- Sneakers Draked Viola
- Led Think Tank With Serena Williams + More – Poligo News - nike mens twilight low se skate shoe sale free - Nike Reveals Women Athlete
- Air Jordan 1 Old Love New Love, 100+ New Arrivals, Gmar Store – Amazing Gift Shoes, Handbags
- Air MUS12 Jordan 3LAB5 Gamma Blue Metallic Silver - MUS12 Jordan Air 200e Men Dc9836-200 - 200 - MUS12 Jordan Air 200e Men Dc9836
- adidas mercury vintage cars price list Release Date , SBD , petite adidas inventory management system flowchart
- Air Jordan 1 Hand Crafted DH3097 001 Release Date
- 2021 Air Jordan 4 Red Thunder Release Date
- new air jordan 1 high og osb dian blue chill white cd0463 401
- Air Jordan 4 White Tech CT8527 100 Release Date
- nike dunk low purple pulse w dm9467 500
- Home
- Articles Archive, 2006-2016
- Golden Oldies
- 2016-2024 Articles Archive
- About This Site
- As Relevant Now as It Was One Hundred Six Years Ago: Our Lady's Fatima Message
- Donations (December 6, 2024)
- Now Available for Purchase: Paperback Edition of G.I.R.M. Warfare: The Conciliar Church's Unremitting Warfare Against Catholic Faith and Worship
- Ordering Dr. Droleskey's Books
Revised and Expanded: Naturally Absurd, part two
I had been waiting to complete the writing of this commentary until there had been a definitive resolution in the case of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was, as I have explaining on this readers for the past few years, a special target of the Capo di tutti Capi, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro because of the open criticism Flynn, then an active duty Army officer, directed at him in 2014. The Great Procrastinator of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Emmett Sullivan, has sought to carry out his own personal vendetta against General Flynn, who is simply a surrogate for Sullivan’s hatred of President Donald John Trump and his administration, by delaying any decision to dismiss the Federal case against Flynn that the United States Department of Justice has decided to drop (for more about the Flynn case, see New Red Flags Emerge from the FBI’s Handling the Flynn Case). The case has dragged on and on because of Judge Sullivan's patent intransigence and lack of any kind of judicial impartiality. Thus, I made the decision to stop waiting for a final resoulution to the Flynn case to complete this commentary, which focuses only on a few of the “trees” on which the adversary wishes the masses to concentrate in order to agitate them in endless fits of fury as happens almost all the time now but especially in election years when otherwise rational people suspend the use of their reasons and send themselves into fits of apoplexy about the decay of a country that was founded on decadent principles in the first place and is thus simply manifesting the perfection of that inherent degeneracy about which I will comment more in a short while.
Let’s Chop Down a Few Trees Before Returning to Root Causes
Although it is not the purpose of this commentary to figuratively wander from “tree to tree” and thus get lost in a thicket of Modernity’s logical consequences rather than to focus on Modernity’s false premises that have gotten us into the current situation, I want to stipulate some basic facts so that readers do not come to the conclusion that it is my intention to ignore the multifaceted and as yet ongoing conspiracy led by Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and his gang of “Chicago Way” gangsters to prevent the election of Donald John Trump and then, failing that, to take full advantage of Trump’s ignorance about the Constitution, the very structure of Executive Office of the President of the United States of America, his unpreparedness to staff his new administration with competent personnel committed to his agenda and his hubristic belief that he could schmooze the bureaucrats who hated him into being loyal when they were using every investigative, judicial, legislative and journalistic tool available to them to convince Americans that Trump was a Russian agent who had to be stopped by “all means necessary.” This is beyond question now.
Innocent people have been targeted for investigation and/or prosecution solely because of their association with President Trump and for no other reason. The injustices that the president continues to suffer in this regard were all proclaimed to be true by the mainslime media at first but are now being rationalized in light of the unraveling of the conspiracy that may or not result in criminal prosecutions beyond the guilty plea to making a false statement by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Agent Kevin Clinesmith for doctoring an email to make it appear that Carter Page, a low-level Trump advisor, was a Russian agent when, in fact, he had done work for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (see Clinesmith Charging Documents Documents that the FBI Withheld Carter Page’s Work for the CIA From FISA Court and then Lied About It.) Unlike the hapless careerists of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” who have always dropped the ball when investigating the likes of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton (Whitewatergate, Filegate, Travelgate, Chinagate, Lewiskygate, etc.) and Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro (Lois Lerner’s abuse of her position at the Internal Revenue Service, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton’s misuse of confidential files and her subsequent coverup of her mendacity), the gangsters of the organized crime of the naturalist “left” are relentless in their use of whatever means, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, and/or constitutional or unconstitutional, at their disposal to destroy whoever would dare to get in the way of their claim to be infallible, omniscient, and omnipotent in their efforts to impose a “soft” totalitarianism that destroys the reputations, livelihoods and even the lives of those they deem to be nonpersons because of their opposition to their collection of leftist lies that they have declared to be “true” and the basis of all social action.
In this vein, however, it must be remembered that it is almost impossible to expect any kind of authentic justice from those who are personally unjust and intellectually dishonest in their own lives. As has been noted on this site so many times in the past, those who adherent to the falsehoods of the false opposition of the naturalist “left” do not believe that any opposition to their “received truths” is just nor can be permitted.
Believe me, I experienced this many times in my academic career as a college professor, which is why what is happening politically, legally, judicially, legislatively, bureaucratically, administratively, journalistically, and culturally of is of utterly no surprise to me whatsoever. The very people who do not believe that there are absolute truths that exist in the nature of things and that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force and validity believe themselves to be repository of all that is true and that anyone who disagrees with them must be tarred and feathered as a “bigoted hater” who is undeserving of any kind of respect due even to his own personal safety, which is why there has been utter silence from the “left” about the violence committed by the neo-Jacobins and neo-Bolsheviks who are the beneficiaries of the funds provided them by organizations associated in one form or another with George Soros.
Here are links to a variety of news stories and commentaries about the many ways in which the Obama/Soetoro-led conspiracy against President Donald John Trump and his associates were initiated, implemented and unfolded over the course of the last four years: Dirty Dozen: Twelve Revelations That Sank Mueller’s Case Against Trump, Representative Matt Gaetz Slams Former Representative Trey Gowdy Over 2018 FISA Comments, Obama-Biden Oval Office Meeting on January 5, 2017, was the Key to Entire Anti-Trump Operation, Looks Like President Obama Ordered Up Phony Russiagate Scandal, Russia and Ukraine Scandalds Revelations Trigger Steele’s Primary Source Focus on Brookings Institution, Trump-Russia Hoax: FBI Lies, FBI's Clinesmith to Plead Guilty to Falsifying FISA Warrant, Durham Grills Former FBI Top Lawyer James Baker, More Willful Blindness by the Media on Spying by the Obama Administration, Dachenko Outed as Steel Sub-Source, Declassified Documents Show FBI Used Defensive Briefing in 2016 to Spy on Donald Trump, New FBI Notes Re-Debunk Major Neew York Times Story, Highlight Media Collusoin to Produce the Russia Hoax, FBI Knew Collusion was a Nothing Burge but Kept Fake Scandal Alive Anyway.
All right?
Thus, let me, therefore, stipulate yet again the fact that President Donald John Trump has been under attack even since his announced his presidential candidacy five years ago and remains under attack to this day.
Unfortunately, however, the president, lacka any understanding of First and Last Things and thus has not even the scantest idea approaching a clue about how he has offended Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ throughout his life by means of impurity, profanity, blasphemy, dissembling and the vile words he has used to describe even those who are his supporters who do not agree with him on various issues. Trump is a narcissist who was used to getting his way almost all the time in private business, and he has even gone so far in public as to say that “people don’t love” him because his public approval ratings are lower than those of the plandemic’s own Dr. Anthony Fauci (Trump Questions Why Fauci Has Better Approval Ratings than he has). The thought of accepting a chastisement for his own sins would never occur to him as he has no concept as to what a personal sin is nor the horror it represents for his own immortal soul and thus for his ability see clearly and to act wisely as a redeemed creature. Rather than seek justice without vengeance, the president must use the odious thing called “twitter” to denounce people with various insults. It is one thing to oppose a person for his policy positions and for his abuse of power. It is another to resort to insults all the time. Even the largely supportive New York Post has had enough of his itchy twitter finger (Lose the Nasty Words, Mr. President, It Does You No Good).
It is certainly the case that members of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” have been very open and aggressive in their support for the promotion of sodomy and to stifle all opposition to it—as well as to stifle all opposition to anything and everything else that they promote as they deem themselves to be infallible agents of “social justice” with whom no one is free to dissent. Let it be stipulated that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and his opportunistic, radicalized American Baptist running-mate, Kamala Harris (Kamala Harris is radical threat to America ot a moderate, who is every bit the equal, if not the superior, of a character assassin (Kamala Harris was a ringleader in the character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh) as the mask-mandating (Unmasking Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s plans to control Americans), pro-abort, pro-perversity Biden himself, as well as being a full-throated supporter of contraception a surgical baby killing absolutist (Kamala Harris’s Abortion Aboslutism), perversity and statism (see Kamala Harris: I Have a Longstanding Commitment Fighting for “Transgender Rights) whose unflagging support for the daily slaughter of the preborn has earned the justifiable contempt of the conciliar “bishop” of Providence, Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, who has, in a swipe at Biden that will not please Senor Jorge at the Casa Santa Marta, said that the Democratic ticket lacks a Catholic on it (“Bishop” Thomas Tobin: Democratic Ticktet Doesn’t Even Have a Catholic on it), are unqualified to hold any kind of public office anywhere in the world, including, to quote the late Dr. Charles E. Rice, being elected as trustees of a mosquito abatement district.
On the other hand, however, it is irresponsible to the point of unconscionable to become so agitated about the open support of evil on the part Biden and Harris to ignore, if not to make excuses for, Trump’s coarsening of public discourse by his use of blasphemy and profanity, his support of the sodomite agenda and the constant obeisance that he pays to the Zionist State of Israel (remember Trump called Jerusalem the “eternal capital” of the Jewish people, a statement that is blasphemous as Jerusalem Belongs to Christ the King and His True Church, part four). Just because the fascist totalitarians of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” are so patently horrific does not make the evils done or promoted by the supposed “good guys” good nor does it justify silence in the face of those evils.
To wit, the United States Ambassador to the Russian Federation, John Joseph Sullivan, who had served as Deputy Secretary of State from May 27, 2017, to December 20, 2019, prior to being sworn into his current position on January 16, 2020, felt confident enough of his position with the Trump administration to order that the American Embassy in Moscow fly the so-called “rainbow flag” in honor of the cooptation of the month of June, the month of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, as a month of celebration in honor of perverse sins against nature that cry out to Heaven for vengeance:
On June 25, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan posted a video on Twitter to celebrate gay pride month and LGBTI rights. He also explained that the gay rainbow flag was being displayed outside the embassy in honor of homosexuals.
During a video conference, Vladimir Putin was asked about the flag.
"Who works in this building?" asked Putin, and Senator Alexei Pushkov said, "Americans."
"Let them celebrate," said Putin with a smile. "They've shown a certain something about the people who work there."
On July 3, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty reported that Putin signed numerous amendments to the Russian constitution, including one that defines marriage as being "the union of a man and a woman," and describes "belief in God" as a national value.
Putin has stated that Russia does not discriminate against LGBT persons and that a 2013 law banning LGBT propaganda was designed to protect children
“Yes, we passed a law banning the propaganda of homosexuality among minors. So what? Let people grow up, become adults and then decide their own destinies,” Putin said, as reported by Reuters. (US Embassy Flies Rainbow Flag as Putin Mocks Embassy Staff.)
It is quite a telling commentary on the sorry state of affairs here in the United States of America when such a story goes unnoticed by most Americans and, worse yet, can be dismissed with a “shrug of the shoulders” and a cynical comment that “things would be worse under Biden/Harris.” The fact that things would be worse, yes, far worse, under Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Kamala Harris, without realizing evils that please the adversary, offend God and are hurtful to the right ordering of the souls of men and thus of nations themselves are promoted far more easily under the cover of darkness by “lesser evils” as those who would otherwise be vocal in their opposition to them if the “greater evils” did similar things conclude that silence is the best course to prevent against a “worse” fate. This is precisely how contraception, abortion, and sodomy have been mainstreamed in American law, politics, and culture.
These evils have become accepted, mainstreamed, institutionalized in law and heralded in popular “culture” because the more people get accustomed to the spread of evil incrementally out of the fear of its spreading more rapidly is the more that it becomes impossible to reverse their institutionalization as to fight evil with means merely human results in its triumph of the course of time.
Pope Leo XIII put the matter this way in Libertas Praestantissium, June 20, 1884:
But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.
And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless license of which We have spoken, they exceed all limits, and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty. And because the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, and the unerring teacher of morals, is forced utterly to reprobate and condemn tolerance of such an abandoned and criminal character, they calumniate her as being wanting in patience and gentleness, and thus fail to see that, in so doing, they impute to her as a fault what is in reality a matter for commendation. But, in spite of all this show of tolerance, it very often happens that, while they profess themselves ready to lavish liberty on all in the greatest profusion, they are utterly intolerant toward the Catholic Church, by refusing to allow her the liberty of being herself free. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)
This is not a matter of ethereal speculation having nothing to with the real lives of human beings. Not at all. The heresy of religious liberty, which is at the heart of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, devastates souls. The belief that those who belong to false religions have a "civil right" to propagate themselves and that their false beliefs can contribute to the betterment of society make it impossible to exclude those false religions from making their presence felt everywhere in society, especially in "educational" institutions, where the tender souls of the young become ready prey to false ideas that are propagandized by charismatic professors. This is true in the United States of America and elsewhere in the allegedly "free" world of "democratic republics.
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not want us to spend our lives in endless agitation as needless debates about those things that are beyond debate as they are part of Divine Revelation and/or the Natural Law.
How can social order be established and maintained upon a welter of religious, philosophical, cultural, social, economic and mortal errors in a land where most people are, objectively speaking, steeped in states of Mortal Sin that wound their ability to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus choose wisely in accordance with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law?
Are these words of Silvio Cardinal Antoniano to be held of no account because our circumstances are said to be “different” than in times past and because the current set of “greater evils” are worse than others in past (Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro-Zaccaro, Michael Dukakis/Lloyd Bentsen, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, Jr./Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., Albert Arnold Gore, Jr./Joseph Lieberman, John Frederick Kerry/John Edwards, Barack Hussein Obama (Barry Soetoro)/Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (Madame Defarge)/Timothy Michael Dolan Kaine, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr./Kamala Harris) and it is important to “stop” the bad guys with means that are merely natural and thus help to perpetuate the very errors of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry upon which the modern civil state is based?
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.)
I fail to see or to understand why even believing Catholics cannot grasp these truths?
Donald John Trump Has No Greater Enemy Than Himself
Sure, President Donald John Trump means well enough in many, although far from all, of his polices, he continues to be his own worst enemy as, rather than articulate a coherent set of polices for a second term, he continues to spend his mornings watching news programs on hellovision that agitate him into sending our “tweets” to “correct” misinformation, something caught the attention of the largely supportive New York Post editorial that was referenced just above:
On Thursday, he stooped to calling presumptive vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris a “mad woman.”
That doesn’t promote his agenda. It doesn’t help him with women. It doesn’t shore up his image as worthy of the nation’s highest office.
It’s just, as Trump would say, mean and nasty.
Sure, Harris isn’t the first target of Trump’s ad hominem attacks or over-the-top language. But making everything personal is unbecoming. It turns off voters who like his policies but dislike his rhetoric.
It’s just, as Trump would say, mean and nasty.
Sure, Harris isn’t the first target of Trump’s ad hominem attacks or over-the-top language. But making everything personal is unbecoming. It turns off voters who like his policies but dislike his rhetoric.
Surely there are enough substantive issues on which to hit Harris and running mate Joe Biden: their views on crime, the economy, foreign policy . . . Why not focus on that, Mr. President — instead of resorting to callous insults that do you no good?
Your goal is to get reelected, right? (Lose the Nasty Words, Mr. President, It Doest You No Good).
President Trump seems to have such a penchant for self-destruction that it makes one wonder if his goal is not to win reelection but to return to the golf course at Mar-A-Lago for however long it would be until a President Joseph Robinette Biden’s attorney general, acting on her own and/or in conjunction with the corrupt excuser of rioters, marauders and assaulters of police, Cyrus Vance, Jr., the District Attorney of New York County, New York, on a combination of trumped up charges that would place him in jail as a political prisoner for the rest of his life. Trump is a fool not to recognize that he would hounded for the rest of his life until the “left” placed him and many of his family members behind bars, thus making his constant, belligerent use of “twitter” inexcusable not only the grounds of continuing his largely solid record of appointing solid nominees to the Federal judiciary but also on the grounds of what is in his own best personal self-interest.
What kind of commitment to his reelection can the president be said to have when he casts unjustified aspersions of the American citizenship of the anti-Catholic bigot (this is not an insult but an accurate characterization) named Kamala Harris?
Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, Calif. That makes her an American citizen and eligible for the vice presidency (and even presidency) of the United States. It’s pure nonsense to suggest otherwise — as President Trump has done.
“I heard it today that [Harris] doesn’t meet the requirements,” he said Thursday.
