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                 May 8, 2008

Public Scandal Is Never A Private Matter

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Fallen human nature takes quite a toll on us. One of the many ways in which the ravages of our fallen natures leads us away from God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through the true Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, is to tend to invest in mere creatures something approach salvific power. This is evident in the pages of the Old Testament, where we find many of the Chosen People forgetting about God entirely to worship false gods and/or to disobey His Commandments in order to curry favor with those positions of political and/or social prominence. And it was not uncommon to find those holding such positions of prominence to believe themselves to be above God's Commandments while being enabled in their deceits by the sycophants around them.

Even King David, from whose very line Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ received His Sacred Humanity from His Most Blessed Mother, proved himself to be unfaithful, seeking after a mere creature, Bethsabee, and arranging for the death of her husband Urias while he was still married to his own wife.

And it came to pass at the return of the year, at the time when kings go forth to war, that David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel, and they spoiled the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabba: but David remained in Jerusalem. In the mean time it happened that David arose from his bed after noon, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and he saw from the roof of his house a woman washing herself, over against him: and the woman was very beautiful. And the king sent, and inquired who the woman was. And it was told him, that she was Bethsabee the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Urias the Hethite. And David sent messengers, and took her, and she came in to him, and he slept with her: and presently she was purified from her uncleanness: And she returned to her house having conceived. And she sent and told David, and said: I have conceived.

And David sent to Joab, saying: Send me Urias the Hethite. And Joab sent Urias to David. And Urias came to David. And David asked how Joab did, and the people, and how the war was carried on. And David said to Urias: Go into thy house, and wash thy feet. And Urias went out from the king's house, and there went out after him a mess of meat from the king. But Urias slept before the gate of the king's house, with the other servants of his lord, and went not down to his own house. And it was told David by some that said: Urias went not to his house. And David said to Urias: Didst thou not come from thy journey? why didst thou not go down to thy house?

And Urias said to David: The ark of God and Israel and Juda dwell in tents, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord abide upon the face of the earth: and shall I go into my house, to eat and to drink, and to sleep with my wife? By thy welfare and by the welfare of thy soul I will not do this thing. Then David said to Urias: Tarry here today, and tomorrow I will send thee away. Urias tarried in Jerusalem that day and the next. And David called him to eat and to drink before him, and he made him drunk: and he went out in the evening, and slept on his couch with the servants of his lord, and went not down into his house. And when the morning was come, David wrote a letter to Joab: and sent it by the hand of Urias, Writing in the letter: Set ye Urias in the front of the battle, where the fight is strongest: and leave ye him, that he may be wounded and die.

Wherefore as Joab was besieging the city, he put Urias in the place where he knew the bravest men were. And the men coming out of the city, fought against Joab, and there fell some of the people of the servants of David, and Urias the Hethite was killed also. Then Joab sent, and told David all things concerning the battle. And he charged the messenger, saying: When thou hast told all the words of the battle to the king, If thou see him to be angry, and he shall say: Why did you approach so near to the wall to fight? knew you not that many darts are thrown from above off the wall?

Who killed Abimelech the son of Jerobaal? did not a woman cast a piece of a millstone upon him from the wall, and slew him in Thebes? Why did you go near the wall? Thou shalt say: Thy servant Urias the Hethite is also slain. So the messenger departed, and came and told David all that Joab had commanded him. And the messenger said to David: The men prevailed against us, and they came out to us into the field: and we vigorously charged and pursued them even to the gate of the city. And the archers shot their arrows at thy servants from off the wall above: and some of the king's servants are slain, and thy servant Urias the Hethite is also dead. And David said to the messenger: Thus shalt thou say to Joab: Let not this thing discourage thee: for various is the event of war: and sometimes one, sometimes another is consumed by the sword: encourage thy warriors against The city, and exhort them that thou mayest overthrow it.

And the wife of Urias heard that Urias her husband was dead, and she mourned for him. And the mourning being over, David sent and brought her into his house, and she became his wife, and she bore him a son: and this thing which David had done, was displeasing to the Lord. (2 Kings 11: 1-27.)

 

The Prophet Nathan was sent by God to remonstrate with David, who was sincerely repentant for his crimes of adultery and of arranging the murder of his paramour's husband, Urias. David recognized that he was not above the law of God, recognizing Nathan to be His own Prophet:

And the Lord sent Nathan to David: and when he was come to him, he said to him: There were two men in one city, the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many sheep and oxen. But the poor man had nothing at all but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up, and which had grown up in his house together with his children, eating of his bread, and drinking of his cup, and sleeping in his bosom: and it was unto him as a daughter.And when a certain stranger was come to the rich man, he spared to take of his own sheep and oxen, to make a feast for that stranger, who was come to him, but took the poor man's ewe, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. And David's anger being exceedingly kindled against that man, he said to Nathan: As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this is a child of death.

He shall restore the ewe fourfold, because he did this thing, and had no pity. And Nathan said to David: Thou art the man. Thus saith the Lord the God of Israel: I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee from the hand of Saul, And gave thee thy master's house and thy master's wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and Juda: and if these things be little, I shall add far greater things unto thee. Why therefore hast thou despised the word of the Lord, to do evil in my sight? Thou hast killed Urias the Hethite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. Therefore the sword shall never depart from thy house, because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Urias the Hethite to be thy wife.

Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thy own house, and I will take thy wives before thy eyes I and give them to thy neighhour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun. For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing in the sight of all Israel, and in the sight of the sun. And David said to Nathan: I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David: The Lord also hath taken away thy sin: thou shalt not die. Nevertheless, because thou hast given occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, for this thing, the child that is born to thee, shall surely die. And Nathan returned to his house. The Lord also struck the child which the wife of Urias had borne to David, and his life was despaired of. (2 Kings 12: 1-15.)

 

Saint John the Baptist, the cousin and Precursor of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, warned the powerful King Herod the Tetrarch, the son of King Herod the Great, who had ordered the murder of the Holy Innocents as he sought the very life of Saint John's infant cousin, that he was living in a bigamous and adulterous relationship with the wife his very much alive brother, Philip the Tetrarch:

At the time Herod the Tetrarch heard the fame of Jesus. And he said to his servants: This is John the Baptist: he is risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works show forth themselves in him. For Herod had apprehended John and bound him, and put him into prison, because of Herodias, his brother's wife. For John said to him: It is not lawful for thee to have her. And having a mind to put him to death, he feared the people: because they esteemed him as a prophet.

But on Herod's birthday, the daughter of Herodias danced before them: and pleased Herod. Whereupon he promised with an oath, to give her whatsoever she would ask of him. But she being instructed before by her mother, said: Give me here in a dish the head of John the Baptist. And the king was struck sad: yet because of his oath, and for them that sat with him at table, he commanded it to be given. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.

And his head was brought in a dish: and it was given to the damsel, and she brought it to her mother. And his disciples came and took the body, and buried it, and came and told Jesus. (Matt. 14: 1-12.)

 

Even in the era of Christendom, of course, there were many examples of conflicts between ecclesiastical officials and civil potentates. One of the most memorable occurred in 1170, as is recounted in A Martyr for the Church's Liberties.

Saint Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in his own cathedral in 1170, had to fight for the liberties of the Church against King Henry II, intent on making the Church serve his own purposes, a foreshadowing of the evils of another King Henry some 460 years later. Saint Thomas a Becket, although a friend of King Henry Plantagenet, would not let human respect stand in the way of defending the absolute right of the Catholic Church to be free in matters of her internal governance from any interference by temporal officials. The king of a country had to be subordinate to the King of Kings Who was born for us in poverty and in anonymity in Bethlehem so as to be crucified as Our King of Love on Calvary. No amount of blandishments from even a close friend, whom he had served for a time as the Chancellor of the Realm, and no amount of punishments imposed on his own relatives could persuade Saint Thomas a Becket to disown the King of Kings in order to curry favor with a mere mortal whose own kingship was transitory and circumscribed in the exercise of its legitimate powers by the Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Catholic Church.

Saint Thomas a Becket was a humble man. He prayed day and night. He served the poor with selfless abandon. He preached the Gospel fearlessly in the midst of all of the threats that were being made against him and his relatives. He wore a hair-shirt to mortify his flesh. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate as Archbishop of Canterbury to resist his friend, King Henry II, in order to reclaim lands that belonged rightly to the Church and to oppose with great courage the imposition of unjust taxes upon her by the civil state. Moreover, Saint Thomas asserted the right of the Church to try clerics charged with civil crimes in ecclesiastical courts as opposed to their being tried in civil courts.

Unlike the "bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in the United States of America who have sought to shield priests guilty of perverted behavior from all real punishments, whether ecclesiastical or civil, Saint Thomas a Becket meant to deal severely with clerics adjudged guilty of having committed crimes. He was simply asserting the right of the Church and not the civil state to do so, recognizing that the civil state might abuse its prosecutorial power to trump up totally bogus charges against priests so as to extort silence from them in the pulpit about matters of civil governance contrary to the demands of objective justice and thus the good of souls. It was in no way the intention of Saint Thomas a Becket to do what Bernard "Cardinal" Law and Roger "Cardinal" Mahony and countless other conciliar "bishops" have done, that is, to protect perverted priests by transferring them to other assignments without either punishing them for their perversity or seeking their spiritual reform for having the predilection to engage in unnatural acts indicative of grave mental disorders. Saint Thomas a Becket was willing to be charged with a bogus charge of "contempt of court" rather than yield for one instant to King Henry II's demands to bring the Church in England to heel under his power.

For the good of the Church, however, and for the sake of civil peace Saint Thomas was willing to absent himself from Canterbury for a time in order to calm King Henry's anger and to foster the Church's liberties. It was the prayerful hope of Saint Thomas while he was in exile in France, chiefly under the protection of King Louis VII of France, that the rights of the Church to be free from any and all threats imposed by the civil state would be respected anew. Alas, he had to pay with his life for his defense of the liberties of Holy Mother Church against the unjust exercise of civil authority by a fellow Catholic, falling under the blows imposed upon his body during vespers on December 29, 1170, becoming a new kind of martyr: one killed by fellow Catholics who viewed an archbishop's loyalty to Christ the King as disloyalty to the civil state. Coming as it did during the Octave of Christmas 836 years ago, the martyrdom of Saint Thomas a Becket reminds us that there will be those from the household of the Faith itself--and not just from the world-at-large--who will tempt us even during the solemnities of the Church's liturgical year to surrender to the exigencies of the moment rather than to remain steadfast at all times and in all places to the fullness of the Catholic Faith without one moment's hesitation.

