Bordering on the Borderless

One of the chief duties of a nation’s chief executive is to secure the borders of his country. A president of the United States of America, a position that combines the duties of chief of state and chief of the government that differentiates from, say, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or the Chancellor of Germany, takes the following oath of office as he is sworn in, usually by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Part of a president’s constitutional duties is to enforce the laws passed by the Congress of the United States of America. A dereliction of those duties would be considered a violation of his oath of office and thus ground for impeachment if we lived a world governed by men who were committed to the fair and impartial pursuit of justice in light of the just Judgment that awaits us all when we die. It is a fundamental dereliction of duty for a president of the United States of America to ignore just laws that provide for the regulating of immigration and thus contribute to national security, the integrity of the nation’s borders, and to an orderly process of migration that permits time to assure that immigrants will pose neither a health nor safety threat to American citizens.

The relevant provision of Article I of the Constitution as dealing with naturalization, which presupposes immigration to the country, is as follows:

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States; (Subsection 4, Article I)

The current president of the United States of America is deliberately refusing to ignore the just laws passed by Congress to provide for the orderly migration of non-citizens into the United States of America, and he is doing so to achieve “equity,” something that the ideologue who serves as the Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security, Alex Mayorkas, has stated proudly several times in testimony before Congressional committees while also stating—and with a straight face, mind you, that the “border is secure.” An article written by a secular commentator provided a thorough explanation of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.’s deliberate refusal to enforce existing laws:

Three years into the border crisis, most Americans still don’t understand what’s actually happening at the border. This lack of understanding extends to the mainstream press and to most Republicans, who have struggled to communicate effectively on the issue.

The cause of the current crisis is President Joe Biden’s unprecedented refusal to enforce federal immigration law, which requires that all asylum-seekers be detained rather than released into the United States. The solution, therefore, is for Biden to start enforcing federal law as he is constitutionally required to do—or for Congress to deny the president something else he wants until he does.

Many observers, however, seem unclear about the cause of the crisis. Praising a not-yet-released Senate immigration bill, which a trio of senators is currently negotiating with the White House behind closed doors, the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes that “the President needs Congress to fix the underlying incentives at the border.” But the president, not Congress, has created the incentives that have attracted so many illegal aliens, by offering a near guarantee that asylum-seekers will get released into the U.S. rather than detained as their claims are adjudicated.

Under presidents of both parties before 2021, those trying to enter the U.S. illegally at least had to evade the authorities. This hasn’t been true under Biden. U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell writes that U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) Chief Raul Ortiz “testified that the current surge differs from prior surges that he [has] seen over his lengthy career in that most of the aliens now being encountered at the Southwest Border are turning themselves in to USBP officers rather than trying to escape the officers.” Ortiz, whom the Biden administration selected as chief, said that aliens are likely “turning themselves in because they think they’re going to be released.”

The difference in the number of releases under Biden and under his immediate predecessor is like the contrast between the Himalayas and a pitcher’s mound. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, in December 2020, the last full month under President Donald Trump, the USBP released 17 aliens into the U.S. In December 2023, the most recent month for which statistics are available under Biden, the USBP released 191,142 aliens into the U.S. In other words, the USBP released 0.009 percent as many aliens into the U.S. during the final month under Trump as it did during the most-recent month under Biden—for every one alien released under Trump, 11,244 were released under Biden. That’s not a normal increase; it’s a flash flood.

In all, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the Biden administration released 2 million aliens into the U.S. in fiscal year (FY) 2023. In addition, the CBO estimates that there were 750,000 “got-aways”—those detected crossing the border but not apprehended. This gives a rough sense of what’s driving this crisis: for every three people who were detected crossing the border but got away, there were eight people—nearly three times as many—who were apprehended between the ports of entry, or deemed inadmissible at a port of entry, yet were released into the U.S. in defiance of federal law.

The prospective Senate bill would reportedly let the president “shut down the border” if the average number of migrant crossings were to surpass 4,000 a day over the span of a week, and it would mandate such action if there were 8,500 illegal crossings on a given day. Oklahoma senator James Lankford, the sole Republican playing a lead role in the negotiations, appeared on Face the Nation on January 28 and suggested that he believes the Biden administration’s line that it is releasing so many aliens into the country because there are simply too many to detain them.

In truth, the reason why there are so many aliens to detain is because word has gotten out that if you come and request asylum, you’ll be released into the U.S.—and this has been the case since Biden took office. As Judge Wetherell put it in a 2023 immigration case, the Biden administration’s actions have been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.” As word has spread, the numbers at the border have massively increased, with the most recent month on record (December 2023) being the worst month to date.

For his part, Biden claims that if the prospective Senate bill “were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly”—thereby implying that Congress is at fault. This flips the truth on its head. What’s more, even if the bill were to pass and Biden were to “shut down the border,” it’s not as if the flow would stop: people cross the border illegally on a daily basis already.

Such a “shutdown” would reportedly “suspend asylum [claims] in between official ports of entry” but apparently wouldn’t stop people from claiming asylum at the ports. According to CBS News, during a so-called shutdown of the border, the bill “would preserve asylum at official ports of entry”—indeed, it “would require U.S. border officials to continue processing more than 1,400 asylum-seekers daily at these official border crossings.” So, this means that another half-a-million illegal aliens would be released into the U.S. annually, even if the border were “shut down” all year.

In reality, having a “Come In, We’re Open” sign at each port of entry, while discouraging rampant crossings of the border between the ports, reflects the Biden administration’s goals. In a 2022 interview, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whether “it is the objective of the Biden administration to reduce—sharply reduce—the total number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.” Strikingly, Mayorkas refused to answer yes, instead immediately replying, “It is the objective of the Biden administration to make sure that we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system.”

What Mayorkas meant by this is that the administration wants illegal aliens to come not to random places along the border but to the ports of entry—from whence they will be released into the interior of the country. The Biden administration and the mainstream media insist on calling this “lawful” entry. The law, however, requires that those who enter the U.S. without proper documentation be continuously detained until their claim can be adjudicated, since they lack the documents to enter lawfully.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states that if “an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted, the alien shall be detained for a [removal] proceeding.” It also declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Justice Samuel Alito writes that these detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.”

The Biden administration asserts that it can use “parole” or “prosecutorial discretion” to release illegal aliens into the U.S. as it sees fit, but this policy plainly violates federal law. Quoting the INA, Chief Justice John Roberts writes for the Supreme Court, “DHS may exercise its discretion to parole applicants ‘only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.’” In the past, DHS has construed this language to mean that those who would qualify might include, for example, someone who needs emergency medical care (for urgent humanitarian reasons) or an alien scheduled to be a witness in a trial (providing significant public benefit). The Biden administration is construing it to mean essentially anyone.

The administration’s primary justification for releasing massive numbers of aliens into the U.S. is that it doesn’t have the space or personnel to detain them as the law requires. But as a 2023 DHS Inspector General report notes, “Since FY 2019, Congress has authorized most of the law enforcement personnel that CBP and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] requested.” Judge Wetherell observes that DHS had the capacity to detain an average daily population (ADP) of 55,000 just five years ago, but under the Biden administration “DHS requested a reduction to 32,500 ADP for fiscal year 2022” and for FY 2023 “requested a further reduction to 25,000 ADP.”

Congress nevertheless approved funding for 34,000 ADP for FY 2023. This year, in its 119-page FY 2024 Budget in Brief—under the heading of “Major Decreases”—DHS requested that detention space be reduced to 25,000 ADP for FY 2024, touting that this would save $555 million versus 2023 outlays. In short, the Biden administration is claiming that there isn’t enough detention space, while simultaneously proposing further reductions in detention space.

The Biden administration’s catch-and-release—or welcome-and-release—policy has also had the effect of making it easier for others to evade capture along the open border. Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge currently at the Center for Immigration Studies, explains that “many if not most” border patrol agents are now “stuck transporting and processing migrants before they are released,” rather than policing the open border.