Well, you heard wrong, Mr. President.
Harris was born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother who were in the United States as students. The 14th Amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States.” And the Supreme Court confirmed that anyone born on US soil is a citizen.
People are worried about the virus, about the economy, about crime, about our future. Stop trafficking in bizarre, false and insulting conspiracy theories like birtherism and QAnon, Mr. President, and concentrate on what’s important. (No, Kamala Harris’s Citizenship is Not in Question.)
By the way, I do not know what “QAnon” is, and I don’t want anyone to inform me as Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not want us to be agitated by an endless procession of speculations that do nothing to inform our souls but does plenty to increase the web rankings of those who post these speculations for the world to see.
Furthermore, to demonstrate how entirely clueless Trump is about First and Last Things, permit me to quote from the address he gave at the so-called “National Prayer Breakfast," which is nothing other than a hodgepodge of religious indifferentism and false ecumenism to the nth degree:
But I can say that going beyond that, we’re grateful to the people in this room for the love they show to religion. Not one religion, but many religions. They are brave. They are brilliant. They are fighters. They like people. And sometimes they hate people. I’m sorry. I apologize. I’m trying to learn. (Laughter.) It’s not easy. It’s not easy. (Applause.)
When they impeach you for nothing, then you’re supposed to like them? It’s not easy, folks. (Laughter.) I do my best.
But I’ll tell you what we are doing: We’re restoring hope and spreading faith. We’re helping citizens of every background take part in the great rebuilding of our nation. We’re declaring that America will always shine as a land of liberty and light unto all nations of the world. We want every nation to look up to us like they are right now. We were not a respected nation just a few years ago. We had lost our way. Our country is respected again by everybody. (Applause.)
This morning, let us ask Father in Heaven to guide our steps, protect our children, and bless our families. And with all of our heart, let us forever embrace the eternal truth that every child is made equal by the hand of Almighty God.
Thank you. God Bless you. And God bless America. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause.) (President Donald John Trump’s Address to the 68th National Prayer Breakfast.)
Yes, Mr. President, we are supposed to pray for our enemies and to will their good, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of their souls as members of the Catholic Church. This does not mean that we have to "like" those who cause us injustice, but it does mean that we must pray for them in this life and to have a good and happy reconciliation in Heaven:
Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake: Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you. (Mt. 5: 11-12)
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ repeated this in the Sermon on the Plain as recorded in the Gospel of Saint Luke:
Blessed shall you be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Be glad in that day and rejoice; for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For according to these things did their fathers to the prophets. (Lk. 6: 22-23)
No, we are not called to "like" those who cause us injustices. However, we are called to will their good, to love them as God loves them. This does not mean that we cannot seek justice without vengeance, but it does mean that we must forgive others from our hearts and to recognize that those who persecute us, calumniate us or cause us to suffer grave injustices that wound our reputation in the eyes of others are actually our best friends as we must consider it a great gift from God to suffer humiliation so that our pride and disordered self-love can be ground down into the dust. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ suffered the greatest injustice in history as He patiently and silently bore the price of our sins in His own Sacred Humanity to be pay back the debt owed to Him in His Sacred Divinity. We must never complain in the midst of suffering. Following the example of Saint Francis of Assisi, we must say "Deo gratias!" at such times. Always. Without exception.
The president's igorance was on display also when he said: “Not, one religion, many religions." Although this was a swipe at the infamous flip-flopper and preeningly self-righteous United States Senator Willard Mitt Romney, who had voted to convict Trump on the charge of abuse of power the day before the breakfast and had invoked his deep “religious faith” for doing so, Trump believes that all religions please God. Ignoramus.
Only one religion pleases God. Catholicism, nothing else.
As Pope Leo XIII noted in Custodi di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892, and Pope Saint Pius X noted in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910
Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God. (Pope Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892.)
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
It is impossible to hold back a chastisement that has already begun by praising the existence of “many religions,” even unwittingly, and to speak of God in generic, Judeo-Masonic terms that Pope Pius XI condemned in no uncertain terms:
Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community -- however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things -- whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.
This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.
None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah xI, 15). (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)
It is simply wrong to project into the mind of Donald John Trump thoughts that he does not possess and, sadly, may never be willing to learn. It is one thing to recognize the evils posed by Biden and Harris. Fine. It is quite enough to think that Donald John Trump, who equates the “greatness” of the United States of America with material and economic prosperity (see Appendix D below), is possessed of virtue. He is not. He is filled with the sort of errors that reaffirm souls in the prevailing anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity. This is offensive to truth and to the good of one’s nation. Error divides. Catholicism unites.
There is no such thing as secular salvation in either the “right or the left.” It is well past time for Catholics to recognize this fact and to understand that no matter who wins the election that will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, but whose final results may not be known for weeks nor without endless court battles that might be resolved ultimately by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Glover Roberts casting a decisive vote in favor of the Biden/Harris ticket, Christ the King loses.
Here is another cheery thought to consider: The planned, well-funded riots of the past nearly three months will pale into insignificance if President Trump wins reelection, thus prompting even more violent and widespread rioting, looting, killing and other forms of subsidized mayhem, and whatever protests or calls for secession will be made by citizens upset about a Biden/Harris victory will be stomped down in a nanosecond by the full force of the American military at the command of the very people who decried President Trump’s dispatch of Federal troops to protect Federal property in various cities and who said nothing—absolutely nothing—as one American city after another surrendered to subsidized rioters, looters and killers.
Have I told you lately that error divides and that Catholicism unites?
Have I told you lately that it is either Christ or Chaos in the world, nothing in between?
Look at reality clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and not through the agitated eyes of naturalism that is a dead end to more naturalism that pleases no one other than the adversary.
The Decadence of False Principles
Pope Pius IX warned us that nations founded on false, decadent principles, including those of religious indifferentism, produce citizens concerned about material well-being to the exclusion of everything else:
But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.
For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."
"And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?" (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)
The only real difference between the “left” and “right” that exists at this point is that the “left” wants to provide a coerced “equality” of material goodies by means of obscenely high tax rates upon the wealthy, massive regulation of private property and a complete adherence to the “reset of humanity” agenda that is the real reason for the Chinese/China/Wuhan/Covid-19/Coronavirus plandemic/scamdemic, while the “right” believes, at least for the most part despite President Trump’s own profligate, budget-busting, national-debt increasing fiscal policies, in lower taxation rates and a deregulation of the economy.
Sure, yes, there are differences between the two about Red China as the “left” wants to follow the Chicom model of thought control and repression of dissent while many, although not all, on the “right,” emboldened by the president’s very correct confrontation of the Chicoms that has driven Xi Jinping to increase his ties to his sycophants Silicon Valley and Hollywood, see Red China as the threat to American national security that it is.
Other than that, however, good readers, both the “left” and the right” are in total agreement on these essential points: 1) that is not necessary, wise or prudent for men and their nations to confess the Catholic Faith and to adhere to the teaching of Holy Mother Church in all that pertains the good of souls; and 2) that men can be virtuous and pursue the common temporal good by their own unaided powers without having belief in, access to, and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. These kinds of errors ultimately lead to the triumph of, at first, practical atheism as the lowest common social denominator and, at last, to the triumph of an open atheism that must be imposed upon those who will not offer grains of incense to whichever false idols are decided to be fashionable at the moment.
Why is the American founding decadent?
Oh my, Oh my, Oh my.
How many hundreds upon hundreds of times do I have to repeat the following?
Here is proof from the pens of some of those considered “founding fathers” that I have quoted so many times before but which seem to matter not at all to Catholics steeped in the heresy of Americanism, which is not patriotism as true love of country seeks her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization in every aspect of her political, legal, social, economic and cultural life:
The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.
Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. (President John Adams: "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787-1788)
"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594).
Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)
I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."—James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr„ April I, 1774
". . . Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."—James Madison, spoken at the Virginia convention on ratification of the Constitution, June 1778.
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."—-James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance," addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December, 1813.)
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death. This letter is quoted in its entirety in Dr. Paul Peterson’s now out-of-print Readings in American Democracy. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1979, pp. 28-29.)
These men blamed the Catholic Church for the abuses of power by English monarchs in the Eighteenth Century even though it was precisely because King Henry VIII had broken from the true Church that despotism of the sort that he embodied to murder over three percent of his ow people who remained faithful to the true Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, became so institutionalized. The very abuses they contended had been committed by King George III were made possible by what Henry VIII had wrought two hundred years before.
To be sure, most of the four million people who lived in the United States of America were practicing Protestants of one stripe or another. Protestantism, however, is not “religion.” There is only one true religion, Catholicism, which alone is the means of personal salvation and the only authentic means of providing the possibility of whatever kind of a justly ordered society is possible with fallen men who live in world wounded the vestigial after-effects, if not the actual effects in the souls of the unbaptized, of Original Sin as well as the consequences of the Actual Sins of men.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884, taught us about the end results of naturalism that we are witnessing at this time as the combined forces of the anti-Incarnational civil state wrought by Protestantism, especially Calvinism, and Judeo-Masonry have produced citizenries around the world that are wholly ready to submit to the many secular forerunners of Antichrist after being brainwashed in schools, colleges, and universities and just by being immersed in naturalism as the only way to see the world and the events that occur within it:
But the naturalists go much further; for, having, in the highest things, entered upon a wholly erroneous course, they are carried headlong to extremes, either by reason of the weakness of human nature, or because God inflicts upon them the just punishment of their pride. Hence it happens that they no longer consider as certain and permanent those things which are fully understood by the natural light of reason, such as certainly are -- the existence of God, the immaterial nature of the human soul, and its immortality. The sect of the Freemasons, by a similar course of error, is exposed to these same dangers; for, although in a general way they may profess the existence of God, they themselves are witnesses that they do not all maintain this truth with the full assent of the mind or with a firm conviction. Neither do they conceal that this question about God is the greatest source and cause of discords among them; in fact, it is certain that a considerable contention about this same subject has existed among them very lately. But, indeed, the sect allows great liberty to its votaries, so that to each side is given the right to defend its own opinion, either that there is a God, or that there is none; and those who obstinately contend that there is no God are as easily initiated as those who contend that God exists, though, like the pantheists, they have false notions concerning Him: all which is nothing else than taking away the reality, while retaining some absurd representation of the divine nature.
When this greatest fundamental truth has been overturned or weakened, it follows that those truths, also, which are known by the teaching of nature must begin to fall -- namely, that all things were made by the free will of God the Creator; that the world is governed by Providence; that souls do not die; that to this life of men upon the earth there will succeed another and an everlasting life.
When these truths are done away with, which are as the principles of nature and important for knowledge and for practical use, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality. We say nothing of those more heavenly virtues, which no one can exercise or even acquire without a special gift and grace of God; of which necessarily no trace can be found in those who reject as unknown the redemption of mankind, the grace of God, the sacraments, and the happiness to be obtained in heaven. We speak now of the duties which have their origin in natural probity. That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained, and forbids that it be disturbed; that the last end of men is a destiny far above human things and beyond this sojourning upon the earth: these are the sources and these the principles of all justice and morality.
If these be taken away, as the naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. But, how insufficient such teaching is, how wanting in soundness, and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already begun to appear. For, wherever, by removing Christian education, this teaching has begun more completely to rule, there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. All this is commonly complained of and deplored; and not a few of those who by no means wish to do so are compelled by abundant evidence to give not infrequently the same testimony. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)
Additionally, Pope Pius XI pointed out in Quas Primas that the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ must be proclaimed by men and their parliamentary assemblies:
If We ordain that the whole Catholic world shall revere Christ as King, We shall minister to the need of the present day, and at the same time provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of anti-clericalism, its errors and impious activities. This evil spirit, as you are well aware, Venerable Brethren, has not come into being in one day; it has long lurked beneath the surface. The empire of Christ over all nations was rejected. The right which the Church has from Christ himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation, that right was denied. Then gradually the religion of Christ came to be likened to false religions and to be placed ignominiously on the same level with them. It was then put under the power of the state and tolerated more or less at the whim of princes and rulers. Some men went even further, and wished to set up in the place of God's religion a natural religion consisting in some instinctive affection of the heart. There were even some nations who thought they could dispense with God, and that their religion should consist in impiety and the neglect of God. The rebellion of individuals and states against the authority of Christ has produced deplorable consequences. We lamented these in the Encyclical Ubi arcano; we lament them today: the seeds of discord sown far and wide; those bitter enmities and rivalries between nations, which still hinder so much the cause of peace; that insatiable greed which is so often hidden under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism, and gives rise to so many private quarrels; a blind and immoderate selfishness, making men seek nothing but their own comfort and advantage, and measure everything by these; no peace in the home, because men have forgotten or neglect their duty; the unity and stability of the family undermined; society in a word, shaken to its foundations and on the way to ruin. 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.)
Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:
1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.
2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.
3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.
4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.
5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.
6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.
7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.
8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.
9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her Indirect Power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.
10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are the basis of the actions of civil governance in all that pertains to the good of souls and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church. Civil leaders must, therefore, recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.
This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past twenty-five years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).
The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:
1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation
3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.
4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.
5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the words of Holy Writ are for a Protestant or to a Modernist, is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact. The likes of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Kamala have no regard for the words of the Constitution or for the just laws passed by Congress, and Donald John Trump is plainly ignorant of some of the fact that there are seven articles in the Constitution and twenty-seven amendments to it since its ratification in 1788. We are governed by men who are contemptuous or law or wholly ignorant of it. Quite a state of affairs.
6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.
A nation founded on false premises, no matter the "good intentions" of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American "popular culture" destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some "naturalist" hero or idea by which to win the "culture wars," oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.
The United States of America will never know true liberty until it submits itself to the sweet yoke of Social Reign of Christ the King and raises the holy standard that Emperor Constantine saw in the sky: the Holy Cross of Our Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Pope Saint Pius X explained that the true shining city set on a hill is the Catholic City. None other:
No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. omnia instaurare in Christo. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
The city we must build up every day within our own souls is the Catholic City. We must conform everything in our own lives to the immutable truth of the Holy Faith as we seek to cooperate with the graces won for us by Christ the King by virtue of the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. The Catholic City can only be built up in the world after we have sought to build it up within the fortress of our immortal souls, which have been redeemed at so great a cost.
The farces of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism are converging to impose upon us an era of persecution and hardship. These forces are driven by principalities and powers, and they will not be defeated in an election. They can be defeated only by the use of supernatural means. Nations whose citizens fail to understand this truth are destined to be governed by tyrants, no matter how “soft” and “tolerant they may seem.
A system of civil governance that fosters conditions that are inimical to man's last end is bound to degenerate over the course of time into a such a state of lawlessness that a "state religion" will be imposed by the brute force of the civil state, namely, that of statism itself, the worship of the state and of its leaders as omniscient and omnipotent. The antidote to this is not found in any naturalistic philosophy, such as libertarianism or conservatism, but in Catholicism alone. There is no way—as in no way—to retard the evils caused by the separation of Church and State wrought by Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and their actual, concrete expressions in the American and French Revolutions except by planting the seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King and Our Lady, she who is our Immaculate Queen,
This is the work to which each of us is called. We are called to look beyond the lies of office-seekers steeped in naturalism and are clueless about First and Last Things in order to build up Christendom in our homes, starting with their being Enthroned to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, pulsating with the rhythm provided by the liturgical life of the Church, especially (where this is possible) daily Mass in the Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or its false shepherds who are opposed to the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King, and animated by fervent family prayer, especially by means of the daily family Rosary and frequent visits to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament. We must be about the business of penance and of making reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world.
We are not called to be worldlings. We are not called to be grubby Calvinist materialists. We are not called to be successful careerists willing to compromise the Faith at any given moment in order to "get ahead." We are called to be faithful to Christ the King and to ever reliant upon Mary our Immaculate Queen, ever desirous of scaling the heights of sanctity, which is the sole foundation of order in the soul and hence of order within society itself.
The entire framework of the modern civil state is built upon the heresies and errors of Martin Luther that made possible the triumph of the naturalism that has been propagated and institutionalized since then by the interrelated, multifaceted forces of Judeo-Masonry, and this what so many unthinking Catholics celebrate without realizing that they are placing themselves in perfect communion with the conciliar revolutionaries, including Jorge Mario Bergoglio himself.
Consider the history of the Anabaptists in Europe, whose descendants in heresy are the Southern Baptists, as described by William Thomas Walsh in Philip II and ask yourselves if the United States of America has not suffered—and is not suffering now—from the fatal errors that continue to be held by various Protestant sects from its inception to the present day:
At no time, during the eight years after his return to Spain, could Philip's policy in the Low countries be called tyrannical. He made one concession after another. He assumed the huge and mounting deficit of the government of a rich country. He went to great pains to avoid any undue interference with the lives and privileges of his subjects. As regards religion, he insisted that the Catholic Faith must not be destroyed. What else could a man say of a truth he believed to be divinely ordained?
Even in that respect, considering the times and the anarchical and anti-social tendencies of sixteenth-century Protestantism, he was more lenient than most rulers. It was considered an unusual event, worthy of comment, when a notorious heretic and agitator was burned in Valenciennes in 1563. The man who ordered the execution was not the King, but one of the chief advocates of freedom of worship, the Marquis of Berghes. Jews and heretics acted and spoke as they pleased in Antwerp, without much hindrance. Many of them were Marranos, fugitives from Spain, of whom the Inquisitors in Madrid sent full information.
