by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Yesterday' article, Common Core: From Luther To Mann To Bismarck To Obama, began with a quote from an article written by columnist George Will, who had referred to the lawlessness of the currently reigning caesar, Barack Hussein Obama (aka Barry Soetero). That is a point worth exploring a bit as Mr. Will's comment calls to mind a scene in the motion picture A Man for All Seasons.
The scene that came to mind involved England's Chancellor of the Realm, Thomas Cromwell, plotting with Richard Rich, the man who gained notoriety for himself when he was named the Attorney General of Wales as a reward for the false testimony he gave n the trump trial of Sir Thomas More in 1535, to find some way to accuse More of committing a crime that could be used as leverage against him to force him to recognize the lecherous King Henry VIII's adulterous and bigamous marriage to Anne Boleyn. When one effort to do so was foiled by Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, who was himself later imprisoned by Henry on trumped up charges, being freed from London Tower after the murderous tyrant's death in 1547, Cromwell pleaded with Lord Norfolk to serve on the panel that was to interrogate More, eventually make a righteous declaration that was meant to signify England was a "civilized" nation, a nation of laws, if you will:
NORFOLK Oh, this is a horse that won't run, Master Secretary.
CROMWELL Just a trial canter, Your Grace. We'll find something better.
NORFOLK (Between bullying and pleading) Look here, Cromwell, I want no part of this.
CROMWELL You have no choice.
NORFOLK What's that you say?
CROMWELL The King particularly wishes you to be active in the matter.
NORFOLK (Winded) He has not told me that.
CROMWELL (Politely) Indeed? He told me.
NORFOLK But why?
CROMWELL We feel that, since you are known to have been a friend of
More's, your participation will show that there is nothing in the nature
of a "persecution," but only the strict processes of law. As indeed
you've just demonstrated. I'll tell the King of your loyalty to your
friend. If you like, I'll tell him that you "want no part of it," too.
NORFOLK (Furious) Are you threatening me, Cromwell?
CROMWELL My dear Norfolk . . . This isn't Spain. ( A Man For All Seasons, Act 2)
There was a bit of irony in this exchange as it was an echo of a exchange between Thomas More and Thomas Howard earlier in the screenplay:
Norfolk: Why do you insult me with this lawyer's chatter?
More: Because I am afraid.
Norfolk: Man, you're ill. This isn't Spain, you know. This is England.
Yes, "civilized"
England could not be compared to the Spain of the Inquisition in the minds of those who had taken the Oath of Loyalty to Henry VIII. Lord Norfolk did not believe it to be so, at least not at first. Thomas Cromwell insisted that it was not.
In actual truth, however, over 72,000 Catholics who remained faithful
to Rome when King Henry VIII had himself declared Supreme Head of the
Church in England were killed between 1534 and the tyrant's death in
1547, a little over three percent of the population of England at that
time. "Civilized" England could not compare itself to "brutal"
Spain while it was systematically rooting out anyone who would not sell
out their baptismal birthright as Roman Catholics to save their lives
and their property. The killing of over 72,000 people, the seizure of
the monastery and convent lands and the other discriminatory measures
imposed upon Roman Catholics in the wake of the English Protestant Revolt
were undertaken done quite legally, thank you. Judges sentenced Catholics to
death quite routinely. The England of the Anglican Church just went
about its business as though anyone who resisted the new order of things
was a disloyal extremist..
Many of the English have tended over the centuries to have a particular lack of self-reflection about how their words contradict their earlier actions or the actions of those they admired.
To wit, Jonathan Boucher, a Anglican preacher in
England and in the Colony of Virginia in the years before the
Revolutionary War in the Eighteenth Century, argued in very eloquent
terms against a break of the thirteen English colonies from the British
Crown by reminding his listeners that true freedom comes only from Our
Blessed Lord and Saviour. (See: Jonathan Boucher: On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance.)
Boucher made some very fine points in his sermon, which should be
studied if for no other reason that to realize that there was some
effort made by "conservative" colonists to stem the tide of rebellion
and to prevent a war for "independence," which was, after all, an act of high treason against King George III.
Boucher, who sometimes packed two single-shot pistols
and kept them in his pulpit when he preached so that "patriots" would
not attack him, argued against what could be called "liberation
theology," urging Anglicans and other colonists to accept whatever
sufferings were being imposed by King George III and to offer them up to
God, stating that one should not seek to rebel from the authority which
God has seen fit in His Providence to provide for the governance of
men. The "disconnect" of Protestantism was such, however, that Boucher
could not see that his own false "church" was born in a violent, bloody rebellion
against the true authority given by God Himself over men in the form of
the Church that He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. It was
incongruous to argue that a rebellion against civil authority was unjust
when one's very "church" was created as a result of a rebellion against
God Himself.
