We live at a time in salvation
history quite similar to that of the first few centuries of the Church.
We are governed civilly by virtual demigods who view any criticism
of them to be tantamount to acts of disloyalty. Pagan superstitions
are practiced by the multitudes. Emotion and illogic take the place
of rational thought. Bread and circuses have become expressions of
an unofficial civic liturgy of sorts. Murder and mayhem are endorsed
under cover of law. The stability and the integrity of the family
are undermined in practically every sphere of popular culture. And
it appears to many that the only thing that we can hope for, humanly
speaking, in these troubled times is to be governed by civil leaders
who are less evil than others.
The Catholics of the first few centuries Church who lived in the Roman
Empire discharged their civic duties that did not conflict with the
binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law without
complaint, understanding that their duties to the Emperor were such
that they had to obey all just laws and to provide for the upkeep
of the civil government. They nevertheless understood that it was
their duty to upbraid the Emperor and his minions when the occasion
necessitated it, going so far as to denounce him and to refuse to
render unto him the worship that belongs to the true God alone.
Consider this passage from Father A. J. O’Reilly’s
The Martyrs of the Coliseum:
When the Emperor Gordianus III ascended the throne,
he was but a young man, under the guidance of his preceptor, Misithes.
He had a prosperous reign of six years. His docility, natural probity,
and amiable disposition, united with the skill and prudence of this
virtuous preceptor, made him dear to the whole Empire. Even the success
and triumph which fortune had given to his military enterprises, made
his reign a real sunshine in those days of revolt and trouble. In
the year 243, whilst away on an expedition against the Goths, and
the ever restless and unsubdued Persians his good preceptor died,
and Julius Philippus succeeded Misithes in the praceptorship, one
of the most important offices in the state. Ambition entered the heart
of Philip, and he determined to obtain the command of the Empire.
He knew Gordian was too much beloved by the soldiers to make them
betray him, and he resolved upon his assassination. For this purpose
he lured a wretch, and the bloody deed was effected. Philip was declared
Emperor in 244. On Easter Eve, the same year, Philip was in Antioch
with his wife, Severa, and they repaired to the Catholic church to
join in the public prayers in preparation for the great festival.
The holy Bishop Babilas was at the time in the see of Antioch; and
having heard that the Emperor was coming to the church, he stood at
the porch, and refused him admission. With the courage and zeal of
an apostle, he bade the Emperor go and do penance, for the blood of
his murdered victim called to heaven for vengeance. The holy Bishop
repulsed him with his own hand, and would not permit him to enter
except in the garb of a public penitent of the Church. Philip humbled
himself before the aged Bishop; he confessed his crimes, and voluntarily
accepted the penance which the minister of God imposed on him, and
thus was permitted to enter the Church of the true God, before whom
the crown and tattered garment are alike. . . .
We cannot pass over the authority, much less the beautiful and powerful
eloquence, of the great Chrysostom, in his panegyric on Babilas. Speaking
of his brave and intrepid reproof of the sinful Emperor, he compares
him to the Apostle St. John; and alludes to the Emperor in words that
leave no doubt of the tradition of the time in which he flourished:
“Nor was he the mere tetrarch of a few cities,” says St.
Chrysostom, speaking of Philip, “nor the king of one nation
only, but the ruler of the greater portion of the world–of nations,
of cities, and a countless array, formidable on every side, from the
boundless immensity of the empire and the severity of his power; yet
he was expelled from the church by the intrepid pastor, like a bad
sheep that is driven from the flock. The subject becomes the ruler,
and pronounces sentence of condemnation against him who commanded
all. Alone and unarmed, his undaunted soul was filled with apostolic
confidence. With what zeal was the ancient Bishop fired! He commanded
the satellites of the Emperor to depart. How fearlessly he spoke,
and placed his right hand on that breast that was still glowing and
bleeding with the remorse of recent guilt! How he treated the murderer
according to his merits!”
It was apostolic courage of this sort, recounted throughout the pages
of The Martyrs of the Coliseum, that built Christendom, an
era which saw such saintly rulers of States as Saint Edward the Confessor,
Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Louis IX, and Saint Henry, among scores
of others. These rulers understood that there were limits that existed
in the binding precepts in the Divine positive law and the natural
law that they could not transgress legitimately, and that they had
the positive obligation to help to root out those conditions in society
that bred sin and thus were harmful to the sanctification and salvation
of their subjects and thus to the common good of their States.
