrat who was defeated in his bid for a fourth term by Pataki in 1994. Did any such "understanding" exist with the former Governor of the State of New York, David Paterson, a pro-abortion Catholic member of the Democrat Party, or with Figlio di Sfachim today? Why all of the silence if such "understandings" exist?
One wonders why the conciliar "bishop" of Providence, Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, chose to issue a "private" warning to Patrick Kennedy, who is keeping alive the pro-abortion, pro-perversity legacy of his late father, Edward Moore Kennedy, not to receive what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Judeo- Masonic Novus Ordo service, expressing his regret that the younger Kennedy chose to make his, Bishop Tobin's, 2007 letter a public matter. (See Bishop Tobin Asked Rep. Kennedy Not to Receive Communion.) Public scandal is never a private matter. Why the regrets?
Then again, of course, the counterfeit church of conciliarism specializes in giving scandal to the faithful. The scandal of esteeming the symbols of false religions, an act that is so offensive to the honor and majesty of God that it is almost impossible for us mortals to comprehend in its full enormity, has become passe to most Catholics in the conciliar structures. What's the "big deal" about calling the Koran, a document that blasphemes Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and denies the doctrine of the Most Blessed Trinity, among other things, "dear" and "precious"? What's the "big deal" about calling Mount Hiei in Japan, on which the false religion of Buddhism is practice, as "sacred"? What's the "big deal" about calling the heretical and schismatic "patriarch" of Constantinople a "pastor" in the Church of Christ. What's the "big deal" about a putative "pope" going into a mosque or a synagogue and being treated as an inferior as reverence is given to places that are abominable in the sight of God? (Public Scandal Is Never A Private Matter, revised in 2009.)
How did over thirty years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York).
How did over twenty-four years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late William Brennan, a Catholic who cast a vote in favor the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January, 22, 1973, while he served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. decisions he reaffirmed in subsequent cases?
How did twenty years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Thomas P. O'Neill (D-Massachusetts)?
How did over thirty-six years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachussets)?
How did over thirty-three years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Representative Geraldine Anne Ferraro-Zaccarro (D-New York).
How did over thirty-eight years of "engagement and dialogue changed former Governor of New York Mario Matthew Cuomo before he died?
How has over thirty years of "engagement and dialogue" changed former Mayor of the City of New York Rudolph William Giuliani?
How has thirty-five years of "engagement and dialogue" changed current Governor of New York Andrew Mark Cuomo, who was an aide-de-camp of his father’s between 1983 and 1984 and served as the Secretary of the United States of Housing and Urban and Development (1997-2001) before his election as the Attorney General of the State New York in 2006 prior to his election as governor in 2010?
How has ten years of "engagement and dialogue" changed United States Senator Kirsten Gillebrand (D-New York).
How has forty-six years of "engagement and dialogue" changed the former Vice President of the United States of America, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware; see, for example, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Demagogue Update).
It must be remembered, though, that the riotous scene within the New York State Legislature a week ago today is hardly new as it was forty-nine years ago this year that the late New York State Senator Edward Speno, a Republican and a member of Saint Raphael Church in East Meadow, New York, cast the deciding vote on March 18, 1970, to pass legislation permitting baby-killing in the first three months of the babies’ lives in their mothers’ wombs, and he suffered no consequences from Bishop Walter P. Kellenberg, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, at whose hands I was confirmed at Saint Aloysius Church, Great Neck, New York, on March 21, 1961, the Feast of Saint Benedict, for doing so.
Speno died less than a year later (February 17, 1971), and though Kellenberg did not reverse the decision of Father Francis Bain, the pastor of Saint Raphael Church, to refuse Speno the conciliar “Mass of Christian Burial,” he did permit Speno have the conciliar church’s “white” non-requiem at Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick, New York. This was the first known instance, at least to me, of a Catholic who cooperated formally in making surgical baby-killing "available" under cover of the civil law receiving what purported to be a Catholic funeral service. Many have been the occasions since this that this has been done (Thomas P. O’Neill, Edward Moore Kennedy, William Brennan, Daniel Moynihan, Thomas Foley, Mario Matthew Cuomo, Geraldine Anne Ferraro-Zaccaro, Thomas Menino, et al.) scandalizing "pro-life" Catholics and "pro-life" non-Catholics alike.
The conciliar officials talk, talk, talk about talking but they only enable and embolden agents of evil to continue to their wicked work. As noted just before, this emboldens the wicked and dispirits at least a few Catholics in the conciliar structures who know better, to say nothing of scandalizing Protestants and reaffirming them in their own false sect.
V. The Conciliar Echo Chamber of Making a Moral Equivalency Between Baby-Killing, Illegal Immigration, Protecting the Environment and the Death Penalty
Jorge Mario Bergoglio will have nothing to say Andrew Mark Cuomo’s promotion of the new baby-killing law in the State of New York, although his cronies have had plenty to say in support of Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr., Paul Ehrlich, Emma Bonino, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, Emanuel Macron and all other globalist leaders.
This is why the aforementioned Timothy Michael Dolan has to make a morally equivalency between the killing of the innocent preborn and the “rights” and the nonexistent rights of foreign nationals to cross into other nations in defiance of their just laws that are nothing other than an exercise of the Natural Law right to self-defense and their duty to protect the health and safety and their own citizens. Many, although not all, of those in the conciliar hierarchy cannot issue any kind of even mild criticism of abortion without coupling it with other matters, including a firm opposition to the Natural Law right of the civil state to impose the death penalty on heinous malefactors after the administration and exhausting of the due process of law (arrest, indictment, arraignment, trial, subsequent appeals) that is a denial of the unchanging teaching of the Catholic Church.
Enter again, therefore, is Timothy Michael Dolan, who wondered why Democrats wanted to alienate Catholic voters about abortion, which he called a difficult "choice" for women while he praised the statists for their otherwise "progressive" agenda items such as the "DREAM Act," prison reform and "voters rights" act. Mind you, this is the same "historian" who once said to Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, "We Want To Be With You" in support of ObamaDeathCare and who said that one could refer to God by a variety of different names (see Whatever You Want).
Here is the column that “Cardinal” Dolan wrote in the New York Post on Tuesday, January 29, 2019, the Feast of Saint Francis de Sales:
It’s been a rough time for faithful Catholics recently in our state government’s frantic rush for “progressive” ideas.
I’m thinking first of the ghoulish radical abortion-expansion law, which allows for an abortion right up to the moment of birth; drops all charges against an abortionist who allows an aborted baby, who somehow survives the scissors, scalpel, saline and dismemberment, to die before his eyes; mandates that, to make an abortion more convenient and easy, a physician need not perform it; and might even be used to suppress the conscience rights of health care professionals not to assist in the grisly procedures. All this in a state that already had the most permissive abortion laws in the country.
As if that’s not enough, instead of admitting that abortion is always a tragic choice, and that life-giving alternatives should be more vigorously promoted, the governor and his “progressive” supporters celebrated signing the bill. At the governor’s command, even the lights of the Freedom Tower sparkled with delight. (Why Are Cuomo and the Democrats Alienating Catholics?.)
Stop right there.
“Cardinal” Dolan, abortion is not a “tragic choice.” It is the direct, intentional murder of an innocent being. Although human beings have the physical freedom to choose to commit an evil act, they have no moral freedom to do so. One is never morally free to “choose” to do that which is evil. There is thus no “tragic choice” about abortion, only the terrible reality that our civil laws have informed women that they have a “right” to do that which is forbidden by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.
Moreover, no one has the right to use that which is proper to married state outside of it, and those who have done so must seek out the absolution of the Divine Redeemer in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and to reform their lives. Sinners are to be “accompanied” or “reaffirmed” in their sins. Sinners must repent of their sins and quit committing them as they seek to make reparation for their sins. It is one thing to sin and to be sorry and to receive absolution from a true priest acting in persona Christi. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly, worse yet to celebrate it as a human right and to enshrine its commission under cover of the civil law.
Although human nature is fallen and even those striving for sanctity can fall prey to the sins of the flesh, it is nevertheless true that there have never been more incentives to commit sins of impurity, including those which are perverse and unnatural, than at the present time, and many of these incentives are to be found not only in “popular entertainment” but in the very programs of explicit instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandment that Jorge Mario Bergoglio endorsed yet again during his inflight interview on Sunday, January 27, 2019, the Third Sunday after Pentecost, and the Commemoration of Saint John Chyrsostom. (For a superb commentary on the wickedness of these programs, please see an article by the world’s foremost expert on this subject, Mrs. Randy Engel, at: Amoris Laetitia and Sex-Education. Also see Mrs. Engel's see Origins of Classroom Instruction in Matters of Purity in Catholic Schools and The McHugh Chronicles).
Choice?
Absolutely not.
The conciliar apostate of the Archdiocese of New York continued as follows:
Those who once told us that abortion had to remain safe, legal and rare now have made it dangerous, imposed and frequent.
Then our governor insults and caricatures the church in what’s supposed to be an uplifting and unifying occasion, his “State of the State” address.
The bishops of this state have long supported a reform of the inadequate laws around the sexual abuse of minors. Yes, we and many others expressed reservations about one element, the retroactive elimination of the civil statute of limitations, but urged dramatic reform that, in many ways, was tougher than what was being proposed by legislators. A month ago we renewed that stance, and even dropped our objections to the “look-back” section if all victims would benefit. The governor was aware of all this.
Why, then, would he use his address to blame the church, and only the church, for blocking this bill? Why would he publicly brag in a political address about his dissent from timeless and substantive church belief? Why would he quote Pope Francis out of context as an applause line to misrepresent us bishops here as being opposed to our Holy Father? Why did he reduce the sexual abuse of minors, a broad societal and cultural curse that afflicts every family, public school, religion and government program, to a “Catholic problem?”
I’m a pastor, not a politician, but I feel obliged to ask these questions, as daily do I hear them from my people, as well as colleagues from other creeds. I’ve been attacked in the past when I asked — sadly and reluctantly — if the party that my folks proudly claimed as their own, the Democrats, had chosen to alienate faithful Catholic voters. Now you know why I asked.
As an American historian, I am very aware of our state’s past record of scorn and sneers at Catholics. It used to be called “know-nothings.” Now it’s touted as “progressivism.”
Genuine progressives work to pass a “DREAM act,” a “voters rights act,” a “prison reform act,” and we pastors of the church pitch in to support them. That’s government at its best. I pray that spirit returns. (Why Are Cuomo and the Democrats Alienating Catholics?.)
Sure, Andrew Mark Cuomo demagogued the issue of clerical abuse that has been covered-up by the conciliar authorities and, truth be told, was downplayed and cover-up by most true bishops even when we had a true pope. We now almost a millennium removed from the attempt made by Saint Peter Damian and Pope Leo IX to remove the pestilence of sodomites from the ranks of the priesthood and consecrated religious life.
Cuomo, who is a public adulterer living in sin with his paramour, sought to use the conciliar authorities as whipping boys in order to justify his signing a piece of legislation into law that is hideous in the sight of God and destructive of both social order and the good of souls. Timothy Michael Dolan was correct to have called Cuomo out on this hypocrisy.
However, Dolan’s expression of disbelief that the Democratic Party would want to alienate Catholics demonstrates how a man who holds an earned doctorate in history ignores the truth that neither of the two major organized crime families in the United States of America has ever sought to advance the true interests of Catholics.
The Democratic Party exploited Catholic immigrants in the Nineteenth Century when at a time when the anti-Catholicism reference by “Cardinal” Dolan in his New York Post column was rampant among White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) nativists, some of whom started the American (or Know Nothing) Party to oppose the growing culture influence of Catholics, and then promoted by many within the Republican Party after the War Between the State in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Democrat ward leaders and city bosses saw a ready source of campaign workers and votes in the millions of Catholics who came to this country during the height of Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Holy Mother Church and Catholics in Germany after the Franco-Prussian War ended on January 28, 1871, and in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Papal States during that war that saw the rise of Masonic persecution of the Church and her children in Italy.
Catholic immigrants, for their part, were all too eager to use the Democratic Party as a means of upward social, economic and political mobility at a time they faced over de facto and even de jure discrimination and persecution. To say that the Democratic Party favored the true good of Catholics and was an instrument of implementing Catholic Social Teaching is false as the statist policies of Presidents Thomas Woodrow Wilson (March 4, 1913, to March 4, 1921) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945) were opposed to Natural Law principle of subsidiarity and advanced numerous programs alien to the good of soul.