Why would anyone feel the need to cross the open border when the Biden administration would willingly let them in at a port of entry if they utter the password “asylum”? Well, if one is a drug-smuggler, a terrorist, or someone with a criminal record in the U.S., one might rather cross the open border than risk an encounter at a port of entry. We don’t know how many potential terrorists have crossed the southwest border under Biden without getting caught, but we do have strong evidence of a huge increase in the number who have tried. According to CBP statistics, from FY 2018 through FY 2020—the three full fiscal years under Trump—USBP had only nine encounters along the southwest border with noncitizens on the terrorist watch list. In just the first two-and-one-quarter fiscal years entirely under Biden (FY 2022 through the first quarter of FY 2024), USBP had 316 such encounters—a 35-fold increase overall, and a 47-fold increase per month.

Even apart from aiding terrorists, drug-smugglers, and the like, the effects of Biden’s refusal to enforce federal law have been profound. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in less than three years under Biden, the United States’s foreign-born population over the age of 16 rose by 5 million (from 43,086,000 in January 2021 (Table A-7) to 48,049,000 in December 2023). That’s enough to populate a new Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. combined.

Why is Biden releasing millions of illegal aliens into the U.S.? Because he thinks that his notion of “equity”—which he extends to non-U.S. citizens—requires it. On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order declaring that his administration would pursue a policy of “advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” In a subsequent document, DHS quoted that passage from Biden and made clear that it was applying it “[i]n the immigration and enforcement context.”

In other words, the situation at the border is by design. What most Americans think of as a “crisis,” the Biden administration regards as a success. (A Border Crisis By Design.)

The crisis created by the Biden administration has benefitted human traffickers, exploited those seeking to come to the United States of America illegally, and created a public health and safety crisis throughout the country. A great many, if not perhaps the majority, of those entering the United States of America at the invitation of the lawless administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Kamala Harris, are as clueless about First and Last Things as are most native-born Americans, and a strong criminal element within the ranks of those who have already been invited to break the nation’s just immigration laws has come here to pillage, steal, ransack, and to commit violent crimes because they know nothing of the fear of God nor have any respect for the just laws of nations, including those are designed, at least ostensibly, to provide for the protection of the lives and property of American citizens. The criminal element among the immigrants knowsfull well that they will not be prosecuted in cities with “woke” prosecutors in states with “cashless bail” laws that have encouraged recidivist criminals to rob stores, commit violent crimes against people, and to even attack police officers with utter impunity. Some letters to the editor published recently in the New York Post expressed the understandable outrage about the crime spree that has been let loose upon the country by the current presidential administration and enabled by the likes of New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg:

The Issue: A group of migrants who were released without bail after assaulting two police officers.

Cops are assaulted and the migrant perpetrators are released — only for them to flip the bird at every taxpaying citizen who is covering the bill for their housing, food, sneakers and cell phones (“Free as a double bird,” Feb. 1).

Incompetent, politically motivated district attorneys and judges enable the release of criminals who feed on society with no accountability.

We must pass laws to hold criminals liable for their actions, like enacting a two-year sentence with no plea for assaulting law enforcement.

The majority of New Yorkers wish the border was controlled and the people crossing were vetted. Murderers and traffickers shouldn’t be welcomed like the other hard-working people looking for a better life for themselves and their families.

Steven Cassidy

Franklin Square

Imagine the audacity of two police officers attempting to arrest a criminal illegal alien, only to be set upon by a mob of other criminal illegal aliens.

As is the norm in New York, the miscreants were free with no bail a few hours later. If I were a cop, I would quietly bide my time until retirement and never attempt another arrest.

Jerry Ciofalo

Massapequa

The Issue: A group of migrants who were released without bail after assaulting two police officers.

Incompetent, politically motivated district attorneys and judges enable the release of criminals who feed on society with no accountability.

We must pass laws to hold criminals liable for their actions, like enacting a two-year sentence with no plea for assaulting law enforcement.

Steven Cassidy

Franklin Square

Imagine the audacity of two police officers attempting to arrest a criminal illegal alien, only to be set upon by a mob of other criminal illegal aliens.

As is the norm in New York, the miscreants were free with no bail a few hours later. If I were a cop, I would quietly bide my time until retirement and never attempt another arrest.

Jerry Ciofalo

Massapequa

A group of migrants assaulted two police officers in Times Square. They took turns kicking their heads and torso.

After being arrested, they were released within hours without bail. And upon leaving the Manhattan

Criminal Court after arraignment, one migrant even gave the middle finger to news cameras outside.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecuters did not request bail from the judge. Alongside that, one of the migrants already had a previous arrest record.

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be allowed to immediately deport any migrant guilty of assaulting law enforcement officials or American citizens.

Larry Penner

Great Neck

Is there no justice protecting regular citizens from those hellbent on doing harm? Why do we even have laws if they are not enforced? What can be on the mind of Bragg and his cronies when the assailants, who happen to be migrants, roam free after being released when they beat up two of New York’s Finest?

One has only to look at the video of them being released in which they gave the finger to the rest of us citizens — and know that they will never return for their later scheduled court dates.

We are in the Upside-Down. Now let’s get righted! (Cop-beating migrants are released, no bail, after attack: Letters.)

Journalist John Miller, who has served within the hierarchy of both the New York City and Los Angeles Police Departments under the commissionership of William Bratton in those cities, explained that some of the illegal immigrants (referred to in the mainsliime media as “asylum seekers”) commit their crimes in New York City before “vacationing” in Florida. Such “vacations” have a short duration as the violent criminals who have entered the country illegally only to continue their life of crime without consequences in a world where there as little regard for private property as there is for the inviolability of innocent preborn life, and it is that disregard that has led to all attacks upon innocent human beings after birth, including those committed by the medical profession under the aegis of “brain death”/human organ vivisection, palliative care/hospice, the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings who are said to be “brain-damaged,” and by the panoply of poisons marketed as “vaccines” that not only fail to protect the jabbed from whatever affliction they seek to avoid contracting but in causing chronic medical conditions and, in all too many cases, “sudden death.” The criminals “vacation” in Florida but return to New York City for their lucrative careers of pillaging because they know that in Florida “you go to jail” whereas in New York nothing happens to you:

JOHN MILLER: It's so complicated because you're a New Yorker, you move through the city every day as I do. We see these people, we touch these people, they're out looking for work, delivering our food, at the gas stations and the car wash.

These are people who came in waves. 170,000 probably to New York City. But within that group, this hard-working, you know, throngs of people in search of hope and a better life, there is this one percent of criminal element that looks at a different opportunity here.

These individuals, I went over their rap sheets yesterday, multiple charges, grand larceny, robbery, attempted robbery, grand larceny, and larcency.

This particular crew worked on mopeds and scooters, they were doing organized retail theft, snatches on the street, iPhones, iPads, clothing, so on and so forth. One they are still seeking has ten charges on one day because he's part of a pattern that's been going on. I'm looking at the dates their arrests started, which is probably close to when they got here. They've only been here a couple of months.

So what the detectives are telling me is, they have crews here that operate in New York, do all their stealing, then go to Florida to spend the money and come back. I’m like, 'Why don’t they just stay and steal in Florida?' They said, 'Because there you go to jail.'" (CNN's John Miller: To Avoid Prosecution, Migrant Criminal Gangs Steal In New York, Spend In Florida.)

One of the ironies in the crisis created by the Biden administration is that the illegal immigrants are not required to produce any identification and they are not required to get any “vaccines.” It is easier to enter the country illegally than it is legally, and it has become very easy for people on the “terrorist watch list” to enter and then become integrated into various locales.

