“Popular Sovereignty” Leads to the Death of Men and their Nations, part two

True to the caricature of himself that he has consistently played into throughout most of his life, President Donald John Trump, though admitting that his war with Iran played a part in the historic wipeout Republicans suffering across the nation on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, but that it was “worth it” to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon (to put that claim in perspective, please see Late Breaking News Sent from a Reader), celebrated the installation of a beam in the White House ballroom that is taking place of the building’s East Wing:

WASHINGTON — A beaming President Trump described plans to install Corinthian columns inside his under-construction White House ballroom Wednesday — turning to renovation projects to lift his spirits after Republicans suffered a devastating election blowout fewer than 24 hours earlier.

“You’ll be able to have dinners for as many people as you want,” Trump said as he expounded on his plans to renovate or build various DC landmarks.

“We ordered the marble for the floor. The marble is really magnificent marble. It’s a cut, it’s a vein that people have been after for 50 years, and the owner of the quarry didn’t want to sell it, but he liked me.”

The new White House helipad, meanwhile, was “so good I never even got sued,” he added.

A planned Garden of American Heroes along the Potomac featuring grand statues “will be something beautiful,” Trump went on before touting plans to develop East Potomac Park near the Jefferson Memorial into a “beautiful” 18-hole championship golf course.

Trump spoke for 25 minutes about his construction projects before getting around to taking reporter questions about Republicans losing the House and Senate.

He agreed with Vice President JD Vance’s assessment that his war with Iran, which caused higher energy prices and inflation, contributed to the staggering defeat.

“I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term,” he said. “But at the same time, if I had it to do again, I’d have to do it again because long term, it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump also predicted that once the 120th Congress convenes Jan. 3, “I’ll get along probably with the Democrats unless they want to be destructive.”

The president spoke shortly after presumptive Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) struck a different tone, vowing to bring the “wannabe king” Trump’s agenda to a screeching halt with “legislative razor wire.”

Trump rejected blame for the massive Republican losses — even though exit polls found that 71% of voters said Congress must do more to check Trump and 62% blamed him personally for higher prices.

“There was such love at those rallies; it was incredible.  We weren’t able to transfer the love to candidates,” he said.

Trump then paused questions and asked journalists to watch the raising of the final steel beam to the roof of his new ballroom — after he signed his name with a black Sharpie and added “Love!” to the metal segment.

The beam, with a Christmas tree balanced in the middle of its span, was raised by a crane as the president provided play-by-play.

“They rarely have to do any chopping. Watch.  Pretty amazing, huh? The entire building, every single hole was perfect, which is rare, but we had great people,” he boasted, adding, “If one bolt fell down you’re history.”

Returning to the Q-and-A, Trump denied speculation he will oust Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a proponent of Operation Epic Fury, and said that while he understood Vance’s opposition to the Iran conflict, “I knew that when I went in.”

The president added, however, that Hegseth would ”be very popular” if he accepted an appointment to fill Tennessee Gov.-elect Marsha Blackburn’s Senate seat, which would head off a potential House impeachment vote later this year.

Returning to Vance, long seen as the MAGA movement’s heir apparent, Trump raised eyebrows by suggesting the Ohioan may not seek the presidency in two years after all.

“You can have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people running. Maybe nobody’s going to run. Maybe he won’t run,” he said.

The bizarre event mirrored Trump’s final election appeal to voters at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday, where the president spoke at length about re-lining the shallow body of water, and took 24 minutes to get around to mentioning the looming election.

Trump said he didn’t regret that appearance, which drew widespread scorn for reminding voters of an initially botched renovation effort over the summer.

“I heard it was a very good speech. Got great reviews,” Trump said. “That was only a speech on the reflecting pool. That had nothing to do with anything else.” (Trump cheers himself up after midterm wipeout by touting White House ballroom, helipad.)

This man is delusional. He is absolutely clueless that his obsession with his ballroom project, the Triumphal Arch, and other such projects in and around Washington, District of Columbia did not play well with ordinary Americans who are been very badly hurt by the increased of living, especially as regards the cost of gasoline, diesel fuel and home heating fuel, to say nothing of gasoline. Trump’s words yesterday will only reinforce the image of a man who is out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans and who is concerned about ostentatious displays of wealth and power that have nothing to with a president’s constitutional duties.

Reality, though, was conveyed very clearly yesterday by Vice President James David Vance:

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."

Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war

2) Focus on cost of living/inflation

3) Put America First

4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)

In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war.

The president himself said so last night.

If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.

But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. (JD Vance on X: "One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely… / X.)