Wilson, of course, was a notorious anti-Catholic, who famously said the following to Father [later Archbishop] Clement Kelley about the plight of Catholics in Mexico in 1915 during their persecution by the Masonic Revolutionaries a full decade prior to the beginning of the Cristeros War:
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.
Perhaps even more relevant to "Cardinal" Dolan's column is that the fact that the Democratic Party has been institutionally committed to the destruction of innocent human life in the womb since 1972 ever since Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, and almost every Democrat in public office today, whether elected or appointed, Catholic or non-Catholic, is pro-abortion and pro-perversity. This fact does not make the orgnized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist "right" to be an instrument of secular salvation or even of justice or limited government, but it does mean that the Democratic Party has been in the business of supporting baby-killing and thus alienating believing Catholics for over four decades now.
Catholic pro-aborts in public life have received great support and encouragement from the likes of Roger "Cardinal" Mahony, Blase Cupich, Joseph Bernardin, Thomas Rosazza, Thomas Kelly, George Niederauer, Tod Brown, Bernard Law, Sean O'Malley, et al. because they, the pro-abort Catholics have been "sound" on matters of "economic justice," war and peace, illegal immigration and the death penalty. It was to indemnify these Catholic pro-aborts that Joseph Bernardin concocted the "consistent ethic of life," better known as the seamless garment, in his address at Fordham University on December 6, 1983, the Feast of Saint Nicholas:
The substance of a Catholic position on a consistent ethic of life is rooted in a religious vision. But the citizenry of the United States is radically pluralistic in moral and religious conviction. So we face the challenge of stating our case, which is shaped in terms of our faith and our religious convictions, in non-religious terms which others of different faith convictions might find morally persuasive. . . . As we seek to shape and share the vision of a consistent ethic of life, I suggest a style governed by the following rule: We should maintain and clearly communicate our religious convictions but also maintain our civil courtesy. We should be vigorous in stating a case and attentive in hearing another's case; we should test everyone's logic but not question his or her motives. ("A Consistent Ethic of Life: An American-Catholic Dialogue".)
Bernardin wanted to indemnify the likes of Edward Moore Kennedy and Mario Matthew Cuomo and Thomas P. O'Neill and Thomas Foley and Christopher Dodd and John Kerry and Barbara Mikulski and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Geraldine Ferraro from any possible electoral consequences because of their support for chemical and surgical baby-killing. They were doing "so much" for the poor. They were really the true "pro-lifers" in public life. It is wrong to be "single issue" voters on the issue of abortion alone.
It is no wonder, therefore, that non-Catholics such as Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetero and his wife, Michelle Robinson Obama, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Wilhelm/Warren deBlasio Wilhem/Bill de Blasio, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, et al., persist in the delusion that they are "caring" for others, with our taxpayer dollars, mind you, even though they support one grave moral evil after another under cover of the civil law, including the slicing and dicing of little children in their mothers' wombs and the sin of Sodomy Their "program" to "care" for children is perfectly in line with the United Nations Convention for the Child that has been endorsed by none other than “Saint John Paul II” and his successor, Antipope Emeritus Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI (see Kindred Spirit of the New World Order). How are non-Catholic statists supposed to know better when the Nanny State and its programs have the seal of approval of the conciliar "popes,” including Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who celebrates the darkness of the world with reckless abandon.
It is thus not "news," "Cardinal" Dolan, that the Democrat Party supports abortion as it has been in the business of alienating Catholics just as much as the counterfeit church of conciliarism has alienated Catholics from Catholic Faith, Worship and Morals.
No political party that is committed to the anti-Incarnational principles of Judeo-Masonic naturalism has the interests of the true common temporal good, which must pursued in light of man’s Last End, at heart, and it is thus reprehensible for Timothy Michael Dolan to make it appear that Catholics support pieces of legislation on proposals about which men of good will are free to debate and/or are actually violative of national sovereignty or subsidiarity.
There is no moral equivalency between taking innocent human life—whether in the womb or at any subsequent stage thereafter—and the “DREAM Act” or prison reform or “universal health care.”
Nice try, “Cardinal” Dolan.
You have still chosen, if I can use that word, to shirk your duties to discipline Andrew Mark Cuomo, who has chosen himself to be unrepentantly and arrogantly persistent in support of sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Pro-aborts in Catholic life scoff at your words and your entreaties, which will be no more effective now than when you tried to use then Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. to remediate the “flaws” in ObamaDeathCare. These pro-aborts take you and your confreres for fools as they know they will never face any sanctions from you this life, although they are going to face them at the moment of their Particular Judgment even if you do not know this or remind them of it.
Pope Pius XI spoke of the futility of naturalism in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:
27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)
28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
Paragraph number twenty-eight above says it all:
They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
“Cardinal” Dolan is wasting his energy and consuming his time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to turn the Democratic Party of statism, death and perversity into an instrument of “social justice” or “peace.” Both the Democratic Party and Republican Party are instruments of naturalism, and men and their nations must perish upon its shoals as Our Lord really meant it when He said, “Without Me you can do nothing.”
Permit me to introduce Timothy Michael Dolan, who dismissed the actual teaching of the Catholic Church on the Social Kingship of Christ by claiming that such teaching was what “we used to say”), to the words of Pope Leo XIII in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:
This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned"(Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)
Men and their nations must descend into barbarism absent the Social Reign of Christ the King and absent the public veneration of His Most Blessed Mother by means of solemn Rosary processions and pilgrimages to advance her cause, which is that of her Divine Son’s Kingship over us all.
VI. Not Politicians or Cultural Warriors, Timothy Michael Dolan?
Timothy Michael Dolan said last week that bishops are not politicians or culture warriors.
Well, true bishops are not “politicians” in that they are not called to hold civil office. However, bishops are called to be defenders of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in the public realm. This means that they must take stands that offend the mighty and could result in losing the benefices of the civil state, especially the “privilege” of the tax-exempt status, and/or their own loss of personal liberty. Thousands upon thousands of Catholic bishops have refused to knuckle under to the threats of the mighty, and they have feared not to oppose those who used civil authority as a cloak for evil. Catholic bishops do not remain inert and silent in the face of grave evils.
Indeed, the Catholic Church teaches that her bishops have a positive obligation before God to remonstrate with civil officials who proposed to undertake—or have indeed untaken—action or actions contrary to the good of souls and thus of a right public order. Bishops who do not do so will themselves reap the whirlwinds of hell.
Writing in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, Pope Leo XIII explained that each Catholic has a duty to oppose unjust laws and to defend the truths of the Catholic Faith:
10. But, if the laws of the State are manifestly at variance with the divine law, containing enactments hurtful to the Church, or conveying injunctions adverse to the duties imposed by religion, or if they violate in the person of the supreme Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then, truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime; a crime, moreover, combined with misdemeanor against the State itself, inasmuch as every offense leveled against religion is also a sin against the State. Here anew it becomes evident how unjust is the reproach of sedition; for the obedience due to rulers and legislators is not refused, but there is a deviation from their will in those precepts only which they have no power to enjoin. Commands that are issued adversely to the honor due to God, and hence are beyond the scope of justice, must be looked upon as anything rather than laws. You are fully aware, venerable brothers, that this is the very contention of the Apostle St. Paul, who, in writing to Titus, after reminding Christians that they are "to be subject to princes and powers, and to obey at a word," at once adds: "And to be ready to every good work."Thereby he openly declares that, if laws of men contain injunctions contrary to the eternal law of God, it is right not to obey them. In like manner, the Prince of the Apostles gave this courageous and sublime answer to those who would have deprived him of the liberty of preaching the Gospel: "If it be just in the sight of God to hear you rather than God, judge ye, for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard." (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)
But in this same matter, touching Christian faith, there are other duties whose exact and religious observance, necessary at all times in the interests of eternal salvation, become more especially so in these our days. Amid such reckless and widespread folly of opinion, it is, as We have said, the office of the Church to undertake the defense of truth and uproot errors from the mind, and this charge has to be at all times sacredly observed by her, seeing that the honor of God and the salvation of men are confided to her keeping. But, when necessity compels, not those only who are invested with power of rule are bound to safeguard the integrity of faith, but, as St. Thomas maintains: "Each one is under obligation to show forth his faith, either to instruct and encourage others of the faithful, or to repel the attacks of unbelievers.'' To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth, is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe. In both cases such mode of behaving is base and is insulting to God, and both are incompatible with the salvation of mankind. This kind of conduct is profitable only to the enemies of the faith, for nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good. Moreover, want of vigor on the part of Christians is so much the more blameworthy, as not seldom little would be needed on their part to bring to naught false charges and refute erroneous opinions, and by always exerting themselves more strenuously they might reckon upon being successful. After all, no one can be prevented from putting forth that strength of soul which is the characteristic of true Christians, and very frequently by such display of courage our enemies lose heart and their designs are thwarted. Christians are, moreover, born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God aiding, the triumph: "Have confidence; I have overcome the world." Nor is there any ground for alleging that Jesus Christ, the Guardian and Champion of the Church, needs not in any manner the help of men. Power certainly is not wanting to Him, but in His loving kindness He would assign to us a share in obtaining and applying the fruits of salvation procured through His grace.
The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)
Pope Saint Pius X’s condemnation of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic principle of the separation of Church and State that is a cornerstone of the American founding and of conciliarism’s entire ethos of refusing to impose sanctions upon those in public life who promote evils contrary to the good of souls after being duly warned of the consequences they face for doing so:
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.)
It is not to act the role of a “politician” for a bishop to state these truths with certainty! A bishop who does so is only fulfilling his duty to God, to the civic official or officials being sanctioned, to the good of the souls of ordinary Catholics and to the very common temporal good of societies themselves. A true and legitimate Successor of the Apostles has the obligation to proclaim the truths of the Catholic Faith with clarity as the spiritual welfare of everyone within his diocese, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, rests upon his own shoulders upon taking canonical possession of his see. There is no such understanding of this today as the “new ecclesiology” involves treating the false clergy of false religious sects as “ministers” who have a mission from God to serve souls.
Pope Pius IX understood his own duties as the Universal Pastor of souls, which is why he issued Iam Vos Omnes on September 13, 1868, prior to the [First] Vatican Council to take place a year later as he specifically exhorted Protestants and the Orthodox to return to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order:
It is therefore by force of the right of Our supreme Apostolic ministry, entrusted to us by the same Christ the Lord, which, having to carry out with [supreme] participation all the duties of the good Shepherd and to follow and embrace with paternal love all the men of the world, we send this Letter of Ours to all the Christians from whom We are separated, with which we exhort them warmly and beseech them with insistence to hasten to return to the one fold of Christ; we desire in fact from the depths of the heart their salvation in Christ Jesus, and we fear having to render an account one day to Him, Our Judge, if, through some possibility, we have not pointed out and prepared the way for them to attain eternal salvation. In all Our prayers and supplications, with thankfulness, day and night we never omit to ask for them, with humble insistence, from the eternal Shepherd of souls the abundance of goods and heavenly graces. And since, if also, we fulfill in the earth the office of vicar, with all our heart we await with open arms the return of the wayward sons to the Catholic Church, in order to receive them with infinite fondness into the house of the Heavenly Father and to enrich them with its inexhaustible treasures. By our greatest wish for the return to the truth and the communion with the Catholic Church, upon which depends not only the salvation of all of them, but above all also of the whole Christian society: the entire world in fact cannot enjoy true peace if it is not of one fold and one shepherd. (Pope Pius IX, Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868)
Pope Pius IX understood that he would be called to account at his Particular Judgment by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ if he failed in his duties to point out and to prepare for non-Catholics the way for them to attain eternal salvation. The conciliar authorities have no such understanding and thus they have no fear of answering to Our Lord as their dismiss as the work of a “politician” the duties of opposing unjust laws and calling to correction those who are separated from Holy Mother Church on matters of Faith and Morals. Then again, it is pretty difficult for men who are themselves outside the Barque of Saint Peter to exhort others to enter into it.
Insofar as Timothy Michael Dolan’s “culture warriors” remark, suffice it to say that our true popes and many true bishops have been such warriors, especially as the fashion and motion picture industries sought to push boundaries and thus desensitize people to the acceptance of what is morally repugnant to God, the good of souls and of entire nations.