Thus, in addition to having a president and secretary of “Homeland Security” deliberately refusing to enforce just laws duly passed by the Congress of the United States of America as lawlessly undemocratic executive orders, presidential directives, and memoranda are issued to circumvent the legislative process mandated by Article I, Section 7, 8, and 9, of the Constitution of the United States of America, we have state and local officials who refuse, in the name of “equity,” to keep the public safe from hoodlums who delight in stealing the property of others and committing random attacks upon their fellow human beings. As Pope Leo XIII explained in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884, there can be no sense of justice when men lose sight of First and Last Things:

But the naturalists go much further; for, having, in the highest things, entered upon a wholly erroneous course, they are carried headlong to extremes, either by reason of the weakness of human nature, or because God inflicts upon them the just punishment of their pride. Hence it happens that they no longer consider as certain and permanent those things which are fully understood by the natural light of reason, such as certainly are -- the existence of God, the immaterial nature of the human soul, and its immortality. The sect of the Freemasons, by a similar course of error, is exposed to these same dangers; for, although in a general way they may profess the existence of God, they themselves are witnesses that they do not all maintain this truth with the full assent of the mind or with a firm conviction. Neither do they conceal that this question about God is the greatest source and cause of discords among them; in fact, it is certain that a considerable contention about this same subject has existed among them very lately. But, indeed, the sect allows great liberty to its votaries, so that to each side is given the right to defend its own opinion, either that there is a God, or that there is none; and those who obstinately contend that there is no God are as easily initiated as those who contend that God exists, though, like the pantheists, they have false notions concerning Him: all which is nothing else than taking away the reality, while retaining some absurd representation of the divine nature.

When this greatest fundamental truth has been overturned or weakened, it follows that those truths, also, which are known by the teaching of nature must begin to fall -- namely, that all things were made by the free will of God the Creator; that the world is governed by Providence; that souls do not die; that to this life of men upon the earth there will succeed another and an everlasting life.

When these truths are done away with, which are as the principles of nature and important for knowledge and for practical use, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality. We say nothing of those more heavenly virtues, which no one can exercise or even acquire without a special gift and grace of God; of which necessarily no trace can be found in those who reject as unknown the redemption of mankind, the grace of God, the sacraments, and the happiness to be obtained in heaven. We speak now of the duties which have their origin in natural probity. That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained, and forbids that it be disturbed; that the last end of men is a destiny far above human things and beyond this sojourning upon the earth: these are the sources and these the principles of all justice and morality.

If these be taken away, as the naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. But, how insufficient such teaching is, how wanting in soundness, and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already begun to appear. For, wherever, by removing Christian education, this teaching has begun more completely to rule, there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. All this is commonly complained of and deplored; and not a few of those who by no means wish to do so are compelled by abundant evidence to give not infrequently the same testimony. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

Yes, there is no “knowledge” of what constitutes justice and injustice in a land that gives full rein to blasphemy and sacrilege, a land where even the adversary himself has “rights” as it is considered to be something akin to a “hate” crime to mention the Holy Name of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which has been banned by United States Department of Defense and its military services from being invoked outside of chaplaincy use.

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when their nations promote public worship of the devil while mocking Christ the King?

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when the civil law sanctions the killing of the innocent preborn and the vivisection of anyone after birth under the aegis of the medical industry’s manufactured, profit-making myth called “brain death”?

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when so many people are unjust in their own personal dealings, when relativism and positivism have become the accepted norms of social conduct?

As has been noted before on this site, we are called by the binding precepts of the Fourth Commandment and of the Natural Law itself to love our country. Authentic love of one's nation, however, wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization, that is, the subordination of everything in her national life to that which redounds to the good of the souls of her citizens as that good as been entrusted to and defined by the one and only true Church, the Catholic Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. One who recognizes this immutable truth of the Catholic Faith can see quite readily that is a day of reparation, not of celebration.

Some careful distinctions must be made proceeding with a topic that has been explored in my writing and speaking and teaching long before this site was launched on February 20, 2004, as a continuation of the work of the printed journal of the same name.

One of the first distinctions that should be made is that it is likely the case that the abuses, no matter how exaggerated by the American colonists in favor of independence from the United Kingdom, associated with King George III would never have arisen if England had remained Catholic. The Kings of England would have continued to recognize the fact that they had to reign their subjects with a view to promoting all that redounded to their sanctification and salvation as members of the Catholic Church, understanding that Holy Mother Church possessed the right, exercised as an absolute last resort following the discharge of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to intervene with them when the good of souls demands such an intervention.

We must keep very much in mind, therefore, that the very conditions that were used as the pretext for the "Declaration of Independence" might never have existed if England had remained Catholic. The devil wants men and their nations to assert their "independence" from the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised exclusively by the Catholic Church. Catholic England's break from the Faith under King Henry VIII--and his subsequent persecution and execution of Catholics who remained faithful to Rome as he confiscated the lands of monasteries and convents to distribute them amongst his political supporters, making them dependent upon the Protestant Revolt in England for their very property and wealth--was used by the devil so as to foment all manner of mischief in subsequent centuries, including the founding of the first secular, religiously indifferentist nation in the history of the world, the United States of America.

A second distinction that should be made is that the thirteen English colonies in North America located up and down the Atlantic seaboard from what is now the State of Maine to the Georgia-Florida border were not bastions of Christianity. The true popes of the Catholic Church always used the word Christianity to refer to the true Faith, that is, Catholicism. Although adherents of individual Protestant sects may be Christians if they had been baptized validly, Protestantism in all of its mutant forms is heretical. "Christianity" must of its nature be free of heresy. Protestantism, therefore, is neither a means of personal salvation or of social order.

To wit, the grubby little Calvinists who founded the Plymouth Colony, which lasted between 1620 and 1691 before being subsumed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony, left England (and the Netherlands) in the hope of founding a settlement free of any taint of "impurity" in religion, that is, free of any taint of the remaining vestiges of Catholicism (hierarchy, sacramental system, veneration of the saints, including Our Lady, the sporadic, intermittent reliance upon an attenuated version of "Apostolic Tradition") found in the Anglican "Church."

The Calvinists hated the Catholic Church and they loathed Catholics. Although they had great natural fortitude, to be sure, they believed quite resolutely that no man needed to follow the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and that no man needed to be sanctified by the worthy reception of Holy Communion or that he had the obligation to worship God in the ineffable, august Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Such wretched beliefs are from Hell, not from God. Such people are to be pitied, not exalted as "role models' for the triumph of a notion of "civil liberty" that is indifferent, if not directly hostile, to the pursuit of man's Last End as a member of the Catholic Church.

This legacy of anti-Catholicism, which was strong in each of the thirteen colonies, would lead Protestant land-owners to subject the free Catholics of Acadia who were expelled from their homes by Governor Charles Lawrence in 1755 to slavery in many instances. It is indeed more than a little curious that few great "flag wavers" of the "American" way mention the fact that members of heretical sects enslaved Catholics whose families had been broken up by Charles Lawrence and sent hither and yon, including to the colonies in what became the United States of America. To recount this history accurately might interfere, I suppose, with the mythology of "decency" that is said to have characterized the people in the English colonies who believed that material success was a sign of divine election and that there could be no greater "tyranny" for man than to be "yoked" to the "dictates" of the priesthood.

A third distinction that should be made is that the Catholics who arrived in Maryland in 1634 being told by a Jesuit priest to "practice their Faith, but as quietly as possible." This started a "tradition," if you will, now of three hundred eighy two years' vintage, of Catholics subordinating their Faith to the exigencies of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and pluralism and religious indifferentism.

Yes, the history of the Catholic Church in the United States of America is very complex, full of examples of bishops and priests who believed in the Faith but who were "ahead of their time," so to speak, concerning the heresy of "religious liberty" and the religiously indifferentist civil state and also full of examples of bishops and priests who defended the totality of the Faith with great distinction. The bottom line, however, is this: there is a difference between accommodating oneself to the particular realities of a given situation, such as those that existed in a world of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and various "Enlightenment" philosophies in the Eighteenth Century, and refusing to seek the conversion of a nation to the true Faith. The dangers of this immersion into naturalism were cited by Pope Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, and they were outlined by Father Edward Leen in The Holy Ghost in passages that can be found on the home page of this website.