Similarly, Americans have long fashioned their nation to be one of laws, not of men. However, this is simply not true. This is a fantasy. This is delusional.
The laws of God have been broken on these shores by the proliferation of unbridled error under the false slogans of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" from the very beginning.
President after president has engaged in activities designed to suppress legitimate dissent and opposition.
It was within a decade of the inauguration of the
first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that
a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the
administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams
(see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King),
who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of
America, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made
it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing
against the government of the United States of America and its
officials.
The sixteenth President of the United States of
America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political
opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he
intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas
corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without
trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when
civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what
led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannis!" as he jumped
onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia,
on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot
Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the
next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.
Suppression of opposition to American involvement in
World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson
was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run
as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate
on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was
running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then
President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the
floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say
anything or print anything against the government of the United States.
The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul
Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service to audit his "enemies." He contravened the law in numerous ways as he used the legislative powers illicitly given his regulatory agencies by Congress during the Great Depression to set the stage for Barack Hussein Obama's rule by decree and presidential fiat.
Mind you, this is only a partial listing of abuses that have been committed in this alleged land of "laws and not men," a land where over fifty-three million innocent babies have been butchered by surgical means (hundreds of millions more by chemical means) since, most of those having taken place in the thirty-nine years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. That staggering figure does not include those babies who were killed by
surgical means in their mothers' wombs between 1967 and 1973 when
various states, including Colorado, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New
York, North Carolina, Alaska, and Washington (and Washington, District
of Columbia) decriminalized surgical baby-killing in some or all cases
at various stages of a baby's development in his mother's womb.
A "civilized" nation of "laws." I don't think so.
The lawless imposition of policies even in violation of constitutions and civil code or statutory law and the suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly-held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.
You see, good readers, those who believe n the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists (see Welcome to the U.S.S.A ) who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.
As I have noted many times on this site, one of the reasons I am not employable in my chosen field of political science despite stellar evaluations of teaching effectiveness from peer evaluators is because of my long record of teaching political science as a Catholic and my work in defense of the Faith outside of the Catholic, including my campaigns for public office on the Right to Life Party line. The open and undisguised hostility that met me in some of the places where I taught was indicative, of course, that the very people who claim that they are "tolerant" and "open-minded" are actually the most bigoted, intolerant people imaginable. Numerous are the instances of organized bands of leftist thugs attempting to disrupt lectures that have been given by naturalists of the "conservative" bent on college and universities campuses so as to prevent any "dissenting" voices from interfering with the transmission of "leftist truth."
This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their worldview shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes.
Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus, however, do not consider it "good enough" that most of those who belong at least nominally, to what they know should constitute their principal source of opposition, Catholicism, are either supportive of their statism or indifferent about it. No, the minions of Caesar Obamus want to eradicate all opposition by whatever means necessary, including the use of slogans and labels to disparage anyone who would dare to raise their voices in opposition to their "magisterial" statements. We must remember it that those who do violence to reason and truth must first violence to language. The constant repetition of slogans to discredit opponents by the use of invectives is meant to create an atmosphere where the relatives, neighbors, coworkers and other associates of the "oddball" "bigots" who dare to criticize the policies of government officials are viewed with constant suspicion.
Yes, Barack Hussein Obama is just carrying on a grand tradition of the kind of statist thuggery that must occur, sooner or later, when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is not recognized as the King of a particular nation and His true Church, the Catholic Church, therefore is unable to serve as the check, principally by means of her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching and exhortation and then, only as a last resort, interposing herself with civil authorities when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention, on the misuse of civil power that imperils souls.
There is nothing new in what he is doing as mean can only know true law under the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as civil rulers seek to undertake 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.
We are suffering, of course, from a chastisement not only for the sins of a lawless land, but for each one of our own sins, which is why we must be earnest, especially during this Holy Season of Lent, about making reparation for our sins to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state in life permits.
Mindful of our need to make reparation of our sins and relying ever more confidently upon the maternal intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Empress of the Americas, may we be emboldened to plant the seeds, starting with the enthronement of our own homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the conversion of each man and woman and child in this nation to the Catholic Faith, thereby ushering in a Christendom in that part of North America located between Canada and Mexico wherein the wonderful cry of the Cristeros, voiced so proudly by Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J., will be on the lips of all men at all times:
Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