Consider how Pope Benedict XV took note of and condemned exotic dances immodest fashions that were being spread after World War I:
19. From this point of view one cannot sufficiently deplore the blindness of so many women of every age and condition; made foolish by desire to please, they do not see to what a degree the in decency of their clothing shocks every honest man, and offends God. Most of them would formerly have blushed for those toilettes as for a grave fault against Christian modesty; now it does not suffice for them to exhibit them on the public thoroughfares; they do not fear to cross the threshold of the churches, to assist at the Holy sacrifice of the Mass, and even to bear the seducing food of shameful passions to the Eucharistic Table where one receives the heavenly Author of purity. And We speak not of those exotic and barbarous dances recently imported into fashionable circles, one more shocking than the other; one cannot imagine anything more suitable for banishing all the remains of modesty.
20. In considering attentively this state of things, the Tertiaries will understand what it is that our epoch expects from the disciples of St. Francis. If they bring their gaze back to the life of their Father, they will see what perfect and living resemblance to Jesus Christ, above all in His flight from satisfactions and his love of trials in this life, had he whom they call the Poverello, and who had received in his flesh the stigmata of the Crucified. It is for them to show that they remain worthy of him by embracing poverty, at least in spirit, in renouncing themselves, and in bearing each one his cross.
21. In what concerns specially the Tertiary Sisters, We ask of them by their dress and manner of wearing it, to be models of holy modesty for other ladies and young girls; that they be thoroughly convinced that the best way for them to be of use to the Church and to Society is to labor for the improvement of morals.
22. Moreover, after having created divers charitable works for the solace of the indigent in their wants of every kind, the members of this Order would wish, further, We are sure, to cause those of their brothers who are deprived of goods more precious than those of earth, to benefit by their charity. 23. Here comes back to Us the memory of the counsel of the Apostle Peter, asking Christians to be, by the holiness of their lives, models for the Gentiles, and this in order that, “remarking your good works, they glorify God in the day of His visitation” (Peter II.: 12). Like them, the Franciscan Tertiaries ought, by the integrity of their faith, the holiness of their lives, and the ardor of their zeal, spread abroad the good words of Christ, to warn those of their brethren who have gone out from the road, and to press them to reenter upon it. Behold that which the Church asks, that which she expects from them. (Pope Benedict XV, Sacra Propediem, January 6, 1921.)
Pope Pius XII was no less vigilant as he addressed the matter of modesty of dress in 1947 and 1957:
This second virtue, modesty - the very word “modesty” comes from modus, a measure or limit - probably better expresses the function of governing and dominating the passions, especially sensual passions. It is the natural bulwark of chastity. It is its effective rampart, because it moderates acts closely connected with the very object of chastity [...] Yet no matter how broad and changeable the relative morals of styles may be, there is always an absolute norm to be kept after having heard the admonition of conscience warning against approaching danger: style must never be a proximate occasion of sin. [...] An excess of immodesty in fashion involves, in practice, the cut of the garment. The garment must not be evaluated according to the estimation of a decadent or already corrupt society, but according to the aspirations of a society which prizes the dignity and seriousness of its public attire. [...] It is often said almost with passive resignation that fashions reflect the customs of a people. But it would be more exact and much more useful to say that they express the decision and moral direction that a nation intends to take: either to be shipwrecked in licentiousness or maintain itself at the level to which it has been raised by religion and civilization. (Pope Pius XII, Address to the Congress of the Latin Union of High Fashion, November 8, 1957; as found in Norms for Modesty, which is on the website of the National Coalition for Clergy and the Laity, which also includes links to Rome's Decrees on Modesty in Dress and Cardinal Siri’s Notification Concerning Men's Dress Worn by Women. Pope Pius XII's entire address may be purchased for fifty cents at MIQ Center Catholic Books: Papal Decrees, Encyclicals.)
Conciliar officials such as Timothy Michael Dolan and, of course, Jorge Mario Beroglio, have made their peace with the customs of the people and they have consciously reaffirmed cultural trends that shipwreck and ruin souls and have devastated the innocence and the purity of the young the stability and even the very definition of family life.
Furthermore, it was an American bishop, Archbishop John T. McNicholas, who was the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, from August 12, 1925, to the time of his death on April 22, 1950, led the formation of the Legion of Decency to combat the promotion of immorality in motion pictures. Catholics took their pledges to the Legion of Decency seriously, which is why Hollywood producers, many of them Jews who were concerned about losing money from Catholic moviegoers, had to agree to have produce films that conformed to moral standards.
The Legion of Decency was started in 1934 at a time when Catholics were, by and large, obedient to their bishops and cared about the sanctification and salvation of their immortal souls. Believe it or not, Catholics at that time were capable of being scandalized, and they recognized sin when they saw it.
Unlike the conciliar officials, who permit indecently attired women and men to serve as “lectors” and “Eucharistic ministers” and who celebrate “rock” music and men such as Archbishop John T. McNicholas were concerned about the sanctification of souls and desired to keep Catholics from that which was injurious to their salvation.
Fathers Gerald Kelly, S.J., and John C. Ford provided a history of the Legion of Decency that included both the long and short versions of the Legion’s Pledge:
I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion.
I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land.
I shall do all that I can to arouse public opinion against the portrayal of vice as a normal condition of affairs, and against depicting criminals of any class as heroes and heroines, presenting their filthy philosophy of life as something acceptable to decent men and women.
I unite with all who condemn the display of suggestive advertisements on billboards, at theatre entrances, and the favorable notices given to immoral motion pictures.
Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality. I promise further to secure as many members as possible for the Legion of Decency.
I make this protest in a spirit of self-respect and with the cdfiviction that the American public does not demand filthy pictures, but clean entertainment and educational features.
A shorter formula, which is in general use even at the present time,
was adopted at the bishops' meeting in November, 1934. The text is as follows:
I condemn indecent and immoral pictures, and those which glorify crime and criminals.
I promise to do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films, and to unite with all who protest them. I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life.
As a member of the Legion of Decency, I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.
There are are, as we shall see later, obligations deriving from natural law itself concerning attendance at indecent motion pictures. But it seems appropriate even at this point to ask whether the taking of the pledge of the Legion adds any new obligation. We have seen private explanations to the effect that the pledge itself is a promise binding in conscience—in fact that it is a promise made to God and, in effect, a vow. This can hardly be squared with interpretations given by bishops when the Legion was inaugurated. For instance, Archbishop John Gregory Murray stated: "Everything contained in the pledge is a duty of conscience independently of the pledge and independently of membership in the Legion of Decency., ' And Archbishop Francis J. L. Beckman was even more explicit. "In the matter of the obligatory force of the pledge," he said, "it may be stated in the instruction and to those who make inquiries, that it.. . does not itself bind in conscience."
It seems, therefore, that the pledge does not per se add any new obligation on those who take it. We say "per se" because, obviously, an individual who wishes to bind himself under pain of sin may do so. But this added obligation is not to be presumed. (Kelly-Ford Study on The Legion of Decency.)
Bishops are not “culture warriors,” “Cardinal” Dolan?
Go on, live in your fantasy world, believing that all is well and that bishops have no obligation to condemn that which is offensive to God and repugnant to the sanctification and salvation of souls. Bishops have an obligation to correct error and to call to correction, and they have an obligation to warn Catholics to avoid all near occasions of sin and to shun anything that is itself an incentive to sin. A Catholic bishop can never be indifferent to the horror of sin as the very thought of coming into contact with its effects caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to sweat droplets of blood during His Agony on the Garden of Gethsemane and imposed unspeakable sufferings upon Him in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday.
Pope Pius XI, making the cause of the Legion of Decency his own, warned Catholics very specifically about the dangerous nature of many motion pictures when he issued Vigilanti Cura, June 29, 1936:
There is no need to point out the fact that millions of people go to the motion pictures every day; that motion picture theatres are being opened in ever increasing number in civilized and semi-civilized countries; that the motion picture has become the most popular form of diversion which is offered for the leisure hours not only of the rich but of all classes of society.
At the same time, there does not exist today a means of influencing the masses more potent than the cinema. The reason for this is to be sought for in the very nature of the pictures projected upon the screen, in the popularity of motion picture plays, and in the circumstances which accompany them.
The power of the motion picture consists in this, that it speaks by means of vivid and concrete imagery which the mind takes in with enjoyment and without fatigue. Even the crudest and most primitive minds which have neither the capacity nor the desire to make the efforts necessary for abstraction or deductive reasoning are captivated by the cinema. In place of the effort which reading or listening demands, there is the continued pleasure of a succession of concrete and, so to speak, living pictures.
This power is still greater in the talking picture for the reason that interpretation becomes even easier and the charm of music is added to the action of the drama. Dances and variety acts which are sometimes introduced between the films serve to increase the stimulation of the passions.
It must be Elevated
Since then the cinema is in reality a sort of object lesson which, for good or for evil, teaches the majority of men more effectively than abstract reasoning, it must be elevated to conformity with the aims of a Christian conscience and saved from depraving and demoralizing effects.
Everyone knows what damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family. They are capable also of creating prejudices among individuals and misunderstandings among nations, among social classes, among entire races.
On the other hand, good motion pictures are capable of exercising a profoundly moral influence upon those who see them. In addition to affording recreation, they are able to arouse noble ideals of life, to communicate valuable conceptions, to impart a better knowledge of the history and the beauties of the Fatherland and of other countries, to present truth and virtue under attractive forms, to create, or at least to favour understanding among nations, social classes, and races, to champion the cause of justice, to give new life to the claims of virtue, and to contribute positively to the genesis of a just social order in the world. (Pope Pius XI, Vigilanti Cura, June 29, 1936.)
These words are truer now than they were nearly eighty-three years, but Timothy Michael Dolan does not believe that he is a called to be a culture warrior, which is logical as he is not a true bishop of the Catholic Church. This is why “Cardinal” Dolan will never do anything other to say that it is not wise to discipline the likes of Andrew Mark Cuomo, who will repay such benignity by lambasting those who oppose abortion and sodomy and by persecuting them with the full force of the civil law.
VII. The Time of Persecution is Upon Us
The time of persecution is upon us.
Indeed, many of us have experienced this persecution in the halls of academe decades ago. As I have recounted before, to just one example of many I encountered over the course of thirty years as a college professor of political science, feminists at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, wanted my signed contract canceled after I had been hired in June of 1992 because they had d discovered that I had run for lieutenant governor of New York six years before. The president of the college refused their furious entreaties, but I was a veritable "non-person" in the eyes of many of my fellow faculty members during the 1992-1993 year that I taught at Morningside College. Liberals are not exactly known to be very tolerant except of their own. They tend to give you the complete freedom to agree with them.
Additionally, there have been many times when I heard the forces of death banging their drums from hell, blowing their whistles, screaming, screeching, shouting obscenities and trying to provoke confrontations while I was part of a group of Catholics praying Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary outside of pioneering baby-killing Bill Baird’s abortuary in Hempstead, New York, in the 1980s, and at countless pro-life rallies and marches in the 1980s and 1990s in New York and elsewhere. Many of those who support evil have souls that are in such possession of the devil that they have a preternatural hatred for all that is good and must seek confrontation with anyone who seeks to singe their consciences with the bright light of the Holy Faith.
This is what happened to the young men from Covington Catholic High School, Covington, Kentucky, when they were confronted by a Native American “activist,” Nathan Phillips, who wanted to hold the students responsible for the crimes that the government of the United States of America did indeed commit against Native Americans in the Nineteenth Century that have been discussed on this website before (see Our Slave Drivers Are In Liberation Mode Again; also see an interview given by my late mother’s late adoptive father, Chief Red Fox, who was not a Sioux Indian as he claimed but who adopted the persona of one and became an eloquent spokesman for the first victims of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic genocide and social engineering: "Chief Red Fox" interviw on the plight of American Indians).
As happens with so many other members of groups whose members have suffered injustices over the course of this nation’s history, Nathan Phillips is unwilling to forgive those who have trespassed against him and his ancestors. Although resentment and grudge-holding are all too well known among so many Catholics across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide at this time of apostasy and betrayal, it is still nevertheless true that one who does not see the world through the eyes of the true Faith is more apt than others to harbor resentment and to nurse grudges without realizing that nothing any human being suffers in this life is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and cause His Blessed Mother to suffer in perfect communion with Him as she died a martyr’s death in her soul standing at the foot of the Holy Cross. We must forgive as we are forgiven.
Nathan Phillips, whose credibility has been shot to pieces since January 18, 2019 (see Nathan Phillips Has Violent Criminal Record, Escaped from Jail as a Teenager) and other “activists,” of course, do not forgive. They seek confrontation in the name of “education,” and they will use any pretext to seek to blame others for things that they have never done and for which they cannot be held responsible. It was contemptible and needlessly provocative for Phillips to pick on a group of young men at the March for Life on January 18, 2019, the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter and the Commemoration of Saint Prisca, because they were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.
