Idols to the Left, Idols to the Right

Part Two

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Idols of naturalism to the left.

Idols of naturalism to the right.

Having posted part one of this brief two part series yesterday by examining yet again some of the false idols of the naturalist "left," it is time yet again to return the favor for the idols of the naturalist "right."

As noted on so many other occasions on this site, including a week ago today in Union of False Opposites, the terms "left" and "right" as they are used in common parlance to refer to the political divisions in Western countries are tools by the adversary to convince people, especially believing Catholics, into spinning their wheels constantly to "save" the country from the ne'er-do-wells found in whatever naturalist "side" they believe is opposed to the common temporal good. Thus it is that those who adhere to the "left" must seek to "save" the country from the "religious right" and that those who adhere to the "right" must seek to "save" the country from the "radical left." It all makes for great political theater and enhances the income of talk show hosts and lobbyists who live to agitate the public for one simple reason: to enhance their incomes.

Rush Limbaugh noted in a 60 Minutes interview around 1990 or so that the goal of his radio program is to attract the largest audience possible so that he can charge the highest rates possible to advertisers in order to make the most money possible. He has attracted a very large following, even among Catholics, even though he is a religious indifferentist of the first order and refuses, at least for the most part, even to mention the word "Christmas" during the weeks leading up to the Nativity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on December 25, using the phrase "holiday season" instead so as not to lose any of his audience base. Rush Limbaugh has become a very wealthy man by blathering on in purely naturalistic terms on social problems that have Original Sin as their remote cause and our own Actual Sins as their proximate causes, starting with the Actual Sins of the Protestant Revolutionaries in the Sixteenth Century who rebelled against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church.

Not to be outdone, of course, are other naturalists of the "right" such as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, et al., each of whom is convinced that a return to "constitutional principles" will save the day as people of all religious beliefs or no religious beliefs at all join together to "restore America." Unfortunately, for these very wealthy naturalists, there is no such thing as a "restoration" of the United States of America as it was founded to be a perfect expression of the revolutionary spirit of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry that had come to dominate Western thought and political praxis in the two hundred fifty-nine years between Father Martin Luther's posting of his ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, and the promulgation of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

The very Mother of God Whose perfect Fiat to the will of God the Father at the Annunciation made possible our salvation appeared to Juan Diego atop Tepeyac Hill near Mexico City, Mexico, in 1531 to win souls for her Divine Son, Christ the King, here in the Americas as they were being lost to the forces of the Protestant Revolution that are so favored by each of the blathering naturalists of talk radio and cable television (see May We Be Made As Simple and Trusting, part one, May We Made As Simple and Trusting, part two and May We Be Made As Simple and Trusting, part three). No one who does not believe that The Americas Belong to Our Lady knows a blessed thing about how to "restore" America. The Americas really do belong to Our Lady. It is the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart for which we must pray and work by planting seeds for the conversion of our nation, not to enrich the pockets of naturalists who reject Catholic doctrine and thus who refuse to give the public honor to the Mother of God that is her due, something that Orestes Brownson himself recognized in the middle of the Nineteenth Century:

Now in estimating the greatness and dignity of the mother we have regard to the Son. All nations call Mary blessed, because he whom she brought forth was the only begotten Son of God, and for a like reason to that for which we honor maternity in her, should we honor it, though of course in an inferior degree, in every human mother. Every human mother may chant with Mary: "My soul cloth magnify the Lord. * * * For he that is mighty hath done great things to me, and holy is his name." It IB a great and sacred thing to be the mother of a child, if we look to the destiny to which every child may aspire. The mother who feels it, feels the sacredness of her relation as mother, the high duty it imposes, and studies diligently to train up her child in the fear of the Lord, in sole reference to his lofty destiny. This estimate of her own dignity and sacred function, reacts on the father, and compels him to think seriously on his relation and solemn duties and responsibilities as father, for more is exacted of him than even of the mother.

Now, devotion to Mary, the honor we pay in her to motherhood, brings all these great and solemn truths home to our winds, and our hearts. We are led to reflect on the great mysteries of the Incarnation, regeneration and glorification, and thence on the awful dignity of motherhood, the sacredness and worth of every child born of woman, and the obligation to reverence the mother, to provide for the child's present and future welfare, and to conform society itself, so far as may be, to the virtues honored in the maternity of Mary. From this it is easy to see that devotion . . .

