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                  December 9, 2008

Madness Is Easy To Define

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Naturalism leads to madness. Utter madness. The belief that humans can "make the world better" by natural means alone, absent a subordination to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church and absent a belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace, leads to the worsening of social problems and feeds the semi-Pelagian belief of Modernity that man is more or less self-redemptive.

The outgoing President of the United States of America, George Walker Bush, believes in this madness. Left to his own devices without a speech writer to put words in his mouth for him to garble and mispronounce, the forty-third President of the United States of America makes Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin seem coherent in her thought process. This is how Bush answered a question posed to him by editors of National Review magazine about "compassionate conservatism" when they interviewed him on Friday, December 7, 2008

Even though the phrase “compassionate conservatism” has been ridiculed by many, including some conservatives, the president explained Friday that he remains devoted to the idea. “This is a philosophy that most people adhere to,” he told us. “It wasn’t very well defended, but most people adhere to it. Compassionate conservatism basically says that if you implement this philosophy, your life would become better. That’s what it says. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s saying to the average person, this philosophy will help you make your life better. It’s the proper use of government to enable a hopeful society to develop based upon your talents and your success.”  (Bush Looks Back)

 

Most people adhere to the "philosophy" of "compassionate conservatism." The man is mad. Utterly mad. How does he know that "most" people adhere to a "philosophy" that lacks any coherency whatsoever and exists only in his own rather feeble mind? Yet Bush actually believes that "compassionate conservatives basically says that if you implement this philosophy, your life will become better." Our lives will become better as a result of "compassionate conservatives"? How? In what way? Madness. Complete and utter madness.

Life certainly has gotten "better" here in the United States of America in the past eight years, hasn't it? We've killed another nine million children by means of surgical abortions. We've killed countless millions of others in this country and around the world by means of chemical abortifacients funded by the "pro-life"  administration of George Walker Bush and Richard N. Cheney. We've invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses and spent billions upon billions of dollars to destroy and then to rebuild that nation's infrastructure as thousands of American citizens have been killed or wounded following the invasion of Mohammedan terror squads during our military occupation of that nation. Countless thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed or injured during our invasion and occupation. Torture has been authorized as a means of interrogation. Legitimate civil liberties at home have been violated in the name of the "global war on terror." Ordinary Americans who must travel by airplanes or open bank accounts are treated as possible "terrorists." The size of the Federal debt has nearly doubled, from $5,751,743,092,605.50 on January 3, 2000, to $10,024,724,896,912.49 on September 30, 2008. The Federal government of the United States of America is "bailing out" predatory lenders and aping the socialism of Western European nations by pumping taxpayer monies into private business and banks that are suffering the consequences of their own mismanagement. "Compassionate conservatism" will make "your life better"? Anyone who believes this is mad. Utterly mad.

Alas, naturalism is madness. To reduce human existence to the merely natural level without any thought of First or Last Things leads men to believe that they can "save" the world by means of their own unaided powers. The madness of naturalism is, of course, only one of the many byproducts of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt. This madness has enveloped most men in the world today in a shroud of darkness which is characterized by competing sets of naturalists, people who many disagree on certain specifics of public policy but who agree on the essential core conviction of naturalism: that man does not need to be directed by any one institution, say, the Catholic Church, and that he does not need to reform his immortal soul on a daily basis in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

As explained yesterday in Spotless Blessed Mother, Spotless Mother Church, those who are steeped in naturalism do not realize that Original Sin and our own Actual Sins are, respectively, remotely and proximately responsible for all of the problems of the world, bar none, and that the only way to ameliorate human problems is for individual men to reform their lives in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace and according to the teaching that has been entrusted by the God-Man Himself to the true Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Catholicism, not liberalism, not socialism, not libertarianism, not communism, not fascism, not conservatism and not "compassionate conservatism," is the one and only foundation of social order.

Pope Saint Pius X made this abundantly clear 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.)

President Bush, do you know more than Pope Saint Pius X? Is "compassionate conservatism" a means of "secular salvation." You are insane if you believe this.

Pope Pius IX, writing in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864, termed naturalism as impious and absurd:

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."