Although readers of this site know that I am not a partisan the “make America great again” slogan as no country is great or can ever be made so without a due reverence and for and recognition of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as its King and His Most Blessed Mother as its Queen. Materialism has always been the bane of American existence.
True, the United States of America has had many great accomplishments in the natural order of things, but it has been responsible also for the exporting of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry in Mexico and the rest of Latin America as well as the Philippines and it has wreaked needless devastation on civilization population centers (Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, various cities Iraq and Syria, among other places) during wartime. (Please see the Appendix Below for an excerpt from Orestes Brownson’s (National Greatness), which was published in 1846, on what constitutes true national greatness, and it is not the Calvinist and Judeo-Masonic spirit of materialism and naturalism. Also of interest is Brownson’s (Moral nd Social Influence of Devotion to Mary.) The young men at Covington Catholic High School do not know this and they cannot be held responsible for that which they have never learned. (Moreover, a friend of ours Long Island said that her son-in-law that Mohammedans were hawking “Make America Great Again” hats at the March for Life this year, which is where a lot of participants bought the apparel. It appears that the Mohammedans, apart from making money, were setting up pro-life Americans for confrontations with paid activists.)
These young men were simply sporting a hat that speaks to them of pride in their nation and their support for a president who is appointing, at least for the most part, men and women to the Federal judiciary who are believed to support a “strict construction” of the Constitution of the United States of America. To believe that the “Make America Great Again” hats are symbols of “hate” and “racism” is to project onto those hat one’s own hatred of a naturalist, Donald John Trump, and his policies that are opposed by globalists, statists, collectivists, socialists, environmentalists and professor “activists” whose “activism” is suborned and underwritten financially by groups beholden to the Soros Foundation.
Nathan Phillips chose the confrontation with the young men, and the fact that he did so prompted a writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer to pose the following questions to him:
It has been suggested that Nathan Phillips, the Native American activist at the center of the recent controversy in Washington D.C., should be invited to Kentucky to sit down with the Covington Catholic kids to resolve their differences. I think Phillips should answer a number of questions before that happens.
Here are some of them:
- Why did you march up to the Covington Catholic students and start banging your drum instead of walking up to the adults from the Black Hebrew Israelites who were viciously insulting not only them, but members of your own group as well?
- Did you hear the epithets that the members of this known hate group were shouting at these teenagers?
- In talking to the news media about the incident did you refer to the students as "the beast" and the Black Hebrew Israelites as their "prey"?
- Video evidence shows members of the Black Hebrew Israelites calling the students "incest babies" and singling out one of their African-American classmates with a racial slur. Also, did you hear a member of the group yell at the Covington Catholic boys, "Your president is a homosexual," "You give faggots rights," and that "the Bible condemns homosexuality"? To which one of the boys shouted back, "They’re still human!" Did you hear any of those exchanges? Would you describe the behavior of the Black Hebrew Israelites towards the students as "respectful"?
- Did a member of your group engage a student telling him to "go back to Europe where you came from, this is not your land"? (Before you answer, know that it was caught on video.) Do you consider that respectful?
- It has been reported that you attempted to disrupt services at Washington, D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception this past Jan. 19, during a Saturday evening Mass with 20 or so other Native American demonstrators and that security forces at the church had to lock the doors to keep you and your group out. Is this true? And if so, what were you trying to accomplish by disrupting that service? Do you have something against Catholics specifically?
- Are you aware that many of your white, liberal supporters have taken to social media and advocated violence against the young man with whom you "faced-off"? Not only him, but the entire student population of the school and the school itself. Do you approve of these threats of violence? If not, have you spoken out against them?
- Do you think anyone who wears a MAGA cap is a racist, anti-Native American, homophobic and sexist?
- You told the media, that the kids "were in the process of attacking these four black individuals" from the Black Hebrew Israelites and "looked like they were going to lynch them." A new two-hour video of the event shows nothing of the sort. How do you explain that?
- You said you heard the boys chanting "Build the wall." Again, neither video or audio of the event proves that to be true. How do you explain that?
- You said you are willing to come to Covington and talk to the teenagers and adults involved if you were given "certain assurances..." What sort of assurances are you talking about?
- There were news reports that you claimed to be a Vietnam war veteran. The New York Times has corrected its own reporting on this matter. It has now asked the Pentagon for you service record. Did you serve in Vietnam? Did you ever say you served there when you didn’t? If so, did you say that you served there because you thought it would give you greater moral standing compared to the high school kids involved in this incident?
- You told The Enquirer that you were "disappointed" in CovCath student Nick Sandmann’s public statement because "he didn’t accept any responsibility" for what happened during the incident. You are a 64-year-old man. He is 17. How much responsibility have you accepted as the grown-up in this situation?
- Since the incident, many of your statements to the media about what happened have proven to be distortions and wild mischaracterizations. Some media organizations have gone so far as to calling some of your statements outright "lies." Why do you think the teenagers you have called "beasts" and accused of wanting to "lynch" black people, should believe they can sit down and talk to you in good faith about anything?
Those will do for a start.
But one more thing. Someone at the Diocese of Covington thought it would be clever to comment on the initial negative reports about the incident and trashed their own kids without knowing the whole story. Typically, Catholic church officials decline to comment on embarrassing controversies until the statute of limitations has run out, if you know what I mean.
Shame on them too. (A Few Questions for Nathan Phillips.)
These points are excellent, including the last one about the craven cowardice of the Diocese of Covington for immediately condemning the young men of Covington Catholic High School before the facts were known. Nathan Phillip’s “confrontation” has been thoroughly discredited, and any efforts to castigate the young men for the words and actions of a group called “Hebrew Israelities” were irresponsible. It was nothing other than a shameful dereliction of his duties as the putative shepherd of the Diocese of Covington, Roger Joseph Foys, to condemn these young men on the basis of a distorted video clip (see Covington Diocese: We Condemn Actions of Covington Catholic High School Students) and that, despite a recognition that he had rushed to judgment, he is still waiting for an “investigation” being conducted by an “independent” investigator to reach any final conclusions (see Roger Foys Apologizes to Covington High School Students for his rush to judgment).
The facts are plain for all who have the honesty and the integrity to stand against the merchants of death and their authoritarian, repressive ways. “Bishop” Roger Joseph Foys wants to “prove” to the victimology class that he has done everything possible to “clarify” a situation that is in no need of clarification. The irony that is lost on the faux “bishop” of Covington, Kentucky, is that the victimology class will never accept the results of his “investigation” as those who comprise it and make a handsome living from their self-imposed victimhood have minds that are closed to all truth, natural and supernatural, and who have among their twisted ranks those who either resort to the use of violence or who make threats of using it (see (Covington Boys' Lawyer Receives Bom Threats After Telling Media to Retract False Statements).
Alas, we live at a time when it is considered to be “hateful” to oppose the surgical execution of the innocent preborn and sodomite agenda of perversity and deviancy, and elected thugs such as Andrew Mark Cuomo or the thugs who agitate in behalf of groups funded by the Soros Foundation always seem to find themselves indemnified by a few of those “bishops” within the counterfeit church of conciliarism who reflect the apostate mind, such as it is, and darkened heart of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
One of those who has been arrogantly and defiantly unspoken against the young men from Covington Catholic High School who were accosted by Nathan Phillips and then demonized by the professional merchants of anti-Catholic hate-mongering is the conciliar “bishop” of Lexington, Kentucky, John Stowe, who, most unsurprisingly, is a friend and advocate of the homosexualist agenda of perversity:
LEXINGTON, Kentucky, January 24, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A Kentucky bishop known for pro-homosexual advocacy has published a commentary criticizing the high school boys who marched against abortion in Washington, D.C. for wearing Make America Great Again (MAGA) hats.
“I am ashamed that the actions of Kentucky Catholic high school students have become a contradiction of the very reverence for human life that the march is supposed to manifest,” wrote Lexington Bishop John Stowe in an op-ed for the Lexington Herald Leader.
Bishop Stowe’s expression of shame comes at an odd moment, days after the boys have been vindicated by extensive video footage showing the minors were targeted by radical, foul-mouthed, aggressive activists. (https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-gay-kentucky-bishop-trashes-covington-boys-wearing-a-trump-hat-isnt-pro.)
Indeed, Stowe is going to lead a retreat at my master’s alma mater, the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Notre Dame, Indiana, for those who base their self-identification on the basis on a proclivity to commit the sin of Sodom and its related vices that is opposed to nature and condemned repeatedly in Sacred Scripture, which was, after all, written under the Divine and thus infallible inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost:
SOUTH BEND, Indiana, January 28, 2019 (LifeSiteNews)– A famously pro-gay Catholic bishop is slated to lead an “LGBTQ retreat” next weekend at the University of Notre Dame. is slated to lead an “LGBTQ retreat” next weekend at the University of Notre Dame.
At the retreat, Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky “will be integrating sexual orientation and faith from a Scriptural and Biblical perspective,” according to an online description provided by the University’s Gender Relations Center (GRC). The University’s Campus Ministry is a cosponsor.
LifeSiteNews reached out to Bishop Stowe requesting an explanation of what it means to integrate “sexual orientation and faith,” but he declined through his spokesman.
Other questions which went unanswered were:
- Does Bishop Stowe intend to hold fast to magisterial teaching, or will he offer some other interpretation which affirms homosexual activity and transgenderism? If so, would Bishop Stowe be willing to share the Scriptural passages which might advocate for this?
- Is Bishop Stowe concerned that participating in an event labeled “LGBTQ” might affirm someone who is already experiencing difficulty escaping gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender “identity”?
The upcoming retreat featuring Bishop Stowe “is primarily geared toward students of the LGBTQ community,” according to its description, a term which in and of itself defies Catholic Church teaching.
Bishop Stowe recently made headlines for penning an op-ed scolding the Covington Catholic High School students who were accosted by radical activist Nathan Phillips while wearing “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hats after the March for Life. The bishop criticized the students, whose lives have been turned upside down by false media reports, death threats, and doxxing, suggesting they weren’t being pro-life by wearing MAGA hats.
Stowe is one of five bishops who endorsed pro-gay Fr. James Martin, S.J.’s book, “Building a Bridge,” and was also a featured speaker at a 2017 conference for the dissident group New Ways Ministry. The gathering was titled “Justice and Mercy Shall Kiss: LGBT Catholics in the Age of Pope Francis.”
New Ways Ministry was condemned in 2010 by then-president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, and in 2011 by Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl, USCCB chairman of the Committee on Doctrine.
Additionally, in 1999 the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “permanently prohibited” the group’s co-founders, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent, “from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons,” after ruling that their teaching was “erroneous and dangerous” and “doctrinally unacceptable.”
Last summer, a spokesperson for Bishop Stowe’s diocese said it was “up to each parish” whether to promote homosexuality.
Also in Bishop Stowe’s diocese last year, Fortunate Families, a pro-LGBT “Catholic” organization working in partnership with “Lexington Catholic LGBT Ministry” and the University of Kentucky LGBTQ* Resource Center, hosted dissident Fr. Bryan Massingale. He spoke about “LGBT Persons in the The Age of Pope Francis & Social Ethics.” (Pro-Sodomite "Bishop" Who Criticized Covington Boys to Lead LGBTQ Retreat at the University of Notre Dame du Lac.)
Here is a confidential memorandum to John Stowe, a stooge of the Catholic-hating “left” who believes that it is somehow “virtuous” and “natural” for human beings to identify themselves on the basis of shameful affections that are opposed to nature and have been condemned as follows in Sacred Scripture:
[13] If any one lie with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination, let them be put to death: their blood be upon them. [14] If any man after marrying the daughter, marry her mother, he hath done a heinous crime: he shall be burnt alive with them: neither shall so great an abomination remain in the midst of you. [15] He that shall copulate with any beast or cattle, dying let him die, the beast also ye shall kill. (Leviticus 20: 13-15.)
And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till you go thence. And when you come into the house, salute it, saying: Peace be to this house. And if that house be worthy, your peace shall come upon it; but if it be not worthy, your peace shall return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust from your feet. Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. (Matthew 10: 11-15.)
For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1: 18-32.)