According to my reading of history, the epochs in which faith is the strongest, piety the most robust, and the church wins her grandest victories, whether in individuals or in nations, are precisely those in which devotion to our Lady, or the worship of her virtue, is the most diffused, the most vigorous and flourishing; and the epochs in which faith seems to be obscured, and to grow weak and sickly, and the church is the most harassed and suffers her greatest losses, are precisely the epochs in which this devotion is the most languid and feeble. All the great saints have been no less remarkable for their tender and assiduous devotion to Mary than for their manly virtues and heroic sanctity, and I suspect that most of us could bear witness, if we would, that the least unsatisfactory portions of our own lives have been precisely those in which we were the most diligent and fervent in our devotion to the mother of God. I claim, then, for devotion to our Lady a full share of influence in rendering Christian society so much superior in all the virtues to the polished but corrupt society of pagan Greece and Rome. As with the pagans the worship of the impure gods of their mythologies could not fail to corrupt the worshippers, so with Christians the worship of the purity and sanctity of the mother of God has not failed to purify and render holy those who in sincerity, earnestness, and simplicity of heart were careful to practice it.

I might tale up other virtues of Mary, for she is a Casket of Jewels, and show in like manner how through devotion to Mary they have entered into Christian society and formed its manners and morals; but this every reader can easily do for himself. I have laid down and illustrated the principle, and though I have said not all, rather the least that could be said, I have said enough to show that the influence of this devotion hag been and must have been great and salutary on individual and domestic manners and morals, and in elevating and advancing general society.

But I should be wanting to my own faith, and do far less honor to our Lady than I would, if I stopped here, and limited the effects of devotion, to the natural influence of her example. This influence is great, and we cannot hold intimate, loving, and reverent intercourse with the wise, the great, and the good, without assimilating something to our own minds, hearts, and life. Meditation on the humility, the maternity, the virginity, the immaculate purity of the Virgin of virgins, Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother undefiled, cannot fail to give us something of those virtues so characteristic of her, and of our holy religion; but I do not believe that meditation on her virtues could alone suffice to produce and sustain the effects I have adduced, any more than the simple example of our Lord himself could have sufficed to redeem the world, and elevate souls to union with God. All the peculiarly Christian virtues are in the order of regeneration, as is Christianity itself, though presupposing, as does regeneration, the order of generation, and therefore are impossible without grace or supernatural assistance. Pelagianism, even Semi-Pelagianism, is a heresy, and little would devotion to Mary in reality effect, if we were to leave out all consideration of the supernatural assistance which she obtains for her clients, by her all-powerful intercession with her divine Son. Even faith alone in the mysteries and teachings of the Gospel could not suffice; for the devils believe and tremble, and yet are none the less devils. Most of us know and believe much better than we do. We see, and approve the better, and follow the worse:

Video meliora proboque Deteriora sequor.

What we most need is not amply instruction or precept, but strength. We are weak, and our appetites, passions, propensities, are too strong for us, and enslave us. We feel ourselves sinking; the waves are closing over us, and in fear and agony we cry out: "Lord, save us, we perish!" "Holy Mother of God pray for us, or we are lost!" (Orestes Brownson, Moral and Social Influence of Devotion to Mary.)

 

Each of the babbling blatherers of naturalism who have such devoted followings today are, whether or not they realize it, spreading anew the exact kind of semi-Pelagianism that is at the core of this nation's false founding principles. Each of the founders of this nation, having been influenced by the false ideas and beliefs of the preceding two and one-half centuries, believed that it was possible for men to know personal and social order absent a belief in, access to and reliance upon Sanctifying Grace. They believed in a form of human self-redemption that is of the essence of all secular political ideologies today. They believed in a lie even though they may have had the purest of intentions and believed that they were indeed attempting to provide the foundation for a truly "limited" form of self-government that took into account the fact that majorities could easily degenerate into forms of tyranny over those who dissent from prevailing views. Pure intentions do not redeem false premises, and it is a false premise to believe that anything other than Catholicism can be the foundation of personal and social order. Anyone who believes otherwise is an apostate.