Vice President Vance is quite correct about the war, which even President Trump has admitted that he, Vance, opposed from the beginning eight and one-half months ago, but he is overly optimistic about the future as most of the constituencies whose support Trump won in 2024 have turned away from the octogenarian and his empty promises of no more wars and slogans such as America First and Make America Great Again that his own actions have shown to be nothing other than meaningless rhetoric from the mouth of a narcissist who believes himself to be immune from criticism because he shields himself from reality.

Another commentary from the perspective of one who see things about as clearly as can be seen without the benefit of viewing the world through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith was written by John Daniel Davidson, who laid the blame for the blue tsunami squarely at the feet of one man, namely, Donald John Trump:

Last night wasn’t just a blue wave or a blue tsunami, it was a nationwide collapse of the Republican Party at the state and federal level — an historic defeat, far worse than 2006, that will have repercussions for the GOP for decades to come.

And it is overwhelmingly President Donald Trump’s fault. 

Anyone watching election coverage Tuesday night, or following it on X, heard all kinds of coping from conservative and neocon commentators, blaming poor candidates or botched campaigns or inadequate GOTV efforts. But the overarching reality is that none of these things were determinative. The midterms were a referendum on the Trump administration, and above all on Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran.

That war, which as of this writing we have lost — with no real prospect of winning it anytime soon — had concrete, everyday effects on Americans’ lives. After February 28 of this year, they began paying more not just for gas but also for groceries and nearly everything else, anything that must be transported by a diesel-fueled truck. As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty noted on X last night, “Running on the slogan of America First and then not even bothering to sell a war of choice to the American people that ended up changing almost every household budget in the country.”

This was a war that no Trump voters were asking for in 2024. In fact they were promised the opposite: no new Mideast wars. That, and mass deportations were the two things voters wanted from a second Trump term. He betrayed them on both counts, launching the Iran war and doing too little on mass deportations. And the result is that voters, clearly perceiving the betrayal, have rejected Republicans everywhere.

The war and the everyday costs it has imposed on the American people have driven this collapse, but it’s not the only factor. There were other self-inflicted failures by the Trump White House: the chaotic tariffs, the shameless corruption of Trump officials, the general megalomania of the president and his often-expressed contempt for ordinary people. Even his bizarre and defensive handling of the Epstein files was an indication that he was not focused on the necessary things.

These were all of course lesser causes of the defeat, and ones that might have been overcome or mitigated if it weren’t for the Iran war. But the war and its costs colored all these things, made them more visible and glaring. People noticed when they might have otherwise overlooked them.

And it’s a real shame, because Trump came into office in January 2025 on a glide path to an historically successful second term, then proceeded to waste two years in foreign adventures and desultory domestic policymaking. He accomplished little, yet repeatedly struck a defiant pose when anyone questioned him. That’s exactly what he did on Tuesday night, blaming the candidates and the voters instead of taking responsibility for his own abject failures. 

For those who, like Trump, would try to conjure up some other explanation for Tuesday’s historic defeat — anything other than the war in Iran — there is precious little evidence to go on. Consider the refrain about “candidate quality.” In Texas, it’s no use arguing that Ken Paxton was a weak candidate to square off against James Talarico. Incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, a three-term Texas governor with a massive war chest, also lost. Before last night, Democrats hadn’t won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. They now have a U.S. Senate seat, the governor’s mansion, and perhaps the office of lieutenant governor and attorney general (both statewide elected offices in Texas).

In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham — recklessly appointed to succeed her brother Lindsay Graham after his death earlier this year — lost to Annie Andrews, a Democrat. In the Iowa Senate race, Democrat Josh Turek defeated Republican Ashley Hinson. In Maine, five-term Republican Senator Susan Collins lost to Democrat Troy Jackson. In the Ohio governor’s race, Democrat Amy Acton defeated Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. All over the country, in key races, Democrats pulled off upset victories. Deeply weird and radical Democratic candidates like Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan ousted or defeated Republicans. As results come in this week in Alaska and elsewhere, the picture will likely get worse for the GOP.

It is not hyperbole or over-simplistic to lay this historic catastrophe at Trump’s feet. He chose to go to war in Iran — the one thing he didn’t have to do, the one thing that would be deeply unpopular with both his base and the Democratic base, demoralizing the one and energizing the latter. No one, as far as we know, forced him into that decision. He went to war willingly, with no plan and no theory of victory, and then refused to do what was necessary to win — refused even to try to sell the American people on the war or even make a serious case for it, at any point in the conflict.