Saint Thomas a Becket's witness to the rights of God and His Holy Church against the unjust exercise of civil authority by a Catholic potentate was one of the first instances of Catholic Cains shedding the blood of Catholic Abels, following by ninety-one years the murder of Saint Stanislaus by King Boleslaus in Poland in the year 1079 A.D., and following within that same ninety years or so the plots of Emperor Henry IV against the rights of the Church during the reign of Pope Saint Gregory VII. Catholics were doing the bidding of the adversary by spilling the blood of their brother Catholics to advance the goals of the civil state over moral reform and the rights of God and His Holy Church.

The adversary, who prowls about the world seeking the ruin of souls and to do as much damage to the Church Militant on earth as possible before Our Lord's Second Coming in glory at the end of time on the Last Day, had done likewise with many of the Prophets of the Old Testament, men who had dared to challenge the kings of Israel and Judah to reform their own lives and to govern according to God's laws rather than the dictates of their own disordered wills. It was to be expected, therefore, that some Catholic kings would lose sight of Whose Kingship they were meant to imitate. If King David, of whose royal house Our Lord was born, could arrange the murder of Uriah, the husband of his paramour, then it should not be too terribly surprising that men such as Saint Stanislaus and Saint Thomas a Becket would suffer at the hands of their own co-religionists, friends, and relatives for the sake of remaining steadfast to the Gospel of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the rights of Holy Mother Church.

 

Yes, it is true that the era of Christendom saw more than its share of bishops who were all too willing to do the bidding of civil potentates who abused their power and/or who threatened the very rights and liberties of Holy Mother Church. All but one bishop, Saint John Fisher of Rochester, England, followed King Henry VIII out of the Catholic Church in 1534 when the English Parliament, acting at his behest, passed the Act of Supremacy to declare the English monarch to be "supreme head of the church in England." Over 72,000 Catholics, including Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More, were put to their deaths between 1534 and 1547 under the orders of Henry Tudor for their remaining faithful to the Catholic Church and Papal Primacy. That figure of 72,000 martyred Catholics represents around 3.1 percent of the entire population of England at the time. An equivalent figure today in the United States of America would be over nine million people. Staggering, is it not?

Although many would be the Catholic martyrs of the French and Mexican and Bolshevik (and related) and Spanish Revolutions in the past 219 years, the sense of English accommodationism has long prevailed in the United States of America. That is, admitting some very notable exceptions here and there, many of the American bishops in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries before the advent of the "Second" Vatican Council were most sanguine about the absolute compatibility between the American constitutional regime and the Catholic Faith. Some were even so delusional as to think that the writings of Saint Robert Bellarmine helped to influence the mind of Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Dr. John Rao handled this piece of self-serving mythology quite well in Dr. John C. Rao: Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers: 666-0.

Each time someone sings to me of the glories of the Founding Fathers—namely, every single day of the year-- I think of the Luca Signorelli cycle of paintings of the Antichrist in the cathedral of Orvieto. There, in Umbria, he is: posing as the Savior in front of a crowd of duped believers while his minions massacre the rest of the faithful in the background. Here, in the United States, for the punishment of our sins, they are: protestants, philosophes, a few befuddled or Enlightenment-drugged papists, and many anxious plantation owners and proto-capitalists--all idolized as architects of the "last, best hope of mankind".

Oh, but there is, admittedly, this one twist to my Signorelli analogy. The Antichrist of Orvieto clearly worked on his own steam. In contrast, the Founding Fathers did not themselves labor to convince believers that they were the last, best hope of the faithful in particular. We have to thank subsequent generations of Catholics for undertaking such a task on these demigods’ behalf. Perhaps this is a perversion only of my own little corner of the New Jerusalem, but it seems to me that in these latter days American Catholics are shouting hosannas to the Founders in sermons, in Good Friday meditations, and in calls for a return to their infallible, constitutional principles more regularly than ever before. And all with a panache that would have left the jaws of those hard-headed Anglo-Saxons dropping in amazement.

I can just imagine what George Washington, a Freemason whose library at Mount Vernon was filled with works on cement-making and other such devotional topics, would really have thought if he had known that he would one day be incensed as a Catholic icon; a new Constantine; and even a Marian visionary to boot. The belly-laugh he would have enjoyed with his buddies at the Arlington Lodge! And what about Benjamin Franklin, fresh from an illuminist workshop in Paris? Did he realize that he was laboring alongside Augustine to build up a Catholic City of God? Or consider the musings of the "liberal " (and non-Mason) Thomas Jefferson with the "conservative" John Adams, recently cited in The New York Sunday Times: "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594). How astonished would they have been to learn that Founder-intoxicated Americanists would not permit such dreams to interfere with their identification as card-carrying Catholic intellectuals: in fact, more reliable ones than men who actually had the temerity to believe in the Trinity, Original Sin, Redemption, and the Resurrection?

