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                  January 18, 2009

From Luther to Bush to Obama

by Thomas A. Droleskey

 

Readers can listen to the talk that I gave on Sunday, January 18, 2009, at Saint Gertrude the Great Church in West Chester, Ohio, by clicking on this link: Abort Christ the King, Abort the Babies. I have given this particular page its name as an article of that title is already published on this site. The title of this page describes most accurately the content of the lecture, which runs one hour, twenty-four minutes. Many of the points made in the talk have been summarized in A Catechism of the Social Reign of Christ the King, which I urge readers to re-read.

As I have explained so many times in countless articles on this site, all of the problems faced by individuals and their nations are caused by Original Sin and our own Actual Sins. There is no secular, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist, inter-denominational or non-denominational way to resolve or to ameliorate a single human problem. We must reform our lives in cooperation with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross as they are poured out into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Pope Saint Pius X put it succinctly in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

. . 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.)

 

We have baby-killing, both chemical and surgical, under cover of law in this country and in most other countries of the world because of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized by the forces of Judeo-Masonry. It was the specific intention of the wretched drunkard named Martin Luther to overthrow the Social Reign of Christ the King as it was exercised by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages and to institute the falsehood of the "separation of Church and State:"

Father Denis Fahey explained this in his The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

The rending of the Mystical Body by the so-called Reformation movement has resulted in the pendulum swinging from the extreme error of Judaeo-Protestant Capitalism to the opposite extreme error of the Judaeo-Masonic-Communism of Karl Marx.


The uprise of individualism rapidly led to unbridled self-seeking. Law-makers who were arbiters of morality, as heads of the Churches, did not hesitate to favour their own enterprising spirit. The nobles and rich merchants in England, for example, who got possession of the monastery lands, which had maintained the poor, voted the poor laws in order to make the poor a charge on the nation at large. The enclosure of common lands in England and the development of the industrial system are a proof of what private judgment can do when transplanted into the realm of production and distribution. The Lutheran separation of Church from the Ruler and the Citizen shows the decay in the true idea of membership of our Lord's Mystical Body.


"Assuredly," said Luther, "a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The man is Christian, but his function does not concern his religion."

 

The overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King by the Protestant Revolt removed the external constraint that the civil potentates of the Middle Ages recognized existed as having been instituted by Christ the King Himself. The Social Reign of Christ the King empowered the Catholic Church, acting judiciously and only as a last resort after the exhausting of her Indirect Powers of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to interpose herself with civil authorities in those grave circumstances when the good of souls demanded her motherly intervention. This is what restrained, although never perfectly and sometimes with great difficulties and conflicts, civil rulers from taking measures injurious to souls and kept those civil rulers from becoming absolute despots.

Father Fahey discussed the purpose of the Social Reign of Christ the King and how its overthrow led to the rise of monarchical absolutism and thus to the reign of the "sovereignty" of man in the modern civil state:

In proportion as the Mystical Body of Christ was accepted by mankind, political and economic thought and action began to respect the jurisdiction and guidance of the Catholic Church, endowed, as she is, with the right of intervention in temporal affairs whenever necessary, because of her participation in the spiritual Kingship of Christ. Thus the natural or temporal common good of States came to be sought in a manner calculated to favour the development of true personality, in and through the Mystical Body of Christ, and social life came more and more fully under the influence of the supreme end of man, the vision of God in Three Divine Persons.

Accordingly, Catholic Social Order, viewed as a whole, is not primarily the political and social organization of society. It is primarily the supernatural social organism of the Church, and then, secondarily, the temporal or natural social order resulting from the influence of Catholic doctrine on politics and economics and from the embodiment of that influence in social institutions. If instead of Catholic Social Order we use the wider but more convenient expression of Kingdom of God, we may say that the Kingdom of God on earth is in its essence the Church, but, in its integrity, comprises the Church and the temporal social order which the influence of the Church upon the world is every striving to bring into existence. Needless to say, while the general principles of social order remain always the same, social structures will present great differences at different epochs. No particular temporal social order will ever realize all that the Church is capable of giving to the world. The theology of history must include, then, primarily, the study of the foundation and development of the Church, and secondarily, the examination of the ebb and flow of the world’s acceptance of the Church’s supernatural mission. . . .