Granvelle sadly wrote to his friend Perez, “It is laughable to send us depositions made before the Inquisition of Spain so that we can seek the heretics here, as if there were not thousands here to whom we dare say nothing and of whom the King's officers arrest none. Indeed, it is more than a year since a single Calvinist has been arrested in Antwerp. The chief Inquisitor at Antwerp was a rather pathetic fellow, a good studious professor of the University of Louvain with the rare name of Jude Titelmanus (or Tiletanus), who begged to be relieved from his office because the enemies of Christendom mocked and hindered and threatened him and he felt powerless to cope with them.
Philip was lenient, but not from choice. If he had had plenty of money, he probably would have wasted little time in persuasion with the heretics of the north. He understood better than most modern historians the significance of the revolutionary movement. Hence, early in 1563, he sent Margaret a list of suspects in Antwerp, many of them refugees from Spain, and urged her to look into their intrigues; especially those who had thrown stones at the executioner of the notorious heretic Fabricius at Antwerp and then circulated threats of vengeance written in the dead man's blood. He wanted her to give particular attention to one Jean Tulet, fugitive from Bruges and Frankfort, a confessed Anabaptist, and to another named Juan de Moya, “not less pernicious.” The King was informed also that there were in Antwerp “an infinite number of Jews, who assembled in their synagogues, circumcised themselves and performed their ceremonies publicly. He complained also of the open performance, in Antwerp, of some very scandalous comedies “in which they speak ill of my person –a matter of which I would take no notice, if, at the same time, they did not mock our holy Faith and Catholic religion.”
The chief target for the King's intolerance in this important long letter was the “cursed sect of the Anabaptists,” which was extending itself in Holland and Zeeland. “It is a great shame,” wrote Philip, “that this cursed sect which even the heretics of Germany cannot endure, finds a refuge and shelter in my Estates.” The international character of the conspiracy was evident. He was informed that the heretics of the Netherlands were in communication with those of France, and bade her stop this. As for the sect of Anabaptists, he requested her to exterminate the vile thing.
The modern reader who shrinks from all this as another example of medieval bigotry, difficult to understand and impossible to condone, has forgotten who and what the Anabaptists were. To Philip, and to most of the men of his time (including Luther and William of Orange) those fantastic forerunners of the Jacobins of 1792 and the Communists of twentieth-century Russia and Spain were enemies of God and man, whom no one in his sane senses could tolerate.
Philip could remember the time (he was then seven) when Melchior Hoffman, one of those furriers who traveled from one end of Europe to the other, let it be known through Lower Germany and the Netherlands that he was a Prophet to whom the Word of the Lord had come, bidding him to establish the New Jerusalem in Strasbourg. His program was simplicity itself, with some remarkable resemblances to that of Mohammed. He undertook to send through the world from the New Jerusalem a hundred and eighty-four Horseman of Extermination, who with Elias and Enoch should pass through the world with the sword, “vomiting flame to destroy the enemies of the Lord.”
Enoch presently appeared in the person a a baker, John Matthiessen. This latter transferred the New Jerusalem to Munster, in Westphalia, where his emissaries found allies in a cloth merchant name Knipperdollinck, who had been active in propagating Lutheranism, and a tailor of Leyden, on John Bockelsohn or Bokelsoon. So successful was their propaganda in Munster that Knipperdollinck was elected burgomaster, and the city passed into their hands. Bockelsohn now revealed himself as the King of Sion, Ruler of all the Earth, and Son of David, while Matthiessen disclosed that he was the Prophet Moses, come to organize a massacre of all the ungodly.
The Reign of Terror which followed would seem incredible if there were not more modern instances to demonstrate the depths of human degradation and blood-lust. The King of Sion, commanded all gold, silver and jewelry to be turned over to his treasury. Communism was proclaimed, with polygamy, community of women, and world-conquest. Rothmann, an ex-chaplain, had four wives. The King of Sion had sixteen. Mass executions began. The corpses of the ungodly piled up, rotting, in the streets. When the chief wife of the King of Sion objected, he cut of her head in the marketplace before a select group of his Loyalist. There followed a delirium of blood letting, with the usual accompaniments of mass drunkeness, mob insanity, indescribable scenes of sadism and bestiality. This went on until a force of landsknechte took the city and slew the leaders and instigators of the anarchy.
The story of Munster alone, to those who were near enough to it to comprehend its horrors and their causes, explains a great deal about Philip II and other men of his sort. To them it was the logical outcome of any departure from the sane unity of the Catholic Church. No one who knew the facts could separate it from Lutheranism and Calvinism and the ancient hatred of the Talmud. These elements were all bound up together in the Munster experiment. The germ of a sinister and growing chapter in modern history was there. The Catholic who loved Christian order and peace instinctively wished to destroy it before it should spread and destroy the world.
It was enough for Philip that Anabaptists were preaching in the Netherlands; the slaughter, the communism, the burning of churches and the torturing of priests and nuns, the anarchy and sex orgies would follow in due time, as a crisis follows pneumonia. It is doing him no injustice as a man of humane instincts and common sense, therefore, to say that he tolerated the Revolution for several years only because he lacked force with which to suppress it. Yes he did tolerate it. It is unhistorical to pretend that he was a tyrant in any sense in which a man of the sixteenth-century (with no heretical axe to grind) would have understood the word.
The results of his tolerance convinced him more and more that it was a mistake. The heretics were not looking for tolerance, of freedom of worship, or equality, or any of the other fine things they talked about. As Professor Merriman has acknowledged, “before long it became evident that some of the revolutionists would not be content with liberty to exercise their own faith, but were even intent of the destruction of Catholicism.” (William Thomas Walsh, Philip II, published originally in 1937 by Sheed and Ward and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1987, pp. 352-355.)
Is there any difference between then and now as the agents of the naturalist “left,” whose amorality, immorality, communism, hedonism, heathenism, and seething hatred for Catholicism seek the elimination of all opposition and the exclusion of any mention of the Catholic Faith and of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, Himself from public life?
Wake up.
The United States of America was founded on corrupt, decadent principles that are simply manifesting the perfection of the inherent degeneracy at this time. Nothing else. The degeneracy was there the beginning in 1776 and 1787, and it is irresponsible for anyone, especially for a Catholic, to turn a blind eye to this fact.
Once again, true love of one’s country, which is a precept of the Fourth Commandment and of the Natural Law, can never be confused with its idolatry as a force for “good” in the world. True love of country wills her good, the ul
Turn off the television and stop being agitated.
Stop getting lost in the “trees” of the latest outrages committed by and/or publicly supported, perhaps even by silence in the face of wanton destruction of private property, and justified by ideological, if not actual, descendants of the Anabaptists?
We must know our history, and it is impossible to keep focused on root causes if one is constantly lost in the “trees” of the outrage du jour or, worse yet, if one thinks that the very thing that got us into this mess. “modern democracy,” is going to get us out of the abyss. I mean, this is like saying the way to escape from Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s rotten agenda is to adhere to a “rigorous” understanding of the “true” meaning of the documents of the “Second” Vatican Council that gave birth to a false church with false doctrines, sacramentally invalid liturgies and invalid holy orders (see Counterfeit Church, Counterfeit Sacraments, Counerfeit Everything, part one, and Counterfeit Church, Counterfeit Sacraments, Counterfeit Everything, part two).
Modern “democracy,” such as it is, the natural result of Protestantism’s revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by Holy Mother Church to assure that those in public life pursue the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven.
Here is a reminder that democracy in and of itself is inherently unstable and, in a non-Catholic country, is based upon the abject lie of “popular sovereignty” that leaves no place for a due submission to Christ the King and His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, leads to the very sort of the tyranny that exists in Communist nations of the sort that existed with the Anabaptists two centuries before the French Revolution occurred and thus set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution itself:
Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the great Dominican foe of Modernism and the Twentieth Century’s greatest exponent of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, explained the flaws inherent in democracies that lead to their decay and dissolution over time:
Democracy is an imperfect regime, as a regime in ratione regiminis, as a result of the lack of unity and continuity in the direction of interior and exterior affairs. Also this regime should only be for the perfect already capable of directing themselves—those virtuous and competent enough to pronounce as is fitting upon the very complicated problems on which the life of a great people depends. But it is always true to say as Saint Thomas noted that these virtuous and competent men are extremely rare; and democracy, supposing such perfection among subjects, cannot give it to them. From this point of view, democracy is a bit in politics what quietism is in spirituality; it supposes man has arrived, at the age or the state of perfection, even though he still may be a child. In treating him as a perfect person, democracy does not give him what is required to become one.
Since true virtue united to true competence is a rare thing among men, since the majority among them are incapable of governing and they have a need of being led, the regime which is the best for them is the one which can make up for their imperfection. This regimen perfectum in ratione regiminis, by reason of unity, continuity, and efficacy of direction towards a single end which is difficult to achieve is monarchy. Above all a tempered monarchy which is always attentive to the different forms of national activity. It is better than democracy or than the feudal regime. Monarchy assures the interior and exterior peace of a great nation, and permits her to long endure. (Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On Royal Government: translated by Andrew Strain, On Royal Government)
“Democracy” is what got us into this mess, and “fighting” for its “restoration” is going to nothing but proliferate errors that have convinced a solid two-fifths of the American public to be committed to all the moral evils of the day and to look to “government” for the “solutions” to both personal and social problems that are but the consequences of their own sins and the multiple errors of Modernity and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
I mean, Donald John Trump did not the win the presidency on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, because he won a majority of the national popular vote. He lost the national popular vote to Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton/Madame Defarge by 2,864,974 votes. Trump only won the presidency because he won the electoral votes of the States of Michigan and Wisconsin and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania after winning the popular vote in those states by razor-thin pluralities:
- A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) — or 0.06% of 137 million cast — would not just have made Hillary Clinton president.
- The bottom line: The WashPost's Philip Bump did the math about Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin back during the transition:
- "Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too."
- "But for 79,646 votes cast in those three states, she'd be the next president of the United States."
- P.S. "The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races." (Trump's Thin Margins of Victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.)
From whence is the great groundswell of “conservative” voters is going to come?
From the graduates of America's public schools, where children are indoctrinated in all manner of statist and leftist and relativist and positivist brainwashing?
From the graduates of the educational institutions under the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, where children are indoctrinated, with a few exceptions here and there, to be sure, in all manner of statist and leftist and relativist and positivist brainwashing?
From the support of the conciliar "bishops" of the United States of America, many of whose dioceses are involved quite actively in the organizations of the penultimate statist and naturalist, the late Saul Alinsky? The "bishops" who support a brand of "Catholic" social teaching that cleaves to the left and favors lawbreakers who enter the country illegally and who, for the most part, give a free pass to "Catholics" who support the "right" of women to "choose" to kill their babies, whether by chemical or surgical means?
Although I get accused a whole of being unrealistic and an “idealist,” I am actually a Catholic realist.
While I do not deny that the upcoming election does represent a distinct difference between two rival gangs of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry, aided and abetted by Modernism, of course, and thus is different than such contests as John Sidney McCain III versus Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro in 2008 and Willard Mitt Romney versus Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro in 2012, one does not have to believe in the public opinion polls, which undercounted the Trump vote in 2016, to be sure, to understand that there is not some kind of hidden Trump “majority” waiting to have their votes ignored in those states where corrupt scions of the “left” want mail-in ballots that will permit thousands of illegal residents to vote with complete legal impunity.
Although it is yet to be seen how many idiots in the “swing states” will see in the rioting that has taken place in various cities across the United States of America for the past three months the future of the country under a Jacobin/Bolshevik administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Kamala Harris and thus vote accordingly, it is still nevertheless true that there a whole lot of idiots throughout the country who have been alienated by Trump’s “tweets” and who have accepted the plandemic/scandemic propaganda that the president could have done “more” to retard the supposed spread of a virus that originated in Red China at a laboratory that that had received money from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at a time with Obama/Soetoro had placed a moratorium on the funding of such laboratories.
Public and conciliar schools, at least for the most part, have done their part to produce “voters” who pay no attention to public events, do not see those events in light of First and Last Things, and who, being absorbed into their daily bread and circuses, are easily misled by propaganda into believing that this or that politician can save them from themselves and the consequences of the choices they have made in their own lives. Those who think that “fighting to restore democracy” will hold back the tide of evil that is the direct result of the founding fathers’ false premises are the ones who are living in fantasy worlds of their own choosing.
Even if the president does win re-election, of course, Americans will be faced with some kind of mandate or, at the very least, “strong recommendation” to get the “vaccine” for the coronavirus and, regardless of who wins in November, many state governments will require their residents to do so and to show some kind of identification badge or wristband to prove that they have been injected with the statists’ plandemic/scamdemic Kool-Aid. Additionally, many commercial establishments (grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, delicatessens, pharmacies, department stores, etc.) will have such a requirement even absent any “mandates” or “recommendations” made by the United State Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and/or a state or local public officials. We are “cooked,” my friends, no matter who wins on November 3, 2020, or whatever time thereafter the election is determined to be decided.
Americanism: Still Corrupting the Minds of American Catholics Now as in the Past
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not want us to spend our lives in endless agitation as needless debates about those things that are beyond debate as they are part of Divine Revelation and/or the Natural Law.
How can social order be established and maintained upon a welter of religious, philosophical, cultural, social, economic and mortal errors in a land where most people are, objectively speaking, steeped in states of Mortal Sin that wound their ability to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus choose wisely in accordance with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law?
Most Catholics in the United States of America were recruited by Antichrist to be his apologists precisely because of the "reconciliation" that Archbishop John Carroll and those who followed him made with the heresy of "religious liberty" as a "protection" of the life of the Catholic Church in a pluralistic society.
Most Catholics thus have been completely unaware that the very thing they exalted as a "protection" was, in truth, a trap to accustom them to think, speak and act as members of any Judeo-Masonic lodge, that is, naturalistically. And it was this very trap, which had different variations in Europe, of course, that helped to ensnare the minds of Modernists at home and abroad into becoming apologists of Judeo-Masonry in order to speak of that mythical "civilization of love" rather than to build up the Catholic City.
Indeed, the ethos of Americanism that has convinced even believing Catholics, including most fully traditional Catholics, into seeing the world through the lens of “democracy” rather than through the eyes of the Holy Faith and with a firm knowledge and grasp of Holy Mother Church’s Social Teaching that provides them with the ability to focus on root causes rather than on the “trees” of the moment is also an important building block and constituent element of the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s embrace of the heresies of religious liberty and separation of Church and State that have been condemned by our true popes repeatedly.
It is no wonder that American Catholics are prone to agitation and to extol the “American Way” that is based on one abject lie another after another, including the lie that men can be “virtuous” on their own unaided powers without having belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace when one considers how thoroughly brainwashed the Americanist bishops of the Nineteenth Century were and how evangelically zealous they were in promoting Americanism as the means to resolve the world’s problems by “enlightening” the rest of the world about the “glories” of American religious indifferentism, democracy and majoritarianism. This is exactly what Bishop Denis O’Connell, the first rector of the North American College in Rome, an ardent Americanist, did when he wrote to his fellow Americanist John Ireland, the Archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota, with breathless wonderment about the defeat of Spain in the needless, immoral and unjust Spanish-American War that introduced Protestantism and Freemasonry to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Philippines:
Thomas T. McAvoy, C.S.C., author of The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism, 1895-1900, describes O’Connell’s letter to Archbishop Ireland, dated May 14, 1898, as “a very important contribution to a definition of Americanism as conceived by the Americanists.” The letter is too long to be quoted here in its entirety. Some of what will be seen from what is quoted: disdain for Europe and European Catholic culture, especially that of Latin Europe (Italy and Spain); fervent Anglophilia married to a view of America being more a sister than a child of the “mother country”; ambition that would seem extravagant except that it was eventually fulfilled to a large measure; a view of war as “often God’s way of moving things onward.” In all this it needs to be remembered that by 1898 the Church had been much occupied for a century in trying to extinguish a “fire in the minds of men,” as Dostoyevsky described the idea of revolution. Thwarting that effort, if not actually fanning the fire, is exactly what Americanism was about.
O’Connell begins his letter to Ireland by exhorting him to embrace his destiny: “I congratulate you and thank God for you. And now only one word more: all doubts and hesitations to the wind and on with the banner of Americanism which is the banner of God & humanity. Now realize all the dreams you ever dreamed, and force upon the Curia by the great triumph of Americanism that recognition of English speaking peoples that you know is needed.”
O’Connell turns now to the meat of his letter — what he has to say about the war against Spain on which the U.S. embarked the month before. “For me this is not simply a question of Cuba. If it were, it were no question or a poor question. Then let the ‘greasers’ eat one another up and save the lives of our dear boys. But for me it is a question of much more moment — it is the question of two civilizations. It is the question of all that is old & vile & mean & rotten & cruel & false in Europe against all that is free & noble & open & true & humane in America. When Spain is swept off the seas much of the meanness and narrowness of old Europe goes with it to be replaced by the freedom and openness of America. This is God’s way of developing the world. And all continental Europe feels the war is against itself, and that is why they are all against us, and Rome more than all because when the prestige of Spain & Italy will have passed away, and when the pivot of the world’s political action will no longer be confined within the limits of the continent, then the nonsense of trying to govern the universal church from a purely European standpoint — and according to exclusively Spanish and Italian methods, will be glaringly evident even to a child. ‘Now the axe is laid to the root of the tree.’ Let the wealth of Convents and Communities in Cuba & the Philippines go; it did nothing for the advancement of religion….