Let’s face it. If any of these Founder characters had lived outside of the United States, American Catholics would send them to hell in a hand basket. Too bad poor Robespierre could not have built a career on our side of the Atlantic. Given his own repeated deist references to God, he would have found himself qualifying as a Catholic candidate for canonization rather than for an eternal roasting as a terrorist Frog.

In any case, each time those sweet hosannas to the Founding Fathers ring, my mind turns to a different fatherly fraternity, this one truly worthy of the name—that of the Church Fathers. How many American Catholics can name them? Or, perhaps more fairly, how many American Catholics honestly take them and their works seriously? I mean, really seriously? Oh, they may be piously remembered for miracles associated with their lives, or for one or two anti-Arian citations, or even a couple of passages from their writings, rendered noteworthy through repeated quotation on EWTN. Nevertheless, insofar as daily practical life are concerned, they are dead, buried, and forgotten, consigned to the doctrinal rubbish bin. There is simply no contest in this battle of the ancestors, fraudulent and echt. The score is always the same: Founding Fathers "666"; Church Fathers "0".

American Catholics thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, are ever more confidently inciting the faithful to desert the army of their true spiritual forebears in order to embrace the "let’s-get-real" Founders of the last, best hope of mankind. They are so flush with Founderology that they promote it as though it were the only valid, practical Patrology. This has made a deeper interest in the old Church Fathers not only superfluous, but even harmful and downright impious. Hasn’t everything really valuable that the Fathers could teach us regarding social life been taught more suitably, and in English, by the American Founders? Some narrow patristic arguments, plucked from out of their overarching spiritual vision, may, of course, still be tolerated--if, that is to say, they can support the truly salvific constitutional and economic dogmas of Founderology. But all else is political and social trash, part of that human side of the Church’s Tradition which can easily be shed when reason and science and the inspired eighteenth century American aristocracy has spoken.

What does doctrine-soaked Cappadocia have to do with common sense Philadelphia anyway? What did Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa have to say about states’ rights? Where were Augustine’s comments on checks and balances? Cyril’s meditations on the pre-Civil War perfection of the dance of the sugar plum executives, legislators, and judges? Or Cyprian’s concerns about the right to bear catapults? What about that unconscionable collectivist John Chrysostom, whose neglect of the scientific laws of free enterprise helped disrupt the imperial GNP? Away with them! And the same worship of the Founder-friendly patristic phrase, accompanied by a dismissal of the Founder-phobic patristic spirit is employed to butcher the global vision of Thomas Aquinas, the late Scholastics, and the Church’s whole counterrevolutionary tradition as well.

Give me a determination to make all things jive with the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, and Adam Smith and I’ll give you back a scriptural exegesis which will reveal the Incarnation to have been a humdrum prelude to the real excitement caused by 1776, 1787, and the daily figures from the New York Stock Exchange. Mutatis mutandis, what shows its face in Founderology is the same methodology familiar to us from the modernists of the turn of the twentieth century: that of restraining Christ’s message within a secular strait jacket. Christianity means the mundane as interpreted by this specific band of exegetes and nothing more. Take it or leave it. Live free according to these secular rules or die.

What most intrigues me as an historian is the sustained assault on Catholic History which such Patricide reflects. War on history has, of course, been declared everywhere in Christendom today. Rome has reduced the world before the1960’s to a house of horrors useful only in providing topics for self-deprecating addresses before frenzied anti-Catholic audiences out for blood. Local dioceses bulldoze their past with a passion matched only by Nicolae Ceausescu in pre-1989 Romania. Many elderly Catholics whom I know will deny on a stack of bibles all memory of doctrines and customs which I heard them piously repeat and saw them fervently practice in my childhood in the 1950’s.

None of this history killing, however, has the long term effect of that which is perpetrated on the school front. Anti-historical warmongering is rampant in Catholic education, and this, sad to say, is as true in conservative and even some traditionalist circles as in liberal centers. Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? Don’t look to Goebbels for the handbook. He was a piker compared to the propagandists at the Sportpalasts of conservative American Catholic instruction. One can easily take stock of the damage by examining certain home schooling programs, whose record of human civilization begins with Virginia and Massachusetts rather than with Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Hebrews, Greece and Rome. Another proof of it is the outright prohibition by some "alternative" Catholic academies or colleges of any substantive presentation of our historical tradition, with its inevitable revelation of radical differences with the pottage served up by the American Dream. Talk about the sin against the Holy Ghost! Disclosure of Catholic History, for all too many conservatives, is the only thing that truly fits the bill. The equation Founders=Fathers=Catholic has more clout in our supposedly countercultural educational camp of the saints than any canon of the Council of Nicaea. Woe to the orthodox teacher who might threaten to weaken it! Would that he had never lived! Would, instead, that a twenty-first century Luca Signorelli might emerge to portray the way this mentality works to smooth the road down which the Antichrist will eventually happily sashay, with our fellow believers pulling his carriage. Once again, Founder Fathers, "666", Church Fathers--along with the rest of Catholic History-- "0".

But why would a believer voluntarily enlist in the ranks of the Catholic heritage killers and happily throw the game to the Founderologists? I have spent my whole adult life trying to explain the answer to that question, and have made my local wine merchant rich while trying to do so. Right now, I should like to approach the issue from the standpoint of one factor alone: the seemingly irresistible influence upon many well-intentioned Catholics of the concept of "American Values". As guides to Catholic morality go, this one is a pure gem. Build your moral life on the foundation of American Values and you will never lack for arguments justifying detours from the Church’s real Tradition again.