The organization of the Europe of the thirteenth century furnishes us with one concrete realization of the Divine Plan. It is hardly necessary to add that there were then to be seen defects in the working of the Divine Plan, due to the character of fallen man, as well as an imperfect mastery of physical nature. Yet, withal, the formal principle of ordered social organisation in the world, the supremacy of the Mystical Body, was grasped and, in the main, accepted. The Lutheran revolt, prepared by the cult of pagan antiquity at the Renaissance, and by the favour enjoyed by the Nominalist philosophical theories, led to the rupture of that order." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 10.). . . .

The tide of revolt which broke away from the Catholic Church had the immediate effect of increasing the power of princes and rulers in Protestant countries. The Anabaptists and the peasants in Germany protested in the name of ‘evangelical liberty,’ but they were crushed. We behold the uprise of national churches, each of which organizes its own particular form of religion, mixture of supernatural and natural elements, as a department of State. The orthodox Church in Russia was also a department of State and as such exposed to the same evils. National life was thus withdrawn from ordered subjection to the Divine Plan and the distinction laid down by our Divine Lord Himself, between the things that are God’s and the things that are Caesar’s, utterly abolished. Given the principle of private judgment or of individual relation with Christ, it was inevitable that the right of every individual to arrange his own form of religion should cause the pendulum to swing from a Caesarinism supreme in Church and State to other concrete expressions of ‘evangelical liberty.’ One current leads to the direction of indefinite multiplication of sects. Pushed to its ultimate conclusion, this would, this would give rise to as many churches as there are individuals, that is, there would not be any church at all. As this is too opposed to man’s social nature, small groups tend to coalesce. The second current tends to the creation of what may be termed broad or multitudinist churches. The exigencies of the national churches are attenuated until they are no longer a burden to anybody. The Church of England is an example of this. As decay in the belief of the Divinity of Jesus continues to increase, the tendency will be to model church organization according to the political theories in favour at the moment. The democratic form of society will be extolled and a ‘Reunion of Christendom,’ for example, will be aimed at, along the lines of the League of Nations. An increasing number of poor bewildered units will, of course, cease to bother about any ecclesiastical organization at all. . . . .

The first [political] result was an enormous increase in the power of the Temporal Rulers, in fact a rebirth of the pagan regime of Imperial Rome. The Spiritual Kingship of Christ, participated in by the Pope and the Bishops of the Catholic Church being no longer acknowledged, authority over spiritual affairs passed to Temporal Rulers. They were thus, in Protestant countries, supposed to share not only in His Temporal Kingship of Christ the King, but also in His spiritual Kingship. As there was no Infallible Guardian of order above the Temporal Rulers, the way was paved for the abuses of State Absolutism. The Protestant oligarchy who ruled England with undisputed sway, from Charles the Second’s time on, and who treated Ireland to the Penal Laws, may be cited, along with that cynical scoundrel, Frederick of Prussia, as typical examples of such rulers. Catholic monarchs, like Louis XIV of France and Joseph II of Austria, by their absolutist tendencies and pretensions to govern the Catholic Church show the influence of the neighboring Protestant countries. Gallicanism and Josephism are merely a revival of Roman paganism.. . .