It’s not too much to say that for Trump to do this, at this point, having conquered the GOP of George W. Bush largely by repudiating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, means he has destroyed the party he took over and remade. Or at least he has destroyed it for now.

Whether Trump is capable of seeing what he’s done, and salvaging what remains of his once right-populist party over the next two years, remains to be seen. He appeared to be aware that the Iran war was a problem in his remarks on Fox News Tuesday night. But he also wanted to blame the candidates and credit Democrats. “I don’t think it was the war. I think it was the gas prices,” he said, apparently not recognizing the relationship between those two things. Asked whether he’ll make any cabinet changes, he said, “I don’t think so. It had nothing to do with my cabinet … It’s just a point in time. There was a mood in the air, I guess.”

Yes, there was a mood in the air. The mood was anger at Trump’s historic betrayal. He ran and won in 2016 and 2024 on a widely popular America First agenda that consisted of no new foreign wars, nation-building at home, no more illegal immigration, pro-tradition and pro-family policies. That agenda is popular with a clear majority of American voters. It’s a winning agenda. It will be again someday. But right now it lies in ruins, destroyed by the one person voters had entrusted to carry it out. (The Nationwide Collapse Of The Republican Party Is Trump’s Fault.)

Even more realistic, sober, and clear-headed remarks were offered by the outgoing, term-limited Governor of the State of Florida, Ronald DeSantis, who called the election results a “near extinction level event” for the Republican Party in many parts of the nation:

RON DESANTIS: This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.

In January, when everyone in office leaves who were either term-limited or voted out, of the 10 largest states in this union, only one state will have Republican control of their state: the state of Florida.

If you look at our chief rival—in a healthy sense—the state of Texas, I would say over my lifetime, Texas has been the crown jewel of Republican politics. I think we've been the leader for Republicans and conservatives since I've been governor, but you go over the whole generation, no one holds a candle on the Republican side to the Lone Star State.

Not only did they lose a highly publicized U.S. Senate race, they lost everything: the governor, attorney general, all the other statewide [races]. They lost four Republican Supreme Court justices on the Texas Supreme Court. They may even lose the Texas Legislature, or one house or both.

Let's just be clear: That is going to hurt not just for the next two years. That is something that can reverberate for the next decade or more. If the Republican Party doesn't have Texas as an anchor, we won't be viable nationally going forward.

The federal results—you have to put a good face on this. I was very clear we were running into headwinds and honest about that. I said a victory would be minimizing the losses, given the climate. Minimize House losses, even though I didn't think we could keep the House. Maybe keep the Senate. That would have been a win. If you lost two or three Senate seats, that was a big win for midterm elections.

We knew it could be worse. I don't think most of us thought it would be this bad.

Democrats will likely go into January with 56 U.S. Senate seats and as many as 258 U.S. House seats. So what that does—not only is that going to totally change the dynamic of the next two years to the detriment of President Trump, this is going to last far beyond just two years.

You look ahead to the 2028 election, a presidential election. You are not, as Republicans, going to be able to retake the Senate under this current map two years from now, and all the House seats—probably not viable to take that back as well.

So this is really going to have an impact two years, four years, six years, maybe even longer, before Republicans could exercise unified control in Washington again like we've enjoyed over the last two years.

Think what this means, having 56 senators. No Supreme Court justice will be confirmed under President Trump's administration unless something happens in the next six weeks.

No major Cabinet officials that have strong conservative credentials will be confirmed. That will likely be true for the four years after that. It will have a huge, huge impact.

We have to be clear-eyed. This is probably the political worst-case scenario for an election.

So why did Florida hold up and hold the line? I think the answer is that we built up a record of achievement. We've earned trust from a number of our voters that, even in the worst situation that you can imagine politically, we were able to hold the line and prevent the worst from happening here.

But just be clear: We're in a deep hole nationally. We saw the electorate shifting 20 points in some parts of the country. We saw races go down that we never thought would be possible.

But here is the thing: Democrats are unpopular. They were able to win based off the sentiment that's existing in the country right now. They did not earn a mandate to indulge their left-wing fantasies, and they will be in their governing, and see what ends up happening.

This was not a positive view of the Democrats. This was a rejection of Republicans in Washington, and Democrats just happened to be the beneficiary.

It will take a lot of time and effort to rebuild. It will not happen in just one election cycle. But Florida shows how you can build a coalition not only to convert on all your promises in good times, but also to withstand the bad times.

We were able to do that last night against very long odds, and I think the state will ultimately be better for it. (DeSantis: Close To "Extinction-Level Event" For Republicans, So Why Did Florida Hold Up?)

Governor DeSantis’s assessment is very correct on the level of pure naturalism.