“At one time one nation in the world now another, took the lead, but now it seems to me that the old governments of Europe will lead no more and that neither Italy, nor Spain will ever furnish the principles of the civilization of the future. Now God passes the banner to the hands of America, to bear it — in the cause of humanity and it is your office to make its destiny known to America and become its grand chaplain. Over all America there is certainly a duty higher than the interests of the individual states — even of the national government. The duty to humanity is certainly a real duty, and America cannot certainly with honor, or fortune, evade its great share in it. Go to America and say, thus saith the Lord! Then you will live in history as God’s Apostle in modern times to Church & to Society. Hence I am a partisan of the Anglo-American alliance, together they are invincible and they will impose a new civilization. Now is your opportunity — and at the end of the war as the Vatican always goes after a strong man you will likewise become her intermediary….
“War is often God’s way of moving things onward. The whole realm of life of every kind lay under the operation of one law: struggle. In that way all the plans of nations are worked out and the name for struggle between nations is sometimes ‘war.’ The ‘horrors of war’ often a sentimental phrase is often better ‘the glories of war’ the triumph of Providence, see the war of secession & negro emancipation. The whole history of Providence is the history of war; survival of the fittest. There is no room in this little world for anything else and as bad as the world is today how much worse it would certainly be if by war & struggle the worse elements had not to go to the wall.
“Then build navies & give your men employment, enroll an army picking up for it as England does fellows fit for nothing else. Take the place God has destined for America and leave John Ireland’s name imperishable among those achievements. You are the only man in America lay or cleric who can properly take in and give the right initiative to this design.
“The history of every good nation has been a history of expansion, Rome, Greece, Venice, England.
“So build your navies and give employment to your laborers. Create your armies and like England enroll in its ranks all those idle fellows hanging ‘round the towns that are good for nothing else’. You will now have a work that will enlist all your strongest sympathies.” (The Heresy of Americanism and the Spanish-American War.)
Look at Bishop O’Connell’s utter contempt for the indispensable influence of Catholicism upon the development of true Christian civilizations in Europe, including Spain and Italy. All that was considered “mean” and “vile” and “ugly” while Americanism represented all that was good. In other words, Holy Mother Church, she who is guided infallibly by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, had to “learn” from Americanism about how to go about her business of sanctifying and saving souls. Holy Mother Church had to adapt to the “age,” not the “age” to the Catholic Faith.
Too harsh.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is but one example of how the United States of America persecuted Filipino patriots after its conquest of The Philippines in 1898 that resulted in the widespread introduction of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry into this archipelago of islands whose people were so devoted to the Holy Faith:
On Aug 11, 1901, Company C, 9th US Infantry Regiment, arrived in Balangiga on the southern coast of Samar island, to close its port and prevent supplies reaching Filipino guerillas in the interior.
A glamour unit, Company C was assigned provost duty and guarded the captured President Emilio Aguinaldo upon their return to the Philippines on June 5, 1901, after fighting Boxer rebels and helping capture Peking in China.
They also performed as honor guard during the historic July 4, 1901 inauguration of the American civil government in the Philippines and the installation as first civil governor of William Howard Taft, later president of the U.S.
Filipino historian, Prof. Rolando O. Borrinaga, tells the story of the massacre in an article entitled "Vintage View: The Balangiga Incident and Its Aftermath":
"The first month of Company C’s presence in Balangiga was marked by extensive fraternization between the Americans and the local residents. The friendly activities included tuba (native wine) drinking among the soldiers and native males, baseball games and arnis (stick fighting) demonstrations in the town plaza, and even a romantic link between an American sergeant, Frank Betron, and a native woman church leader, Casiana “Geronima” Nacionales.
"Tensions rose when on September 22, at a tuba store, two drunken American soldiers tried to molest the girl tending the store. The girl was rescued by her two brothers, who mauled the soldiers. In retaliation, the Company Commander, Capt. Thomas W. Connell, West Point class of 1894, rounded up 143 male residents for forced labor to clean up the town in preparation for an official visit by his superior officers. They were detained overnight without food under two conical Sibley tents in the town plaza, each of which could only accommodate 16 persons; 78 of the detainees remained the next morning, after 65 others were released due to age and physical infirmity. Finally, Connell ordered the confiscation from their houses of all sharp bolos, and the confiscation and destruction of stored rice. Feeling aggrieved, the townspeople plotted to attack the U.S. Army garrison.
"The mastermind was Valeriano Abanador, a Letran dropout and the local chief of police; he was assisted by five locals and two guerilla officers under the command of Brig. Gen. Vicente Lukban: Capt. Eugenio Daza and Sgt. Pedro Duran, Sr. The lone woman plotter was Casiana “Geronima” Nacionales. Lukban played no role in the planning of the attack; he only learned about it a week later. About 500 men in seven attack units would take part. They represented virtually all families of Balangiga, whose outlying villages then included the present towns of Lawaan and Giporlos, and of Quinapundan, a town served by the priest in Balangiga.
"On September 27, Friday, the natives sought divine help and intervention for the success of their plot through an afternoon procession and marathon evening novena prayers to their protector saints inside the church. They also ensured the safety of the women and children by having them leave the town after midnight, hours before the attack. Pvt. Adolph Gamlin observed women and children evacuating the town and reported it, but he was ignored.
"To mask the disappearance of the women from the dawn service inside the church, 34 attackers from Barrio Lawaan cross-dressed as women worshippers.
"At 6:45 a.m., on Saturday, September 28, Abanador grabbed Pvt. Adolph Gamlin's rifle from behind and hit him unconscious with its butt. Abanador turned the rifle at the men in the sergeant’s mess tent, wounding one. He then waved a rattan cane above his head, and yelled: “Atake, mga Balangigan-on! (Attack, men of Balangiga!). A bell in the church tower was rung seconds later, to announce that the attack had begun.
"The guards outside the convent and municipal hall were killed. The Filipinos apparently sealed in the Sibley tents at the front of the municipal hall, having had weapons smuggled to them in water carriers, broke free and entered the municipal hall and made their way to the second floor. The men in the church broke into the convent through a connecting corridor and killed the officers who were billeted there. The mess tent and the two barracks were attacked. Most of the Americans were hacked to death before they could grab their firearms. The few who escaped the main attack fought with kitchen utensils, steak knives, and chairs.
"The convent was successfully occupied and so, initially, was the municipal hall, but the mess tent and barracks attack suffered a fatal flaw - about one hundred men were split into three groups, one of each target but too few attackers had been assigned to ensure success. A number of Co. C. personnel escaped from the mess tent and the barracks and were able to retake the municipal hall, arm themselves and fight back. Adolph Gamlin recovered consciousness, found a rifle and caused considerable casualties among the Filipinos. [Gamlin died at age 92 in the U.S. in 1969].
"Faced with immensely superior firepower and a rapidly degrading attack, Abanador ordered a retreat. But with insufficient numbers and fear that the rebels would re-group and attack again, the surviving Americans, led by Sgt. Frank Betron, escaped by baroto (native canoes with outriggers, navigated by using wooden paddles) to Basey, Samar, about 20 miles away. The townspeople returned to bury their dead, then abandoned the town."
Capt. Edwin V. Bookmiller, West Point Class 1889 and commander of Company G of the 9th US Infantry at Basey, commandeered a civilian coastal steamer from Tacloban, the SS Pittsburg, and with his men steamed to Balangiga. The town was deserted. The dead of Company C lay where they fell, many bearing horrible hack wounds. Bookmiller and his men burned the town to the ground.
Of the original 74 man contingent, 48 died and 26 survived, 22 of them severely wounded. The dead included all of Company C's commissioned officers: Capt. Thomas W. Connell (RIGHT), 1st Lt. Edward A. Bumpus, and Maj. Richard S. Griswold (the Company surgeon). The guerillas also took 100 rifles with 25,000 rounds of ammunition; 28 Filipinos died and 22 were wounded.
The massacre shocked the U.S. public; many newspaper editors noted that it was the worst disaster suffered by the U.S. Army since Custer's last stand at Little Big Horn. An infuriated Maj. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee, military governor for the “unpacified” areas of the Philippines, assured the press that "the situation calls for shot, shells and bayonets as the natives are not to be trusted." He advised newspaper correspondent Joseph Ohl, "If you should hear of a few Filipinos more or less being put away don't grow too sentimental over it."
Adna Romanza Chaffee (LEFT, in 1898) was born in Ohio in 1842. A veteran of the Civil war and countless Indian campaigns, he served throughout the Spanish-American War, and commanded American troops in the capture of Peking, China, during the Boxer rebellion. He replaced Brig. Gen. Arthur C. MacArthur, Jr., as military governor of the “unpacified” areas of the Philippines on July 4, 1901. He appointed Brigadier Generals James Franklin Bell to Batangas and Jacob Smith to Samar, with orders to do whatever was necessary to destroy the opposition--he wanted an Indian-style campaign. Chaffee’s orders were largely responsible for the atrocities that marked the later stages of the war. When the war ended in 1902, Chaffee returned to the States, where he served as lieutenant general and Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army from 1904-1906. He retired in 1906 and died in 1914.
The U.S. Army's retaliation measures included actions that resulted in the courts-martial of two field commanders, . Brig. Gen. Jacob "Howling Jake" Smith (LEFT, in Tagbilaran in 1901) and Marine Maj. Littleton Waller.
After the massacre at Balangiga, General Smith issued his infamous Circular No. 6, and ordered his command thus: "I want no prisoners" and "I wish you to kill and burn; and the more you burn and kill, the better it will please me." Then he tasked his men to reduce Samar into a "howling wilderness," to kill anyone 10 years old and above capable of bearing arms.
He stressed that, "Every native will henceforth be treated as an enemy until he has conclusively shown that he is a friend." His policy would be "to wage war in the sharpest and most decisive manner," and that "a course would be pursued that would create a burning desire for peace." [On Dec. 29, 1890, as a cavalryman, Smith was present at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an incident ---also referred to as a massacre---that left about 300 Sioux men, women and children, and 29 Army soldiers dead.]
In Samar, he gave his subordinates carte blanche authority in the application of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 General Order 100. This order, in brief, authorized the shooting on sight of all persons not in uniform acting as soldiers and those committing, or seeking to commit, sabotage.
The exact number of civilians massacred by US troops will never be known, but exhaustive research made by a sympathetic British writer in the 1990s put the figure at about 2,500; Filipino historians believe it was around 50,000.
General Smith and Major Waller (RIGHT) underwent separate courts-martial for their roles in the suppressive campaign of Nov 1901- Jan 1902. Although he received the "Kill all over ten" order from Gen. Smith, Waller countermanded it and told his men not to obey it.
However, he was specifically tried for murder in the summary execution of 11 Filipino porters. After a long march, Marine Lt. A.S. Williams accused the porters of mutinous behavior, hiding food and supplies and keeping themselves nourished from the jungle while the Marines starved. Waller ordered the execution of the porters. Ten were shot in groups of three, while one was gunned down in the water attempting to escape. The bodies were left in the square of Lanang (now Llorente), as an example, until one evening, under cover of darkness, some townspeople carried them off for a Christian burial.
In an eleven-day span, Major Waller also reported that his men burned 255 dwellings, slaughtered 13 carabaos and killed 39 people. Other officers reported similar activity.
Smith commanded the Sixth Separate Brigade, which included a battalion of 315 Marines under Waller. Waller's court martial acquitted him but Smith's found him guilty, for which he was admonished and retired from the service. Gen. Smith was born in 1840 and died in San Diego, California on March 1, 1918.
Outcry in America over the brutal nature of the Samar campaign cost Waller his chance at the Commandancy of the US Marine Corps. Liberal newspapers took to addressing him as "The Butcher of Samar".
Waller was born in York County, Virginia on Sept. 26, 1856. He was appointed as a second lieutenant of Marines on June 24, 1880. He rose to Major General, retired in June 1920 and died on July 13, 1926. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1942, the destroyer USS Waller was named in his honor.
In April 1902, Abanador accepted the general amnesty offered by the Americans. He died sometime in the 1950's.
In the April 18, 1902 issue of the New York World, Richard Thomas O'Brien, formerly a corporal in Company M, 26th U.S. Volunteer Infantry Regiment, based in Miag-ao, Iloilo Province, Panay Island, described how his birthday went on Dec. 27, 1901 at Barrio Lanog: [LEFT, Miag-ao Church, late 1890's]
"It was on the 27th day of December, the anniversary of my birth, and I shall never forget the scenes I witnessed on that day. As we approached the town the word passed along the line that there would be no prisoners taken. It meant that we were to shoot every living thing in sight—man, woman, and child. The first shot was fired by the then first sergeant of our company. His target was a mere boy, who was coming down the mountain path into the town astride of a caribou. The boy was not struck by the bullet, but that was not the sergeant's fault. The little Filipino boy slid from the back of his caribou and fled in terror up the mountain side. Half a dozen shots were fired after him. The shooting now had attracted the villagers, who came out of their homes in alarm, wondering what it all meant. They offered no offense, did not display a weapon, made no hostile movement whatsoever, but they were ruthlessly shot down in cold blood—men, women, and children. The poor natives huddled together or fled in terror. Many were pursued and killed on the spot.
"Two old men, bearing between them a white flag and clasping hands like two brothers, approached the lines. Their hair was white. They fairly tottered, they were so feeble under the weight of years. To my horror and that of the other men in the command, the order was given to fire, and the two old men were shot down in their tracks. We entered the village. A man who had been on a sick-bed appeared at the doorway of his home. He received a bullet in the abdomen and fell dead in the doorway. Dum-dum bullets were used in that massacre, but we were not told the name of the bullets. We didn't have to be told. We knew what they were.
"In another part of the village a mother with a babe at her breast and two young children at her side pleaded for mercy. She feared to leave her home, which had just been fired—accidentally, I believe. She faced the flames with her children, and not a hand was raised to save her or the little ones. They perished miserably. It was sure death if she left the house—it was sure death if she remained. She feared the American soldiers, however, worse than the devouring flames."
Company M was commanded by Capt. Fred McDonald. (Balangiga Massacre, 1901. Thomas A. Droleskey note: Liberty and justice for all? One "republic under God." Think again, ladies and gentlemen. Think again.)
As bad as this was—and it was bad, the government of the United States of America was entirely complicit in the crushing of the Cristeros between 1926-1929 and had two presidents, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, a Catholic-hating Presbyterian, and John Calvin Coolidge, a rock-ribbed Yankee who had been Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who were indifferent to suffering of Catholics ten years apart.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s slap-in-the-face to Father [later Bishop] Clement Kelley in 2016 about the slaughter of Catholics then taking place in Mexico:
Father Francis Clement Kelley, later the founding bishop of the then named Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, was told the following to his face when he, representing the American bishops and the Extension of Society of which he was the first head, met with Wilson at the White House the anticlerical sieges of Carranza as early as 1915 after Carranza took his stolen office:
Wilson replied: '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 visitor as to 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 Catholics 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 President Plutarco Calles. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1970, p. 274.)
Bishop Kelley described Wilson's steadfast support for the Carranza regime and justified his refusal to assist Catholics being persecuted in Mexico:
Carranza was chosen by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, to be the President of Mexico. When the Turks massacred the Armenians the Christian world shouted its protest. When the Russians murdered the Jews the shout was repeated. No people shouted louder against the massacres than the Americans and the English. About the horrors perpetrated against the Catholics of Mexico few voices were raised. President Wilson told an Indianapolis audience that he would allow the Mexicans to shed all the blood they wanted. He told me in his office in the White House that, as the inspiration of democracy had come out of the French Revolution, which had shed as much blood as Carranza and his men, perhaps something good would come out of the Mexican debacle. His words were offered in consolation. I thanked him and withdrew. (Bishop Francis Clement Kelley, Blood-Drenched Altars, published originally in 1935 by the Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, p. 237.)
Wilson did, however, write a letter, dated March 20, 1915, but most likely authored by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, shortly thereafter his meeting with Father Kelley to explain that he was, of course, opposed to the "treatment already said to have been accorded priests has had a most unfortunate effect upon opinion outside of Mexico" (cf. Kelley, p. 241). This is interesting as Wilson was plotting all along to using his own agents in Mexico to pave the way for a constitution with anticlerical provisions. The lady had protesteth a bit too much.
Wilson's motivations were, obviously, purely political. Even though he despised Catholics and was possessed of such anticlericalism that he addressed his own enthusiastic supporter, the arch-Americanist James Cardinal Gibbons, as "Mister" Gibbons, he was nevertheless conscious of the need to cultivate what had become a key constituency for his Democratic Party.
Thus it is that Wilson's letter to Carranza was issued as a means of mollifying Catholics, whose "foreign" roots he believed could prove them to be subversive, which is why Gibbons and his brethren fell all over themselves during World War I so as to "prove" that Catholic citizens, from being "subversive," were as "patriotic" as other Americans. And what so few historians have even considered, no less have written about, is the fact that Wilson's involvement of the United States in the establishment of the anti-clerical Mexican Constitution of 1917 that ushered in the crimes that led a decade later to the Cristeros War was largely out of the consciousness of most Catholics in the United States because, perhaps not by "coincidence," they were intent on "proving" their "patriotism" to the cause of the needless, immoral and thoroughly unjust World War I. What American Catholics won’t do to indemnify their secular saviors, whether of the false opposite of the naturalist "right" or that of the "left.' (For more of this material from “Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!” can be found in Appendix C.)