[9] Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, [10] Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God. (1 Cor. 6: 9)
[6] And the angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved under darkness in everlasting chains, unto the judgment of the great day. [7] As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty. [9] When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee. [10] But these men blaspheme whatever things they know not: and what things soever they naturally know, like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted. (Jude 1 6-10.) [13] If any one lie with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination, let them be put to death: their blood be upon them. [14] If any man after marrying the daughter, marry her mother, he hath done a heinous crime: he shall be burnt alive with them: neither shall so great an abomination remain in the midst of you. [15] He that shall copulate with any beast or cattle, dying let him die, the beast also ye shall kill. (Leviticus 20: 13-15.)
And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till you go thence. And when you come into the house, salute it, saying: Peace be to this house. And if that house be worthy, your peace shall come upon it; but if it be not worthy, your peace shall return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust from your feet. Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. (Matthew 10: 11-15.)
For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1: 18-32.)
[9] Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, [10] Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God. (1 Cor. 6: 9)
[6] And the angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved under darkness in everlasting chains, unto the judgment of the great day. [7] As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty. [9] When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee. [10] But these men blaspheme whatever things they know not: and what things soever they naturally know, like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted. (Jude 1 6-10.)
Sinners must reform their lives, Roger Joseph Foys, not be “accompanied” and/or reaffirmed in lives of wickedness that the Catholic Church has taught from time immemorial end in eternal perdition. True charity wills the good of souls, the ultimate expression of which is their sanctification and salvation. The Divinely inspired writers of Holy Writ whose words have been quoted just above understood that sodomy and the possession of Heaven for all eternity are mutually exclusive. True charity, therefore, requires all Catholics, but especially one who thinks himself to be a bishop, to call to correction according to these words of Saint Paul the Apostle 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 Timothy 1: 1-5.)
Disciples of Jorge Mario Bergoglio such as John Stowe, Blase Cupich and James Martin do not endure sound doctrine. They have rebelled against it and mocked it their entire life. They have heaped unto themselves only those who are their fellow mockers and blasphemers of all that is sacred, all that is pure, all that is just. Led by Bergoglio, men such as Foys are the most prolific manufacturers of fables since Aesop.
John Stowe has a vested interest in having contempt for Holy Writ’s condemnation of sodomy and his contempt of the good young men from Covington Catholic Church is a testament to the hatred that for all that reminds him that there are still Catholics who believe in absolute moral truths despite all of the revolutionary agitation in favor of apostasy and perversity that men of his ilk have undertaken since days of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI.
I have long contended that the worst enemies of believing Catholics when the “loving” and so very “tolerant” merchants of the slaughter of the innocent preborn and apologists for all that is indecent, impure and hideous in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity control all three branches of the Federal government of the United States of America launch their overt schemes of persecution against us that believing Catholics will be fingered by men such as Roger Joseph Foys, who served as the apologists for and cheerleader of our own show trials to eradicate all dissent from the prevailing cultural agenda of evil.
We must take seriously the following words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that are contained in Chapter Ten of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew:
Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. [17] But beware of men. For they will deliver you up in councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. [18] And you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles: [19] But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. [20] For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.
[21] The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. [22] And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. [23] And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come. [24] The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. [25] It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?
[26] Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. [27] That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. [28] And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. [29] Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. [30] But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
[31] Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. [32] Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. [33] But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. [34] Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. [35] For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
[36] And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. [37] He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. [38] And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. [39] He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. [40] He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me.
[41] He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward of a prophet: and he that receiveth a just man in the name of a just man, shall receive the reward of a just man. [42] And whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, amen I say to you, he shall not lose his reward. (Matthew 10: 16-40.)
We must never fear to proclaim the truths of the Holy Faith, especially as the time of the Roman caesars and their persecution of believing Catholics has returned, this time with the full support and enabling of a putative Successor of Saint Peter and many of his equally putative clergy.
VIII. Jorge Emphasizes the Emotive, Not Objective Truth
As one could expect, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is so quick to denounce politicians who oppose the globalist agenda of climate change and who seek to secure the borders of their own nations, has said not a word out of his wicked mouth about the legislation that was passed by the New York State Legislature and signed into law by Andrew Mark Cuomo on Wednesday, January 23, 2019, the Feast of Saint Raymond Pennafort and the Commemoration of Saint Emerentiana, he was asked a question by Lena Klimkeit of the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) about a strong statement that had bene made by a young participant at the World Hootenanny Day during the inflight press conference from Panama to Rome.
Lena Klimkeit, DPA: Holy Father, during the Stations of the Cross on Friday a young man spoke very strong words about abortion. I want to repeat them for a moment. [Ed. note: The reporter repeats the comment in Spanish] ‘There is a tomb that cries out to heaven and denounces the terrible cruelty of humanity. It is the tomb that opens in the womb of the mothers from which innocent life is plucked. May God grant us to truly humanize ourselves, to defend life fervently, to make the laws that kill life not feel erased forever.’ This is a very radical position, in my opinion. I wonder and would like to ask you if this position also respects the suffering of women in this situation and if it corresponds to your message of mercy. (Bergoglio In-flight Press Conference from Panama, January 27, 2019.)
Before providing Senor Jorge’s response, which speaks volumes about how little regard he has for the offense that willful murder is to God or that is indeed the positive duty of those in public life to erase laws that permit it, a few moments must be taken to address Lena Klimkeit’s belief that the young person who spoke at World Hootenanny Day had taken a “radical position” by praying that laws sanctioning the killing of innocent human life be erased.
Radical position?
Fraulein Klimkeit, you are ignorant of Catholic teaching on the duty to oppose unjust laws, which was summarized by Pope Leo XIII in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, and cited earlier in this commentary, and you are ignorant of the fact that “Saint John Paul II” actually repeated this teaching, albeit in conciliarspeak’s jargon of “human rights” and “human dignity,” in Evangelium Vitae, March 25, 1995:
Certainly the purpose of civil law is different and more limited in scope than that of the moral law. But "in no sphere of life can the civil law take the place of conscience or dictate norms concerning things which are outside its competence",90 which is that of ensuring the common good of people through the recognition and defence of their fundamental rights, and the promotion of peace and of public morality. 91 The real purpose of civil law is to guarantee an ordered social coexistence in true justice, so that all may "lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way" (1 Tim 2:2). Precisely for this reason, civil law must ensure that all members of society enjoy respect for certain fundamental rights which innately belong to the person, rights which every positive law must recognize and guarantee. First and fundamental among these is the inviolable right to life of every innocent human being. While public authority can sometimes choose not to put a stop to something which-were it prohibited- would cause more serious harm, 92 it can never presume to legitimize as a right of individuals-even if they are the majority of the members of society-an offence against other persons caused by the disregard of so fundamental a right as the right to life. The legal toleration of abortion or of euthanasia can in no way claim to be based on respect for the conscience of others, precisely because society has the right and the duty to protect itself against the abuses which can occur in the name of conscience and under the pretext of freedom. 93
In the Encyclical Pacem in Terris, John XXIII pointed out that "it is generally accepted today that the common good is best safeguarded when personal rights and duties are guaranteed. The chief concern of civil authorities must therefore be to ensure that these rights are recognized, respected, co-ordinated, defended and promoted, and that each individual is enabled to perform his duties more easily. For ?to safeguard the inviolable rights of the human person, and to facilitate the performance of his duties, is the principal duty of every public authority'. Thus any government which refused to recognize human rights or acted in violation of them, would not only fail in its duty; its decrees would be wholly lacking in binding force".94
72. The doctrine on the necessary conformity of civil law with the moral law is in continuity with the whole tradition of the Church. This is clear once more from John XXIII's Encyclical: "Authority is a postulate of the moral order and derives from God. Consequently, laws and decrees enacted in contravention of the moral order, and hence of the divine will, can have no binding force in conscience...; indeed, the passing of such laws undermines the very nature of authority and results in shameful abuse".95 This is the clear teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who writes that "human law is law inasmuch as it is in conformity with right reason and thus derives from the eternal law. But when a law is contrary to reason, it is called an unjust law; but in this case it ceases to be a law and becomes instead an act of violence".96 And again: "Every law made by man can be called a law insofar as it derives from the natural law. But if it is somehow opposed to the natural law, then it is not really a law but rather a corruption of the law".97
Now the first and most immediate application of this teaching concerns a human law which disregards the fundamental right and source of all other rights which is the right to life, a right belonging to every individual. Consequently, laws which legitimize the direct killing of innocent human beings through abortion or euthanasia are in complete opposition to the inviolable right to life proper to every individual; they thus deny the equality of everyone before the law. It might be objected that such is not the case in euthanasia, when it is requested with full awareness by the person involved. But any State which made such a request legitimate and authorized it to be carried out would be legalizing a case of suicide-murder, contrary to the fundamental principles of absolute respect for life and of the protection of every innocent life. In this way the State contributes to lessening respect for life and opens the door to ways of acting which are destructive of trust in relations between people. Laws which authorize and promote abortion and euthanasia are therefore radically opposed not only to the good of the individual but also to the common good; as such they are completely lacking in authentic juridical validity. Disregard for the right to life, precisely because it leads to the killing of the person whom society exists to serve, is what most directly conflicts with the possibility of achieving the common good. Consequently, a civil law authorizing abortion or euthanasia ceases by that very fact to be a true, morally binding civil law.
73. Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection. From the very beginnings of the Church, the apostolic preaching reminded Christians of their duty to obey legitimately constituted public authorities (cf. Rom 13:1-7; 1 Pet 2:13-14), but at the same time it firmly warned that "we must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). In the Old Testament, precisely in regard to threats against life, we find a significant example of resistance to the unjust command of those in authority. After Pharaoh ordered the killing of all newborn males, the Hebrew midwives refused. "They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live" (Ex 1:17). But the ultimate reason for their action should be noted: "the midwives feared God" (ibid.). It is precisely from obedience to God-to whom alone is due that fear which is acknowledgment of his absolute sovereignty-that the strength and the courage to resist unjust human laws are born. It is the strength and the courage of those prepared even to be imprisoned or put to the sword, in the certainty that this is what makes for "the endurance and faith of the saints" (Rev 13:10).
In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to "take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it".98 (Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, March 25, 1995.)
Ignoring the fact that one can see very readily that Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II quoted “Saint John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris, which was meant to serve as an “antidote” Pope Pius XI’s Quas Primas, December 23, 1922, the Polish Phenomenologist, who was unstinting in his opposition to the surgical execution of the preborn even though he helped to popularize the inversion of the ends proper to marriage and provided a truly hideous series of general audience talks between 1981 and 1982 that became the foundation of the "theology of the body," correctly summarized the simple truth that unjust law is no law at all. Perhaps Fraulein Lena Klimkeit has never read Evangelium Vitae, but it is a telling commentary that one assigned to cover “Pope Francis” for the German Press Agency considers a prayer asking God for the erasing of laws permitting the killing of the innocent to be “radical” as the fourth in the current line of antipopes sought to encourage such an erasure throughout the 9,666 days of his false “pontificate.”
Poor Fraulein Klimkeit is also unfamiliar with Pope Pius XI’s description of the fate that await baby-killers and those in public who facilitate such killing:
Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)
Too “radical,” Fraulein Klimkeit?
Pope Pius XI was stating objective truth.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes that truth is subjective and that the true horror of abortion is the wound that it causes the woman who chooses to kill her baby. Bergoglio, you see, did not answer Klimkeit’s question about the young person in Argentina’s “radical” prayer, as he turned the question immediately into one of his false concept of “mercy":
Pope Francis: The message of mercy is for everyone. Also for the human person who is in gestation. It is for everyone. (Bergoglio In-flight Press Conference from Panama, January 27, 2019.)
Stop right there, you blaspheming fiend and scoundrel.
A baby in the womb is a human being who belongs there. It is not an act of “mercy” to “spare” a baby from being killed by an abortionist.
One can see in this instance that Bergoglio was making a moral equivalence between the mercy that a woman who repents of killing her child can realize in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and the duty that an expectant mother has to her preborn child to nurture him in her womb and at all subsequent stages after he is born and is dependent on her during his childhood and adolescence and, if necessary, into adulthood if he is incapable of caring for himself.
Bergoglio believes that the civil state must pass draconian measures to fulfill the United Masonic Nations’s “sustainable development goals” and to protect the rain forests (As Jorge Worries About the Rainforest and "SDGs"), which is why he give pro-aborts in public life a free pass while castigating “politicians” who say that they are anti-abortion but do not support statist measures that come from hell and are designed to enslave us all and to destroy what it is left of normal family life, including the Natural Law right of parents to educate their children at home while “normalizing” every moral offense imaginable. Bergoglio is a Modernist theologically and is a tool of the “left” politically (see "He Speaks Like A Leftist").