To wit, it amazes me that so-called “conservative” Catholics still waste their time and money in states such as New York on behalf of pro-abortion candidates such as Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman in the belief that he had any legitimate chance to defeat the pro-abortion, pro-perversity statist named Kathleen Hochul, who is the seventh straight pro-abortion Governor of New York dating back to the late Hugh Leo Carey in 1974 (she is the eighth of ten New York governors to support baby-killing dating back to Unitarian named Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, who resigned the governorship on December 18, 1973, to seek the 1976 Republican Party presidential nomination before encountering a detour that made him Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr.’s vice president in 1974; Rockefeller was succeeded as governor by Malcolm Wilson, a pro-life Catholic who should have resigned the his office as lieutenant governor in 1970 when baby-killing became “legal” in New York) and the sixth pro-abortion Catholic among the seven (Elliot Spitzer, a Jew, was elected in 2006 and resigned in disgrace in 2008, being succeeded by the pro-abortion Catholic named David Paterson). Why support a pro-abortion Republican who has no chance of winning in a state that, along with California, Oregon, Hawaii, Washington, New Mexico, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine, that will never elect another Republican to statewide office?

I mean, one of the persistent criticisms of my political analyses is that I am not “realistic.” However, I believe that my analyses have been and continue to be very realistic as it is utter insanity to think that, given the demographic makeup of the “blue states” listed above, that a Republican, no less one who actually stands for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, has any chance of getting elected and, if elected, to have enough support in his state’s legislature to enact a policy agenda consonant with the true common temporal good.

The naturalistic farce of elections does, of course, carry with it consequences, and among the principal consequences of Tuesday’s blue tsunami are the following:

1. As Governor DeSantis noted, none of President Donald John Trump’s judicial nominees is going to be confirmed in the next two years.
2. This means that the Democrats in the United States Senate will handle a vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States of America in exactly the same manner that the retiring Addison Mitchell McConnell did in 2016 when he, then the Senate Majority Leader, refused to hold hearings to consider the nomination of the political hack named Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Associate Justice Antonin Scalia following the latter’s death on February 13, 2016.
3. It will thus be only a matter of time before such a vacancy occurs, at which time a Democratic President elected, say, in 2028, will nominate persons who will undo the little good that has been done in a very selected few of the Court’s decisions in the past few years. There is nothing stable about the American political system, which hangs by the slender threads of whoever happens to hold office rather than being bound securely by an open acknowledgment of the primacy of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.
4. As Florida is now the only state in the nation where control of the governorship and state legislature remain in the hands of the Republican Party, efforts will be made in Texas to undo the “pro-life” legislation passed during the twelve years of outgoing Gregory Wayne Abbot’s governorship. Similar efforts will be undertaken in other states to protect mutants playing in women’s sports and to be ready to impose draconian lockdowns and vaccination mandates when the next manufactured scamdemic unfolds.
5. Eventually, of course, given the fact that, as Governor DeSantis noted, it would take several election cycles for the blue tsunami to recede, Democrats will succeed in passing legislation to codify unrestricted baby-killing in the Federal code (the fact that this would be of doubtful constitutional provenance would not matter to a Supreme Court consisting of ideological clones of Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson), and in admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states, thus making the election of a member of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” to the presidential not a “virtual” impossibility but an actual one.
6. A Democratic victory at the presidential level in 2028 will result in the permanent opening of the borders and the granting of citizenship to all those who enter, thus changing the demographics of the nation to such an extent that there will be only one political party that can win office nationally and in all but a handful of states in the Mountain West.
7. The power, size, and scope of the Federal government will increase once again and lawfare will be used once more upon all those who are vocal enough to be considered
   “hateful” threats to the ideological flavor du jour.
8. Unrestricted support for sodomy and its related vices, the recruitment of children to undergo mutilation to “correct” their “gender identity.”

Even if all this comes true, we must remember that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is still the King and men and their nations even though they may be aware of or, perhaps more accurately, deny this truth. He will suffer men to mock Him for so long, and it must be our lot to endure the hardship that comes with being a member of His true Church.

Naturalism, I am afraid, has such a hold on us that we tend to get fearful and hyperventilate in the midst of difficulties rather than to rest secure in the knowledge that God Himself has known from all eternity that the exact circumstances we find ourselves in at any given moment of our lives would occur. His discipline in the midst of difficulties is not to be a cause of complaint or anxiety. No. It is to be a cause of rejoicing and gratitude.