What, exactly, are these "American Values"? Presumably, values associated with America or accepted by Americans. Grasping what such values entail is not a terribly difficult enterprise. It merely involves a basic knowledge of the nature and interaction of the two different elements that have gone into forming them: ideas and men.

Ideas are real things, possessing a life and logic of their own, separate from the intentions of those who create or utilize them. No matter what the formulators of ideas might "will" regarding the meaning and development of their principles, these still enjoy their own innate character and direction. The Iron Law of Ideas applies to the labors of the Founders as much as to ordinary human beings who do not inhabit their special Olympus. And no matter how much the assertion may disturb a Founderologist’s breakfast, the Protestant and Enlightenment ideas which have shaped the Founders and America work with relentless logic to destroy all aspects of Catholic culture.

Individual men on their own, however, do not always think and act coherently or completely. They do not necessarily understand all the consequences of what they say and do. Many of the individual heretics and philosophes who created or promoted the ideas informing the United States of America are perfect examples of this phenomenon. There is much that they happily accepted as part of the obvious, unchanging "common sense" structure of the world around them, while nevertheless espousing subversive ideas undermining the very positions they cherished and thought to be unassailable.

The original Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers grew up in an environment that was either dominated by Catholicism or still nurtured numerous residual Catholic influences. Many thus took for granted and worked with familiar Catholic words and themes, even as they gave to them new anti-Catholic meanings. Many also presupposed the continued practice of Catholic ways of behavior even as their own ideas began to create a New Adam who would eventually act in a decidedly anti-Catholic manner. Thus, to note but one example, while using the concepts "freedom" and "nature", both of them themes familiar and friendly to Catholic ears, they brutally perverted their orthodox significance. While assuming that human beings would always act freely and naturally in a Catholic way, they destabilized the support system encouraging such traditional behavior. Doors were opened to the gradual construction of a new style of life for a new kind of man reflecting their changed ideas more accurately. What, exactly, their own New Adam would be like they could not even themselves imagine, precisely because they had no practical experience of him yet. In fact, if they had had a clear picture of this Frankenstein they might have quickly jettisoned him and returned to the bosom of Holy Church.

I am reminded in this regard of the instructive tale about Jeremy Bentham, who sought "the greatest good for the greatest number" on the basis of a materialist definition of what was "useful". Someone supposedly once asked him what would happen if 51% of Englishmen found that their greater good would be achieved by killing the other 49% of their countrymen. "Don’t be ridiculous", he is said to have responded, incredulously, "Englishmen do not act that way". Apocryphal or not, this would have been a valid comment, so long as they continued to behave as Christians, and in gross contradiction to the utilitarian ideas that he was teaching. But once men really understood what the full logic of his vision was; once they started to act in harmony with its precepts, they would begin to pursue what was useful in less scrupulous ways. The Twentieth and budding Twenty-First Centuries are filled with examples of utilitarians of many nations ready to "choose" their version of the good through actions that even Bentham would have had to call murder.

Proponents of so-called "American Values" are in a similar position to Jeremy, the Founders, and the original Protestants and philosophes behind them. These men of values enthusiastically repeat the fundamentally erroneous and radical ideas of the Reformation and the Enlightenment on such matters as freedom and nature, but are often held back from recognizing and accepting the wicked consequences of their false teachings due to the impact upon them of residual traditional presuppositions and "gut feelings". Here are men who are repeatedly horrified by the behavior of people who actually do draw the logical consequences from their formative ideas and radicalize their comportment accordingly. In short, supporters of so-called American Values are a house divided against itself. They wish to maintain a traditional behavior to which they are both non-rationally and irrationally committed, together with rational, radical principles that will make the survival of this traditional behavior absolutely impossible. In the long run, the only honest-to-goodness American Value is actually the incoherent willful desire to have one’s cake and eat it too. A banner should be flown over the American Values camp depicting a whining child banging its head on the floor to protest the nausea caused by the lollipop which it furiously persists in sucking.

Further, rather bizarre complications for the American Values camp emerge from the press of the myriad of different groups seeking to squeeze inside. For, despite paleo-conservative claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the real thing, many others have insisted upon pitching their tents within its precincts. Each faction really has the right to do so, since all can be shown to share the same Protestant and philosophe background, and to differ merely in their various applications of Reformation and Enlightenment ideas regarding freedom and nature with diverging degrees of logic. Each sect arbitrarily limits the import of its ideas to one or two realms, willfully cutting off concern for their effects in all others. Each finds a gaggle of Founders who shared its views or can at least be used as a starting point for promoting them. Liberal proponents of American Values praise the freedom that opens the floodgates to gay marriage and pornography; conservatives, the liberty unleashing that locust plague called unrestrained capitalism; neo-conservatives the license for lying, murderous Machtpolitik. Each then expresses shock at the unnatural distortion of American Values and the will of the Founders perpetrated by the other, just as Luther proclaimed his outrage at the manipulation of his ideas by Anabaptists or Rousseau by atheists. Fists are shaken and tongues stuck out. An incongruous War Between the Heirs erupts.