Indeed, the beliefs the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, semi-Pelagian foundation of the Modern civil state found expression in the false ideas of The Sillon in France that found their way into the "Second" Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, and the "magisterium" of the conciliar "popes" as they have sought to encourage "inter-religious" cooperation in "solving" the problems of the world. Writing in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, Pope Saint Pius X taught us that it is impossible to "improve" the world by "inter-religious" means, that Catholic Charity and Catholic Charity alone is the foundation of all genuine justice in the world:

The same applies to the notion of Fraternity which they found on the love of common interest or, beyond all philosophies and religions, on the mere notion of humanity, thus embracing with an equal love and tolerance all human beings and their miseries, whether these are intellectual, moral, or physical and temporal. But Catholic doctrine tells us that the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in the theoretical or practical indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren plunged, but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well as for their material well-being. Catholic doctrine further tells us that love for our neighbor flows from our love for God, Who is Father to all, and goal of the whole human family; and in Jesus Christ whose members we are, to the point that in doing good to others we are doing good to Jesus Christ Himself. Any other kind of love is sheer illusion, sterile and fleeting.

Indeed, we have the human experience of pagan and secular societies of ages past to show that concern for common interests or affinities of nature weigh very little against the passions and wild desires of the heart. No, Venerable Brethren, there is no genuine fraternity outside Christian charity. Through the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ Our Saviour, Christian charity embraces all men, comforts all, and leads all to the same faith and same heavenly happiness.

By separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, Democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization. If, as We desire with all Our heart, the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.

 

"But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization." Go tell that to Angelo Roncalli or to Giovanni Montini or to Albino Luciani Karol Wojtyla or to Joseph Ratzinger, none of whom believed in the restoration of the Catholic City, being content to promote a "humanism" premised on the sort of interdenominational grounds condemned by Pope Saint Pius X. Go tell that to Glenn Beck or Sarah Heath Palin or Tim Pawlenty, each of whom is a Catholic apostate, by the way, or to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Michael Savage or Michelle Bachmann or to Glenn Beck's fellow Mormons, Mitt Romney and John Huntsman. Go tell that to Mike Huckabee or Leroy Newton Gingrich or Donald Trump or Ron Paul who still polls only at about five or six percent in polls of prospective Republican voters in next year's caucuses and primaries. Go tell that to the two governors, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi, who have called for a "moratorium" on the social issues.

Come on, folks, when are we going to realize that the only "real" world is that of the Catholic Faith? Everything else is an illusion of the devil. Everything else. When are we going to realize this and stop wasting our time believing that "things" are going to get better by means purely natural? Do we prefer the likes of the nattering nabobs of naturalism listed above to the wisdom of Pope Leo XIII, expressed in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900? Do we?

This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" John xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

 

It is impossible to "save" America by appealing to people of all "faiths" as false religions belong to the devil, not to the true God of Divine Revelation Who has entrusted His Sacred Deposit of Faith exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.

Alas, we are are in a trap set by the devil himself in the Sixteenth Century that has not only shaped the course of events in the civil realm but have made possible the "reconciliation" of the apostate Catholics posing as officials of the Catholic Church with the false principles of Modernity, which makes our situation all the more demonic as the authentic Social Teaching of the Catholic Church is so foreign to so man Catholics across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide here in the United States of America that it is easier and more convenient to believe in the founding myths and/or the myths of conciliarism than it is to study and reflect about the necessity of each nation in the world being converted to the Catholic Faith as its civil officials undertake the pursuit of the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, the possession of the glory of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity.

The devil, you see, raised up up "nice" and "tolerant" Protestants in the former English Colonies of North America in the Eighteenth Century after subjecting Catholics to the cruel persecutions of "bad" and "intolerant" Protestants for over two and one-half centuries in Europe, thus predisposing many, although far from all, Catholics in the early years of this nation's history to accept the "religious liberty" enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America as being a great "protection" of their own right to worship rather than being the means by which false religions could propagate themselves in civil society. The "magnanimity" of the First Amendment would also prove to be the means by which future generations of Catholics would be coopted into viewing the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith, to say nothing of serving as the model for conciliarism's own view of the subject as expressed in Dignitatis Humanae, December 7, 1965. John Carroll and his cohorts did not recognize this at the time, focused as they were about simply being "free" to practice the Catholic Faith without fear of arrest and execution.