We must be grateful that we are alive at this moment in salvation history, grateful for each cross that is sent our way, grateful for being able to participate in the work of saving souls, starting with our own, by lifting high each cross we are asked to carry as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

God's chastisement is a sign of His ineffable love for us. He wants us with Him for all eternity in Heaven. We cannot get there, however, if we are not willing to accept His discipline and His punishment so that we can be purified of the stain of our own sins and thus be better able to plant seeds for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and of Christendom in the midst of the world. We must never lose sight of these words which the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, inspired Saint Paul the Apostle to write:

And therefore we also having so great a cloud of witnesses over our head, laying aside every weight and sin which surrounds us, let us run by patience to the fight proposed to us: Looking on Jesus, the author and finisher of faith, who having joy set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and now sitteth on the right hand of the throne of God. For think diligently upon him that endured such opposition from sinners against himself; that you be not wearied, fainting in your minds. For you have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin: And you have forgotten the consolation, which speaketh to you, as unto children, saying: My son, neglect not the discipline of the Lord; neither be thou wearied whilst thou art rebuked by him.

For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth; and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. Persevere under discipline. God dealeth with you as with his sons; for what son is there, whom the father doth not correct? But if you be without chastisement, whereof all are made partakers, then are you bastards, and not sons. Moreover we have had fathers of our flesh, for instructors, and we reverenced them: shall we not much more obey the Father of spirits, and live? And they indeed for a few days, according to their own pleasure, instructed us: but he, for our profit, that we might receive his sanctification.

Now all chastisement for the present indeed seemeth not to bring with it joy, but sorrow: but afterwards it will yield, to them that are exercised by it, the most peaceable fruit of justice. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, And make straight steps with your feet: that no one, halting, may go out of the way; but rather be healed. Follow peace with all men, and holiness: without which no man shall see God. Looking diligently, lest any man be wanting to the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up do hinder, and by it many be defiled. (Hebrews 12: 1-15.) 

It is not only for the sins of our nation throughout its sordid history of exporting evils throughout the world that we are being chastised at this time.

We are being chastised for our own sins, our lack of fidelity to the truths of the Catholic Faith by our placing trust in everything but the totality of that Faith as the foundation of personal and social order. There has been so much short-sighted emphasis on attempting to "retard evils" by means of the ballot box that we have lost sight of the fact that evil has been advancing exponentially no matter who gets elected.

Indeed, the sleepiness of so many Catholics in the past two years alone to the past eight years of the torrents of evil that have flowed forth from the administration of President Donald John Trump (continued funding for Planned Barrenhood, support for in vitro fertilization, the refusal to withdraw mifepristone, the human pesticide, from the market and the concomitant refusal to enforce the Comstock Law to prohibit its distribution via the mails, the needless war with Iran and silence about the ongoing liquidation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by the Zionists, profligate Federal spending, etc.) is very reminiscent of a period in the middle of Third Century A.D. when there was a lull in the persecutions by the civil authorities of the Roman Empire. Catholics the believed all was well and returned to mirth and frivolity, much as most Catholics have recently refused to condemn their "pro-life" president for advancing one evil after another as they themselves thought that this false "era of peace" was going to last indefinitely.

Father A. J. O'Reilly's description of the historical scene in the middle of the Third Century A.D. should give us a little pause for concern in our day when so many are trying to devise the "grand strategy" to "regroup" politically for the future:

The hour of sunshine and peace is now drawing to a close, and the year 250 opened, even on its first day with one of the most terrible persecutions that the Church had suffered. The blessings and repose of peace had relaxed the morals of the Christians, and it pleased Almighty God to purify them once more by the fire of persecution. The great Bishop of Carthage, who was secreted in exile during the few months that the storm raged, describes the sad causes that drew once more the terrible sword over the Christian community. “Almighty God,” says the great doctor, “wished to prove His family; for the blessings of a long peace had corrupted the divine discipline given to us; our sleeping and prostrate faith roused, if I may so to speak, the celestial anger. And although we deserved more for our sins, yet the clement and merciful Lord so acted that what has passed has been more a probation than a persecution. The whole world was wrapt in temporal interests, and the Christians forgot the glorious things that were done in the days of the apostles; instead of rivalling their brilliant example, they burned with the desire of the empty riches of the world, and strained every nerve to increase their wealth. Piety and religion were banished from the lives of the priests, and fidelity and integrity were no longer found in the ministers of the altar; charity and discipline of morals were no longer visible in their flocks. The men combed their beards, and the women painted their faces; their very eyes were tinted, and their hair told a lie. To deceive the simple, they used fraud and subtlety, and even Christians deceived each other by knavery and underhanded dealing. They intermarried with unbelievers and prostituted the members of Jesus Christ to pagans. They scoffed at their prelates in their pride, and they tore each other to pieces with envenomed tongues, and seemed to destroy each other with a fatal hatred. They despised the simplicity and humility demanded by faith, and permitted themselves to be guided by the impulses of worthless vanity; they contemned the world only in words. Did we not deserve, then, the dreadful horrors of persecution that have burst upon us?”  (Father A. J. O'Reilly, The Martyrs of the Coliseum, published originally in 1885 by D. and J. Sadlier and Company and republished in 1987 TAN Books and Publishers.)