The chastisement that is being visited upon us now at this time is not unjust. The United States of America is suffering very justly, and what we are experiencing now is just a down payment on the evils that this nation’s government’s leaders have committed in the past and the evils of recent decades that have promoted governmentally, legally, administratively, bureaucratically, educationally and culturally.
In this regard, therefore, we must ever keep in mind that the disproportionate fear of most otherwise healthy Americans about a virus that is not a legitimate threat to either their “good health” or physical safety stands in stark contrast with their lack of fear about offending God by means of sinning unrepentantly. Sin maketh nations miserable, and this nation, which has celebrated sins in the name of “liberty” from its very inception, based as it is on the rejection of any public obligation to the true God of Divine Revelation and a concomitant rejection of the authority of His true Church to intervene with civil leaders when the good of souls demands her to do so, that have included, among so many others:
- Constant blasphemies committed against Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints.
- The exporting of Protestantism and Freemasonry in once proudly Catholic countries.
- The invasion and occupation of Catholic countries by armed military force.
- The liberalization of divorce laws in many states in the late Nineteenth Century.
- The establishment of public schooling as the means to indoctrinate Catholic immigrants—first from Ireland and then all throughout formerly Catholic Europe—in the ways of “democracy,” religious indifferentism, egalitarianism, materialism, majoritarianism and everything else pertaining to Americanism.
- Immodesty of dress and the rank impurity and indecency of stage plays, motion pictures, magazines, books, television programming, etc.
- The acceptance of contraception and its subsequent exportation all over the globe by means of American taxpayer dollars.
- The exportation of the perversities associated with the pestilential vice of the sin of Sodom and its related sins.
- The institutionalization of the surgical execution of the innocent preborn—and anyone else thereafter—who is deemed to suffer from a “poor quality of life,” which has “widened the killing field,” so to speak, for “medical professionals” to kill anyone they choose to kill over and beyond their manufactured myth of “brain death” that has been used to justify human vivisection for “their bodily organs.
Americanism was crammed down the throats of unsuspecting school children until there was a new “god” to worship, namely, that of “globalism, when the conciliarists came to power. This inculcation in all things “democratic as the only just means of governance that was taught in Catholic schools of all levels of education and preached unabashedly from the pulpits of Catholic churches throughout the land, thus presaging most American Catholics’ joyful and willing acceptance of the “democratizing” tendencies of the “Second” Vatican Council and the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination, Archbishop John Ireland’s sermon on the silver jubilee of his fellow Americanist James Cardinal Gibbons’s elevation to the episcopacy explained how the Catholic Church extolled the “new age” of progress represented by “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the very language of the French Revolution:
It is an age of liberty, civil and political; it is the age of the democracy, when the whole people, tired of the unrestricted way of sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, and exercise with more or less directness the power was always their primarily by divine ordinance. The age of the democracy! The Catholic Church, I am sure, has no fear of the democracy, this flowering of her own most sacred principles of the equality, fraternity, and liberty of all men, in Christ and through Christ. These principles are spread upon every page of the gospel. From the moment they were first confided to the Church they have been ceaselessly leavening minds and hearts towards the fullest recognition of rights and the dignity among all men, toward the elevation of the multitudes of men, and the enjoyment by them of freedom from unnecessary restrictions, of social happiness mingled with as few sorrows as earth's planet permits. (Appendix A below contains substantial excerpts from a sermon that Archbishop John Ireland gave in the Nineteenth Century that demonstrates the "spirit" of the "Second" Vatican Council took shape right here in the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century as Catholics were taught about and "progress" and "reconciliation with the age." A careful reading of these excerpts in Appendix A, which contain emphases supplied by this writer, will reveal key points of similarity between Americanism and conciliarism and thus the chaos of our own times).
You see, ladies and gentlemen, there is no stopping the logical and inexorable devolution of men and their societies into the abyss of state-sponsored godlessness once the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King is accepted as an "irreversible" fact of history that requires us to make our "reconciliation" with the "principles of 1789.
This is what Pope Saint Pius X wrote about those who desired to reconcile themselves to the principles of the “revolution” (liberty, equality, fraternity):
We know only too well the dark workshops in which are elaborated these mischievous doctrines which ought not to seduce clear-thinking minds. The leaders of the Sillon have not been able to guard against these doctrines. The exaltation of their sentiments, the undiscriminating good-will of their hearts, their philosophical mysticism, mixed with a measure of illuminism, have carried them away towards another Gospel which they thought was the true Gospel of Our Savior. To such an extent that they speak of Our Lord Jesus Christ with a familiarity supremely disrespectful, and that – their ideal being akin to that of the Revolution – they fear not to draw between the Gospel and the Revolution blasphemous comparisons for which the excuse cannot be made that they are due to some confused and over-hasty composition.
We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one’s personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
Catholicism, nothing else. All must fall apart when men are divided over First and Last Things and spread error publicly while celebrating their “right” to do so.
The world of Modernity is premised upon the lie that it is possible for men to be well-ordered in their own personal lives that they can live within the framework of well-ordered republics. To profess believe in Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ "personally" without acknowledging His Social Kingship over our nations is, to quote Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie, the Bishop of Poitiers, France, from 1849 to 1880, is to say that He is not God:
"If Jesus Christ," proclaims Msgr. Pie in a magnificent pastoral instruction, "if Jesus Christ Who is our light whereby we are drawn out of the seat of darkness and from the shadow of death, and Who has given to the world the treasure of truth and grace, if He has not enriched the world, I mean to say the social and political world itself, from the great evils which prevail in the heart of paganism, then it is to say that the work of Jesus Christ is not a divine work. Even more so: if the Gospel which would save men is incapable of procuring the actual progress of peoples, if the revealed light which is profitable to individuals is detrimental to society at large, if the scepter of Christ, sweet and beneficial to souls, and perhaps to families, is harmful and unacceptable for cities and empires; in other words, if Jesus Christ to whom the Prophets had promised and to Whom His Father had given the nations as a heritage, is not able to exercise His authority over them for it would be to their detriment and temporal disadvantage, it would have to be concluded that Jesus Christ is not God". . . .
"To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say that the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine."
In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:
"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies."
Fr. de St. Just asks, in conclusion:
"Could it be proven in clearer terms that social atheism conduces to individualistic atheism?". . . .
"Neither in His Person," Card, Pie said in a celebrated pastoral instruction, "nor in the exercise of His rights, can Jesus Christ be divided, dissolved, split up; in Him the distinction of natures and operations can never be separated or opposed; the divine cannot be incompatible to the human, nor the human to the divine. On the contrary, it is the peace, the drawing together, the reconciliation; it is the very character of union which has made the two things one: 'He is our peace, Who hat made both one. . .' (Eph. 2:14). This is why St. John told us: 'every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God. And this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh: and is now already in the world' (1 John 4:3; cf. also 1 John 2:18, 22; 2 John: 7). "So then, Card. Pie continues, "when I hear certain talk being spread around, certain pithy statements (i.e., 'Separation of Church and State,' for one, and the enigmatic axiom 'A free Church in a free State,' for another) prevailing from day to day, and which are being introduced into the heart of societies, the dissolvent by which the world must perish, I utter this cry of alarm: Beware the Antichrist."
Fr. de St. Just adds:
"Accordingly, the Bishop of Poitiers had always fought against THE SEPARATION OF Church and State. Moreover, he opposed all separations, that of reason and faith, of nature and grace, of natural religion and revealed religion, the separation of the philosopher and the Christian, of private man and public man. He saw in all these [separations] a resurgence of Manichean dualism and he had fought all these with, the supreme argument, the law formed by Christ. Therefore, it is in all truth, writing to [Minister of the Interior] the Count of Presigny, that he could render this testimony:
'We have nothing in common with the theorists of disunion and opposition of two orders, temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural. We struggle, on the contrary, with all our strength against these doctrines of separation which is leading to the denial of religion itself and of revealed religion.'"
Fr. de St. Just returns at this point and introduces us to what is perhaps Msgr. Pie's strongest language, with regard to this entire subject:
"To this doctrine of the Church, which Msgr. Pie brought to the mind of the rulers of nations, the liberals would oppose acts favoring separation.
"Certain countries, Belgium and America, for example, haven't they proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and doesn't the Church enjoy a more complete liberty under such a system?"
Cardinal Pie responded firmly to this question:
'THE AMERICAN AND BELGIUM SYSTEM, this system of philosophical-political indifference, shall eternally be a bastard system" (pp. 122-124 in Fr. de St. Just's book) (Selected Writings of Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October, 2007, pp. 21-23.)
None other than Pope Saint Pius X used the writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers to help him explicate Catholic Social Teaching as a bishop in Mantua, Italy, and Venice, Italy, before he did so upon his elevation to the Throne of Saint Peter on August 3, 1903:
"[St.] Pius X, giving audience in the French seminary, declared to have 'often read and re-read' the works of Cardinal Pie . . . . This veneration of [St.] Pius X for the great Bishop of Poitiers is demonstrated for us by this account found in Canon [Paul] Vigue's 'Select Pages of Cardinal Pie': "A priest from Poitiers has recalled that one day he had the honor of having been introduced into the cabinet of the Supreme Pontiff, [St.] Pius X, in the company of a religious who was also from Poitiers. 'Oh! the diocese of Poitiers," the Holy Father exclaimed, raising his hands, when he heard the name Poitiers mentioned. "I have almost the entire works of your Cardinal,' the saintly Pontiff continued, 'and, for years, there has hardly been a day that I have not read some of its pages.' (Selected Writings of Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October 2007, testimonial pages.)
Our Lord provided His Apostles with a forewarning about the events of His Passion and Death. Their eyes, however, were blinded as they did not have yet a full understanding of what He meant when He told them that He was going to fulfill the prophecies that were written about Him. All but one of them ran away while He redeemed us on the wood of the Holy Cross, and even the first pope himself, Saint Peter, thrice denied knowing Him before he repented. The Apostles, save for Saint John the Evangelist, were fearful.
Our Lady gave strength and comfort to Saint John the Evangelist at the foot of the Cross, and she stands ever ready to give that same strength and comfort to us during our own personal crosses and during this time that is redolent of the Roman Empire’s overt persecution of the first Catholics as a counterfeit church preaches all that is opposed to what her Divine Son has taught, revealed and entrusted to the infallible protection of His Catholic Church.
There is nothing to fear.
There are only crosses to be borne with love and prayers to be said to Our Lady for forbearance during these truly tumultuous times.
Our Lady’s Holy Rosary vanquished the Albigenses.
Our Lady’s Holy Rosary vanquished the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto and at the Gates of Vienna.
Our Lady’s Holy Rosary kept Calvinist fleets from invading Peru in the Sixteenth Century and The Philippines in the Seventeenth Century.
Our Lady’s Holy Rosary forced the Red Army to withdraw voluntarily from half of Austria in 1955, one of only two times between 1945 and 1989 that it withdrew from any territory it had occupied by force.
Why do we doubt that Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary will vanquish the enemies of our own personal salvation and of her Divine Son’s Social Kingship over men and nations?
Why do we doubt that Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary will vanquish the lords of conciliarism and make them but mere footnotes in the history of heresiarchs?
Pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary, and remember these words of Pope Saint Pius X:
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.
Who is organizing such processions today when they are needed even more than in times past? Who has the courage and the desire to lose everything to do so in honor of the Mother God to whose Immaculate Heart has been entrusted the cause of world peace by none other that her Divine Son Himself, Christ the King.
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, socialism, communism, capitalism, 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.
Pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and pray it well for the conversion of all men and all nations to her Divine Son’s true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us.
Viva Cristo Rey!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Appendix A
Excerpts from Archbishop John Ireland’s Sermon in Honor of the Silver Jubilee of the Episcopacy of James Cardinal Gibbons
(Taken from a previous commentary, part of which is included below)
Most Eminent Cardinal - Brethren of the Clergy and of the Laity: Twenty-five years in exalted office, a bishop, a chieftain of bishops, in the Catholic Church, in America, in the latter days of this nineteenth century of the Christian era! Great the opportunities and weighty the responsibilities.
Of those years what record should I, who revere and love the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, fain have to write? Should it be that they went by without harm done or good prevented, without blemish or reproach? This, whatever its value along the dark lines of frail humanity, is, at best, but the story of the talent wrapped up in napkin folds and securely guarded from misuse. Not this record did Christ expect from apostles, and from this pulpit I will not speak it.
Should the record be that of common duties performed in zeal and loyalty, of useful ministry in blessing and ordaining, in building temples and asylums, in exhorting souls unto their salvation? This record would be that of the ten hundred; it merits no special praise; it teaches no special lesson, and it shall not be the theme of this evening.
The Common! We are surfeited with it.
Let others tell of the many. I wish to tell of the few. I am tired of the common; I am angry with it. If I am myself compelled to plod over its wearying pathways, I want, at least, to see others shun them, to see men rise far above their singular thoughts and singular deeds freshen human life and give it power to place itself in those high altitudes wherein is born progress. The common never puts humanity forward, never begets a great movement; nor does it save humanity when grave peril comes upon it. The common! We are surfeited with it; it have made our souls torpid and our limbs rigid. Under the guise of goodness it is a curse. The want in the world, the want in the Church, to-day as at other times, to-day as never before, is of men among men, of men who see further than others, rise higher than others, act more boldly than others. They need not be numerous. The never were numerous. But, while the few, they take with them the multitude and save humanity. The one man of sufficient grandeur of soul and firmness of hand saves a whole country; the one man saves the whole Church.
This evening it is my coveted privilege to honor a man among men. The record of the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore! I speak it with pride and exultation; it is the record I should have traced for my ideal bishop and leader of men in these solemn times through which the Church is passing.
The New Era Has Come: The Church Needs to Adapt Herself To It
The times are solemn. In no epoch of history, since the beginning of the Christian era, did changes so profound and so far-reaching occur.There is in the physical sphere of human activity a complete revolution. Discoveries and inventions have opened to us a new material world. Social and political conditions have been transformed. Intellectual curiosity is intense and peers with keenest eye into the recesses of sky and earth. Intellectual ambition, maddened by wondrous successes in many fields, puts on daring pinions and challenges all limitations of knowledge. The human heart is emboldened to the strangest dreams and frets itself into desperate efforts in presence of all barriers to the completion of its desires. Let things be new, is the watchword of the present humanity, and to make things new is its strong resolve. To this end are pledged its most fierce activities, which, in whatever part of man’s realm they are exercised, have their illustration in the stream and electricity of the new material creation.
In the midst of these times the Catholic Church moves and works, professing, as her charter obliges her, to conquer minds and hearts, individuals and society. Her mission to the world is what it was for long centuries: but the world wears a new aspect. The Church sails upon the waters of the same ocean upon whose bosom she has glided since her first departure from Palestine: but the new winds trouble those waters and toss them into unusual billows. No long argument is needed to show that there ought to be new movements of the helm in the Ship of State and new unfurlings of canvas from her masts.
Now is the opportunity for great and singular men among the sons of God’s Church. To-day old-time routine is fatal; to-day the common is worn-out senility. The crisis demands the new, the extraordinary, and with it the Catholic Church will score the grandest of her victories in the grandest of history’s ages.
Oh, just an interjection here. What was it that I wrote over four years ago in Modernism Repackaged as Newness? Something about "new," wasn't it? Yes, I believe so. Jorge Mario Bergoglio wants "newness," which means he wants to recycle old heresies.
Back to John Ireland, thank you very much:
There Is A Discord Between Age and Church. Where the Fault Lies
“There is a discord between the age and the Church.” I recall the fact with sorrow. The interests of society and of religion suffer, while misunderstanding and separation last. The peace of harmony is the price of well-being and of progress.
The fault lies with the age and with the Church, or rather with spokesmen of the age and spokesmen of the Church. Age and Church, rightly apprehended, are in no manner at war. The age, as it is represented to us, is at fault. Elated with its material and intellectual successes, it is proud and exaggerates its powers. It imagines that the natural, which has served it so well, is all sufficient; it tends to the exclusion of the supernatural; it puts on the cloak of secularism. In it worship of the new, which the march of progress brings to it, whatever is old is suspected. It asks why its church may not be new as well as its chemistry or its science of mechanics. A church bearing on her front the marks of nineteen centuries is in its eyes out of date and out of place. Pride and thoughtlessness are the evil and misleading characteristics of the age.
The Church, as she comes before us in the speech and actions of churchmen, deserves her share of reproach. I speak as a Catholic with sincere love for the Catholic Church. I know the divine elements in the Church which Christ has made the repository of truth and grace, and I have full faith that those elements are at all times guarded under the unerring breathings of of the Holy Spirit. But I know, too, the human elements in the Church. Men in the Church retain their human parts, and upon their wisdom and their energy very much of the Church’s outward weal is made dependent. The Church has had her epochs, differing one from another in light and glory, as Catholic pastors and Catholic people scanned the world with clearer sight and unsheathed the spiritual sword with greater alacrity. The dependence of the Church upon her human elements is often too easily forgotten although the Church herself authoritatively teaches that undue reliance upon divine grace is a sin of presumption.