A very clever trap had been set by the devil to lull Catholics to sleep in the former colonies of the United Kingdom that became the first thirteen states of the United States of America. The adversary raised up Protestants in Europe who attacked the Catholic Church and individual Catholics with a furious abandon, subjecting Catholics in England and Ireland to a particularly vicious persecution that killed thousands of thousands of them and deprived thousands more of their homes and their freedom. This made the tiny number of Catholics of English and Irish descent in the colonies and the original thirteen states "grateful" to the "nice" Protestants who left them alone, for the most part, that is, to practice their Faith privately. This "gratitude" was ingrained in the minds and hearts of Catholic immigrants to the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century, thus predisposing them to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.

Pope Leo XIII noted this in his apostolical letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, the Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae , January 22, 1899:

But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.

In the apostolic letters concerning the constitution of states, addressed by us to the bishops of the whole Church, we discussed this point at length; and there set forth the difference existing between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.

It is well, then, to particularly direct attention to the opinion which serves as the argument in behalf of this greater liberty sought for and recommended to Catholics.

It is alleged that now the Vatican decree concerning the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff having been proclaimed that nothing further on that score can give any solicitude, and accordingly, since that has been safeguarded and put beyond question a wider and freer field both for thought and action lies open to each one. But such reasoning is evidently faulty, since, if we are to come to any conclusion from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, it should rather be that no one should wish to depart from it, and moreover that the minds of all being leavened and directed thereby, greater security from private error would be enjoyed by all. And further, those who avail themselves of such a way of reasoning seem to depart seriously from the over-ruling wisdom of the Most High-which wisdom, since it was pleased to set forth by most solemn decision the authority and supreme teaching rights of this Apostolic See-willed that decision precisely in order to safeguard the minds of the Church's children from the dangers of these present times.

These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.

We, indeed, have no thought of rejecting everything that modern industry and study has produced; so far from it that we welcome to the patrimony of truth and to an ever-widening scope of public well-being whatsoever helps toward the progress of learning and virtue. Yet all this, to be of any solid benefit, nay, to have a real existence and growth, can only be on the condition of recognizing the wisdom and authority of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benvolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

Pope Leo XIII "took off the gloves" in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, having praised what he could of various elements of the American founding, including the natural virtues of George Washington, in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, before making it clear in that encyclical letter that the American bishops were not doing what they could to Catholicize the nation, especially as pertains to making his own encyclical letters on Church-State relatoins known to the Catholics of the United States of America. Pope Leo wanted to make it abundantly clear in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae that some of the American bishops did indeed want to view the Deposit of Faith through the lens of the American Constitution as the prototype of a "future church" modeled along the lines of "democracy" and "collegiality" and "egalitarianism" and "ecumenism." This telling passage from Pope Leo's Apostolical Letter to the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, is a prophetic warning about the counterfeit church of conciliarism that would owe much of its origins to the heresy of Americanism:

For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive of and desire the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world. (Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

Quite specifically, you see, a nation that is not founded on right principles must degenerate into the barbarism of our present era, having no immutable teaching authority to guide it, choosing to be "guided" by the demigods of national founding fathers and/or by the shifting winds of majoritarian sentiment at any particular point in time. Contradiction and instability are bound to result, as we can see with great clarity today. It is very much beside the point to argue that the "founders" would have opposed this or that social evil. They premised the entire fabric of national life under the Constitution upon the false belief that men could sort out their differences by means of a cumbersome process of negotiation and debate in the national legislative process, believing that there was no single belief that could unite men and guide them in the pursuit of the common good as the supreme and eternal good each man was kept in mind. There is no way, therefore, for naturalists to use a naturalist Constitution to defend against various evils. Evil must win when man does not subordinate himself to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and when men do not have belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

Putting Aside All Emotion

Catholics must put aside all emotion on the explosive issue of illegal immigration in order to look at the concrete principles (the right and duty of nations to defend their borders and to control the flow of immigration according to just laws) as they seek how to apply those principles in a prudent manner that is conducive to national security and at the same time takes account of the actual circumstances in which those who have heretofore entered one's country illegally find themselves.

We must remember that those who have entered this country illegally or are trying to seek illegal entry into it are human beings who possess souls created in the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and have been redeemed, whether or not they know it or understand much about it if they do, by the Most Precious Blood Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King. They cannot be dismissed in a demagogic fashion as threats to the “purity of the blood” or as objects to be derided. Many of these people have been the victims of the human traffickers and others are truly desperate about the situations in their home countries. Even though a lot have come here for the proverbial free ride and to enjoy the benefits such are being handed out to them by the mayoral administration of the City of New York, New York, and by the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom in California, illegal aliens must be the object of our prayers as we pray also for justice to be done in their cases while maintaining the public health and national security of native-born citizens and restoring the country’s territorial integrity.

Many there are, especially among Catholic "bishops" and priests/presbyters who are of the "leftist" bent of naturalism, who have served as nothing other than demagogues on the issue of illegal immigration, seeking to encourage non-Americans, especially from Mexico and Central America, to ignore American laws and then to serve as their ready enablers so as to lobby Federal, state, and local officials for various social services for these illegal immigrants. Some even have gone so far as to say that one cannot consider himself "pro-life" unless he believes in a national policy of "open borders" and then for a full panoply of social services to be extended to those who have entered our country without following a just and orderly process of immigration. Men such as Roger "Cardinal" Mahony, the disgraced former "archbishop" of Los Angeles, have been egregious in their open support of the flaunting of the just laws of the United States of America, daring to assert that the cause of defending those who have deliberately and willfully broken the just laws of this country are victims of "oppression" and that theirs is a "human rights" cause founded in the "dignity of man."

Other Catholics, especially those who are committed to one or another of the "rightist" bents of naturalism, engage in no small bit of demagoguery on their own parts, demonstrating in some instances a nativist mentality towards non-Americans that is eerily and most ironically similar to the nativist mentality exhibited by Freemasons and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against Catholics who were emigrating from Ireland and Italy and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, including what is again today the nation of Poland that what was then divided among the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries.

Various laws were passed to discriminate against Catholic immigrants.

The General Court state legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the behest of the Unitarian named Horace Mann, created the first state department of education in 1837 as a means of "standardizing" educational standards in public schools so that the children of Catholic immigrants would learn the ways of religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and democracy.

One author, evidently not a Catholic, put the matter this way:

There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.

Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme? One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world. What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.

Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state-sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient. He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them. At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution. (Steven Yates, A Book Review of Bruce Shortt's "The Harsh Truth About Government Schools," The Harsh Truth About Government Schools by Steven Yates.)

An entire political party, the Know Nothing Party (or American Party), was formed in 1845 to protest the influx of German and Irish immigrants to the United States of America. Part of the larger "Know Nothing" movement (named not for fictional Sergeant Hans Schultz of Hogan's Heroes, but for members of this movement saying that they "knew nothing" about its activities when questioned) that sponsored mob riots against Catholics in various areas, including the attacking and killing of individual Catholics and the burning of Catholic church buildings and schools. Know Nothings won control of the Massachusetts General Court in the elections of 1854, being successful as well in electing their candidates as mayors of the cities of Chicago, Illinois, and San Francisco, California. Ohio was a particular stronghold of the Know-Nothings, who nominated former President Millard Fillmore, who had succeeded to the presidency of the United States of America upon the death of President Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850, and served the remainder of Taylor's term (which ended on March 4, 1853), for president in 1856.

The Blaine amendments, named after the virulently anti-Catholic James G. Blaine (R-Maine), who, in additional to being the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States of America in 1884, served in the United States House of Representatives (where he was the Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875) and the United States Senate and served two different terms in two different presidencies as the United States Secretary of State, prohibited the use of public funding of any kind to subsidize schools operated by religious organizations.

