Felonious Wearing of a Jacket and Tie

As one who grew up on Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s, I was taught at an early age that a Catholic gentleman should wear a jacket and tie in public. This is just second nature to me. Indeed, it was second nature to many Catholic men prior to the “looseness” of the 1960s. And as late as the 1969 World Series it was the case that many men wore their jackets and ties to Shea Stadium as a matter of course. They just didn’t give the matter a second thought. Neither have I. Apart from the times that I am doing my penance by exercising on a treadmill and a few other situations, the wearing of a jacket and tie is just beyond question. Oh, this raises a few stares now and there, perhaps more often than not these days. Never before an incident on the evening of Wednesday, March 3, 2004, however, had the wearing of a jacket and tie become a police matter.

A state trooper questioned me closely while I while filling up our motor home with gasoline that evening. He said, “Why are you wearing a jacket and a tie?” I was flabbergasted. He persisted. I explained to him what I noted above, which is described also in much detail in my There’s No Cure for This Condition. He wasn’t buying it. He took a flashlight and began to search through the windows of our station wagon, which is towed behind the motor home. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “I check out everybody, especially a person in a jacket and tie.” He explained that the only people who wore jackets and ties in his part of the world were men who were selling marijuana. He did not believe me when I said that I had never even “experimented” with any hallucinogenic substance, no less even been drunk once in my life because I do not consume alcoholic beverages (I think I may have drunk a total of twenty glasses of wine in my over fifty-two years). He wasn’t buying that. He continued to question me at great length as to how many people were traveling with me in the motor home. He wanted to know where I had come from and where we were headed.

Obviously, he had no probable cause to question me the way he did. I could have made quite a stink about this. However, I wasn’t going to go toe to toe with an armed “peace officer” while in a remote part of the country. I am not afraid to fight the battles that need to be fought to defend the living patrimony of the Church and to defend simple justice when the situation calls for it. I am hated and reviled by all manner of people for what I have written and continue to write. Most of my critics do not consider for one moment that I have nothing to gain in earthly terms by taking stands in conscience that I know will cost both me and my family greatly in temporal terms. However, the situation with the state trooper was neither the time nor the place to challenge an office intent on finding criminal activity where there was none.

The trooper’s statement that he “checked out everybody” spoke for itself, indicating that he considered everyone to be a possible criminal suspect. This is the state of law enforcement in the United States of America at present. Ordinary citizens are considered to be guilty of one or another transgression while baby-killers and pornographers and the executives of pharmaceutical companies that manufacture contraceptives are considered as operating within the framework of the civil law. Catholic Charities in California is required to provide their employees with health insurance coverage for contraception while the New York City Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, orders a special “hate crimes” unit to monitor The Passion of the Christ for possible violations of New York State’s anti-bias laws.

It is illegal to display a crucifix or even a corpseless cross on public property while it is permissible to display a menorah and the Mohammedan crescent. Overtly Christian prayers are banned in public places while references to a false gods such as Allah and Buddha are promoted, especially in the context of the prisons and ideological training camps known as public schools.

Practicing sodomites and lesbians march openly with police protection while those who pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary in front of the killing centers that are abortuaries are jostled about and treated with contempt, including rough-housing and verbal intimidation. Wheelchair-bound grandmothers are searched completely at airports while the people who should be the only ones subject to such scrutiny, Mohammedan men, are given a free pass as the government can’t even publicly admit that the Mohammedan religion is the principal source of world terrorism today.

Indeed, President George W. Bush has called this false religion one of “peace,” which is a laughably absurd proposition demonstrating a willful neglect of facts and/or a desire to avoid offending what National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice has said is the fastest growing bloc of voters in the country.

Average citizens traveling through the nation while dressed in once what was considered to be fitting attire are accosted by a state trooper as the supposedly “conservative” Republican administration rewards illegal immigration to the United States.

Yes, the average citizen is a criminal while those who are engaged in activity contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law are given free passes repeatedly. And this is not even to consider the bigotry against Catholicism and all aspects of God’s law and natural justice by the private sector, which has included such outrages as the Eckerd pharmacy chain disciplining pharmacists who have refused to fill physician prescriptions for contraception and the exporting of American jobs overseas, including Red China, to maximize profits, to say nothing of the outrageously usurious behavior of the oil industry to jack up the prices of gasoline and home heating oil for no good reason at all other than corporate greed.

All of this is the result of a country that was founded and has maintained itself in a specific, categorical rejection of the primacy of the Social Kingship of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Queenship of His Most  Immaculate Mother. A country founded in part as a result of the Protestant ethos that men are saved merely by making a profession of faith on their lips and in their hearts is bound to degenerate to a point where everything is right and the only thing that is wrong is what Our Lord has entrusted in the Deposit of Faith to His Mystical Bride, the one, true Church founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. A country founded in part on the Masonic belief that denominationalism is divisive and that men can be brothers without discussing the things than can divide them leads a nation into promoting the false idea that men can pursue virtue and pursue justice without having belief in, access to, or cooperation with sanctifying grace. As the then Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen noted in 1931, it is either Christ or chaos in the midst of our own lives and in the larger life of any nation, including the United States of America. Just as there is no middle ground in our own lives as pertains to Our Lord and the teaching He has entrusted to the Catholic Church, so is it the case that there can be no middle ground in the midst of any aspect of our society. As is noted on another article on this website, Pope Pius XI reminded us in Quas Primas in 1925 that Christ must reign as King in every aspect of our lives, bar none, at all times.

Oh, yes, justice is still achieved now and then in American courts, as was evidenced in the verdict of the United States Supreme Court in the case of N.O.W. v. Scheidler last year. The fact that justice is achieved now and then does nothing to detract from the reality that the law is used by all levels of government in this nation to work against the common good by the violation of God’s laws and the inevitable suspension of common sense that follows as a logical result. Things are degenerating now at a remarkably fast pace. And absent a conversion of this nation to the Social Reign of Our Lord and the Queenship of Our Lady, which is something we must pray for most fervently, we may face a situation where a family man wearing a jacket and tie in some parts of this nation will be arrested on sight rather than asked questions that violate fundamental due process rights founded in the natural law.

Then again, as I have pointed out even in my days as a “conservative” Catholic, a nation that can kill the unborn and starve the elderly and the suffering under cover of law will find itself spiraling downward no matter how many laws and amendments are proposed to deal with a set of crises that have their proximate origin in the Protestant Revolt and their philosophical justification in Masorny and its other Modernist relatives.

Praying, as always, that some pope will actually consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we offer everything to her Immaculate Heart so that a world enslaved to the errors or Russia will once again find the direction offered only by the God-Man through His true Church.

Our Lady, Mirror of Justice, pray for us.