Sounds very much like our own time today, does it not?

We deserve the same sort of punishment that befell our ancestors in the Faith from the middle of the Third Century A.D. to the Edict of Milan in the year 313 A.D.

We should be grateful for this punishment as a sign of God's merciful love for us.

After all, how long will God permit us to consider the killing of innocent preborn babies, both by chemical and surgical means, as a regrettable fact of daily live and that it is "no big deal" for one in public life to support such killing under some "limited" circumstances?

We deserve a punishment for mortgaging the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law to the career interests of professional politicians, whom Dr. Paul Johnson referred to in his Modern Times as the "scourge of the Twentieth Century."

The late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn commented in his commencement address at Harvard University forty-eight years ago on the human tendency, both in the West and in the Soviet-dominated East, to rely upon politics and social reform as the means to "resolve" the problems caused by the sin of men:

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times. (Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, June 8, 1978.) 

Millions upon millions of Catholics continue to look for the “next election” to “save” the country without even bothering to consider the farce that is the modern, religiously indifferentist democratic republic wherein citizens are divided on matters of objective truth that demand our assent and, as such, are inarguable, and wherein these words of Pope Pius XI, written in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, never seem to penetrate the intellects of even otherwise rational Catholics, who keep thinking that they can indeed “save” the country politically as it deteriorates more and more morally:

Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)

23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)

26. Perhaps the advantages to one's family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. "It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch." (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)

27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)

28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

That last paragraph, number twenty-eight, says it it all. The gist of the two hundred thirty-seven articles linked at the top of this article can be summarized in the following words written by Pope Pius XI nearly one hundred four years ago:

They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Sadly, many Catholics continue to waste their energies and consume their time and efforts (if not money!) in vain sterile efforts to find a remedy for the ills of Modernity without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin.

We have been thinking for far too long in naturalistic terms without realizing that we must be unapologetically Catholic at all times and in all places without any equivocation whatsoever. The false premises of the Modern civil state have influenced us so insidiously and so subtly that we are even unwilling to consider for a moment all of the empirical evidence proving that no evils have been retarded as a result of our Judeo-Masonic electoral process wherein we are expected to disregard one candidate's support for grave evils to defeat another candidate who is said to support those evils to a greater degree, thereby fulfilling Pope Leo XIII's prophetic warning in Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888, about what happens to a society when it gets used to the toleration of more and more evils over time:

But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)

Pope Leo XIII exhorted us two years later, in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, to proclaim the Catholic Faith unapologetically, something that so many Catholics across the ecclesiastical divide believe is neither advisable or necessary, thereby denying the efficacy of the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, to provide us with all of the helps necessary to be as courageous as were the Apostles themselves:

But in this same matter, touching Christian faith, there are other duties whose exact and religious observance, necessary at all times in the interests of eternal salvation, become more especially so in these our days. Amid such reckless and widespread folly of opinion, it is, as We have said, the office of the Church to undertake the defense of truth and uproot errors from the mind, and this charge has to be at all times sacredly observed by her, seeing that the honor of God and the salvation of men are confided to her keeping. But, when necessity compels, not those only who are invested with power of rule are bound to safeguard the integrity of faith, but, as St. Thomas maintains: "Each one is under obligation to show forth his faith, either to instruct and encourage others of the faithful, or to repel the attacks of unbelievers.'' To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth, is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe. In both cases such mode of behaving is base and is insulting to God, and both are incompatible with the salvation of mankind. This kind of conduct is profitable only to the enemies of the faith, for nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good. Moreover, want of vigor on the part of Christians is so much the more blameworthy, as not seldom little would be needed on their part to bring to naught false charges and refute erroneous opinions, and by always exerting themselves more strenuously they might reckon upon being successful. After all, no one can be prevented from putting forth that strength of soul which is the characteristic of true Christians, and very frequently by such display of courage our enemies lose heart and their designs are thwarted. Christians are, moreover, born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God aiding, the triumph: "Have confidence; I have overcome the world." Nor is there any ground for alleging that Jesus Christ, the Guardian and Champion of the Church, needs not in any manner the help of men. Power certainly is not wanting to Him, but in His loving kindness He would assign to us a share in obtaining and applying the fruits of salvation procured through His grace.