Pope Leo XIII commented on this era in Immortale Dei, issued
in 1885:
There was once a time when States were governed by
the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine
virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws,
institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations
of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ,
established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by
the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates;
and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange
of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits
important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and
always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs
which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any
enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed
them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to
true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest;
retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank
as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture;
bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and
most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human
suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered
a condition of things, the answer is -- beyond all question, in large
measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great undertakings
were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to completion.
A similar state of things would certainly have continued had the agreement
of the two powers been lasting. More important results even might
have been justly looked for, had obedience waited upon the authority,
teaching, and counsels of the Church, and had this submission been
specially marked by greater and more unswerving loyalty. For that
should be regarded in the light of an ever-changeless law which Ivo
of Chartres wrote to Pope Paschal II: "When kingdom and priesthood
are at one, in complete accord, the world is well ruled, and the Church
flourishes, and brings forth abundant fruit. But when they are at
variance, not only smaller interests prosper not, but even things
of greatest moment fall into deplorable decay.
The period of Christendom was not without problems. It was far from
perfect. However, it was an era in which Church and State cooperated
with each other in the furtherance of their respective ends, mindful
that the common temporal good of men and their nations was intricately
bound up with man’s identity as a redeemed creature and the
Last End for which the God-Man shed every single drop of His Most
Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. Pope Pius XII described
this in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus,
issued in 1939:
It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of
brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching,
she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her
waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today
as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective
moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the
unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way
open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions
come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from
a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles
of private and public morality.
It was the specific mission of two of Pope Pius XII’s predecessors,
Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI, to reiterate the necessity of restoring
the cooperation that existed between Church and State in the Middle
Ages. The entire corpus of the encyclical letters of these two great
popes bears a telling witness to the binding, immutable teaching of
the Catholic Church on the State. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII had done such
a masterful job of summarizing the Social Teaching of the Catholic
Church on the State and of exhorting Catholics to work for the restoration
of this teaching as the foundation of all social order that his successor,
Pope Saint Pius X, did not have to devote a great deal of time to
the matter except to stamp as Modernist anything and everything that
specifically rejects that Social Teaching as the foundation of social
order. Consider this passage from Pascendi Domenici Gregis,
issued on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, September
8, 1907:
But it is not only within her own household that the
Church must come to terms. Besides her relations with those within,
she has others with those who are outside. The Church does not occupy
the world all by herself; there are other societies in the world.,
with which she must necessarily have dealings and contact. The rights
and duties of the Church towards civil societies must, therefore,
be determined, and determined, of course, by her own nature, that,
to wit, which the Modernists have already described to us. The rules
to be applied in this matter are clearly those which have been laid
down for science and faith, though in the latter case the question
turned upon the object, while in the present case we have one of ends.
In the same way, then, as faith and science are alien to each other
by reason of the diversity of their objects, Church and State are
strangers by reason of the diversity of their ends, that of the Church
being spiritual while that of the State is temporal. Formerly it was
possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual and to speak
of some questions as mixed, conceding to the Church the position of
queen and mistress in all such, because the Church was then regarded
as having been instituted immediately by God as the author of the
supernatural order. But this doctrine is today repudiated alike by
philosophers and historians. The state must, therefore, be separated
from the Church, and the Catholic from the citizen. Every Catholic,
from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty
to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling
himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed
to its wishes, its counsels, its orders -- nay, even in spite of its
rebukes. For the Church to trace out and prescribe for the citizen
any line of action, on any pretext whatsoever, is to be guilty of
an abuse of authority, against which one is bound to protest with
all one's might. Venerable Brethren, the principles from which these
doctrines spring have been solemnly condemned by Our predecessor,
Pius VI, in his Apostolic Constitution Auctorem fidei.