The Mistakes Of Churchmen In Not Seeking To Conciliate The Age
I am not afraid to say that, during the century whose sun is now setting, men in the Church have made the mistake of being to too slow to understand the new age and too slow to extend toward it the conciliatory hand of friendship. They were not without their excuses, the strength of which I respect. The Church in her divine elements is unchangeable, supremely conservative. Her dread of change, so righteous is a degree, is likely to be carried beyond the legitimate frontier and made to cover ground where change is proper. The existence under most inauspicious and repellent form. The revolution of 1789 whose waters, rushing and destructive as those of the maddest mountain torrent, were created with the crimson of blood, was the loud signal of the birth of the new era. The standard-bearers of the age often bore aloft the insignia of impiety and of social anarchy. Certain men, as Lamennais, who attempted, an alliance between the age and the Church, were imprudent in speech, and in their impatience they courted failure for themselves and discouragement for their allies. But with all these excuses churchmen thought and acted too slowly. They failed to grasp the age, to Christianize its aspirations and to guide its forward march; it passed beyond them. There were the few Lacordaires, who recognized and proclaimed the duties of the hour; timid companions abandoned them; reactionaries accused them of dangerous liberalism, of semi-heresy, and they were forced to be silent. The many saw but the vices of the age, which they readily anathematized; its good and noble tendencies they ignore and denied. The age was for them the dark world against which Christ has warned his followers. The task of winning it to the gospel was considered a forlorn hope. It was a task to be accomplished only through some stupendous miracle from heaven, and until the miracle came the ministers of Christ withdrew, as into winter quarters, into sacristies and sanctuaries, where surrounded by a small band of chosen ones, they could guard themselves and their friends from the all-pervading contagion. The age, abandoned to itself and to false and mischievous guides, estranged each year more and more from the Church on account of the Church’s isolation of her energies, irritated by her unfriendliness, became hardened in its secularism and taught itself to despise and hate religion. This deplorable condition prevailed in some countries more that in others; but from none was it totally absent. The Church had seemingly furled her flag of battle, her flag of victory.
The Opportunity For The Great And Singular Churchman.
It was a mistake and a misfortune. God and teach all nations, the Christ has said once for all times, and in obedience to these words the first apostles rushed into the roman Empire, speaking to the sages of Athens on Mars’ Hill, to the patricians and senators of Rome in the very courts of emperors, to the slaves in their huts, and the roman Empire was christianized. Radically, erring and evil-doing as the present age may have been, the methods and zeal of the early apostles would have won it to the Saviour. But, in veriest fact, the present age, pagan in its language and in the excesses of its qualities, is in its depths instinct with Christian emotions; it worships unwittingly at Christian shrines and awaits but the warm contact with the living Christian religion to avow itself Christian.
I indicate the opportunity for the great and singular churchman. His work is to bridge the deep valley separating the age from the Church, to clear off the clouds which prevent the one from seeing the realities of the other, to bring the Church to the age, and the age to the Church.
We must know that the age and the Church are not hopelessly apart.
The Bad And The Good In The Age
The age has, assuredly, its errors and its sins, and these the Church never can condone. With the age conceived as the embodiment of errors and sins the Church cannot be reconciled. But these are the accidents, not the essentials, in the make-up of the age. For my part, I see in the present age one of the mighty upheavals which occur from time to time in humanity, causing and marking the ascending stages in its continuous progress. Humanity strengthened by centuries of reflection and of toil, nourished and permeated by principles of Christian truth, is lifting upward its whole mass to higher regions of light and of liberty, and demanding a fuller and more universal enjoyment of its God-given rights. All this is praiseworthy; all this is beautiful and noble. It is all this that we are asked to accept when we accept the age, and in accepting the age we give ourselves the right the chide it for its defects–we put ourselves in a position to correct them.
Yes, yes, another brief interjection here.
The sins of "the age" are indeed of its essence. They were in 1893 and continue to be now the direct consequence of the "age" of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry, the "age" of concilairism's" official "reconciliation" with the principles of the "new era inaugurated in 1789." Gee, who was wrote about that "reconciliation" thirty-four years ago now? I got it:
Let us be content to say here that the text [of Gaudium et Spes] serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. Only from this perspective can we understand, on the one hand, the ghetto-mentality, of which we have spoken above; only from this perspective can we understand, on the other hand, the meaning of the remarkable meeting of the Church and the world. Basically, the word "world" means the spirit of the modern era, in contrast to which the Church's group-consciousness saw itself as a separate subject that now, after a war that had been in turn both hot and cold, was intent on dialogue and cooperation. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382.)
Does this mean that the Council should be revoked? Certainly not. It means only that the real reception of the Council has not yet even begun. What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it. This becomes clear precisely in the history of the influence of Gaudium et spes. What was identified with the Council was, for the most part, the expression of an attitude that did not coincide with the statements to be found in the text itself, although it is recognizable as a tendency in its development and in some of its individual formulations. The task is not, therefore, to suppress the Council but to discover the real Council and to deepen its true intention in the light of the present experience. That means that there can be no return to the Syllabus, which may have marked the first stage in the confrontation with liberalism and a newly conceived Marxism but cannot be the last stage. In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that the "demolition of the bastions" is a long-overdue task. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 391.)
There's a lot of invoking the spirit of John Ireland that's gone on in our times. And speaking of that deceased devil, let us return to his heretical screed:
The Invariable And the Variable; The Permanent And The Transient In The Church
The Church, too, has her accidents and her essentials. We must be able to distinguish the former from the latter; we must be prepared, while jealously guarding the essentials, to let got the accidents as circumstances of time and place require. What the church at any time was, certain people hold she ever must be. They do her much harm, making her rigid and unbending, incapable of adapting herself to new and changing surroundings. The Church, created by Christ for all ages, lives in every age and of every age. We find consequently, in her outward belongings the variable and the contingent. The Church, at one time imperialistic in her political alliances, was at another feudalistic; but she never committed herself in principle to imperialism or feudalism. She spoke Greek in Athens and Latin in Rome, and her sons wore the chlamys or the toga; but she was never an institution confined to Greece or to Italy. In later days she lisped the nascent languages of Goths and Franks, and showed in her steppings through their lands not a little of their uncultured bearing and of their defective civilization without being a Gothic or Frank product, limited in life and conditions to the life and conditions of her contemporaries. Her scientific knowledge at different epochs was scant as that of those epochs; her social legislation and customs, as their, were rude and tentative. She was simply in her human elements partaking of the life of her epochs, her divine elements always remaining the self-same, however shifting the mundane scenes around her. Two or three centuries ago, she was courtly and aristocratic under the temporal sway of the Fifth Charles of Spain or the Fourteenth Louis of France; but this again was a passing phase in her existence, and she may be at other times as democratic in her demeanor as the most earnest democracy would expect. Her canon law, which is the expression of her adaptability to circumstances, received the impress at one time of the Justinian code, at another that of the capitularies of Charlemagne, at another that of the Hapsburg or Bourbon edicts: but she was never mummified in Justinian or Bourbon moulds, and her canon law may be as American as it was Roman, as much the reflection of the twentieth century as it ever was of the middle ages. Were not all this most true the Church would not be catholic , as her founder was catholic, the teacher and Saviour of all ages and of all nations. Let us be as broad and as catholic in our conceptions of the Church as Christ was, and we shall find no difficulty in recognizing her fitness to all lands and to all ages–the past as well as the present, and the presents and the future as well as the past.
This a complete misrepresentation of the history of Holy Mother Church, she who lacks nothing in her Divine Constitution and who has raised to her altars civil potentates such as Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Casimir, Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Wenceslaus of Bohemia, Saint Henry the Emperor, Saint Canute of Denmark and Saint Louis IX, King of France, among others. These monarchs ruled in behalf of the one and only Sovereign, Christ the King.
Sure, there were prelates who did the bidding of corrupt kings during the era of Christendom. So what? Americanist bishops and their conciliar successors have done the same thing in the United States of America as they have sought to make their own "reconciliation" with the spirit of the age. The bad example during Christendom was the result of fallen human nature. The accommodations in the United States of America made to statist politicians who support all manner of moral and social evils have been part and parcel of the Americanist approach to public policy by means of "dialogue" and "discussion," if not outright surrender.
No sale, John Ireland. No sale. We're not buying the self-serving misrepresentation of history that you're selling. No sale. While Holy Mother Church indeed has adapted herself to the specific conditions in which her children have found themselves in order to teach and sanctify them, she never concedes a thing to principles or practices that are opposed to Divine Revelation and thus to the temporal and eternal good of souls. No sale, Ireland. No sale.
The Rhine flows into the Tiber, to be sure. So does the Potomac.
Back to the heretic Ireland:
The New Crusade–Bringing Into Close Contact Church And Age
What! the Church of the living God, the Church of ten thousand victories over pagans and barbarians, over false philosophies and heresies, over defiant kings and unruly peoples–the great, freedom-loving, philanthropic, truth-giving Catholic Church–this Church afraid of the nineteenth century! afraid of any century! not seeing in the nineteenth the fervent ebullitions of noblest sentiments, the germinations of her own Christlike plantings; this Church not eager for the fray, not precipitating herself with force irresistible upon this modern world to claim it, to love it, to foster and admire or to correct and cure, to own it for Christ, and with her impetuous arm to lift it to the very summit of its highest aspirations, to which only the Church’s aid this panting, hoping, despairing world can every reach! Far, far from Catholics be the chilling, fatal, un-Catholic thought!
I preach the new, the most glorious crusade. Church and age! Unite them in the name of humanity, in the name of God.
In the "name of humanity"? This could come straight from one of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's endless screeds against the Catholic Faith. Indeed, the conciliar "popes" have long spoken of a "new humanity," and the wretched Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul the Sick did so with the same kind of glee as the man who was installed as a lay Jesuit presbyter during his false "pontificate," Jorge Mario Bergoglio:
All right, back to John Ireland:
Church and age! Bring them into close contact; they pulsate alike; the God of humanity works in one, the God of supernatural revelations works in the other–in both the self-same God.
The Characteristics of The Age--Its Ambition of Knowledge.
Let us note the chief characteristics of the age. The age is ambitious of knowledge. Its searchings take no rest and submit to no limitations of territory. Be it so. The Catholic Church proclaims that all truth, natural and supernatural, is from God, and that the mind, whose proper aliment is truth, grows more God-like as it absorbs truth in more generous proportions. Two sources of knowledge there are according to Catholic teaching, both from God,--the individual reason of man and the voice of God in revelation. Between reason and revelation there never can be a contradiction, the so-called war between Church and science being a war between the misrepresentations of science and the misrepresentations of faith, or rather between certain ignorant scientists and certain ignorant theologians. The Church desires the spread of intellectual light among all men and over all regions of truth; the age in its tireless studying of nature does the work of the Church. The discoveries of the age, whether in minute aminalcules or in vast fiery orbs, demonstrate God. They show forth through all the laws of the universe an absolute cause, all-wise, all-powerful, eternal, and this cause is God. The fruits of historical inquisitions, of all social and moral meditations, give us Christ rising from the dead and raising the world from the dead. They give us Christ's Church as the enduring embodiment of Christ's mission. The knowledge of the age! The age has not a sufficiency of it, and the need of the hour, the duty of the Church, is to urge the age to deeper researches, to more extensive surveyings, leaving untouched no particle of matter that may conceal a secret, no incident of history, no act in the life of humanity that may solve a problem. The knowledge of the age! the Church blesses it; the Church aids its onward growth with all her might, with all her light.
It Is An Age of Liberty--the Age of the Democracy.
It is an age of liberty, civil and political; it is the age of the democracy, when the whole people, tired of the unrestricted way of sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, and exercise with more or less directness the power was always their primarily by divine ordinance. The age of the democracy! The Catholic Church, I am sure, has no fear of the democracy, this flowering of her own most sacred principles of the equality, fraternity, and liberty of all men, in Christ and through Christ. These principles are spread upon every page of the gospel. From the moment they were first confided to the Church they have been ceaselessly leavening minds and hearts towards the fullest recognition of rights and the dignity among all men, toward the elevation of the multitudes of men, and the enjoyment by them of freedom from unnecessary restrictions, of social happiness mingled with as few sorrows as earth's planet permits. The whole history of the Catholic Church is the record of the enfranchisement of the slave, the curbing of royal tyranny, the defence of the poor, of the people, of woman, of all the social entities that pride and passion choose to trample upon. The great theologians of the Church, an Aquinas, a Suarez, provide in their teachings complete foundations for the political democracy, which assumes in the presume age its plenary form. They assert and prove that all political power comes from God through the people, whose delegates kings and princes are, and that when rulers become tyrants the inalienable right of revolution is reserved to the people. The Church lives under all forms of government. When ratified by the people all forms of legitimate; but the government which more than another is that of the people, by the people, and for the people, is the one where the Church of the people, the Catholic Church, breathes air most congenial to her principles of her heart.
What amazing blasphemy. What heresy.
Archbishop John Ireland’s views are shared by the likes of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and the lords of Modernism such as Ratzinger/Benedict and Bergoglio in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
The sovereignty of the people?
All political power comes from God through the people?
This is a direct misrepresentation of Catholic teaching and it was a slap in the face to the reigning pope at the time that John Ireland preached this sermon, Pope Leo XIII, who wrote the following about the "sovereignty of the people" in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:
The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude; which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and to inflame many passions, but which lacks all reasonable proof, and all power of insuring public safety and preserving order. Indeed, from the prevalence of this teaching, things have come to such a pass that may hold as an axiom of civil jurisprudence that seditions may be rightfully fostered. For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are as changeable as the will of the people, so that risk of public disturbance is ever hanging over our heads.
To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)
John Ireland, you were busted in your day by Pope Leo XIII. You knew that this was the case. You did not care. As a proud American who set the stage for the plague represented by such people as those who think themselves fit to send e-mails about a “Catholic Spring” that has everything to do with Antichrist, not Christ the King.
Ireland’s speech continued with a praise of “social justice” and “material progress”:
It Is An Age of Social Justice; It is An Age of Material Progress
It is an age of social battlings for justice to all men, for the right of all men to live in the frugal comfort becoming rational creatures, to all of whom birth in the world gives them title of a sufficiency of the things of the world. Very well; is not this sudden revolution which has come upon men in the plea for social justice and social comfort the loud outburst of the cry which has ever been going forth from the bosom of the Church since the words were spoken by the Founder: "Seek first the king of God and His justice, and all things else should be added unto you"? It is not sufficiently made public that the principles underlying the social movement of the times in all its legitimate demands are the principles constantly taught in Catholic theological schools, as, for instance, this chief one proclaimed by the Cardinal Manning, to the horror of the aristocratic England, that in case of extreme need of food all goods become common property. Catholics have of late been so accustomed to lock up their teachings in temple and seminary that when the same teachings appear in active evolution upon the broad sea of humanity they do not recognize them; they even fear and disown them.
It is an age of material progress, of inventions, of the subjugation of nature's forces to the service of man, of the building up of the man over all irrational creatures. Does Church in these things condemn the age? It is her doctrines that the earth was given to man that he dominates over it. Progress of every kind the Church blesses; for progress along the lines of all human activities and human uses is the divine ordering,--stagnation and inactivity calling down from God reprobation, as we learn from the parable of the talents. (Archbishop John Ireland, A Sermon of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Episcopal Consecration of His Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. Full text found in The Voice of the Church, a book published by the Bishops of the United States of America in 1899, pp. 103-113. We were given this book by a friend of ours who believed that it would be of use in my work. It is a treasure of Americanism mixed in with various articles that are authentically Catholic. In other words, it was very representative of the state of confusion that existed in the minds of Catholics in the United States of America at the end of the Nineteenth Century, a state of confusion that has now been spread worldwide as a result of conciliarism's embrace of "the age.")
Well, I think it prudent, wise and necessary to call upon three popes named Pius at this juncture:
80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.- -Allocution "Jamdudum cernimus," March 18, 1861. (Pope Pius IX, The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864.)
It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: 'These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.' On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason'; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.' Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: 'Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)
Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary,that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)
Those want to indemnify false teaching of the likes of John Ireland are, whether or not they realize it, in league the devil as it is he who desires Holy Mother Church to be adapted to an "age" that has been born and is now foundering as the direct consequences of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the subsequent rise of Judeo-Masonry that followed in its wake.
The world of Modernity is premised upon the lie that it is possible for men to be well-ordered in their own personal lives that they can live within the framework of well-ordered republics. To profess believe in Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ "personally" without acknowledging His Social Kingship over our nations is, to quote Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie, the Bishop of Poitiers, France, from 1849 to 1880, is to say that He is not God:
"If Jesus Christ," proclaims Msgr. Pie in a magnificent pastoral instruction, "if Jesus Christ Who is our light whereby we are drawn out of the seat of darkness and from the shadow of death, and Who has given to the world the treasure of truth and grace, if He has not enriched the world, I mean to say the social and political world itself, from the great evils which prevail in the heart of paganism, then it is to say that the work of Jesus Christ is not a divine work. Even more so: if the Gospel which would save men is incapable of procuring the actual progress of peoples, if the revealed light which is profitable to individuals is detrimental to society at large, if the scepter of Christ, sweet and beneficial to souls, and perhaps to families, is harmful and unacceptable for cities and empires; in other words, if Jesus Christ to whom the Prophets had promised and to Whom His Father had given the nations as a heritage, is not able to exercise His authority over them for it would be to their detriment and temporal disadvantage, it would have to be concluded that Jesus Christ is not God". . . .