The rejection by Luther of the visible Catholic Church opened the door, not only to the abuses of absolute rulers, supreme in Church and State, but soon led to an indifference to all ecclesiastical organizations. As faith in the supernatural life of grace and the supernatural order grew dim and waned, the way was made smooth for the acceptance of Freemasonry. The widespread loss of faith in the existence of the supernatural life and the growing ignorance of the meaning of the Redemption permitted the apostles of Illuminism and Masonry to propagate the idea that the true religion of Jesus Christ had never been understood or been corrupted by His disciples, especially by the Church of Rome, the fact being that only a few sages in secret societies down the centuries had kept alive the true teaching of Jesus Christ. According to this ‘authentic’ teaching our Saviour had established a new religion, but had simply restored the religion of the state of nature, the religion of the goodness of human nature when left to itself, freed from the bonds and shackles of society. Jesus Christ died a martyr for liberty, put to death by the rulers and priests. Masons and revolutionary secret societies alone are working for the true salvation of the world. By them shall original sin be done away with and the Garden of Eden restored. But the present organization of society must disappear, by the elimination of the tyranny of priests, the despotism of princes and the slavery resulting from national distinctions, from family life and from private property.”

 

Judeo-Masonry institutionalized the revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King by championing the cause of the religiously indifferentist civil state that was built on the premise of the "brotherhood of man" as men of different religious and philosophical beliefs put aside their differences in order to find some naturalistic means to pursue social order as they themselves pursued "civic virtue" by means of their own unaided powers. In other words, the precepts of Judeo-Masonry are designed to convince men that it is not necessary to to subordinate the lives of men and their nations to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping and that it is not necessary for men to have belief in, access to and to have cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to be virtuous.

The Constitution of the United States of America is defective not because of the specific institutional arrangements created therein. It is defective because it does not recognize the Catholic Church as the true Faith and thus refuses to concede to her the right to intervene with the exercise of civil power when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention. A written document that admits of no higher authority than the words of its own text will be as defenseless in the hands of "liberal" or "activist" judges as the Bible is in the hands of Protestants, who admit of no Divinely-instituted hierarchical authority to guide them in Its interpretation, and/or in the hands of Modernist Catholics, who reject the authority of the Church just as much as do Protestants. Men need the Catholic Church in their own lives and they need her in the lives of their nations.

A civil government founded on the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity is bound to manifest the inherent degeneracy of its false premises more and more over the course of time. Even thoroughly orthodox Catholic scholars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries did not think critically about the false premises of the American founding, teaching one generation of Catholics after another that the founding principles, crafted by men who were largely abjectly hostile to the Faith and who had contempt for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and for His Most Blessed Mother (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), were perfectly compatible with the Faith. This benign view of things was nothing only than positivism as well-meaning Catholics projected into the minds of the founders a Catholicism that was not there.

The effort on part of Catholic scholars and bishops and priests in the United States of America in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries to equate the American founding with the Catholic Faith took deep root in the consciousness of ordinary Catholics, becoming "gospel" in civics textbooks and readers (such as the Faith and Freedom series) used in Catholic elementary schools. Catholics were taught that participation in the political process was a means for them to realize upward social mobility and to gain a measure of "respect" from their Protestant neighbors as "good citizens."

What happened, of course, was that Catholics became so immersed in the machinations of partisan politics that they lost sight of the fact that they had been baptized and confirmed to bear witness to the Faith at all times, including in the realm of public discourse. The belief that Catholics could segregate their "private" beliefs from their public statements did not just originate forty years ago in the years leading up to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United states of American in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973. This belief had deep roots in the "psyche" of Catholics in the United States of America (as I have explained recently in Cushing's Children, It's Still a World of Sisyphuses, and We're Not in Kansas Any More). What mattered to so many Catholics in the United States of America was not fealty to the true Faith but fealty to the Democrat Party, led by anti-Catholics such as Woodrow Wilson and thirty-third degree Masons such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Many Catholics continue to be attached to the Democrat Party today in spite of its open support for chemical and surgical baby-killing because they have been told from one generation to the next that this particular organized crime family of naturalism is closest to the Church's Social Teaching on providing assistance to the poor and needy. Some Catholics today are attached to the Democrat Party precisely because of its commitment to chemical and surgical baby-killing under cover of law. That they feel free to do so with impunity is the result of the Americanism engendered by the Catholic bishops of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, an Americanism that fed into and helped to shape the ethos of conciliarism and is being perpetuated to this very day by the "bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in the United States of America.