None of these monotonous battles and mutual recriminations, treated oh so seriously by the earnest warriors of American Values, reflect anything other than the desperate attempts of the members of one big, unhappy libertine family to hide their common spiritual and intellectual bloodline; to escape the inescapable curse that descends with birth into the whole blasted clan. Hiding the family history in order to deny and flee from the family curse has literally become second nature to its members. They have written more glosses on the subject of the differences among them than the most pedantic of late medieval nitpickers, and almost all of these at some point drag in the question of their relationship with the Founders.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to note that the "argument by appeal to the Founders", used by all supporters of American Values, has a long history of rhetorical effectiveness behind it, and one that is much older than the United States. Isocrates used it to batter Plato, who was accused of betraying the will of the Founders of Athens with his non pragmatic pursuit of truth. Ancient Roman patricians defended senatorial prerogatives with reference to the desires of their own ancestors. This same theme was valuable to secularized bishops of the 1300’s and 1400’s, who appealed to an imagined will of Apostles in their efforts to subject the Papacy to General Councils. Venetian statists divinized the passions of those who first waded into the waters of the lagoons when trying to fend off the advance of the Catholic Reformation. The recipe is always the same. Clarify your narrow self-interested goals of wealth, power, and fame. Incense them as the obvious, God-given or Newtonian pillars of order and freedom. Distinguish them from the grubby desires of competitors. Repeat unceasingly the unbreakable connection of your particular longings with those of the most ancient, prestigious dead men who can no longer contradict you, and whose true dicta can be revealed, suppressed, or rehashed ad infinitum. Ridicule your opponents claims to Founder friendship, and, with it, all their ties to the past. So much will you hit the jackpot with this con game, that, after a short while, you will begin to believe your own mythological propaganda yourself.

Still, to emphasize a phrase popular with one of the most prominent representatives of American Values in politics today, the varied supporters of this scam "can run but they can’t hide". Ultimately, they all voluntarily line up together, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, neo-cons and libertarians, to beat their heads on the immovable brick wall called reality. Bit by bit, each faction begins to radicalize its behavior and slips, easily, into an appeal to the natural freedoms of the kind of morality and sort of New Adam praised by its competitors. They badly need one another. Each supplies a gap in the other’s logic and progress. Capitalists have to resort, eventually, to pornographers’ arguments, pornographers to the positions of unrestrained capitalism. Internationalist warmongers can easily become enthusiasts for a temporary isolation of the Western Paradise from corrupting outside influences; isolationists, when necessary, for temporary warmongering. When you board the heretical Protestant-Enlightenment express, you arrive at the same drab and pointless destination, jazzed up though it might be with glitzy banners, and baptized with the patriotic-sounding name of American Values. The American Values train is headed straight to perdition. No dose of Founderology will fend off the day of reckoning with God and with the rest of the world.

The fact that that day of reckoning seems to be rapidly approaching makes Catholic participation in the losing game of Founderology all the more tragic. A strengthening of the Catholic presence in the United States ought to have served not only as an obstacle to the construction of a new morality and a New Adam, but also as an aid for the correction of the rotten teachings shaping them. Unfortunately, Catholics failed to pick through the confusions of homeland culture. They were seduced into accepting the benefits of American Values. Catholics saw that supporters of "American morality" were horrified by varied types of perverse behavior which offended them as well. They heard wickedness attacked and goodness defended in familiar, Catholic-like language. They were taught that the Founders lay behind this homely fight for the right. Liberals assured them that the Enlightenment and Reformation on which those Founders fed were really quite conducive to social justice; conservatives, that they were perfectly tradition-friendly, offering no stimulus whatsoever for the sort of madcap Revolution that silly France had experienced.

Eager to accommodate their new land, Catholics then quite happily drew the conclusion that American Values and the Founders responsible for them could legitimately be cheered on as if they were as Catholic as St. Irenaeus; that the philosophes behind them must all be budding catechists at the school of Alexandria; that their Protestant ancestors would surely have been welcome at the table of St. Hilary of Poitiers. Yes, Protestantism and the Enlightenment were wicked in 1517 and 1750, back in Geneva and Paris, but their effects could definitely be transmuted and become good through the magic of America and the Founders’ Touch. Doctrines foul enough to raise generations of Europeans ready to risk martyrdom to oppose them were perfectly suitable for serving as the unalterable foundations for the good life on the other side of the Atlantic. Ignatius of Antioch might be used to thunder versus Lutheranism in the Old World, but in America he would doubtless have been the bosom buddy of Calvin, John Locke, and James Madison. Fight Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and the Founders? Why, you might as well fight the ante- and post-Nicaean Fathers and Catholicism itself.

Catholics also gradually embraced the notion that Founderology required their active participation in building a new morality and a New Adam. They understood that, radically changed though these would be, they must still be labelled traditional and Catholic. Great progress has been made in recent years in declaring the new morality and the New Adam to be as papist as penance and indulgences. Conservatives supporting the American Empire have completely stripped Catholic ideas involving just wars of any kind of practical clout, dismissing the moral revulsion of people who know that they have been lied to as mere "opinions" that must bend to the will of the omnipotent secular Leader. Torture has come to be taken for granted as the appropriate method for dealing with "terrorists" who would have been labeled freedom fighters and praised for their unorthodox fighting styles if only they had been insurgents in 1776 at Lexington and Concord. Doing good has more and more come to be equated with making big time bucks in capitalist cultural killing and environmental devastation. And even the appropriate kind of ancient Christian leader matching their adulation of George W. as a new Constantine has been located: Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Arian imperial apologist, patron "saint" of Catholic political boot licking.