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

We deserve chastisement not only for our sins but for our failure to profess "openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power," being willing to accept crumbs from careerist politicians while turning a blind eye and a deaf eye to the evils they support as a matter of principle and as the basis of public policy. Oh, yes, we, each of us, deserves the chastisement that is upon us.

Father Frederick Faber described the situation of the modern world by explaining how the passage of the life of the Church Militant on earth is summarized in a Corpus Christi procession:

I said that Corpus Christi was naturally a day of processions. Now the whole history of the Church may be viewed as in itself a vast and various procession, seen under all the vicissitudes of war, as a caravan of pilgrim soldiers fighting their way from east to west. Now it is in little straggling bands with the apostles on the Roman Roads, or now encamped with the obscure Proselytes of the Gate round the Jewish Synagogues in the Roman Provinces. Here we behold it, an army of martyrs, with the pontiff at its head in the dim chambers of the Catacombs; there it is out before the world's eyes, all gleaming and glancing with the ensigns of imperial favour and command. One while it is pushing its way across the desert to reach the unevangelized nations; another while it is curbing the inundations of the whole barbarian north. Now it has absorbed the whole civilized world into itself and in its mediaeval splendours; and again it is mingled through the crowd of base literatures, of wicked philosophies, of corrupted civilizations, and of debased diplomacies, never lost to the eye, always cognizable, always suffering, always royal always unlike anything else in the world, like the children of Israel in the Red Sea when the solid waters stood up as a wall on their right hand and on their left.

The procession of the Blessed Sacrament is a compendium of Church History. It is a disclosure of the mind of the Church in all the vicissitudes of her warlike pilgrimage. It makes us feel as past ages have felt and as generations will feel in times to come. It gives us a taste of her supernatural disposition, and helps powerfully to form the same disposition within ourselves. It is not the triumph of the Church because she has finally destroyed her enemies and is victorious. Every day is only bringing new enmities to view, and unmasking false friends. The whole of the extraordinary versatility of human wickedness is simply at work to harass and exhaust the Church by the multiplicity and unexpectedness of its attacks. The empire of the demons abounds in fearful intelligence, backed by no less fearful power, and the Church has to prove it all. There is not a change in the world's destinies which is not a fresh trial for the Church. There is not a new philosophy or a freshly-named science, but what deems, in the ignorance of its raw beginnings, that it will either explode the Church as false, or set her aside as doting. There is no new luxury of our modern capitals, but the devil or the world enter into it with a mysterious possession, in order to make a charm of it against the Church and her mission to the souls of men. Heresy can be pious, reverent, philanthropic, a zealot for public morals, patriotic, liberal, conceding, if so only the Church can be wounded by the stratagem. No! it would be premature indeed if at this day the Church should sing her paean because she has finally destroyed her enemies and is victorious.

Neither is the feast of the Blessed Sacrament a triumph because she is at peace. She never gets beyond a truce, and it is seldom enough that she ever has so much as that. She can never be at peace until the day of doom, nor while there is yet a soul, that is not already reprobate, left unsaved. Her very alliances must needs be full of suspicions from long experience, and in reality they are rather fresh anxieties than permissions for repose. She has often been in alliance with the governments of the world, and thereby has many a soul been saved that would have been lost. But such alliances cost her the blood of martyrs and the toilsome sweat of popes, and at the best she can live in them only as the timid deer in the forest whose every echo is ringing with the hunter's horn. She is less at her ease in a Concordat than in a Catacomb. So with educational and reformatory movements; so with legal efforts for political liberties; so with philosophical and scientific leagues; so even with the graceful enervations of beautiful and refining art. She has her place in all these things, because she has a mission to them all; but she does not, may not, dwell with them in peace.

Neither does she triumph because heresy is stifled all over the earth. For new heresies wax while old ones wane; and each schism as it decays is the fruitful parent of many more. In truth heresies are a condition of her life, and the unwitting cause of nearly all the intellectual magnificence of her dogmatic teaching. Nevertheless it is doubtless a pleasure and a triumph to her children to see how year after year various heresies seem to shed their Christian elements, and to work their way with a blind fatality outside the ring of revealed truth altogether. There is not perhaps a single year in England which does not see some section of protestant opinion repudiate its own starting point and anathematize its own first principles, and so either lose its hold on earnest minds, or drop with indifferent minds into the growing gulf of simple weary unbelief. An Englishman should be the last person in the world to deem the Church was triumphing because heresy is extinct.