"To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say that the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine."
In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:
"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies."
Fr. de St. Just asks, in conclusion:
"Could it be proven in clearer terms that social atheism conduces to individualistic atheism?". . . .
"Neither in His Person," Card, Pie said in a celebrated pastoral instruction, "nor in the exercise of His rights, can Jesus Christ be divided, dissolved, split up; in Him the distinction of natures and operations can never be separated or opposed; the divine cannot be incompatible to the human, nor the human to the divine. On the contrary, it is the peace, the drawing together, the reconciliation; it is the very character of union which has made the two things one: 'He is our peace, Who hat made both one. . .' (Eph. 2:14). This is why St. John told us: 'every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God. And this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh: and is now already in the world' (1 John 4:3; cf. also 1 John 2:18, 22; 2 John: 7). "So then, Card. Pie continues, "when I hear certain talk being spread around, certain pithy statements (i.e., 'Separation of Church and State,' for one, and the enigmatic axiom 'A free Church in a free State,' for another) prevailing from day to day, and which are being introduced into the heart of societies, the dissolvent by which the world must perish, I utter this cry of alarm: Beware the Antichrist."
Fr. de St. Just adds:
"Accordingly, the Bishop of Poitiers had always fought against THE SEPARATION OF Church and State. Moreover, he opposed all separations, that of reason and faith, of nature and grace, of natural religion and revealed religion, the separation of the philosopher and the Christian, of private man and public man. He saw in all these [separations] a resurgence of Manichean dualism and he had fought all these with, the supreme argument, the law formed by Christ. Therefore, it is in all truth, writing to [Minister of the Interior] the Count of Presigny, that he could render this testimony:
'We have nothing in common with the theorists of disunion and opposition of two orders, temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural. We struggle, on the contrary, with all our strength against these doctrines of separation which is leading to the denial of religion itself and of revealed religion.'"
Fr. de St. Just returns at this point and introduces us to what is perhaps Msgr. Pie's strongest language, with regard to this entire subject:
"To this doctrine of the Church, which Msgr. Pie brought to the mind of the rulers of nations, the liberals would oppose acts favoring separation.
"Certain countries, Belgium and America, for example, haven't they proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and doesn't the Church enjoy a more complete liberty under such a system?"
Cardinal Pie responded firmly to this question:
'THE AMERICAN AND BELGIUM SYSTEM, this system of philosophical-political indifference, shall eternally be a bastard system" (pp. 122-124 in Fr. de St. Just's book) (Selected Writings of Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October, 2007, pp. 21-23.)
None other than Pope Saint Pius X used the writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers to help him explicate Catholic Social Teaching as a bishop in Mantua, Italy, and Venice, Italy, before he did so upon his elevation to the Throne of Saint Peter on August 3, 1903:
"[St.] Pius X, giving audience in the French seminary, declared to have 'often read and re-read' the works of Cardinal Pie . . . . This veneration of [St.] Pius X for the great Bishop of Poitiers is demonstrated for us by this account found in Canon [Paul] Vigue's 'Select Pages of Cardinal Pie': "A priest from Poitiers has recalled that one day he had the honor of having been introduced into the cabinet of the Supreme Pontiff, [St.] Pius X, in the company of a religious who was also from Poitiers. 'Oh! the diocese of Poitiers," the Holy Father exclaimed, raising his hands, when he heard the name Poitiers mentioned. "I have almost the entire works of your Cardinal,' the saintly Pontiff continued, 'and, for years, there has hardly been a day that I have not read some of its pages.' (Selected Writings of Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October 2007, testimonial pages.)
What was good enough for Pope Saint Pius X has been rejected by the conciliar revolutionaries. This means that the Catholic Church is not indefectible, that our true popes taught Catholicism in a “time-conditioned” manner, and that the teaching of the “past” had to be “corrected.” Where was the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, as this teaching was being promulgated? Did God the Holy Ghost “hide” this teaching from the eyes of our true popes until the “blinders” were lifted at the “Second” Vatican Council?
Preposterous.
Yet it is that our true popes have warned us of the dire consequences that would befall men if they and their nations endorsed the falsehoods of “liberty of conscience” and “religious liberty."
The astounding events unfolding before our very eyes are the result, proximately speaking, of living under the adversary's rules. Indeed, the adversary inspired the lecherous drunkard named Father Martin Luther, cheered on as he was by the Talmudists who happily spread his heretical tracts, to overthrow the Divine Plan that God Himself created to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church. Anyone who thinks that there is any kind of naturalist "solution" to the chaos in which we live is, in plain English, nuts. (Look, I will never live in New York again, and we have spent all of thirty hours there, driving time included, in nearly five years. However, New Yorkers are prone to say one another when they believe someone is wrong, "You're nuts.")
Our Lord has given us a way out of this chaos, and it runs through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
This is why Our Lady, acting at the behest of her Divine Son as she does not act on her own, appeared to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and Lucia dos Santos one hundred years ago tomorrow. Our Lady told them the following on July 13, 1917:
"I want you to come here on the 13th of next month, [August] to continue to pray the Rosary every day in honour of Our Lady of the Rosary, in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war, because only she can help you."
"Continue to come here every month. In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want, and I will perform a miracle for all to see and believe."
Lucia made some requests for sick people, to which Mary replied that she would cure some but not others, and that all must say the rosary to obtain such graces, before continuing: "Sacrifice yourselves for sinners, and say many times, especially when you make some sacrifice: O Jesus, it is for love of You, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary."
"You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.
"To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world."
Mary specifically told Lucia not to tell anyone about the secret at this stage, apart from Francisco, before continuing: "When you pray the Rosary, say after each mystery: 'O my Jesus, forgive us, save us from the fire of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are most in need.' "
Lucia asked if there was anything more, and after assuring her that there was nothing more, Mary disappeared off into the distance. (Our Lady's Words at Fatima.)
Our Lady promised on July 13 1917, to return to request the consecration of Russia by the Holy Father. She came to visit Sister Lucia in Tuy, Spain, on June 13, 1929, to specify the terms of this consecration:
"The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father, in union with all the Bishops in the world, to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means. There are so many souls whom the Justice of God condemns for sins committed against me, that I have come to ask reparation: sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray." (Our Lady's Words at Fatima.)
Our Lady herself said that “There are so many souls whom the Justice of God condemns for sins committed against” her, the Theotokos, “that I have come to ask for reparation.”
We must live more penitentially as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
We must accept the penances that Our Lord sends us as the means to make reparation for our own many sins, which have worsened the state of the Church Militant on earth and the state of the world at large far more than we want to understand or accept, and for those of the whole world. We may live in a world that observes the adversary's rules. We do not want ourselves or others to live under the adversary's grip for all eternity in hell. We must make reparation for our sins and those of the world.
We must realize that each cross that we are asked to bear has been specifically fashioned for by the loving hand of God from all eternity and that His own Most Blessed Mother will send us the graces to carry our crosses with joy, serenity and gratitude as the means by which we can give honor and glory to Him through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.
Our Rosaries will be more fruitful the more that we live in accord with the Fatima Message of penance and reparation.
Our Rosaries will provide consolations to us--and to others that we may only meet in eternity--if we ask Our Lady for the graces to meditate on the mysteries contained therein as we think of her indispensable role in the economy of salvation.
What a great love God has to give us such a Mother, our very own Blessed Mother, to help us erring sinners to save our souls and to view the world and everything in it exclusively through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith.
Appendix B
From Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani on the Modernist Methodology to Dispense with the True Social Teaching of the Catholic Church
Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the Pro-Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition during last five years of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII (he continued in the Holy Office and in its successor in the conciliar church, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until his retirement on January 8, 1958), was an unflagging foe of the concept of "religious liberty" being promoted by an unapologetic Americanist, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. He wrote a a masterful treatise against this lie of Modernity that was popularized first and foremost in the supposedly "free" United States of America:
Here the problem presents itself of how the Church and the lay state are to live together. Some Catholics are propagating ideas with regard to this point which are not quite correct. Many of these Catholics undoubtedly love the Church and rightly intend to find a mode of possible adaptation to the circumstances of the times. But it is none the less true that their position reminds one of that of the faint-hearted soldier who wants to conquer without fighting, or of that of the simple, unsuspecting person who accepts a hand, treacherously held out to him, without taking account of the fact that this hand will subsequently pull him across the Rubicon towards error and injustice.
The first mistake of these people is precisely that of not accepting fully the "arms of truth" and the teaching which the Roman Pontiffs, in the course of this last century, and in particular the reigning Pontiff, Pius XII, by means of encyclicals, allocutions and instructions of all kinds, have given to Catholics on this subject.
To justify themselves, these people affirm that, in the body of teaching given in the Church, a distinction must be made between what is permanent and what is transitory, this latter being due to the influence of particular passing conditions. Unfortunately, however, they include in this second zone the principles laid down in the Pontifical documents, principles on which the teaching of the Church has remained constant, as they form part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine.
In this matter, the pendulum theory, elaborated by certain writers in an attempt to sift the teaching set forth in Encyclical Letters at different times, cannot be applied. "The Church," it has been written, "takes account of the rhythm of the world's history after the fashion of a swinging pendulum which, desirous of keeping the proper measure, maintains its movement by reversing it when it judges that it has gone as far as it should.... From this point of view a whole history of the Encyclicals could be written. Thus in the field of Biblical studies, the Encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, comes after the Encyclicals Spiritus Paraclitus and Providentissimus. In the field of Theology or Politics, the Encyclicals, Summi Pontificatus, Non abbiamo bisogno and Ubi Arcano Deo, come after the Encyclical, Immortale Dei."
Now if this were to be understood in the sense that the general and fundamental principles of public Ecclesiastical Law, solemnly affirmed in the Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, are merely the reflection of historic moments of the past, while the swing of the pendulum of the doctrinal Encyclicals of Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII has passed in the opposite direction to different positions, the statement would have to be qualified as completely erroneous, not only because it misrepresents the teaching of the Encyclicals themselves, but also because it is theoretically inadmissible. In the Encyclical Letter, Humani Generis, the reigning Pontiff teaches us that we must recognize in the Encyclicals the ordinary magisterium of the Church: "Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand assent, in that, when writing such Letters, the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their teaching authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say "He who heareth you heareth Me" (St. Luke 10:16); and generally what is expounded and inculcated in Encyclical Letters already belongs for other reasons to Catholic doctrine."
Because they are afraid of being accused of wanting to return to the Middle Ages, some of our writers no longer dare to maintain the doctrinal positions that are constantly affirmed in the Encyclicals as belonging to the life and legislation of the Church in all ages. For them is meant the warning of Pope Leo XIII who, recommending concord and unity in the combat against error, adds that "care must be taken never to connive, in anyway, at false opinions, never to withstand them less strenuously than truth allows." (Duties of the Catholic State in Regard to Religion.)
Appendix C
An Excerpt from “Then, Now, and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!”
Dr. Michael Kenny explained the direct involvement of Woodrow Wilson in the drafting of the provisions of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, tracing Wilson's beliefs right back to those of Joel R. Poinsett and the actions of the cipher known as James Buchanan, who served as President of the United States from March 4, 1857, to March 4, 1861:
It has been shown by documented proof that our first United States Envoy organized a Masonic political machine for the dominance of Mexico by ousting the Catholic Church and its culture from school and temple and the hearts of its people, and by securing therefor the armed forces of the United States at the price of half its territory and of preponderance over all.
We have also seen how the price was paid, and how from Buchanan to Wilson we furnished arms and armies and whatever other aid was requisite to empower bandit factions to eradicate religion and culture and civil liberties.
Mr. Wilson differed from his predecessors in making his intrusions work directly to this effect by empowering and sanctioning the Carranza Constitution of 1917. Mr. Yon Lind had wried him to bring he rule of intellectuals to an end. His own confidential agent to Carranza, a Methodist preacher named Silliman, wrote in like tone; and The United States Foreign Relation Papers of 1914., sq., which make humiliating reading, show their principals eager following these agents' advices' but Duval West of San Antonio, their only gent that told the truth, was recalled.
There no intellectuals at what they called the Constitutional Convention of Queretaro, but there were ex-lawyers, who, like the other members, had won representative right by pillaging distinctions, and were keen to concoct a legal contrivance that would guarantee their plunder and perpetuate the plundering. This they did in the 1917 "Constitution," an extension into organic law of the worst enactments in the Juarez Code against religion and liberty.
Though devoid of every constitutional character, having been imposed by self-nominated bandit chiefs who pistoled the few moderates into silence and never submitted it for ratification, this monstrous instrument has living interest today as the basis for Calles' organic and executive monstrosities, and as a Wilsonian legacy which no successor of Mr. Wilson had yet disowned and which the Secretary of his then empowering Navy is now sedulously guarding. How sedulously Mr. Daniels is caring in our name for the child of his fostering will appear when we have made some stud of this constitutional monster whose potencies Calles has actualized and applied systematically in totalitarian destructiveness.
The Juarez Code, though intentionally prohibitive of all religious rights, left loopholes here and there through which churchmen and others marked for despoilment might enter claims for possession or indemnity, and it failed to afford sufficient scope to the war chiefs of [Pancho] Villa pattern for legalized plunder. This the Carranza Constitution fully achieved; even though Carranza himself was more tool than the chieftain of the plunderers. Picked by the bandit chiefs whom our navy and army monies and diplomacies had lifted into power, the members of the convention represented but the motley forces we had armed and paid for, and certainly not a half million of the fifteen million population.
This crude misrepresentation achieved, however, one result of permanent and perilous importance. Dropping the smoke screen of "Constitutionalist," which had been thrown up to accommodate Mr. Wilson, they called themselves the National Revolutionary Party; and, claiming to represent all the people of Mexico they initiated the Calles dogma that the P.N.R. [later the P. R. I.] (Partido Nacional Revolucionario) was the one and only party permissible, and there cannot and must not be another. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 69-71.)
Carranza, grateful to Woodrow Wilson for engineering his rise to power, may have abandoned the practice of the Catholic Faith. Murdered that he was, and he did murder his own fair share of political opponents, he asked the Mexican Congress to amend Article 130 of the 1917 Constitution to permit "liberty of conscience." his plea fell on deaf ears. He knew his time was up, attempting to flee to Vera Cruz, found shot to death in a hut after the engineer of the train he was riding to escape from Mexico City had discovered that the track ahead had been torn up. Agents of Plutarco Elias Calles's immediate predecessor, Alvaro Obregon, are speculated to have bribed the three men guarding President Venustiano Carranza to shoot hit as he slept on May 21, 1920.
Bishop Kelley wrote as follows about this tragic man's end:
Later, when his portfolio was received by his family, they found in it a crucifix and a little religious medal. On the latter was the inscription: "Madre Mia Salve Me--Mother mine save me." He had done a brave thing to go before the Congress with a request to change the provisions of the Constitution and end the religious persecution. He must have known that it was a brave thing to do with enemies all around him, and Obregon, back by the C.R.O.M., in the filed against him. It can be said that for him that he kept his word to President Wilson at the cost of his life. Perhaps the memories of the old days in Saltillo when he ad respected religion, though he did not seem to practice it, had helped him to be brave. Certainly no revolutionist who understood the situation would have advised him to do what he did. Perhaps he felt that the end had come and that he could at last tell the truth. Perhaps he realized that since his own hand had unloosed the whirlwind, he had no right to complain if it sucked him into swirling death. (Bishop Francis Clement Kelley, Blood-Drenched Altars, published originally in 1935 by the Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, pp. 244-245.)
The die had been cast, however. The forces unleashed by Joel R. Poinsett in the 1820s would be powerful enough to seek a wholesale frontal assault on Christ the King and Our Lady of Guadalupe, who won Mexico for the Catholic Faith from the barbaric Aztecs, whose true ideological and religious descendants govern us in the "civilized" United States of America today to continue, albeit, at least for now, by less "nonviolent" means (although the innocent preborn and those being carved up alive in hospitals for their body members would disagree), the same crusade that was carried on with such zeal by the likes of Plutarco Elias Calles.
Appendix D
Orestes Brownson on Natural 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 F
Father Denis Fahey on Jewish Naturalism's War Against the Social Reign of Christ the King
The decay in the social acceptance of the divine plan for ordered life, since the thirteenth century, has had for inevitable consequence the gradual disappearance of supernatural influences and ideals from the political and economic life of nations. This is the first result. There is a second. The elimination of the supernatural from public life is making smooth the path for the coming of the natural messias. “He that is not with Me is against me.” (St. Matt. XII, 30). The world is not standing still and the once Christian nations have to choose between returning to the integral truth of the Catholic Church and falling more and more fully under the yoke of those who are systematically preparing for the advent of the natural messias. The supernatural Messias proclaimed the supremacy of the Catholic Church, His Mystical Body, which is both supernatural and supranational and respectful of the natural qualities and particular rôles of all nations. The natural messias can only have for end the subjection of all nations to the Jewish nation; for the refusal of the Jews, whose national organisation had been set up by God to prepare for Christ, to accept the supranational Church of Christ, inevitably leads to their setting up their nation as the highest embodiment of the divine order.