The Argentine Apostate’s answer to Lena Klimkeit continued as follows:
After this failure, there is mercy as well. But a difficult mercy because the problem is not in giving forgiveness. The problem is to accompany a woman who has become aware of [what it means to have had] an abortion. These are terrible tragedies. Once I heard a doctor talking about a theory that a cell of the newly conceived fetus goes to the marrow of the mother and there is also a physical memory. This is a theory, but to say, a woman when she thinks about what she did... but I tell you the truth, you have to be in the confessional and you have to give comfort there, you can't say anything. That is why I have opened up the power [for priests] to absolve abortion out of mercy, because many times, but always, they have to meet with their child. I advise many times when they call, they have this anguish: "Your child is in heaven, talk to him. Sing to him the lullaby that you have not sung... you have not been able to sing to him". And there is a way for the mother to reconcile with her child. With God there is already forgiveness, God always forgives. But mercy also, that you elaborate this. The tragedy of abortion, to understand it well, one must be in a confessional. Terrible. (Bergoglio In-flight Press Conference from Panama, January 27, 2019.)
One can see that Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not answer Lena Klimkeit’s question. His entire focus was not on the horrible fact that the civil law has sanctioned the surgical execution of the preborn but on the emotional red herring of a woman who is suffering from having an abortion. There are many women, however, who do not have any remorse about killing their children.
Without for a moment minimizing the scars of women who have had their babies killed by surgical executioners, the fact remains that there is no “decision” to be made, only a child to be welcomed and love unto his eternal salvation. A woman must be instructed in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance that she must be sorry not only for the act of child-killing but must repent of the act of fornication that led to the conception of the child she paid to have murdered if she is in the single state or to repent for the act of adultery in the case of a married woman. Moreover, married women who have killed their children because of pressure from husbands and/or the various ecomonic considerations must be counseled to welcome as many or as few children as God wills for them to have without seeking to frustrate the natural process of the transmission of life. Then again, the counterfeit church of concilairism has inverted the ends of marriage, making it "understandable" to the likes of Bergoglio that a married woman might have to "agonize" over accepting the child given her by God.
However, none of this is in any way related to the question posed by Lena Klimkeit because Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not want to appear critical of the young person at World Hootenanny Day who prayed for all pro-abortion laws to be erased. Bergoglio ignored the question entirely and chose to simply talk about “mercy” rather than to tell Fraulein Klimkeit that the premise of her question was wrong and that, yes, all pro-abortion laws must be erased. Bergoglio’s emphasis was on the subjective and emotive, not on the objective horror of baby-killing, which is a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance, and the harmful consequences that men and their nations must suffer once this killing is enshrined in public law and celebrated in popular culture.
Bergoglio’s reply to Lena Klimkeit is, though, boilerplate fare for him as he said pretty much the same thing in Evangelii Gaudium, November 26, 2013:
213. Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenceless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defence of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, “every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual”.[176]
214. Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question. I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations”. It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life. On the other hand, it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as a quick solution to their profound anguish, especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty. Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations? (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Evangelii Gaudium, November 26, 2013.)
Holy Mother Church has no "position" on abortion.
She is Divine Repository of all that is contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith. She is the infallible teacher all that is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, whose precepts, though knowable by reason, she teaches authoritatively and in a manner that binds all human consciences at all times and in all places and under all circumstances.
Opposition to the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn is based upon our fidelity to the Fifth Commandment's firm prohibition against the direct, intention taking of any innocent human life.
Bergoglio was clearly laying the groundwork in Evangelii Gaudium for coupling opposition to abortion to opposition to the death penalty and support for Marxist-based programs of income redistribution, alleged environmental protection and the supposed “rights” of migrant to invade countries of their choosing at will, which he has done on many occasions subsequently.
Moreover, Bergoglio claimed very gratuitously that Catholics within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism had not done enough to help unwed mothers even though there are countless numbers of home for unwed mothers run by Catholics in the United States and around the world.
One calls to mind here the work, for example, of Christopher Bell in New Jersey and other parts of the New York City metropolitan area with the Good Counsel homes and the work of the Mother of Life Center in Providence, Rhode Island, that was founded by Mrs. Joanne McOsker, then the wife of a prominent Rhode Island judge in 2003 (see So Rare to Find a Champion of Christ the King), although her work in this regard dated back to the founding of Catholics for Life in the 1960s. To assert, as Bergoglio did in Evangelii Gaudium, that not enough have been done to help unwed mothers was an effort to claim that “pro-life” Catholics are ideologues who do not have any true compassion for the “difficulties” of unwed mother. (The mention of these homes is not to endorse the advocacy of so-called “natural family planning” that some of their counselors promote, only to note that Bergoglio used a straw man argument in Evangelii Gaudium to throw stones at “pro-life” Catholics and what he believes to be the “institutional” Catholic Church in general.)
Also, it should be remembered that some of Jorge’s hand-picked “bishops” are supportive of the removal of civil penalties against baby-killing:
MEXICO, August 9, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In an extensive interview with LifeSiteNews.com conducted last week, His Excellency Raul Vera López, bishop of the Diocese of Saltillo in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, answered questions about his involvement with organizations that promote the homosexual lifestyle and the decriminalization and government provision of abortion services.
Bishop Vera is the president of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, based in Chiapas, and is the founder of the Saltillo diocese’s Fray Juan de Larios Human Rights Center. A spokesman of the Fray Bartolomé Center has confirmed to LifeSiteNews that the organization supports both the decriminalization (or “depenalization”) of abortion and the provision of abortion by the government. Both groups are members of a pro-abortion alliance of civil organizations called the All Rights for Everyone Network (“Red Todos los Derechos para Todas y Todos”), and the names of both organizations have appeared on various pro-abortion “human rights” statements.
Bishop Vera recently acknowledged that he is under investigation by the Vatican for his sponsorship of a homosexual organization that is accused of denying the Catholic Church’s teaching on human sexuality. The group has also been associated with pro-abortion forces, including “Catholics for the Right to Decide.”
ter this reporter mentioned the fact that the names of two “human rights” groups led by Bishop Vera López appear on a 2008 declaration denouncing a pro-life constitutional amendment for the state of Jalisco, the bishop answered that the declaration was not pro-abortion, but rather against the penalization of abortion, something he regards as distinct. He called the penalization of abortions “the persecution of people who have abortions.”
“No, no, no, the penalization,” said Vera López regarding the document. “What is debated here is the penalization or depenalization of abortion in Mexico. That’s something else. The penalization is the persecution of people who have abortions.”
The bishop added that he knows “perfectly” that abortion is “a crime, a murder, of a child in the womb of his mother.”
“What might be subject to debate is the penalization or non-penalization, and do you know why? Because of the frightful failures we have in Mexico in the judicial process. And they have imprisoned indigenous women for miscarriages, they have imprisoned them, there, in the state of Guanajuato, indigenous women who have had miscarriages, and they are in jail.”
“So, knowing the type of justice system we have in Mexico, and that they are going to manage that, for that reason we…I personally have never entered into a discussion about that, never have entered, never have entered.”
Vera López repeated his contention that women have been imprisoned in Guanajuato for miscarriages later in the interview. This reporter observed that pro-abortion organizations had accused the government of imprisoning women for miscarriages, but in fact (in accordance with the evidence presented at their trials) the women had killed their babies following birth at full gestation. See LifeSiteNews coverage here. The bishop claimed that he knew nothing about those cases, and insisted that women had been imprisoned in Guanajuato for miscarriages.
Asked about the new Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching that abortion should be prohibited by law, the bishop claimed that the if the Church evangelized people properly, the government’s laws would be of no concern. He repeated his contention that it was not pro-abortion to advocate the depenalization of abortion. (Twisted Mexican Apostate Discusses His False Beliefs.)
This mirrors Bergoglio’s belief that abortion is “tragically regrettable” but the civil law has no place in the matter because women might be sent to jail, which is another red herring as no one is talking about sending women to jail. This is nothing other an excuse for men such as Bergoglio and his stooges such as Raul Vera Lopez, Blase Cupich, Joseph Tobin, Roger Joseph Foys, Reinhard Marx, Marcello Sanchez, Sorondo, Oscar Andres Maradiaga Rodriguez, et al to wash their hands of any responsibility criticize their globalist compatriots in civil governments who are in league with them in the promotion of the Soros Foundation’s goals for world governance. (See, for example, Jorge Always Indemnifies Today's Herods.)
The following news story, my own brief commenatary and accompanying photograph from Thursday, September 24, 2015, the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, provide all one needs to know about Jorge Mario Bergoglio and abortion:
Pope Francis’ warm and forgiving nature was on display again Thursday when he said he would pray for Gov. Cuomo’s late father, Mario, sources told The Post.
The pontiff told Cuomo that Mario — who himself led New York state from 1983 to 1994 — was a great man despite Mario’s support of abortion rights.
Francis also blessed the governor’s gal pal, Sandra Lee — a cancer survivor — when the couple met the pontiff outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral before a service.
“The pope gave Sandra a special blessing for her health and her recovery and Cuomo asked the pope to say a prayer for his father,” the source said.
“The pope told him . . . that his father was a great man and he would keep him in his prayers.” (Jorge "blesses" Andrew Cuomo's Live-in Girlfriend and Praises Mario Cuomo.)
A supposed “pope” gives a “blessing” to a woman who is living in sin with the divorced, pro-abortion, pro-perversity Governor of the State of New York, Andrew Mark Cuomo, while praising Figlio di Sfachim’s father, the pro-abortion, pro-perversity Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo (see It Is Still A Terrible Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God) as a "great man."
Mario Matthew Cuomo was a “great man”?
Only in the minds of apostates such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, whose answer to Lena Klimkeit dismissed the objective horror of abortion and gave women who have killed their children the false confidence that their children are in Heaven and can sing a lullaby to them. Such a false belief is in perfect harmony with the false theological position of his predecessor, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who was not very vocal about abortion during his own time in the conciliar seat of apostasy between April 19, 2005, and February 28, 2013, and wished God’s blessing on “you and your work” to Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro in 2009 (A "Blessing" on a Murderer and His Work) and praised the pro-abortion Catholic Leon Panetta for “keeping the world safe” upon his retirement as United States Secretary of Defense six years ago Forty Years Of Emboldening, Appeasing And Enabling Killers). which received the endorsement of the so-called International Theological Commission The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized, April 19, 2007, on reaffirming women, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, in the most erroneous belief that the souls of unbaptized babies, including aborted babies, go to Heaven.
Contrary to the beliefs and teachings of the conciliar revolutionaries, Pope Saint Pius X reaffirmed the existence of Limbo as follows: “Children who die without being baptized go to limbo, where they don't enjoy God, but don't suffer either because whilst carrying the original sin...they don't deserve paradise but neither do they deserve hell or purgatory.”
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on the other hand, reaffirms women who have had abortions with the falsehood that they can sing lullabies to their babies, which is an offhand way of saying that abortion, though horribly, is really no big deal with God because the babies are enjoying Heaven with Him.
No, they are not.
Liar. Deceiver. Heretic. Apostate.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not a Catholic despite the fact that he reaffirms some Catholic teaching and discipline on occasion as one must hold to the entirety of the Catholic Faith without exception.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter even though he is dressed to look like one.
The counterfeit church of conciliarism and invalidly ordained clergy and its sacramentally invalid liturgical rites is not and can never be the Catholic Church, she who is without stain of spot or error. (See Antichrist Has Shown Us His Calling Card.)
IX. Conclusion
With a Firm Reliance Upon and A Confident Trust in Our Lady’s Intercessory Power
We must remember that these are the times that God has chosen for us from all eternity to live and thus to work out our salvation in fear and in trembling as members of his Holy Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. It is to kick against the goad to wish that we lived in different times as this is place into question the Providence of God and the efficacy of His graces to assist us at every moment of our lives.
This is not a time of despair, and those who think that it is to “despair” of our situation by emphasizing First and Last Things and to exhort others to pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary are sadly mistaken. Prayer, penance and sacrifice are the instruments we have at our disposal now as there is no way to turn back the advancing tide of evil by means that are merely natural.
Pope Saint Pius X, writing in Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, February 2, 1904, on the approaching fiftieth anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s issuance of Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854, explained some of the prerogatives of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception and the private and public honor that is owed to her as the Mother of God and the Mediatrix of All Graces:
11. If then the most Blessed Virgin is the Mother at once of God and men, who can doubt that she will work with all diligence to procure that Christ, Head of the Body of the Church (Coloss. i., 18), may transfuse His gifts into us, His members, and above all that of knowing Him and living through Him (I John iv., 9)?