The antidote to these particular tenets of Modernism is to proclaim
the Social Reign of Christ the King. There is no “practical”
program that will provide an infallible guarantor of success. There
is no guarantee that any of our efforts will ever bear fruit in our
lifetimes, if at all. Nevertheless, we have the same apostolic duty
to try to plant the seeds for the restoration of Christendom no matter
the seeming futility of the task or the fact that our very shepherds
at this point in time have accepted the premises of Modernity condemned
by Pope Saint Pius X. The Apostles themselves would have stayed in
the Upper Room in Jerusalem following the Descent of the Holy Ghost
upon them and Our Lady on Pentecost Sunday if they were “practically”
minded. Fortified by the gifts and fruits imparted upon them in tongues
of flame by the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Apostles
went out to proclaim the truths of Truth Himself, Truth Crucified
and Resurrected, no matter the seeming impossibility of their efforts
in human terms.
The late Michael Davies stated in his pamphlet on the Social Reign
of Christ the King that one of the reasons that errors of Modernity
and Modernism had made such an inroad among Catholics is that the
doctrine of Christ the King was not preached in most instances in
the wake of the great encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII and Pius
XI. The seeming impossibility in our own day of realizing a new Christendom
should never deter us from speaking out as Catholics and from judging
the positions of our civil leaders solely on the basis of how well
they conform to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and
the natural law. Even before the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII (1878-
1903), Orestes Brownson, who converted to the Faith in 1845, wrote
article after article to advance the truth that Catholicity is the
only basis of social order, providing over thirty years of commentaries
on precisely this point before he died in 1876. Brownson did not flinch
from criticizing the civil leaders of his day on the grounds of Catholic
truth. Neither should we.
Some very good and faithful Catholics who understand and accept the
doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King have taken the view
that we should concentrate on the building up of our own families
and not expect much from the political realm. This is certainly true.
Each one of our own sins hinders the reign of Christ as the King of
our own hearts and souls, thus making us instruments that wound the
Mystical Body of Christ and the social order, which is why we must
be earnest during this season of Lent to do extra penances to make
reparation for our sins, offering all to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
We must indeed be serious about our daily conversion away from sin
and selfishness in order to let our hearts, consecrated as they must
be to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
beat for the joys of Heaven that await the souls of those who die
in states of sanctifying grace. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII’s Mirare
Caritatis, contained a wonderful explication of the absolute
necessity of pursuing Eucharistic piety as a foundation of clear thinking
and right acting:
Indeed it is greatly to be desired that those men would
rightly esteem and would make due provision for life everlasting,
whose industry or talents or rank have put it in their power to shape
the course of human events. But alas! we see with sorrow that such
men too often proudly flatter themselves that they have conferred
upon this world as it were a fresh lease of life and prosperity, inasmuch
as by their own energetic action they are urging it on to the race
for wealth, to a struggle for the possession of commodities which
minister to the love of comfort and display. And yet, whithersoever
we turn, we see that human society, if it be estranged from God, instead
of enjoying that peace in its possessions for which it had sought,
is shaken and tossed like one who is in the agony and heat of fever;
for while it anxiously strives for prosperity, and trusts to it alone,
it is pursuing an object that ever escapes it, clinging to one that
ever eludes the grasp. For as men and states alike necessarily have
their being from God, so they can do nothing good except in God through
Jesus Christ, through whom every best and choicest gift has ever proceeded
and proceeds. But the source and chief of all these gifts is the venerable
Eucharist, which not only nourishes and sustains that life the desire
whereof demands our most strenuous efforts, but also enhances beyond
measure that dignity of man of which in these days we hear so much.
Our daily conversion, founded on the twin pillars of Eucharistic piety
and Total Marian Consecration, is meant to make us instruments, despite
the debt we owe for our forgiven sins, of confounding the powerful
and the mighty when the need arises, just as Bishop Babilas did with
Emperor Philip in the year 243 A.D. We must remonstrate with civic
officials who do things that are injurious to the rights of Christ
the King and thus to the whole of social order, domestically and internationally.
Those of us, for example, who criticize the policies of President
George W. Bush do so not because we “hate” him or because
we are heedless of the evils promoted by most of his political opponents.
No, we criticize the forty-third President of the United States precisely
because he holds the highest elected office in this country and nothing
less than our duties to God and the filial love we must have for the
good of country demand that we call to correction those who are in
error. Our efforts may fall on deaf ears. Fine. We must nevertheless
make the effort to do, speaking frankly and without equivocation as
Catholics.