Finally, Catholics grasped the reality that the society shaped by Founderology rewards its idolators as heroes and punishes its principled enemies as losers, most effectively by economically emarginating them and depriving them of the ever-increasing incomes that basic survival within the Western Paradise demands. They understood that there was no salvation outside the Founderology world, temporal as well as spiritual; that having been baptized into it, they could pick up the works of the real Fathers for information regarding the character of a Christian society only at the risk of kissing influence in the world at large goodbye. Such social and economic suicide they could not bring themselves to commit. Hence, their further support for a recognition of the dicta of the Founders as the sole guide to daily living worth calling Catholic.(Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers: 666-0.)

 

Just as a slight reality check for those who are prone now and again to fall into the same mistake as many, although not all, of the Catholic bishops of the United States of America prior to "Vatican II," whose false spirit made its most unfortunate accommodation to the Belial of the Americanist spirit of religious freedom and separation of Church and State as "benefits" to the Catholic populace, here is a brief recitation of how three of the founders (John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson) hated the Catholic Church, the Mystical Bride of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.


Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. (John Adams: "A Defense of the [State] Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787-1788)

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."—James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr„ April I, 1774


". . . Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."—James Madison, spoken at the Virginia convention on ratification of the Constitution, June 1778

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."—-James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December, 1813.)

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death.)

 

For those not yet convinced that the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of the founding of the United States of America was not in se hostile to the Faith (facts that are to be distinguished from the specific form of government as created by the Constitution of the United States of America; Holy Mother Church has taught from time immemorial that she can adapt herself to any legitimate form of government by which men choose to be governed as long as right principles are maintained) ought to reckon with the testimony of the government of the United States of America itself, contained in its treaty with the country of Tripoli (now Libya) on June 10, 1797:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Pope Saint Pius X reminded us in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906, that the the civil state has  duty not only to acknowledge the true religion as its own but to aid its citizens in the pursuit of their Last End. Does anyone want to assert with a straight face that that was the intention of the Protestants and Masons and Deists and their Catholic collaborators who founded the United States of America?

None of this, of course, means anything to Americanists, who populate the entirety of the ecclesiastical divide, including in fully Catholic venues in the catacombs where no concessions are made by true bishops or true bishops to conciliarism or to its false shepherds. None of this meant anything to many of the American bishops of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries prior to the "Second" Vatican Council as they enabled the anti-Catholic policies of such loathsome men as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt. James Cardinal Gibbons, the Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, Maryland, from 1877-1921, did the bidding of Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967, constantly was carrying water for the thirty-third degree Mason named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston, Massachusetts from 1944 to 1970, was the errand boy of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., doing whatever he could to advance the career of Kennedy's reprobate second born son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Thus it is that the "bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarist, the entity that is the "ape" of the Catholic Church and which has formal custody of her parishes and convents and schools and hospitals and other properties, have continued, with notable exceptions here and there that I used to get all "excited" about during my days as a "conservative" conciliarist, the enabling of various civil potentates that had been the modus vivendi of so many Catholic bishops of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

What action has been taken against Catholic politicians of either major political party in the United States of America who support the destruction of innocent preborn human life by chemical and/or surgical means? Next to none, that's what. The conciliar "archbishop" of Washington, District of Columbia, Donald Wuerl, has issued no statement of "apology" for the fact that United States Senators John Kerry and Edward Moore Kennedy, both Democrats from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-California), received what purported to be Holy Communion in the atrocious Novus Ordo service that was hosted by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI at Nationals Park in Washington, District of Columbia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2008. Indeed, Wuerl noted earlier this year that he had no intention of imposing any sanctions on pro-abortion Catholic politicians, thus continuing the policies of his corrupt predecessor, Theodore "I bless you in the name of Allah" McCarrick. Kerry, Kennedy and Pelosi remain in perfectly "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Edward "Cardinal" Egan, the conciliar "archbishop" of New York, who has boasted of being the "friend" of pro-abortion politicians, took nine days--nine days, mind you--to issue the following terse statement in the aftermath of the thrice married Catholic pro-abort Rudolph William Giuliani's reception of what purported to be Holy Communion at the Novus Ordo show at Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Saturday, April 19, 2008:

“The Catholic Church clearly teaches that abortion is a grave offense against the will of God. Throughout my years as Archbishop of New York, I have repeated this teaching in sermons, articles, addresses, and interviews without hesitation or compromise of any kind. Thus it was that I had an understanding with Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, when I became Archbishop of New York and he was serving as Mayor of New York, that he was not to receive the Eucharist because of his well-known support of abortion. I deeply regret that Mr. Giuliani received the Eucharist during the Papal visit here in New York, and I will be seeking a meeting with him to insist that he abide by our understanding.” Statement of "Cardinal" Egan

 

"An understanding"? Public scandal is never a private matter. The faithful have a right to know that a public sinner is being sanctioned by those who appear to them to be the ecclesiastical officials of the Catholic Church. Edward Egan said nothing back in 2003 when Giuliani entered into his sacramentally invalid marriage to his third wife, Judith Nathan, thereby depriving Catholics who believe that divorce and remarriage is no "big problem" of an opportunity to learn that Giuliani was not entitled to "congratulations" on this bogus marriage, that, indeed, he was further jeopardizing the salvation of his immortal soul. There was nothing but silence from Egan's offices at 1011 First Avenue in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York. Silence.