Members of the Grand Orient Masonic lodge of Oregon, using all of their considerable clout, joined forces with their great ally, the Ku Klux Klan, and others to sponsor an initiative (a referendum that, if approved by voters, becomes law as though it had been passed by a state legislature) to amend the Compulsory Education Act to, in effect, outlaw Catholic schools in the State of Oregon by mandating that all children be "educated" in public schools. This effort was rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925.

The State of North Dakota, long a den of Masonic activity (Freemasons in the newly formed state legislature in 1889 sought to "liberalize" existing divorce laws as a means of destabilizing the family, something that was fought by the founding bishop of the Diocese of Jamestown (later Fargo), North Dakota, John Shanley), passed an anti-garb law in 1947 to require priests and consecrated religious to wear lay clothing when teaching in public schools. The Freemasons of North Dakota hoped to force a crisis of conscience for priests and religious that would prompt the two bishops of North Dakota from prohibiting their clergy and religious to teach in public schools. Bishops Leo Dworschak of Fargo and Vincent Ryan of Bismarck got permission from the Holy See for the clergy and the religious to wear lay clothing, thereby avoiding that crisis of conscience:

When the "anti-garb" campaign was waged in North Dakota in 1948, Bishop Ryan led in the defense of the rights of those wearing religious garb to teach in the public schools of the state. The opposition was well organized and had carried on vigorous campaign before the Catholics of the state were aware of their activities. Bishop Ryan rose to the challenge, and his efforts to defeat this measure were very nearly successful. In conjunction with Bishop Leo Dworschak of the Fargo Diocese, he appealed to the Holy See for permission for the sisters to teach in lay clothing. The victory for the anti-Catholics and the bigots was rendered empty when the Holy See granted their request. Friends and enemies alike had a new admiration for Bishop Ryan following this campaign. (History of Bishop Vincent J. Ryan.)

Did I hear anyone out there chant the slogan of "states' rights"?

Catholics, therefore, should be the last ones on the face of the earth to resort to any kind of nativism whatsoever as it is wrong for those of us who are disciples of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church that He founded on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and was brought to her birthday on Pentecost Sunday to lose sight of the fact that Our Lord died to redeem the soul of each and every human being on the face of this earth, and that we are treat every human being as we would treat Him in the very Flesh. What would we say to Our Lord, "Get out of America, you Nazarene, you. America is for Americans, not Nazarenes"?

Yet it is that, fallen human nature being what it is, Catholics have practiced bigotry, sometimes upon their very arrival to these shores. A former graduate student of mine from Saint John's University in Jamaica, Queens, back in the 1985-1986 academic year told me the story of what his maternal grandmother said upon her arrival fresh off the boat from Ireland when she realized that her neighbors in Floral Park, Queens, were Italian-Americans: "Look, there's foreigners living next to us!" Bigotry has no place in the heart of a believing Catholic as the only "foreigners" to Our Lord at the General Judgment of the living and the dead on the Last Day will be those who had persisted until the end outside of the Catholic Church and/or who died in a state of final impenitence.

Discrimination in the Making and Enforcement of Just Immigration Laws

All of this having been noted, it is important to point out that nations do have the right and the duty to make and enforce immigration laws on the basis of a just discrimination, which is different than "bigotry," which is an irrational hatred of a group of people. Permit me a word a thousand to explain.

Discrimination is part of daily life. That is, those reviewing a student's application for admission to a particular school or college, or university or graduate program are required by the dictates of the Natural Law to assess his qualifications. This is a process of discrimination, a just discrimination, you see, as those who are less qualified are excluded from qualifying for admission or placed on a waiting list or told to undertake some program of remedial studies before reapplying if they desire to do so. Mind you, there is no place for invidious racial bigotry in this process nor is there any place for the reverse bigotry known as "affirmative action." There is neither racial segregation or "affirmative action" in Heaven.

As one who taught in college classrooms for over thirty years (and yes, I miss it very much; I must accept the will of God for me that those days are probably over forever), I had to discriminate when assigning a grade to a particular essay written by a particular student.

Did the student express himself intelligibly in the mother tongue? Did the student present factual points accurately?

Did the student understand the philosophical or even theological points at work in a particular issue?

As I told my students at the start of every semester and frequently thereafter until the conclusion of a course, they must write their essays as though I, the reader of the essay, know nothing about the subject matter. They must "teach" me about the subject, being careful to be explicit and thorough in their presentation. I told them that I would not "read into" their essays what they wanted to write but not do so explicitly. They had to be explicit. (Most people, especially in these days of instant communications, write or speak to others as though the people to whom they are addressing do indeed know the contexts of their various references without even bothering to give a brief description. Some people will write, "Joe said this and that the other day. This troubles me." That's nice. Who is Joe? That might be a helpful bit of information to pass along.) I had to use my own imperfect abilities to assess the competency of these essays. This is a process of just discrimination.

Similarly, discrimination must be used by employers when seeking to fill a particular job vacancy. Applicants with better qualifications are identified and then invited for interviews. Those who are considered to be less qualified get form letters of rejection wishing them well on their careers. (I am just a bit familiar with that kind of letter. Humiliation is good for the soul. I get a lot of it as my sins deserve so richly.)

Managers and coaches of professional, collegiate, scholastic or amateur sports teams must discriminate on the basis of judgments concerning the ability of various individuals to discharge the skills required of them to succeed in competitive sports.

Judges of, say, a contest of piano performances or at a dog show must use a process of discrimination to choose a winner.

Just discrimination is simply part of ordinary daily living. We even discriminate on the basis of our food tastes and/or dietary needs, do we not? Those who equate the word "discrimination" with "bigotry" are entirely misinformed.

Thus it is that just discrimination plays a very important role in the process of devising and enforcing immigration laws that are meant to secure a nation's borders and to provide for skilled workers at a time of need for them and to provide a legitimate refuge for those suffering from proven political oppression or severe economic distress, perhaps caused by a natural disaster (a tornado, earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane). No one has a right founded in the Natural Law to enter a particular country and to stay there as long as he wants. Those desiring to reside permanently in a country must submit themselves to a process of just discrimination to determine their eligibility for admission.

Contemporary Immigration Problems as the Result of the Protestant Revolution and the Social Revolutions of Modernity

Alas, this whole process of devising and enforce just immigration laws has been rendered exceedingly complex, if not almost entirely perverted and distorted, by the rise of the contemporary pluralist state that is not composed of a very heterogeneous population. Again, permit me a chance to explain.

Although even European countries whose people have a strong sense of national identity and culture cannot claim a "pure" race of people as invasions of barbaric tribes in Europe over the centuries resulted in all types of ethnic and even racial mixtures over time, it is certainly true that there was a sense of national personality, as termed by the late Father Denis Fahey in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, that developed in the Catholic Middle Ages. Ireland, England, Scotland, France, the various regions within what are known today as Germany and Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Portugal, to name just a few countries, developed, despite the faults of their citizens and the bad example given on many occasions by those in civil and ecclesiastical positions, a strong national personality during their long years of their allegiance to the banner of Christ the King. Other than missionaries, such as Saint Boniface (Winifred) or even Saint Patrick himself, who were sent from their native places to convert pagans and barbarians elsewhere, there was no need for large numbers of people to migrate during the Catholic Middle Ages. They were proud of their national identities and how they were able to express the Catholic Faith within the context of those identities.

Father Fahey explained this in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

In proportion as the Mystical Body of Christ was accepted by mankind, political and economic thought and action began to respect the jurisdiction and guidance of the Catholic Church, endowed, as she is, with the right of intervention in temporal affairs whenever necessary, because of her participation in the spiritual Kingship of Christ. Thus the natural or temporal common good of States came to be sought in a manner calculated to favour the development of true personality, in and through the Mystical Body of Christ, and social life came more and more fully under the influence of the supreme end of man, the vision of God in Three Divine Persons.