I have addressed myself to President Bush a number of times, posing
a series of over twenty questions to him in early 2003 that went unanswered.
If I had the opportunity to address him again, I would ask him to
stop doing things that hinder the Social Reign of Christ
the King, admitting that each of us hinder that reign by means of
our sins. These are some of the things I would implore of President
Bush:
1. Convert to the fullness of the Catholic Faith; get yourself, Mr.
President, to Father Ronald Ringrose in Vienna, Virginia, for convert
instructions.
2. Stop supporting abortion in cases of rape, incest and alleged threats
to the life of a mother.
3. Stop appointing pro-abortion
politicians to the highest posts in your administration.
4. Stop supporting pro-abortion politicians in the Republican Party.
5.Stop funding the chemical executions of children by means of abortifacient
contraceptives both in this country and internationally.
6. Stop calling yourself
"pro-marriage" while you support "civil unions"
while opposing sodomite "marriages."
7. Stop dropping bombs
on innocent human beings abroad.
8. Stop repeating the lie
that "Islam" is a religion of peace.
9 . Stop your monstrous spread of the power of the Federal government
over our daily lives.
10 . Stop the promotion and mainstreaming of sodomy by agencies that
are under the direct control of your administration.
11. Issue an Executive Order to countermand the Food and Drug Administration's
September, 2000, decision to market the human pesticide, RU-486.
12. Dear Mr. President,
read Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio. Pope Pius XI condemns as madness
your Wilsonian view of how to build peace in the world.
These are just a few things, among many others, that Bush could do
to stop hindering the Social Reign of Christ the King, admitting
that we are not going to see this until some pope actually consecrates
Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. We are required
to plant seeds to point out that false friends, such as Bush, are
worse than open enemies, trusting that Our Lady will use those efforts
as she sees fit without worrying about the results.
We must understand and come to accept this truth: there is no secular,
religiously indifferentist way to retard the evils of our day. We
must confront the evils of our day as Catholics. Consider the words
of Pope Leo XIII in Tametsi, issued in 1901:
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.
So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers
involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for
an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish
malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent
crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient.
The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater
than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them
the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once
before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more
terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian
spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will
be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die
away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both
rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they
must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation,
if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established
( by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the
precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority
and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the
people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity
rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established
by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity
are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a
return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who
is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,-and this on the part not only
of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to
this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life
must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation,
political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital
and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation
which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is
fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by
the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue.
Pope Leo XIII issued warnings
that went unheeded by most Catholics. Pope Pius XI issued an Encyclical
Letter, Quas Primas, that was, as the late Michael Davies and the
late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre pointed out, effectively vitiated
by Dignitatis Humanae. Indeed, the great Social Teaching
of the Church has been redefined to the suit the purposes of the conciliarist
agenda. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, has endorsed the American model of
pluralism. Pope John Paul II himself had a statement issued in his
name on February 12, 2005, that praised the separation of Church and
State in France, if "understood correctly" in light of the
Church's social doctrine. The fact that Pope Saint Pius X condemned
the very thing praised by Pope John Paul II is simply ignored (and
is the subject of a companion piece to be posted with this article.)
In spite of all of this,
however, the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church on the State
and the Social Reign of Christ the King must be proclaimed no matter
the lack of fruit that may result therefrom and no matter the opposition
from individuals seeking the approval of the "conservative"
intelligentsia in this country or the opposition of the Holy See itself.
The “only” fruit that might result from a fidelity to
this doctrine might be the salvation of our own immortal souls. As
my three year-old daughter, Lucy Mary Norma says, “That’s
a good deal.” Indeed.
Imploring
Our Lady, the Seat of Wisdom and the Help of Christians, to give us
a spirit of simplicity and humility to accept and to defend at all times
the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church and the rights of Christ
the King, may we come to understand that the seeming impracticality
of the Faith in our perilous times, so very similar to that described
above, was the foundation of Christendom itself. May we be inspired
by the examples of the martyrs whose blood made Christendom possible
to renew in our own lives the saintly witness of those who upheld the
glories of Christendom in the Middle Ages.