Neither again is she triumphing because she has outlived so many foes who at one time seemed to be actual conquerors: though this phenomenon must be a daily subject for her devout thanksgiving and renewed confidence in God. The turbid flood of protestantism, daily subsiding and leaving waste tracks of dismal mud, behind, never covered the earth so dreadfully as Arianism in the early centuries; and as the one passed, so will the other. Protestant prophecies are coming untrue, and making their rash author a laughing-stock year after year. Date after date of the infallible destruction of the Papacy passes on with the harmless course of the four grateful seasons, and the calendar of heretical prophecy is left disdainfully, cruelly unfulfilled; and they will figure in the half antiquarian novels of our posterity as the vagaries of the Rosicrucians, and the sabbaths of the Lancashire witches do in ours, emblems and monuments of the undignified weaknesses of the human mind. Still souls are lost meanwhile, and the Christian eye is fixed far more on that lamentable fact than on the successive extinction of her foes, which it is as natural and common-place a thing for her to expect as that the sun shall rise, or the harvest, plentiful or scarce, shall come in its appointed season.

Neither does she triumph because the Blessed Sacrament is to her a foretaste of the joys of heaven and of its eternal satisfactions. Men do not triumph in anticipations, and the feast of victory must be something more than the pleasure ardour of desire. Nay, truly, if I shall not seem to be uttering a conceit, I will say that this one day is the only day in the year in which she does not seem to think of heaven; rather, she acts as if it had come to her, and she needed not to go to it. And this brings me at once to the real cause of her spiritual triumph. It is because she has Jesus Himself with her, the Living God, in the Blessed Sacrament. It is no commemoration of Him; it is Himself. It is no part of the mystery of the Incarnation; it is the whole mystery, and the Incarnate One Himself. It is not simply a means of grace; it is the Divine Fountain of Grace Himself. It is not merely a help to glory; it is the glorified Redeemer Himself, the owner and the source of all glory. The Blessed Sacrament is God in His mysterious, miraculous veils. It is this real presence of God which makes Catholicism a religion quite distinct from any of the so-called forms of Christianity. It is this possession of her God which is of necessity the lifelong triumph of the Church. Nothing short of this could be a a real or sufficient triumph to the Bride of Christ. (Father Frederick Faber, The Blessed Sacrament, written in 1854, republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1978, pp. 20-23.) 

We have God Himself in the Most Blessed Sacrament in these days of apostasy and betrayal and persecution.

Why do we fear a little chastisement?

We have His Most Blessed Mother, who has given us numerous aids (the Brown Scapular, the Rosary, the Miraculous Medal, the Green Scapular) for our sanctification and salvation.

Why do we fear a little chastisement?

Why do we fear a big chastisement?

Why do we fear at all?

Suffering is indeed the path to triumph for all eternity in Heaven.

Can't we be generous in offering up the difficulties of the present moment to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit and as we spend time with Our Beloved where He can be found in those Catholic venues served by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or its wolves in shepherds' clothing?

The fear engendered by naturalism will dissipate the more that we envelop ourselves in the things of eternity.

Yes, chastisement is a silver lining in and of itself for which we should be most grateful. The chastisement of the moment is being sent to us in large part to help us find our way out of the straitjacket that is the Judeo-Masonic lie of naturalism.

I know that I have no hope of saving my immortal soul, stained with so many sins over the course of my lifetime, absent the rod of correction which God uses to beat me down into dust and to humiliate me for my stubborn refusal to give my whole heart and soul to Him at all times.

We should be grateful for being permitted to live in these challenging times so that the chastisements of the moment may help us to make reparation for our sins as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary so that we will be better able to think, to speak and to act as Catholics at all times as we seek to discharge the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy.

Our Lady's Immaculate Heart will triumph. We simply need to be faithful we accept hardship as the price of our sanctification and salvation:

For which cause I admonish thee, that thou stir up the grace of God which is in thee, by the imposition of my hands. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear: but of power, and of love, and of sobriety. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but labour with the gospel, according to the power of God. (2 Tim. 1: 6-8.) 

With our Rosaries prayed well and our fervent remembrance of the Poor Souls in Purgatory being uppermost in our minds this month of November, let us take refuge in the simple fact that millions upon millions who have gone before us marked with the Sign of Faith, that is, the Sign of the Cross, have been willing to embrace that Cross with love, joy and gratitude.

Why can't we in the midst of our own difficulties?

Why can't we?

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, 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.

All the Saints, pray for us.

The Holy Relics, pray for us.