Accordingly, Catholic Social Order, viewed as a whole, is not primarily the political and social organization of society. It is primarily the supernatural social organism of the Church, and then, secondarily, the temporal or natural social order resulting from the influence of Catholic doctrine on politics and economics and from the embodiment of that influence in social institutions. If instead of Catholic Social Order we use the wider but more convenient expression of Kingdom of God, we may say that the Kingdom of God on earth is in its essence the Church, but, in its integrity, comprises the Church and the temporal social order which the influence of the Church upon the world is every striving to bring into existence. Needless to say, while the general principles of social order remain always the same, social structures will present great differences at different epochs. No particular temporal social order will ever realize all that the Church is capable of giving to the world. The theology of history must include, then, primarily, the study of the foundation and development of the Church, and secondarily, the examination of the ebb and flow of the world’s acceptance of the Church’s supernatural mission. . . .

The organization of the Europe of the thirteenth century furnishes us with one concrete realization of the Divine Plan. It is hardly necessary to add that there were then to be seen defects in the working of the Divine Plan, due to the character of fallen man, as well as an imperfect mastery of physical nature. Yet, withal, the formal principle of ordered social organisation in the world, the supremacy of the Mystical Body, was grasped and, in the main, accepted. The Lutheran revolt, prepared by the cult of pagan antiquity at the Renaissance, and by the favour enjoyed by the Nominalist philosophical theories, led to the rupture of that order." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 10.)

The unity and cohesion of Europe was, of course, rent asunder by the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century. Peoples who shared a common national identity become enemies one to another. Half of the German states were lost to the Holy Faith. The countries of Scandinavia were lost to the Holy Faith. Irishmen were now divided against their fellow Irishmen. Catholics were hunted down and killed in England by their former friends, sometimes even by their own relatives, eager to prove their "loyalty" to the crown.

Catholics in England and Ireland were particularly hard hit in economic terms by the Protestant Revolt. Catholics in England who had been living as hereditary tenant farmers on the lands of monastery and convents were expelled, forcing them off the land into unfamiliar lives in urban centers, where they lived in poverty and hunger. Catholics in Ireland were oppressed severely. The nearly three centuries of persecution and temporal misery that followed made some more than willing to seek refuge in the new world of pluralism that was the United States of America, a country that had been formed by the union of thirteen British colonies, most of which under colonial rule had their own laws to persecute Catholics.

The social revolutions that began with the French Revolution on July 14, 1789, and thereafter, revolutions that were but the result of the aftermath of the Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church, introduced more upheaval and enmity in the formerly Catholic countries of once proudly Catholic Europe. Class warfare replaced the religious differences engendered by the Protestant Revolt as a new fault-line to divide families and friends, to drive wedges of hatred against Holy Mother Church and to lead people into lives of agnosticism, if not complete atheism. People became refugees in their own countries, fleeing sometimes from one country to another in Europe to avoid the chaos.

The social revolutions in Central Europe in 1848 produced a great wave of immigration specifically to the United States of America from the then still divided German states and parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another wave of immigration followed after the Franco-Prussian War on May 10, 1871, as Catholics suffering from the Freemasonic anticlerical Risorgimento in Italy and the Freemason Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf in the now united Germany fled to the shores of the United States of America. Modern immigration was in full swing in the era between 1871 and the beginning of World War I in Europe on August 3, 1914, when the United Kingdom declared war on the German Empire.

Although anti-Catholic nativism was far from dead in the United States of America after the War Between the States, there was a need for both skilled and unskilled laborers to do the work required of the industries that were coming to full bloom during the American version of the Industrial Revolution. These new Catholic immigrants, although they faced the overt hostility and persecution described earlier in this commentary, were seen as a valuable source of labor to increase American wealth and power, and it is for this reason that they were welcomed into this country.

Many of the industrialists, inheritors of the ethos of Calvinist materialism, viewed the presence of these new immigrants as a "necessary evil" to help them make money. They could be tolerated if they were kept in their places. Professional politicians, especially those in the Democratic Party in the Northeast and industrial Midwest saw these new immigrants in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century in exactly the same terms that many of their predecessors had viewed the Irish and German immigrants to these shores in the 1820s and 1830s: an invaluable resource of voters who could be, in effect, bribed with jobs and favors--and even an easy path to citizenship--in exchange for becoming loyal members of the Democratic Party who would vote (sometimes in multiple voting precincts on the same day) and organize in behalf of their candidates, which might involve intimidating opposition candidates and spreading disinformation about them (sound familiar?).

Large numbers of Jewish refugees came to the United States of America in the latter part of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, emigrating from the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. Lutherans from Nordic lands such as Norway and Sweden came here in large numbers at around the same time. More came from parts of the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon and Syria and Palestine. The American pluralist state was expanding greatly with no true principle of national unity, that is, without the principle of national unity desired by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: Catholicism.

The world created by the Protestant Revolution and the social revolutions that followed a few centuries later disrupted such basic elements of social order as national identity and character, making it more possible for the devil to use his various minions to promote the concept of a "global new word order" as a means of dealing with the "global interdependence" caused by massive shifts of peoples from one place to another and by the economy of the post-industrial revolution that relies upon the dictatorship of the corporate elite in multinational corporations and the outsourcing of most manufacturing jobs from "first world" countries such as the United States of America and those in the socialist enclave that is the European Union to countries such as Red China, where workers are paid very substandard wages to manufacture most of the world's consumer goods in largely unsafe working conditions. This is a world of chaos and dislocation, not the world of order and national cohesion of the Catholic Middle Ages.

Social Engineering and American Immigration Law

American immigration law has varied from time to time. There have been efforts to preserve a "white European heritage" by seeking to establish quotas from non-European countries. And there has been an effort in the past forty-five years to encourage immigration from non-European nations so as to change the social, political and economic composition of the United States of America.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese immigration to the United States until its repeal in 1948. This more or less continued United States immigration policies first established in 1790 to bar all but those who were deemed to be "white" from being naturalized as citizens, although non-whites could live as permanent residents without the privileges of citizens.

The Immigration Act of 1924 limited immigration from European to countries to two percent of number of people from a particular country that had already emigrated to the United States and barred the immigration of Asians almost entirely. The two percent quota was an effort to reduce the numbers of people coming from eastern and southern Europe. Those from Latin American countries were permitted to emigrate to this country without any limitations or quotas whatsoever. Although there were changes made to the quota system and racial restrictions were removed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the first sweeping measure of true modern social engineering by means of American immigration law occurred with the now infamous Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was signed into law by then President Lyndon Baines Johnson on October 3, 1965.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was a sweeping measure of social engineering designed by the socialists of the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey to alter the demographics of the United States of America so that those of a white and "Christian" background would be in the minority of the population--and hence of the electorate--within a hundred years or so. These social engineers could be confident in their success as the Johnson administration oversaw passage of legislation in 1967 that mandate the states and localities to implement "family planning" programs, knowing that the more affluent white population would be inclined to accept contraception in order to "enjoy" their material success while those in the non-white population could be told that the use of "family planning" would be helpful to their own economic stability. Despite all of the loud protestations at the time, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was an effort to reshape the American electorate so as to institutionalize the sort of social engineering being implement by means of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and "Great Society," both of which were responsible for the large increase in the size and scope and power of the Federal government of the United States of America since the "New Deal" of the thirty-third degree Freemason Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Oh, yes, the protestations were loud. They were also entirely disingenuous.

Consider these comments made by the late United States Senator from Massachusetts, Edward Moore Kennedy:

"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.... The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.)

Quite the anti-prophet, wouldn't you say?

Lyndon Johnson himself, ever the liar, cheat, scoundrel and all around fake, phony and fraud, was equally disingenuous in the comments he made at the signing ceremony of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965:

This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. (President Lyndon Baines Johnson, October 3, 1965.)