12. Moreover it was not only the prerogative of the Most Holy Mother to have furnished the material of His flesh to the Only Son of God, Who was to be born with human members (S. Bede Ven. L. Iv. in Luc. xl.), of which material should be prepared the Victim for the salvation of men; but hers was also the office of tending and nourishing that Victim, and at the appointed time presenting Him for the sacrifice. Hence that uninterrupted community of life and labors of the Son and the Mother, so that of both might have been uttered the words of the Psalmist “My life is consumed in sorrow and my years in groans” (Ps xxx., 11). When the supreme hour of the Son came, beside the Cross of Jesus there stood Mary His Mother, not merely occupied in contemplating the cruel spectacle, but rejoicing that her Only Son was offered for the salvation of mankind, and so entirely participating in His Passion, that if it had been possible she would have gladly borne all the torments that her Son bore (S. Bonav. 1. Sent d. 48, ad Litt. dub. 4). And from this community of will and suffering between Christ and Mary she merited to become most worthily the Reparatrix of the lost world (Eadmeri Mon. De Excellentia Virg. Mariae, c. 9) and Dispensatrix of all the gifts that Our Savior purchased for us by His Death and by His Blood.
13. It cannot, of course, be denied that the dispensation of these treasures is the particular and peculiar right of Jesus Christ, for they are the exclusive fruit of His Death, who by His nature is the mediator between God and man. Nevertheless, by this companionship in sorrow and suffering already mentioned between the Mother and the Son, it has been allowed to the august Virgin to be the most powerful mediatrix and advocate of the whole world with her Divine Son (Pius IX. Ineffabilis). The source, then, is Jesus Christ “of whose fullness we have all received” (John i., 16), “from whom the whole body, being compacted and fitly joined together by what every joint supplieth, according to the operation in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in charity” (Ephesians iv., 16). But Mary, as St. Bernard justly remarks, is the channel (Serm. de temp on the Nativ. B. V. De Aquaeductu n. 4); or, if you will, the connecting portion the function of which is to join the body to the head and to transmit to the body the influences and volitions of the head — We mean the neck. Yes, says St. Bernardine of Sienna, “she is the neck of Our Head, by which He communicates to His mystical body all spiritual gifts” (Quadrag. de Evangel. aetern. Serm. x., a. 3, c. iii.).
14. We are then, it will be seen, very far from attributing to the Mother of God a productive power of grace — a power which belongs to God alone. Yet, since Mary carries it over all in holiness and union with Jesus Christ, and has been associated by Jesus Christ in the work of redemption, she merits for us “de congruo,” in the language of theologians, what Jesus Christ merits for us “de condigno,” and she is the supreme Minister of the distribution of graces. Jesus “sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high” (Hebrews i. b.). Mary sitteth at the right hand of her Son — a refuge so secure and a help so trusty against all dangers that we have nothing to fear or to despair of under her guidance, her patronage, her protection. (Pius IX. in Bull Ineffabilis).
15. These principles laid down, and to return to our design, who will not see that we have with good reason claimed for Mary that — as the constant companion of Jesus from the house at Nazareth to the height of Calvary, as beyond all others initiated to the secrets of his Heart, and as the distributor, by right of her Motherhood, of the treasures of His merits,-she is, for all these reasons, a most sure and efficacious assistance to us for arriving at the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. Those, alas! furnish us by their conduct with a peremptory proof of it, who seduced by the wiles of the demon or deceived by false doctrines think they can do without the help of the Virgin. Hapless are they who neglect Mary under pretext of the honor to be paid to Jesus Christ! As if the Child could be found elsewhere than with the Mother!
16. Under these circumstances, Venerable Brethren, it is this end which all the solemnities that are everywhere being prepared in honor of the holy and Immaculate Conception of Mary should have in view. No homage is more agreeable to her, none is sweeter to her than that we should know and really love Jesus Christ. Let then crowds fill the churches — let solemn feasts be celebrated and public rejoicings be made: these are things eminently suited for enlivening our faith. But unless heart and will be added, they will all be empty forms, mere appearances of piety. At such a spectacle, the Virgin, borrowing the words of Jesus Christ, would address us with the just reproach: “This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matth. xv., 8).
17. For to be right and good, worship of the Mother of God ought to spring from the heart; acts of the body have here neither utility nor value if the acts of the soul have no part in them. Now these latter can only have one object, which is that we should fully carry out what the divine Son of Mary commands. For if true love alone has the power to unite the wills of men, it is of the first necessity that we should have one will with Mary to serve Jesus our Lord. What this most prudent Virgin said to the servants at the marriage feast of Cana she addresses also to us: “Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye” (John ii., 5).
Now here is the word of Jesus Christ: “If you would enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matt. xix., 17). Let them each one fully convince himself of this, that if his piety towards the Blessed Virgin does not hinder him from sinning, or does not move his will to amend an evil life, it is a piety deceptive and Iying, wanting as it is in proper effect and its natural fruit.
18. If anyone desires a confirmation of this it may easily be found in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. For leaving aside tradition which, as well as Scripture, is a source of truth, how has this persuasion of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin appeared so conformed to the Catholic mind and feeling that it has been held as being one, and as it were inborn in the soul of the faithful? “We shrink from saying,” is the answer of Dionysius of Chartreux, “of this woman who was to crush the head of the serpent that had been crushed by him and that Mother of God that she had ever been a daughter of the Evil One” (Sent. d. 3, q. 1). No, to the Christian intelligence the idea is unthinkable that the flesh of Christ, holy, stainless, innocent, was formed in the womb of Mary of a flesh which had ever, if only for the briefest moment, contracted any stain. And why so, but because an infinite opposition separates God from sin? There certainly we have the origin of the conviction common to all Christians that Jesus Christ before, clothed in human nature, He cleansed us from our sins in His blood, accorded Mary the grace and special privilege of being preserved and exempted, from the first moment of her conception, from all stain of original sin.
19. If then God has such a horror of sin as to have willed to keep free the future Mother of His Son not only from stains which are voluntarily contracted but, by a special favor and in prevision of the merits of Jesus Christ, from that other stain of which the sad sign is transmitted to all us sons of Adam by a sort of hapless heritage: who can doubt that it is a duty for everyone who seeks by his homage to gain the heart of Mary to correct his vicious and depraved habits and to subdue the passions which incite him to evil? (Pope Saint Pius X, Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, February 2, 1904.)
Catholic empires, kingdoms and principalities used to honor Our Lady publicly with pilgrimages, processions and festival on her feast days, including those feast days particular to a local area or region and those not included in the universal calendar of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Moreover, Catholics who participated in these pilgrimages did so out of love for Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother as they sought to make reparation for their sins. Unlike Jorge Mario Bergoglio and most of his conciliar comrades, these Catholics had horror for and detestation of their sins, and they did not want anyone to “accompany” them in those sins. They sought to quit their sins and implore the intercessory help of Our Lady, without whose loving help we are lost. Doomed. Damned.
Pope Saint Pius X explained that Our Lady’s example of perfect humility and ready obedience to the will of God is for us all to imitate:
20. Whoever moreover wishes, and no one ought not so to wish, that his devotion should be worthy of her and perfect, should go further and strive might and main to imitate her example. It is a divine law that those only attain everlasting happiness who have by such faithful following reproduced in themselves the form of the patience and sanctity of Jesus Christ: “for whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son; that He might be the first-born amongst many brethren” (Romans viii., 29). But such generally is our infirmity that we are easily discouraged by the greatness of such an example: by the providence of God, however, another example is proposed to us, which is both as near to Christ as human nature allows, and more nearly accords with the weakness of our nature. And this is no other than the Mother of God. “Such was Mary,” very pertinently points out St. Ambrose, “that her life is an example for all.” And, therefore, he rightly concludes: “Have then before your eyes, as an image, the virginity and life of Mary from whom as from a mirror shines forth the brightness of chastity and the form of virtue” (De Virginib. L. ii., c. ii.) (Pope Saint Pius X, Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, February 2, 1904.)
We live in a world that rewards and celebrates unchastity, impurity, indecency and perversity. It is up to us as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary to make reparation for the paganism, satanism, materialism, naturalism, hedonism, pantheism, relativism, utilitarianism, egalitarianism, authoritarianism, statism and globalism that promises men “happiness” here in order to lead them to eternal unhappiness and punishment fire for all eternity in hell while being deprived of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity. Our acts of reparation for our sins and those of the whole world will help to plant a few seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith.
Although we are living at the time of Holy Mother Church’s Mystical Burial rather than her Mystical Infancy in the first three centuries of the First Millennium, it is nevertheless true that the Apostles and those who followed them, including the saint whose feast is celebrated today, February 1, 2019, Saint Ignatius of Antioch (see Appendix B for his hagiography as contained in Matins for today’s Divine Office), who had the privilege as a little boy to sit on Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s knee, to labor and to pray without looking for success.
Catholics are neither pessimists nor optimists. A pessimist is a sad idiot. An optimist is a happy idiot.
Although we may have done many dumb and/or idiotic things in our lives, it is not to be a “happy idiot” to be filled with the Supernatural Virtue of Hope as we step back from the terrible events of the world and run with the childlike simplicity of Sant Ignatius of Antioch as a little boy to the loving embrace of Our Lady, who told Juan Diego the following atop Tepeyac Hill:
Know for certain that I am the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God. . . . Here I will show and offer my love, my compassion, my help and my protection to the people. I am your merciful Mother, the Mother of all those who love me, of those who cry to me, of those who have confidence in me. Here I will hear their weeping and their sorrows and will remedy and alleviate their suffering, necessities and misfortunes. . . . Listen and let it penetrate into your heart. . . . Do not be troubled or weighed down with grief. So do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?
As we remain calm in the midst of the storms as we enfold ourselves in the crossing of Our Lady's arms, we should also remember this injunction of Pope Pius XI, contained in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925:
We firmly hope, however, that the feast of the Kingship of Christ, which in future will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of society to our loving Savior. It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. Many of these, however, have neither the station in society nor the authority which should belong to those who bear the torch of truth. This state of things may perhaps be attributed to a certain slowness and timidity in good people, who are reluctant to engage in conflict or oppose but a weak resistance; thus the enemies of the Church become bolder in their attacks. But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him, and would valiantly defend his rights.
Moreover, the annual and universal celebration of the feast of the Kingship of Christ will draw attention to the evils which anticlericalism has brought upon society in drawing men away from Christ, and will also do much to remedy them. While nations insult the beloved name of our Redeemer by suppressing all mention of it in their conferences and parliaments, we must all the more loudly proclaim his kingly dignity and power, all the more universally affirm his rights. (Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, December 11, 1925.)
May we pray to Our Lady for the day the likes of the Antichrists in the civil government and their comrades and enablers in the counterfeit church of conciliarism will be be vanquished by her the Triumph of her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart in complete fulfillment of her Fatima Message,
In the meantime, though, we must bear our sufferings and to be grateful for each of them as it is truly a privilege to live in these times so as to bear a witness to Christ the King, not to naturalism and its needless agitation, as His consecrated slaves through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits. We should also draw strength from the courageous example of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who wanted to be Christ's wheat to be ground into nothing by the wild berasts and thus make into good "bread" for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
When he was brought condemned to the theatre, and heard the roaring of the beasts which were to devour him, he felt so strong an eagerness to suffer, that he cried out I am Christ's wheat, and so let the beasts' teeth be my mill, that I may be ground, and be found to make good bread. He suffered in the eleventh year of Trajan. What was left of his body lieth at Antioch, in the graveyard outside the gate which leadeth toward Daphne. (Saint Jerome on the Ecclesiastical Writers, Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch.)
It is good to prepare for the coming persecution, which is really already upon us in the form of open attacks by politicians and "entertainment" and "educational" figures against the true Catholic Faith and believing Catholics, by praying to Saint Ignatius of Antioch today for the grace of persverance in the midst of these difficulties and, of course, to pray at least one set of the Mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary right now
Why delay?
The time of persecution here. We need Our Lady's help more than ever before.
Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!
Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint James the Greater, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Ignatius of Antioch, pray for us.