As I noted in Only Themselves to Blame, "conservative" "bishops" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism in this country oppose moral evils such as contraception and abortion on Americanist grounds, appealing to the "founding" documents rather than on the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to His Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Each of these "bishops" is to a man a dissenter from the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church that the civil state must recognize the Catholic Church as the true religion and accord her the favor and the protection of the laws, embracing the falsehood of "separation of Church and State" that was condemned by one pope after another prior to 1958, especially so in most succinct terms by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it.

 

Yes, the civil state has an obligation to aid us in the pursuit of our Last End, the possession of Heaven for all eternity. This is a truth that was not taught in any of those old Catholic civics books published in the 1940s or 1950s. Encyclical letters such as Vehementer Nos that reiterated eternal truths of the Catholic Faith were ignored as "irrelevant" to the "unique" situation of Catholicism in the United States of America. And while, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Libertas, June 20, 1888, Holy Mother Church will accommodate herself to the concrete realities in which her children find themselves in the modern civil state order to continue her work of sanctification and instruction, she never concedes as a matter of principle the false premises of the modern civil state as she seeks to exhort her children to know their obligations to pray and to work for the conversion of their nations to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

The counterfeit church of conciliarism concedes the licitness of the false principles, which is one of the reasons that chemical and surgical baby-killing under cover of law continues unabated. One cannot fight moral evils with false principles. The counterfeit church of conciliarism rejects the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, its "conservative" 'bishops" in the United States of America content to ally themselves with phony "pro-life" politicians in the organized agency of naturalism known as the Republican Party, most of whom support surgical baby-killing in some instances and the assassination of the innocent preborn by chemical means in all instances, thus falling into the same naturalist trap as their predecessors in the Catholic Church who served as lackeys for the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As has been noted in many recent commentaries (Y2K's Lesser Evil Has Brought Us Great Evils, Socialism, Straight From Your "Pro-Life" Conservative, Fallacies Galore, Apostasy Has Consequences, Figures of Antichrist, We Don't Want to Learn Anything, Living With Murder Quite Comfortably, Foggy Bottom's Bloody Tradition, Madness Is Easy to Define, It Pays to be Ignorant, and Clueless Is As Clueless Does), the policies of the past eight years made possible the election of the pro-abort named Barack Hussein Obama, who will be sworn into office tomorrow, Tuesday, January 20, 2009, as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. The "conservative" "pro-life" President, a man whose administration funded the deaths of countless millions of preborn children by means of abortifacient contraceptives and who presided over a military action that resulted in the needless deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis, has discredited what is called in naturalistic terms "values voting" even among some of the more "moderate" members of his own political party. There could not be a more cleverly devised trap from the devil as he raises up some naturalists who are openly in support of various evils in order to make those who advance those same evils in more subtle ways seem as though they are the "lesser of two evils." Behold the thoroughly and completely wicked results of such a trap.

In the midst of these events from have brought us from Martin Luther to John Calvin to Henry VIII to Elizabeth I to Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his open embrace of the "separation of Church and State" to Lyndon Baines Johnson to William Jefferson Blythe Clinton to George Walker Bush to Barack Hussein Obama we must understand that the devil has fought mightily against the Social Reign of Christ the King. He has done so in the United States of America by convincing most Catholics to think and to speak and to act in purely naturalistic terms, losing their minds and all sense of proportion during election campaigns, permitting themselves to be whipped into a frenzy as well when advocacy groups attempt to raise money by claiming that certain nefarious bills, such as the "Freedom of Choice Act," will be enacted and signed into law when the truth is otherwise (see Only Themselves to Blame).