Indeed, the election of someone along the lines of Barack Hussein Obama is exactly what the social engineers who gave us the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (named after the late United States Senator Philip Hart, a Democrat from Michigan, and the late United States Representative Emmanuel "Manny" Celler, a Democrat from Brooklyn, New York, who was the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 1949 to 1953 and again from 1955 to 1973) had in mind when this law passed in 1965. (See an article in the Boston Globe from 2008 that discussed the effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on the election of 2008: Obama victory took root in Kennedy-inspired Immigration Act of 1965.) There is no turning back the effects of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Our situation is what it is, and it has certainly helped produce a political climate favorable to the election of statists such as Barack Hussein Obama and thence to Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., twelve years later.

Our lives have been revolutionized by the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and as the counterfeit church of conciliarism in the United States of America made its own "reconciliation" with the goals in this act as it celebrated "diversity" and "pluralism" in the "free" United States of America, the land of "religious liberty."

This "reconciliation" involved sometimes very subtle efforts to de-emphasize Catholicism on the campuses of traditionally Catholic colleges in order not to "offend" non-Catholic students from Asia and Africa. I was told by a colleague of mine at Saint John's University in Jamaica, Queens, upon returning to adjunct teaching there in January of 1991 after an absence of about two and one-half years from the campus, "Be careful, Tom. Things have changed. You can't be as Catholic now as you were before. The study body is different. No more prayers at the beginning of class." This was advice, not "official" policy. I ignored the advice (and I haven't taught there since the Spring of 1992). Conciliarists used "sensitivity" for the "diverse" nature of the once Catholic colleges in their control to prevent Catholicism from being taught by the few professors interested in teaching their subject matters in light of the Holy Faith and interested in helping their students to get home to Heaven as members of the Catholic Church, no less to exhort non-Catholic students to convert.

American immigration law has been used in the past fifty-nine years to make it difficult for Europeans (what few of them are left, that is) to emigrate to this country as those from traditionally non-Christian nations have permitted to come here in droves and thus take their place in American society. This has indeed changed the social, political, and economic landscape of the United States of America quite a lot.

Contraception and Abortion as the Driving Force to Spur Illegal Immigration from Mexico and Other Parts of Latin America

Prompted by the endemic corruption of Mexican government, especially those at the state and local levels who are bought and paid-for by the drug cartels, and industry, millions of people from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America have entered the United States of America illegally since the 1970s. Nearly twenty million illegal immigrants have come to the United States of América in the first twenty-three years of this century, and over six million have entered the country just since January 20, 2021!

The problem was so bad in the 1980s, however, that even the administration of then President Ronald Wilson Reagan surrendered to the realities of the situation at hand and agreed to grant amnesty to a large number of illegal immigrants who had been in this country continuously since before January 1, 1982, and created a means by which some illegal immigrants who worked on farms or other agriculture-related fields could be legalized.

What were the realities at hand that prompted the "conservative" Reagan administration to agree to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?

Simply this: contraception and abortion had taken their toll on the supply of available workers for jobs, especially those menial, backbreaking jobs that so few Americans want to take. Many of our restaurants and hotels and other service industries would have to shutter their doors were it not for the fact that so many illegal immigrants are now in this country to take the jobs that do not appeal to most Americans. Other industries relied on this supply of labor as well. Employers needed these workers. Many of these employers made hefty campaign contributions to members of the two organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party, and one of the many things that unite the naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and the "right" is their deep and profoundly held personal desire for ready campaign cash.

The current Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security, Alex Mayorkas, has justified his push for “asylum seekers,” as he puts it, by claiming that the United States has a dearth of native-born workers for the jobs that are available:

President Joe Biden’s border chief says Americans need more migrants to fill jobs — even as House legislators debate his possible impeachment and the Senate considers a legislative deal he helped broker.

Mayorkas made his demand for a high-migration, low-productivity economy during a softball interview with the New York Times:

Wouldn’t it be more orderly, and wouldn’t it be responsible governance to be able to deliver a lawful pathway to fill what we have, which is a labor need, and cut the exploitative smugglers out and give individuals a path to arrive lawfully, safely, in an orderly way, to perform labor that we need? They can send remittances home. They can return home when their work is done. Isn’t that an element of a workable immigration system?

Interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro passively accepted his family-separating, George W. Bush-like “Any Willing Worker” pitch as she suggested the nation’s migration debate is really about how to ensure more orderly migration:

Q. So what I’m hearing you say is that you’d like to expand legal pathways in order to relieve some of the pressure on the Southern border where people come in illegally?

A. Yes, and to fulfill one of the goals of our immigration system.

Mayorkas did not mention that a primary legislated goal of the immigration system is ensuring that American families are not discarded by employers’ use of cheap and compliant foreign labor.

Since 2021, Mayorkas has allowed more than 6.2 million migrants into Americans’ housing, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. His policy has pressured down Americans’ wages. It also boosted rents and housing prices and inflicted more divisive diversity on Americans’ society. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of fields and spiked the number of “Deaths of Despair.”

Mayorkas heads the Department of Homeland Security that guards the nation’s borders. But he has repeatedly called for a Canadian-style migration system in the United States that would supply companies with all the labor they prefer. Yet Canadians increasingly recognize that their migration strategy has caused great damage to their people and economy.

However, Mayorkas’ pro-Wall Street economic agenda is downplayed by GOP legislators and by most reporters. The establishment’s silence is a tacit admission that the dispute is powering the nationwide populist upsurge that sidelined Jeb Bush and elected President Donald Trump in 2016.

Mayorkas played a central role in drafting the planned legislation with Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

The interviewer also ignored many dramas in Mayorkas’ tenure — including his 2021 decision to stop deporting illegal migrants once they cleared the border, and the overall impact of his favoritism towards migrants — including more anti-Semitic attitudes and racial appeals — and his moral and legal duty to Americans, including roughly 5 million men who have fallen out of the workforce.

Similarly, the New York Times article sidelined the huge death toll among migrants trying to reach Mayorkas’ welcome, and his failure to curb the cross-border flow of drugs that kills roughly 70,000 Americans each year from drugs. It was also silent about Mayorkas’ recent deals with Mexico to steady the inflow of economic migrants.

Instead, the interviewer mischaracterized Americans’ rational and legitimate concerns about Mayorkas’ nation-changing immigration policies, and allowed Mayorkas to smear those concerns as unreasoning “hate”:

Q. Some people argue that the Biden administration’s mishandling of the border has given those who are anti-immigrant [some] ammunition to advocate for draconian cuts to immigration, like mass roundups of undocumented people and shutting the border down.

A. I’ve never understood individuals with anti-immigrant sentiments to need ammunition. Hate is its own ammunition. And regrettably, we have seen that [hate] materialize in many different ways … in this country.

The interviewer did not ask, and Mayorkas did not explain, why he dismissed the public’s majority criticism of his migration policies as mere “hate.”

In general, Mayorkas gets kid glove treatment when he speaks to the national press.

For example, the Associated Press also interviewed Mayorkas and let him dodge the awkward issues of his pro-migration skew, record on drugs and migrant deaths, wages and housing, law, and polls. But the Associated Press article did include this bouquet:

Supporters say he is driven by commitment to public service and that impeachment is completely at odds with what they know of the law-and-order-minded former prosecutor.

Cecilia Munoz, who worked closely with Mayorkas during the Obama administration, praised his tenure as head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, where she says he put in place a program giving protection from deportation to migrants brought to the border as children in “light speed.” She also noted his efforts to get Haitian children, orphaned by the 2010 earthquake, into the U.S. to people who wanted to adopt them.

The New York Times‘ softball interviewer, Garcia-Navarro, is on safe ground with her pro-migration editors.