 

Obviously, it is not only George Walker Bush who believes in the madness of naturalism as the foundation of social order but conciliarists such as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who does indeed believe that "human society be conducted and government" without "any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." It is "enough," in the view of Ratzinger/Benedict, for the Catholic Church to have a "say" along with other "views" in society without asserting a claim upon the civil state to recognize her as the true religion. Pope Pius IX was reiterating the constant, perennial teaching of the Catholic Church. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI rejects this teaching completely, thus reaffirming dunderheads like Bush in their inchoate naturalistic "philosophies.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, discussed the logical consequences of a system of morality reduced to the merely natural level and excluding the direction of the true Church:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. 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.

 

One either sees and accepts these truths or he does not. One either sees that the likes of George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama disagree on the margins of issues but that they are as one on the belief that is some kind of naturalistic "philosophy" that guides the making and implementation of public policy, not the Catholic Faith. No one in public life today, for example, and almost no one in the official quarters of the counterfeit church of conciliarism can be found to agree with Pope Saint Pius X's simple reiteration of the fact that the civil state has an obligation to aid man's Last End and to undertake a pursuit of the common temporal good with that Last End in mind:

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. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

 

Writing in The Precious Blood in 1860, Father Frederick Faber described naturalism's embrace of semi-Pelagianism (the heresy that we are more or less "self-redemptive" and that we can "stir up" graces within ourselves to be good and to do whatever "we set our minds to doing") that so characterize most people alive today. Father Faber understood Saint Paul to be an opponent of the errors of the day, not one who was a precursor of those errors or of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with them:

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.

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.)

 

Catholicism is the one and only foundation of social order. I will reminding you of this until the day I die or until I lose the mental or physical ability to write, whichever comes first. Anything other Catholicism is from the devil and is thus madness. Anything other Catholicism serves the interests only of social chaos and the ruination of souls both in time and in eternity. And I don't care how many people hate for reminding them of this truth over and over and over again. There is not secular, naturalistic, interdenominational, nondenominational, ideological or "philosophical" way to address problems caused by Original Sin and our own Actual Sins.

Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego for the first time on this day, December 9, in the year 1531, four hundred seventy-seven years ago now. She chose this humble Indian man, a widower who was on his way to assist at the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, to be the human instrument of spreading devotion to her in the Americas and to convert everyone here out of their paganism and into the true Faith. This is what Our Lady wanted on December 9, 1531, and this is what she wants on December 9, 2008. Our Lady wants men and their nations to be converted to the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without whose teaching and sanctifying offices there can be no true social order within nations or a real sense of "peace" among nations.

The Queen of Heaven and Earth who was conceived without any stain of Original Sin or Actual Sin is the Queen and the Empress of the Americas. We had better understand this and accept it as we pray as many Rosaries as possible each day in reparation for our own sins, which have contributed to the problems in the Church and in the world, and for those of the whole world as we distributed blessed Green Scapulars and Miraculous Medals and Rosaries (and Rosary instruction booklets) to those whom God's Holy Providence places in our paths each day. We have a role to play in the re-conversion of the Americas to the true Faith as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Are we willing to undertake this role no matter what kind of humiliation we must suffer for doing so? Are we willing to reject the madness of naturalism in all of its farcical forms in order to promote Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal order. Are we willing to entrust all to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary? Are we willing to be considered fools for the sake of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen by the fools steeped in the madness of naturalism as we pray for their conversion to the true Faith?

As we continue to celebrate the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and as we prepare to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, may we have the same fidelity and tenacity as Juan Diego did when insisting upon seeing Bishop [at the time, Fray] Juan de Zumarraga despite the rough and cruel treatment he received at the hands of his, the bishop's aides. May we ask Our Lady to help us to be valiant defenders of Christ the King so that the blindness of the madness of naturalism will be lifted and all men in the Americas and around the world, prospering as a result of the Triumph of her own Immaculate Heart as the fruit of the fulfillment of her Fatima Message, will exclaim:

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.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

 





© Copyright 2008, Thomas A. Droleskey. All rights reserved.