Appendix A
An Excerpt from Orestes Brownson’s National Greatness
What, then, is true national greatness? We answer, that nation is greatest in which man may most easily and effectually fulfil the true and proper end of man. The nation, under the point of view we here consider the subject, is in the people. Its greatness must, then, be in the greatness of the people. The people are a collection or aggregation of individuals, and their greatness taken collectively is simply their greatness taken individually. Consequently the greatness of a nation is the greatness of the individuals that compose it. The question of national greatness resolves itself, therefore, into the question of individual greatness. The greatness of the individual consists in his fulfilling the great ends of his existence, the ends for which Almighty God made him and placed him here. No man is truly great who neglects life's great ends, nor can one be said in truth to approach greatness any further than he fulfils them.
In order, then, to determine in what true national greatness consists, we must determine in what consists true individual greatness; and in order to determine in what true individual greatness consists, we must determine what is the true end of man; that is, what is the end to which Almighty God has appointed man, and which he is while here to labor to secure. What, then, is the end of man? For what has our Maker placed us here? To what has he bidden us aspire? Were we placed here merely to be born and to die,-to live for a moment, continue our species, toil, suffer, drop into the grave to rot, and be no more for ever? If this be our end, true greatness will consist in living for this life only, and in being great in that which pertains to this life. The greatest man will be he who succeeds best in amassing the goods of this world, in securing its honors and luxuries, or simply in multiplying for himself the means of sensual enjoyment. In a word, the greatest man will be he who most abounds in wealth and luxury.
We mean not to say, that, in point of fact, wealth and luxury, worldly honors and sensual gratifications, are the chief goods of even this life; but simply that they would be, if this were our only life, if our destiny were a destiny to be accomplished in this world. It is because this world is not our home, because we are merely travellers through it, and our destination is a world beyond it, that the life of justice and sanctity yields us even here our truest and most substantial pleasure. But confine man to this life, let it be true that he has no destiny beyond it, and nothing could, relatively to him, be called great or good, not included under the heads of wealth and luxury. Nothing could be counted or conceived of as of the least value to him that does not directly or indirectly minister to his sensual enjoyment. No infidel moralist has ever been able, without going out of his own system, or want of system, to conceive of any thing higher, nobler, more valuable, than sensual pleasure.
But this life is not our only life, and our destiny is not accomplished here. The grave is not our final doom; this world is not our home; we were not created for this world alone; and there is for us a life beyond this life. But even this, if we stop with it, does not answer our question. We may conceive of a future life as the simple continuation of our present natural life, and such the future life is conceived to be by not a few among us, who nevertheless flatter themselves that they are firm believers in the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel. Every being may be said to have a natural destiny or end, which its nature is fitted and intended to gain. The Creator, in creating a being with a given nature, has given that being a pledge of the means and conditions of fulfilling it, of attaining to its natural end. Man has evidently been created with a nature that does not and cannot find its complete fulfilment in this life. He has a natural capacity for more than is actually attainable here. In this capacity he has the promise or pledge of his Maker that he shall live again.
The promises of God cannot fail. Man therefore must and will live again. But this is only the pledge, so to speak, of a natural immortality, and reveals to us only a natural destiny. It is only a continuation of our natural life in another world. The end we are to labor for, and the means we are to adopt to gain it, must be precisely what they would be in case our life were to terminate at the grave. Our future life being still a natural life, what is wisest and best for that portion we are now living would be wisest and best for that portion we are hereafter to live. Hence, what is wisest and best for time would be wisest and best for eternity.
Hence it is that we find so many who, though professing belief in a future life, judge all things as if this life were our only life. They look to the future life only as the continuation of the present, and expect from it only the completion of their natural destiny. They agree in all their moral judgments, in all their estimates of the worth of things or of actions, with those who believe in no future life at all. They profess to hope for a future life, but live only for time; because their future life is to be only a continuation of time. Hence they say, as we ourselves were for years accustomed to say, He who lives wisely for time lives wisely for eternity; create a heaven here, and you will have done your best to secure your title to a heaven hereafter.
Hence it is that the morality of many who profess to be Christians is the same which is adopted and defended by infidels. This is so obviously the case, that we not unfrequently find men who call themselves Christians commending downright unbelievers in Christianity as good moral men, and who see no reason why the morality of the infidel should not be the same in kind as the morality of the Christian. Hence it is supposed that morality may be taught in our schools, without teaching any peculiar or distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Morality, we are told, is independent of religion, and not a few regard it as sufficient without religion. So common has this mode of thinking and speaking become amongst us, that we heard the other day a tolerably intelligent Catholic, who would by no means admit himself to be deficient in the understanding or practice of his Catholic duties, say, that, if a man were only a good moral man, he did not care what was his distinctive religious belief. Many who go further, and contend that religion is necessary to morality, contend for its necessity only as a sort of police establishment. It is necessary, be cause the natural sanctions of the moral law are not quite sufficient to secure obedience, and religion must be called in by its hopes and fears to strengthen them.
Now all this is perfectly consistent and right, if it be true that man has only a natural destiny. We ought, in such a case, to judge all things which concern us precisely as if this were our only life. Religion could be of no value further than it strengthened the police, kept people from picking one another's pockets or cutting one another's throats. But man's destiny is not natural, but supernatural. Almighty God created him with a specific nature, but not for an end in the order of that nature, or to be attained by its simple fulfilment. He created him to his own image and likeness, but appointed him to a supernatural destiny,-to an end above what is attainable by the fulfilment of his nature,- to an end not promised in his nature, and which is not be stowed as the reward of fulfilling it. This end is to know and love God; but in a sense far higher than we can know and love him by our natural powers, and as he is now beheld through a glass, darkly, or seen dimly through the medium of his works, as we see the cause in the effect. It is to see him face to face, and to know and love him with a knowledge and love the same in kind, though not in degree, with which God knows and loves himself ;-this is the end for which man was intended, and which it is made his duty and his high privilege to seek. But this end surpasses the utmost capacity of our nature, and requires not only a supernatural revelation of God, but the supernatural elevation of our nature itself. It consists in our being made partakers of the divine nature in an ineffable sense, and in a sense above that in which we partake of it in being created after the image and likeness of God. Hence, St. Peter says, "By whom [Jesus Christ] he hath given us very great and precious promises, that by these you may be made partakers of his divine nature." So also St. John :-" We are now the sons of God, and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; because we shall see him as he is."
This fact in these times is overlooked. Men have wished to rationalize the Gospel, to find a philosophic basis for the mysteries of faith. In attempting this, they have labored to bring the whole of divine revelation, within the domain of reason, and have been led to exclude, as no part of it whatever they found themselves unable to bring within that domain. Reason is necessarily restricted to the order of nature, and can in no instance, of itself, go out of that order. Hence, revelation has come very widely to be regarded as only a republication of the natural law, as at best 'only a running commentary on it, designed simply to explain the natural order, and not to reveal any thing above it.
Men who claim to be Christians, and even ministers of the Gospel, everywhere abound, who have no faith in the supernatural order, scarcely a conception of it. We spent nearly two hours the other day trying to enable a Protestant minister, and him by no means a weak or ignorant one, even to conceive of the supernatural; but in vain. So perverted had his mind become by the false theologies of modern times, that he could attach no meaning to the assertion, "There is a supernatural order." He could use the word supernatural, but it had no meaning for his mind not within the order of nature. Thousands are in the same sad condition. To them nature is all, and all is nature. Indeed, the word nature itself has no definite meaning for them. If a man by a word raise the dead, it is natural; if Moses smite the rock and living waters gush forth, it is natural,-all by a natural power, a natural law. Travelling in the same direction, they lose themselves in a wilderness of absurdities.
Natural laws cease to be laws imposed on nature, laws she must obey, and from which she cannot withdraw herself, and become forces, agents, creators. It is not strange, then that they lose sight of the supernatural destiny of man, and look only for a natura1 destiny, to be obtained not as a reward for obedience to grace, but as the natural consequence of the cultivation or development of our natural powers. Read the writings of the celebrated Dr. Channing, or of the school which he founded or to which he was attached, and you shall never find a single recognition of the supernatural order, properly so called,-any allusion to a supernatural destiny. The highest end you will find presented is that to which we may attain by the unfolding of our higher nature, of our natural sentiments of love and reverence. The school goes so far as to contend that our nature is susceptible of an unbounded good, and that our natural sentiments of love and reverence are capable of an infinite expansion. Yet these are rational Christians, and they boast of their reason! They talk of the absurdities of Catholic theology, and see no absurdity in supposing that a finite nature may be infinitely expanded, or that a nature can be something more than it is without any thing super-natural.
But this by the way. The true end for which man is to live is the supernatural end to which we are appointed, the beatitude which God hath promised to all that love and serve him here. His true end is not the fulfilment of nature, but what the sacred Scriptures term "eternal life"; and "This is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." We cannot know God, without loving him. Hence we say, the end of man is to know and love God. But to know him intuitively, as he knows himself; for we are to see him as he is, -not as he appears through the medium of his works, but as he is in himself. We cannot thus know him naturally, for thus to know him exceeds the power of the highest possible created intelligence. We must be like him, before we can see him as he is,-be made, in a supernatural sense, partakers of his divine nature. To know him intuitively as he is in himself, is, however, the glorious destiny to which we are appointed, and to which we may attain, if we will. A more glorious destiny we cannot desire. In it we possess God himself, who is the sovereign good. Even here we find our highest good in knowing the truth and loving goodness, dim as is our view of the one, and feeble as is our hold of the other. What must it be, then, when we come to behold, by the light of glory, our God face to face, with no cloud intervening to obscure his infinite beauty, no distance between us and his ineffable love? Well may it be said, "Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what our God hath prepared for them that love him." He will reward them with no inferior, no created good; but will give them himself, will himself be their portion for ever.
But this supernatural destiny, since it is supernatural, is not naturally attainable. We may cultivate all our natural powers, we may fill up the highest and broadest capacities of our nature, realize the highest ideal, and yet be infinitely, -we use the word in its strict sense,-infinitely below it. It is not attained to by "self-culture," by the development and exercise of our highest natural powers, including even the boasted sentiments of love and reverence. It is nothing that is due, or ever can be due, to our nature. It is a gift, and can be obtained only as bestowed. But it will be bestowed only on the obedient, and is bestowed as the reward of obedience. Our destiny is eternal life, and the condition of obtaining it is obedience. Obedience is not, as some of the sects teach, the end for which we were made. We were made not that we might obey God, but that we might possess God, and we obey him as the condition of possessing him. (National Greatness)
Appendix B
From the Divine Office on the Feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch
Ignatius was the third Bishop of Antioch after the Apostle Peter. When Trajan stirred up his persecution, he was condemned to be devoured by wild beasts, and sent to Rome in chains. When on his journey thither he arrived at Smyrna, where Polycarp, the disciple of John, was Bishop, he wrote an Epistle to the Ephesians, another to the Magnesians, a third to the Trallians, and a fourth to the Romans and after leaving Smyrna, he addressed a further Epistle to the Philadelphians, and another to the Smyrnians, along with a private Epistle to Polycarp, to whose care he commended the Church of Antioch. In this last he quoteth a passage.
It is fitting that, as we have made mention of a man of so much importance, we should also note briefly the Epistle which he addressed to the Romans. I am on my way, saith he, from Syria to Rome, and am already fighting with beasts on sea and on land all the way. I may say I am chained day and night to ten leopards, for indeed the soldiers, who have charge of me, are no better. The more courteous I am to them, the worse they use me. But still their wickedness is good schooling for me, though I know that my mere sufferings cannot in themselves gain me justification. I earnestly wish for the beasts which are to devour me; at any rate, I pray they may put me out of pain quickly, and fly on me willingly, that I be not like some other Martyrs, whose bodies the animals have refused to touch. If I find that they will not come on, I will run at them as quick as I can, to make them devour me. Let me be, my little children I know what is good for me.
I feel now that I am beginning to be Christ's disciple; I desire none of those things which are seen, if so be I may find Christ Jesus. I care not that there come upon me fire, or cross, or wild beasts, or breaking of my bones, or sundering of my members, or destruction of my whole body, yea, or all the torments of the devil, if only so be I may win Christ. When he was brought condemned to the theatre, and heard the roaring of the beasts which were to devour him, he felt so strong an eagerness to suffer, that he cried out I am Christ's wheat, and so let the beasts' teeth be my mill, that I may be ground, and be found to make good bread. He suffered in the eleventh year of Trajan. What was left of his body lieth at Antioch, in the graveyard outside the gate which leadeth toward Daphne. (Saint Jerome on the Ecclesiastical Writers, Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch.)