One wonders if Egan has any "understanding" with the thirty-third degree Mason named Charles Rangel, a Democrat who serves as the United States Representative from the Fifteenth Congressional District in the State of New York and a militant supporter of baby-killing, who remains a Catholic in "good standing" in the conciliar structures.

One wonders if Egan had or has any "understanding" with former New York Governor George Pataki, a pro-abortion Republican who lives within the confines of the Archdiocese of New York. Does any such "understanding" exist with former New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo, a pro-abortion Democrat who was defeated in his bid for a fourth term by Pataki in 1994. Does any such "understanding" exist with the current Governor of the State of New York, David Paterson, a pro-abortion Catholic member of the Democrat Party. Why all of the silence if such "understandings" exist? Paterson was at Ratzinger/Benedict's "high church" Novus Ordo hybrid service at Yankee Stadium in the Borough of the Bronx, City of New York, New York, on Sunday, April 20, 2008. Did he receive what purported to be Holy Communion at that service?

Then again, of course, the counterfeit church of conciliarism specializes in giving scandal to the faithful. The scandal of esteeming the symbols of false religions, an act that is so offensive to the honor and majesty of God that it is almost impossible for us mortals to comprehend in its full enormity, has become passe to most Catholics in the conciliar structures. What's the "big deal" about calling the Koran, a document that blasphemes Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and denies the doctrine of the Most Blessed Trinity, among other things, "dear" and "precious"? What's the "big deal" about calling Mount Hiei in Japan, on which the false religion of Buddhism is practice, as "sacred"? What's the "big deal" about calling the heretical and schismatic "patriarch" of Constantinople a "pastor" in the Church of Christ. What's the "big deal" about a putative "pope" going into a mosque or a synagogue and being treated as an inferior as reverence is given to places that are abominable in the sight of God?

The only thing that is evidently a "big deal" is to remind Catholics that anyone who supports even one condemned proposition of the Catholic Church has fallen from the Faith and expelled himself from the Church by virtue of having violated the Divine Positive Law. That's the only "big deal" that seems to matter to a lot of people. So what if Pope Leo XIII wrote the following in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896?

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).

The need of this divinely instituted means for the preservation of unity, about which we speak is urged by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians. In this he first admonishes them to preserve with every care concord of minds: "Solicitous to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. iv., 3, et seq.). And as souls cannot be perfectly united in charity unless minds agree in faith, he wishes all to hold the same faith: "One Lord, one faith," and this so perfectly one as to prevent all danger of error: "that henceforth we be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive" (Eph. iv., 14): and this he teaches is to be observed, not for a time only - "but until we all meet in the unity of faith...unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ" (13). But, in what has Christ placed the primary principle, and the means of preserving this unity? In that - "He gave some Apostles - and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" (11-12).

 

Perhaps Nathan should have engaged David in "dialogue" rather than telling him that he had to repent and to pay a price, the death of his own son, for his moral crimes.

Perhaps Saint John the Baptist should have given Herod and Herodias a "kiss of peace" at Ground Zero rather than to be so "judgmental" about the lives they were leading.

Perhaps Saint Stanislaus should have kept his mouth shut as his brother, King Boleslaus lived immorally and treated his subjects with great cruelty.

Perhaps Saint Thomas a Becket should have "gone along" with King Henry II, thus surrendering the rights of the Church to a civil potentate.

Perhaps Saints John Fisher and Thomas More and the Blessed Edmond Campion and the other saints and blesseds of the Protestant Revolt in England during the eras of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (and thereafter) should have made their peace with the Anglican Church, just as Ratzinger/Benedict is doing at present in siding with his fellow non-bishop, Rowan Williams (the Anglican "archbishop" of Canterbury), against a group of Anglo-Catholics who are upset with the apostate policies of Thomas Cranmer's successors.

Perhaps James Gibbons and Richard Cushing and Francis Spellman were right to enable American presidents and potentates.

Perhaps the popes of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries were wrong in their reading of the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church concerning Church-State relations.

You see, my friends, conciliarism, which has made its accommodation to the principles of 1776 and 1787 and 1789, deals with modern civil potentates in most, although not all, instances, in exactly the opposite way of the great saints of the Catholic Church, taking its cue from the likes of the Americanist bishops who paved the way for conciliarism prior to the "Second" Vatican Council.

In the midst of all of this, of course, we must have recourse to Our Lady, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary and of total consecration to her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. The chastisements of the preset moment will pass. The final victory belongs to Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen. In this we must never doubt.

Consider these words spoken to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, Himself:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

 

May we never stand in opposition to the Social Reign of Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen!

Vivat Christus Rex!

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

 





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