Calvary has then a twofold aspect. It is at one and the same time the rejection of the supernatural Messias with His programme, which is summed up in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, and the proclamation of a programme to be accomplished by the natural messias to come. In the Mystical Body of Christ all nations are on equal footing, each nation aiming at the temporal prosperity of its subjects so as not only not to hinder but to favour their attaining their supernatural end—union with the Blessed Trinity in supernatural life. The natural messias to whom the Jews look forward is to bring happiness to the world by the imposition of Jewish domination. It cannot be otherwise, given their messianic aspirations. Our Lord asked them to be the heralds of a supranational kingdom. Their refusal meant that they elected instead to impose their national form on the world, and they have put all their intense energy and tenacity into the struggle for the organisation of the future messianic age. Thus when any nation turns against the supernatural Messias it will be pulled in the direction of subjection to the natural messias. Satan has a wide view of things. He will be quite prepared to utilise German naturalism against our divine Lord. There is laughter in hell when human beings succumb once more to the temptation of the Garden of Eden and put themselves in the place of God, whether the new divinity be the Jewish race or any other race.
The Jewish ideal is interpreted differently by different Jews. The orthodox Jews want to return to Jerusalem, to rebuild the temple and to reinstitute their worship, while awaiting the coming of a personal Messias. The non-orthodox or Reform Jews have departed from the central hope of Judaism by rejecting belief in a personal messiah.1But they believe in the advent of a messias in the sense of a messianic age which will come through the leadership and domination of their race. “In general the Jews,” writes the Jew, Bernard Lazare, in his well-known work, L’Antisémitisme, “even the revolutionaries, have kept the Jewish spirit, and if they have given up religion and faith, they have nevertheless been formed, thanks to their ancestry and education, by the influence of Jewish nationalism. This is true in a very special way of the Jewish revolutionaries who lived in the first half of this [nineteenth] century. Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx are two typical examples.” This is true also of the Jews of high finance, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Kahns, the Schiffs, etc., etc. They are one with their people in the ideal of the domination of the race and, therefore, in opposition to the supernatural life coming from our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, according to them, attempted to turn aside the Jewish nation from its destined goal.
Does that mean that all Jews are bad men? Needless to say, it does not. There are Jews in whom may be seen excellent natural qualities, and the supernatural life of grace is poured out upon us all by our Lord, even upon those who reject Him. It does mean, however, that all Jews, in proportion as they are one with the leaders and rulers of their race, will oppose the influence of the supernatural life in society and will be an active ferment of naturalism. Let us take some examples from New York where the Jews are powerful. We read in the New York Jewish paper, Freiheit, of January 10th 1937: “According to the Jewish religion, the Pope is the enemy of the Jewish people by the very fact that he is the head of the Catholic Church. The Jewish religion is opposed to Christianity and to the Catholic Church in particular.” Again we find in the New York Jewish National Day of December 14th 1935: “The public schools must be kept clear of Christmas carols and other Christmas influences. We want all this Christmas propaganda stopped.”
Thus where the Jews are powerful, they openly attack the supernatural Messias and the supernatural life of grace which comes from Him. In countries where they are only advancing to power, they content themselves with de-supernaturalising the observances and customs which have sprung from acceptance of the supernatural Messias. When the latter process has been carried on for a sufficiently long time and Catholics have grown weak, the open attack on the observance of Sunday or Christmas Day, for example, can then be launched.
As an example of Jewish action in the elimination of the supernatural significance of a Christian observance, let us take the custom of exchanging Christmas cards. Christmas is in reality the anniversary of the birth of our Redeemer, of the Second Adam who restored the supernatural life of our souls. That is the real inner reason for our joy on that day. Families and friends come together to celebrate the coming amongst us as a little human child of Him in Whom we are one as members of His Mystical Body. The body is meant to have its share of the happiness too, because the Son of Man knows that we are human beings. Now the exchange of Christmas cards is meant to remind us of these great facts in their due relation. The supernatural significance of the great feast of the Nativity should of course be always prominent. Yet what do we find? Cards which show only holly and Christmas puddings have some relation to the feast, it is true, but not to the Christ Mass. Others with merely a row of dogs or a few birds have nothing to remind the recipient of what the rejoicing is for, while Yule tide greetings seem to refer to some pagan festival and to be preparing the way for a revival of paganism.
In this process of eliminating the supernatural Messias from the celebration of the anniversary of His birth, Messrs Raphael Tuck and Sons, Ltd., the largest firm of Christmas card manufacturers, have certainly played a great part. “The Directors of this firm,” according to The Britisher of December 15th, 1937, “are registered as Gustave Tuck, Desmond Adolph Tuck and William Reginald Tuck, Bt., and the Secretary is a Mr. A. G. Jacobs. All three directors appear in the Communal Directory of the Jewish Year Book. Mr. Desmond Tuck is a warden of the Central Synagogue. Gustave Tuck is a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies Committee, a member of the Committee for the fund for German Jewry,” etc. This firm is not alone, but it has certainly been a great influence in propagating naturalism by fostering a naturalistic tone.
It will be useful for Irishmen to examine how much of Dublin’s real property has already passed into Jewish hands. Such a control must bring influence, and Jewish influence will operate against Christian social principles. Irish Catholics can see the advance of the elimination of the supernatural from public life, when a Jewish shop exhibits a card to the effect that the shop will be open all day on Christmas Day, and when Jewish professional men make appointments for Sunday morning. This disruption of the organisation of society based on the reality of the supernatural life of grace and on the vital significance of the Mass cannot proceed without disastrous effects on Catholics individually and as a body. For we know that it is only through the supernatural life which comes from our Lord that we can be good men according to the way which God requires and can correct the defects of our natural life. On the one hand, then, the increase of Jewish influence, with its inevitable naturalistic, that is, anti-supernatural, character, cannot take place without such disruption. On the other hand, we are exhorted to work for the return of society to Christ the King so that, instead of having to combat influences hostile to our supernatural life when we leave the Church after Mass, we shall on the contrary be aided by the current of life around us. Accordingly, Jewish naturalism renders conflict inevitable.
The Jews, as a nation, are objectively aiming at giving society a direction which is in complete opposition to the order God wants. It is possible that a member of the Jewish nation, who rejects our Lord, may have the supernatural life which God wishes to see in every soul, and so be good with the goodness God wants, but objectively, the direction he is seeking to give to the world is opposed to God and to that life, and therefore is not good. If a Jew who rejects our Lord is good in the way God demands, it is in spite of the movement in which he and his nation are engaged. Our Lord Jesus Christ alone is the source of the goodness God wants to see in every human being, the goodness due to participation in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. No Jew, in virtue of what he objectively stands for, is supernaturally good as God wants him to be.
Hence there would seem to be a regrettable confusion of thought in the article on The Jews in Ireland, which appeared in The Standard (Dublin), March 3rd 1939. The article stated: “The Standard stands for the practical application of Christian principles in the public life of Ireland . . . Doubtless, there are good Jews and bad Jews, just as there are good and bad non-Jews in every country. We may praise the good and reprobate the bad . . .”
The article in The Standard was perfectly correct in insisting upon the Christian principle of exclusion of hatred of the Jews as a race. The inculcation of that spirit of charity towards the Jews, however, is not the only Christian principle that has a bearing on the problem. To work for the return of society to Christ the King, and so secure the triumph of the supernatural spirit of the Mystical Body in social life, is surely a Christian principle. The Jewish nation in an organised entity opposed to the treatment of our fellow human beings as members of Christ. We, must, therefore, combat their naturalism. Some Catholics seem to forget that the Jews who, in their terrible opposition to God, were plotting the death of our Saviour were so “pious” and “God-fearing” and “good” that they would not go into the hall of Pilate’s palace, “that they might not be defiled but that they might eat the pasch.” (St. John XVIII, 28). Pilate had to yield to their scruples and go out to them, yet alas! they were intent on the most awful crime ever committed, the crime of deicide.
Jewish naturalism, then, is disruptive of all social organisation based upon the divinity of our Lord. This disruptive process inevitably leads to a reaction on the part of the subjects of Christ the King and thus renders social conflict unavoidable. But, besides these two harmful effects, there is a third. Jewish naturalism is injurious to the Jews themselves. Opposition to the supernatural life of grace that comes from our Lord and, consequently, to ordered submission to God, our Father, is disastrous for the Jewish soul and character. Writing of the ceremonies and rites of the Old Law, such as circumcision and the worship of the synagogue, St. Thomas says: “In like manner, the ceremonies of the Old Law prefigured Christ as having yet to be born and to suffer; whereas our sacraments signify Him as already born and having suffered. Consequently just as it would be a mortal sin now for anyone, in making a profession of faith, to say that Christ is yet to be born, which the fathers of old said devoutly and truthfully; so too, it would be a mortal sin now to observe those ceremonies which the fathers of old accomplished with devotion and fidelity. Such is the teaching of St. Augustine” (Ia IIae, Q. 103, a. 4). Objectively, therefore, the Jews as a nation put themselves against the ordered return to God, which can only be through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Their opposition has not only had dire consequences in preventing and retarding the world’s acceptance of Him, but also sad effects on themselves. The results of that ceaseless battle against order are becoming increasingly visible amongst them. The persistent rejection of the one mediator, Christ Jesus, in spite of abundant light and grace, is having its inescapable consequences. As their power in the material order grows, the Jews are ceasing to believe in the God of Israel and are falling a prey to pantheism in its various forms, Marxian and other.
Does it then follow that all Jews are pantheists? It does not. In all this reasoning about the Jewish nation we are dealing with what we may speak of as moral laws in a wide sense. We cannot deduce conclusions therefrom to every individual member of the race. We must take account of the play of human liberty under the influence of the grace that comes from the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the members of the race which He loves as His own. We must affirm, however, that the Jews as a nation and therefore the vast majority of their individual members, given the solidarity of their national organisation, will everywhere show themselves hostile to the supernatural life.
His Excellency Right Rev. Antonio Garcia, Bishop of Tuy, one of the signatories of the Collective Letter of the Spanish Hierarchy of July 1st 1937, has summed up in striking language the essential features of the present struggle in the world. He had a splendid opportunity of seeing the Spanish phase of it. Mgr. Garcia writes as follows: “It is evident that the present conflict is one of the most terrible wars waged by Antichrist, that is, by Judaism, against the Catholic Church and against Christ. And at this crisis in the history of the world, Jewry uses two formidable armies: one secret, namely that of Freemasonry; the other, open and avowed, with hands dripping with blood, that of the Communists and all the other associated bodies, Anarchists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, Socialists, as well as the auxiliary forces, Rotary, and Leagues of Benefaction . . . in which are preached the exclusion of Christ, of His morality and of His doctrine, or in which one hears at least that abstraction is made of such, as if Jesus Christ had not clearly declared: ‘He that is not with me is against me.’”
A writer who sees in a study of the consequences of the Jewish nation’s naturalism merely a series of fantastic statements about a supposed Jewish conspiracy has not grasped either the unity of the divine plan or the meaning of the Kingship of Christ. The Jews do work with abnormal secrecy, and in the Masonic society they certainly have a powerful secret auxiliary force working for naturalism, along with open and avowed auxiliary forces of Communists, Anarchists, etc. But it is a fact patent for all to see, that, in the world as it exists, the Jews, as an organised nation, refuse to accept Him Who is the Cornerstone of the building and the Foundation of right order, and look forward to a messianic era to be ushered in by another messias. Do they not proclaim this from the house tops? Klausner, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth, writes as follows: “What is Jesus to the Jewish nation at the present day? To the Jewish nation he can be neither God nor the Son of God, in the sense conveyed by belief in the Trinity. Either conception is to the Jew not only impious and blasphemous, but incomprehensible. Neither can he, to the Jewish nation, be the Messiah: the kingdom of Heaven (the ‘Days of the Messiah’) is not yet come . . . [The ethical code of Jesus] is no ethical code for the nations and social order of today, when men are still trying to find the way to that future of the Messiah and the Prophets, and to the ‘kingdom of the Almighty’ spoken of by the Talmud, an ideal which is of this ‘world’ and which, gradually and in the course of generations, is to take shape in this world.” A critic may point out that the attack on Christianity by immoral art and by unbelief would continue without Jews in the world. It is quite true that, even if the Jews were to disappear utterly, there would still be original sin in the world and consequently forces of revolt working for naturalism, under the leadership of Satan, whose whole being is in revolt against the supernatural life of grace. What must be insisted upon, however, is that in that hypothesis, the best organised visible force, the one with the greatest cohesion and dynamic energy, would be withdrawn from the naturalist camp.
The leaders of the Jewish race have a terrible responsibility. St. Thomas insists (IIIa P.Q. 47, a. 6 ad 1), that the excusing words of our Lord: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (St. Luke XXII, 34) were uttered on behalf of the common people, but not on behalf of the leaders of the Jews. Not only have they formed the ordinary people of their race to consider the idea of Our Lord being the Messias promised to their fathers as absolutely absurd, but they keep them in strict subjection. Pogroms in which the rank-and-file of the Jewish nation suffer serve the useful purpose of keeping them in absolute dependence on their leaders.
THE OPPOSITION OF JEWISH NATURALISM TO OUR SUPERNATURAL WELL-BEING
The fundamental nature of this opposition will be seen more clearly when we examine a point in which what I have been saying differs to some extent from the thesis of a writer whose name is a household word in Catholic circles. In his work on the Jewish question, Mr. Belloc writes as follows: “We are asked to believe that this political upheaval [the Bolshevik revolution by which the Jews got control of Russia] was part of one highly organised plot centuries old the agents of which were millions of human beings all pledged to the destruction of our society and acting in complete discipline under a few leaders superhumanly wise. The thing is nonsense on the face of it. Men have no capacity for acting in this fashion . . . moreover the motive is completely lacking. Why merely destroy, and why, if your object is merely to destroy, manifest wide differences in your aims? . . . The conception of a vast age-long plot, culminating in the contemporary Russian affair, will not hold water.”
Four points need to be touched upon. First of all, the opposition between the supernatural Messias and the natural messias is in the very nature of things. The Jews, as a nation have refused to accept the supernatural Messias, God Himself, Who came into His own world to restore our most real life, and they still look forward to another messias. They are therefore necessarily opposed to the true order of the world. As I have already said, the Jews work with abnormal secrecy and in the Masonic society they have a powerful secret auxiliary force working for naturalism, but I am here speaking of their opposition as a nation to the supernatural. It is absurd and confusing to speak of that opposition as a plot or a conspiracy, for not only is it clear to us but the Jews themselves proclaim it openly. We must always bear in mind that the world is one, and that it is, only through acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ as the true Messias that we can live our lives as the objective order of the world demands. Mr Belloc seems to miss the force of the opposition between naturalism and the supernatural. That is one point.
Again, opposition to the order God has established in the world leads inevitably to decay in belief in God among the Jews, and to corruption in regard to the correct attitude towards their fellow human beings and in regard to the means to be employed to get other nations to accept the messianic message. It is morally inevitable that nations which resist and oppose the supernatural order of the world should suffer decay in the process. The excesses of the Bolshevik revolution thus find their explanation. We are, however, dealing with a moral law in the wide sense. God is merciful, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus loves the members of His own race with a special love. We cannot, as has been said, draw conclusions from such a law to all the individual members of the nation.
The third point concerns the differences amongst the Jews. Of course, there are differences amongst them and that, more unavoidably than amongst other nations, because of their opposition to order, but that fact cannot hide the truth of their strongly organised national solidarity. Is not the sympathy of the Jewish-controlled press throughout the world with the Muscovite, that is, Judaeo-Russian, Red government of Spain a proof of a strong unity?
The fourth point is that the Jews are not attacking Christian supernatural civilisation merely for the sake of destroying it. They are demolishing what for them are the accretions due to pagan conceptions, by which Catholicism has disfigured the messianic ideal. They want to prepare the way for the messias who, according to them, is still to come and who is to bring about peace and harmony amongst all the people of the world under their own rule. They demolish for the sake of reconstructing on another foundation. No wonder they persecuted St. Paul for his insistence on the fact that “Other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus.” (1 Cor. III, 11).
The orthodox Jews speak of the Fatherhood of God, but they refuse to accept God’s supreme manifestation of His paternity, His sending of His only-begotten Son. They consider as blasphemous the true doctrine of the Blessed Trinity and of the supernatural life by which we can enter into the family circle of the Blessed Trinity and love the Father with the Son and the Holy Ghost. In their pride they want to impose their will on God instead of humbly accepting His Will. In their pride they oppose physical descent from Abraham to the true doctrine of spiritual descent from him in unity of faith. “Know ye, therefore, that they who are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham . . . for you are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus . . . And if you be Christ’s then are you the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians III, 7, 26, 29). In their pride, they refuse to see in the prophecies of Isaias about the sufferings of the Messias, the narrative of the treatment that was to be meted out by them to the Messias when He came. They cannot believe that they could have made such fools of themselves as they actually did and continue to do by attempting to apply the promises of God concerning the world-wide sway of the Mystical Body of Christ to their own nation. This terrible pride is the source of the obstinacy with which they refuse to accept the Supernatural Messias. (Father Denis Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation.)