There has been no need for the devil to use armed force against the Faith in the United States of America as he has done in France and England and Ireland and Spain and Italy and Germany and Russia and Poland and China and elsewhere as the bishops of the Catholic Church in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries fell into this trap of considering the modern civil state to be an actual "protection" for the Church when the truth of the matter is that the modern civil state was designed to convince Catholics to separate their "private" beliefs from public policy just as it, the civil state, was separated from the Church. Most Catholics today view the Church through the lenses of pluralism and egalitarianism and "democracy" rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.

We must pray and work for the conversion of the United States of America to the true Faith as we continue to pray for the conversion of the outgoing President, George Walker Bush, and his family and the conversion of the incoming President, Barack Hussein Obama, and his family.

His Excellency Bishop Daniel Dolan has included the following prayers for the conversion of the United States of America in the January 18, 2009, edition of the Saint Gertrude the Great Bulletin:

Almighty and eternal God, who savest all, and wilt have none to perish, have regard to those souls who are led astray by the deceits of the devil, that rejecting all errors, the hearts of those who err may be converted, and may return to the unity of Thy truth: through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Lord Jesus Christ! From the tabernacle Thou dost unceasingly invite us to partake of the bread that cometh down from Heaven and which containeth in itself sweetness of every kind: "Come to Me all yet that labor and are heavily laden and I will refresh you;" daily Thou dost offer Thyself upon our altars, as a sacrifice of praise and a victim of propitiation to Thy eternal Father--we beseech Thee, bless our beloved country with peace and prosperity; convert all sinners and unbelievers, that all may love Thee and serve Thee in unity of faith; look propitiously upon those pitiable souls who are excluded from the sweets of Thy banquet; mercifully pardon all that has been said and done in this land through ignorance of impiety against the most holy mysteries of the altar; strengthen the faith of all that believe in Thee, and may their conduct, by Thy grace, be in accordance with their faith; inspire the minds of all men with faith in Thee and with the most profound reverence for the Blessed Sacrament; may all become Thy children and be nourished at Thy holy table unto life everlasting. Amen.

 

Bishop Dolan also included the following prayer for the conversion of a soul, one we can most certainly pray for the soon-to-be former President George Walker Bush and the soon-to-be President Barack Hussein Obama:

For the conversion of this soul, Lord, I trust more in Thy grace than in any argument, example, or prayer of mine. When I have done all I can towards helping another in the discovery of peace and truth there is still the comforting knowledge that, when my effort has come to nothing, Thy grace is the only effective factor in the story of every conversion. Lord, bring Thy grace to bear upon this soul, and may the conversion which is brought about give satisfaction to Thy Sacred Heart.

 

We do not look for results in our prayers. We, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, must be content to make reparation for our sins, which are so very, very responsible for the malodorous state of the Church Militant on earth and of the world-at-large, as we spend our time in prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. We are not supposed to see the fruit of our prayers and labors in this life. We should not expect to see such fruit in our lives. It must be enough for us to remember these words of the Divine Redeemer Himself:

So you also, when you shall have done all these things that are commanded you, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do. (Luke 17: 10.)

 

We should also remember as well these words that Our Lady of Guadalupe spoke to Juan Diego atop Tepeyac Hill, never doubting these words for a minute as we trust completely and serenely in her loving, maternal intercession and care for us erring sinners:

Know for certain that I am the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God. . . . Here I will show and offer my love, my compassion, my help and my protection to the people. I am your merciful Mother, the Mother of all those who love me, of those who cry to me, of those who have confidence in me. Here I will hear their weeping and their sorrows and will remedy and alleviate their suffering, necessities and misfortunes. . . . Listen and let it penetrate into your heart. . . . Do not be troubled or weighed down with grief. So do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?

 

Is there anything else that we need? I don't think so. We have Our Lady on our side. This is enough. Her Immaculate Heart will triumph in the end. May it be our privilege to plant a few seeds for this triumph as we never flag in our efforts to restore the Social Reign of her Divine Son, Christ the King, and of herself, Mary our Immaculate Queen.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Prisca, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

 





© Copyright 2009, Thomas A. Droleskey. All rights reserved.