 

All talk of "God" in generic terms makes the adversary, who hates the Catholic Faith, quite happy. The devil knows that all talk of "God" and "faith" and "morality" absent a due submission of men and their nations to the Catholic Faith in all that pertains to the good of souls poses no problem for him whatsoever. Indeed, the generic talk of "God" and "faith" and "morality," which talk is of the essence of Judeo-Masonry, makes it more possible for evil, both personal and social, to triumph in the world. There is only one way to ameliorate the evils of our day (or of any day): Catholicism. The conciliar "popes" and their "bishops" are as one, therefore, with the nattering nabobs of naturalism in the false opposites of the "right" and of the the "left" in rejecting this simple truth. Are we one with them or with Christ the King. There can be no compromise, my friends. None whatsoever.

It is impossible for there to be true social order in any nation absent its conversion to the Catholic Faith. Political ecumenism, as I noted yesterday in part one of this brief two-part series, is as false and hideous in the sight of God as is theological ecumenism. If it is not, then no Americanist Catholic has any right to complain about Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's upcoming Assisi III event as the false "pontiff" believes exactly what is preached by many of the babblers of naturalism found on the radio and on television and the internet today: that "religion" can be a force for good in the world without regard to the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

A Catholic would think in terms of organizing monthly Rosary processions around the nation. It is with Our Lady's Holy Rosary that we must oppose naturalism and naturalists as we lift high the Cross of the Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in every aspect of our lives at all times without any exception whatsoever.

Father Frederick Faber explained the allure of naturalism in his own day in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, an allure that is no less enticing today to Catholics all across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide than it was one hundred fifty years ago now:

All devotions have their characteristics; all of them have their own theological meanings. We must say something, therefore, upon the characteristics of the devotion to the Precious Blood. In reality the whole Treatise has more or less illustrated this matter. But something still remains to be said, and something will bear to be repeated. We will take the last first. Devotion to the Precious Blood is the devotional expression of the prominent and characteristic teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul is the apostle of redeeming grace. A devout study of his epistles would be our deliverance from most of the errors of the day. He is truly the apostle of all ages. To each age doubtless he seems to have a special mission. Certainly his mission to our is very special. The very air we breathe is Pelagian. Our heresies are only novel shapes of an old Pelagianism. The spirit of the world is eminently Pelagian. Hence it comes to pass that wrong theories among us are always constructed round a nuclear of Pelagianism; and Pelagianism is just the heresy which is least able to breathe in the atmosphere of St. Paul. It is the age of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, of the acquired as opposed to the infused, of the active as opposed to the passive. This is what I said in an earlier chapter, and here repeat. Now, this exclusive fondness for the natural is on the whole very captivating. It takes with the young, because it saves thought. It does not explain difficulties; but it lessens the number of difficulties to be explained. It takes with the idle; it dispenses from slowness and research. It takes with the unimaginative, because it withdraws just the very element in religion which teases them. It takes with the worldly, because it subtracts the enthusiasm from piety and the sacrifice from spirituality. It takes with the controversial, because it is a short road and a shallow ford. It forms a school of thought which, while it admits that we have an abundance of grace, intimates that we are not much better for it. It merges privileges in responsibilities, and makes the sovereignty of God odious by representing it as insidious. All this whole spirit, with all its ramifications, perishes in the sweet fires of devotion to the Precious Blood.

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The time is also one of libertinage; and a time of libertinage is always, with a kind of practical logic, one of infidelity. Whatever brings out God's side in creation, and magnifies his incessant supernatural operation in it, is the controversy which infidelity can least withstand. Now, the devotion to the Precious Blood does this in a very remarkable way. It shows that the true significance in every thing is to be found in the scheme of redemption, apart from which it is useless to discuss the problems of creation. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, written in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 258-259.)

 

This is just as much a description of our own days as it was of Father Faber's. Indeed, Father Faber was merely describing naturalism's hatred for the Holy Faith, a hatred that is from Hell and that is meant to send souls there for all eternity as disorder is sown into the hearts and souls of men to be spread abroad in one nation after another as even well-meaning people come to believe that there is some naturalistic "remedy" for the evils of naturalism that are at the proximate root of our personal and social problems today.

We must reject the traps posed by the devil in the camps of false opposites of the "left" and of the "right." We must stand fast with Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, taking as our consolation the fact that God Himself permits us to suffer during this time of apostasy and betrayal so as to give Him through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother whatever merit we might earn by remaining faithful to Him despite the false currents of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

May we never flag in our commitment to the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as the fruit of the perfect fulfillment of her Fatima Message by the proper consecration of Russia to that same Immaculate Heart by a true pope with all of the world's true bishops.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

 

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint 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.

See also: A Litany of Saints