For example, a February 2 article by the newspaper’s Editorial Board complained that the border deal is threatened because “Republican leaders … are engaged in other forms of sabotage.” The deal should go through, said the board, because it will legalize more immigration:

The deal under construction in the Senate reportedly would raise the bar for asylum claims and provide funding to expedite decisions. It would expand other forms of legal immigration [emphasis added], which could help to take some pressure off the asylum process.…

[Congress] needs to act so that people without legitimate claims cannot walk into the United States — not least so that others are able to do so [emphasis added].

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the economy after it allowed investors to move much of the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.

The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced native-born Americans’ productivity and political clout, reduced high-tech innovation, crippled civic solidarity, and allowed government officials to ignore the rising death rate of discarded Americans.

The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The colonialism-like policy has also killed many thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama. (Mayorkas Doubles Down, Says 'We Need' More Migrants Amid Border Debate, Impeachment Fight.)

The pro-abortion Mayorkas would never admit that contraception and abortion have fueled corporate America’s push for illegal immigration. He is far too much of a myopic, bull-headed ideologue to admit any such thing.

Additionally, of course, the Democratic Party and their enablers in the network of Alinsky "community organizations" from whose ranks sprang Caesar Barackus Ignoramus and in the ranks of the "leftists" elements in the counterfeit church of conciliarism (Catholic Charities, Catholic Campaign for Human Development) wanted a new supply of eager voters who would express their "gratitude" for easy access to permanent residency as a means to become naturalized citizens at the ballot box, thus replicating the exploitation of Catholic immigrants to these shores in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century.

As mentioned earlier in this commentary, many conciliar "bishops" and their chancery factotums and other all-around nogoodniks have made the cause of illegal immigrants one of the pillars of the "consistent ethic of life," bestowing near martyrdom status upon those who knowing broke the just laws of the United States of America and entered this country illegally without bothering to get their immigration status legalized. Do not underestimate the role that Democratic Party operatives, Alinsky "community organizers" and conciliarist revolutionaries have played in reaffirming illegal immigrants in their "right" to be here and in their demands for special "rights" and privileges from the Federal, state, and local governments. This witches' brew of people who have no true regard for the legitimate sovereignty of the United States of America or of the Natural Law right of nations to secure their borders and to make and enforce just laws providing for the orderly immigration of people have succeeded in convincing many cities (among them being the City of New York, New York, the City of Washington, District of Columbia, the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, Dallas Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, et al.) to name themselves as "sanctuary cities," which means that law enforcement officials in these cities cannot ask anyone about their residency or citizenship status or report anyone to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States Department of Justice).

The American border with Mexico is porous. It is badly protected. The economic and political factors cited above have prevented policymakers at the national level from dealing with a serious problem that has threatened quite literally the physical safety of many Americans as some of those who have entered illegally have gone on wanton crime sprees and/or joined gangs or drug cartels to wreak violence with almost utter impunity.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that the lion's share of those who enter the United States of America are, apart from having broken the just immigration laws of this nation, very hard working people who even, at least for the most part, pay their taxes. The issue is fraught with the kind of political dynamite that the naturalists of both major organized crime families of naturalism hate to have to face as the Democrats do not want to lose the votes of those who are concerned about the issue of illegal immigration and the Republicans do not want to alienate the growing bloc of voters who are of Latin American or Hispanic origins.

The Texas Border and the Biden Administration’s Cynical Reaction to It

While Texas Governor Gregory Wayne Abbott has responded with courage to the invasion of his state along its southern border with Mexico by acting in defiance of an order by the Supreme Court of the United States of America to stay the placement of razor fencing along the Texas border with the United Mexican States, the arrival of various volunteers from around the nation to help the Texas National Guard (as well as the national guard from several other states, including South Dakota and Alaska) is fraught with difficulties as all it would take for the Federal government to accuse Abbott of being an “insurrectionist” is for one of those volunteers to use armed force against an illegal immigrant. We must pray that such volunteers operate under the command of the National Guard officers in charge of assuring that the razor fencing stays up and is not taken down by the Federales.

This having been noted, immigration policy is a field that is preempted by the Federal government, and it is not an encouraging sign that Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America Amy Coney Barrett allowed herself to be coopted by the institutionalist self-protection that is the raison d’etre of Chief Justice John Glover Roberts to provide the majority that issued the stay in the construction of the Texas border fencing. While immigration enforcement is controlled by the Federal government, border states do possess the Natural Law right of self-defense when an invasion of their states is well underway, an invasion that has been made possible by the Federal government’s complete refusal to enforce existing laws.

A secular author noted the following about the Federal government’s refusal to enforce existing immigration laws:

The adjective “Orwellian” can be overused in our political discourse. But how else to describe a situation in which the federal government abdicates its responsibility to secure the nation’s wide-open border and then, when a state steps up to help stanch the bleeding, is told by that same federal government to stop — and, for good measure, that its efforts to help secure the border via a new razor wire barrier will be undone?

There really is only one apt word: “Orwellian.”

Last Monday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 — with moderate Chief Justice John Roberts and center-right Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining their liberal colleagues — in favor of the Biden administration, which had requested that the court permit its Border Patrol agents to cut or remove protective razor wire fencing installed by Texas officials along the besieged Rio Grande. The court’s ruling is simply astonishing.

In America’s federalist constitutional order, both the federal government and the states act as fully sovereign actors operating within their delineated spheres of legitimate governing authority. The federal government — which was itself initially created in the late 1780s by the then-preexisting states — is in no position whatsoever to demand that states deliberately undermine their own sovereignty. That is especially true when the federal government itself obstinately refuses to secure the nation’s territorial integrity, as has been the case throughout Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency.

That both the federal government and the states may wield power as fully sovereign entities within our constitutional order is constitutional law 101.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 2012 Supreme Court case Arizona v. United States, “As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory, subject only to those limitations expressed in the Constitution or constitutionally imposed by Congress.” (In Texas’ current case, there is no relevant constitutional limitation or congressional imposition.) Later in his separate Arizona writing, Scalia continued: “(A)fter the adoption of the Constitution there was some doubt about the power of the federal government to control immigration, but “no doubt about the power of the states to do so.”

Toward the end, Scalia approached his denouement: “But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the states that support it predicted: A federal government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the states’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude. So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign states at the mercy of the federal executive’s refusal to enforce the nation’s immigration laws?” (Texas is correct to defend its sovereignty from border invasion.)

The late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was entirely correct twelve years ago in his dissenting opinion in the case of Arizona v. United States, June 25, 2012. Governor Gregory Wayne Abbott is correct today, but that may not matter if John Glover Roberts has convinced Amy Coney Barrett that the protection of the Supreme Court of the United States of America from criticism by the Washington establishment (Washington Post, the major television networks, leftist legal commentators and “scholars,” Congressional Democrats, et al.) is more important than the Constitution or the national security of both the United States of America and of its border states.

More to the point, though, is the fact that the bill that Alex Mayorkas has helped to shape that is being proposed by a “bipartisan” group of United States Senators will not secure the border. Indeed, the bill’s provisions permit up to 5,000 illegal immigrants to enter the country every day for a week until border enforcement is tightened. This is a case of an administration that created a problem before its nominal president stated that he needed “Congressional authority” to secure the border even though it was his decision to open the border in the first placed, thereby creating a crisis that he has used to convince weak-kneed establishment Republicans in an election year to “fix” a problem he created by normalizing his open border policies in the name of “reforming the asylum system.”

In essence, of course, the “fix” is simply a way for the decrepit, pro-abortion, pro-sodomite, ice-cream eating dolt from Delaware who never misses a chance to demagogue his way through various issues to take a “hot button” issue off the table even though the proposed 340-page bill, which is filled with loopholes that ideologues can use for their own nefarious purposes, does nothing to address the indemnification of the illegal immigrants who commit crimes repeatedly in this country because thy recognize that nothing will happen to them in sanctuary cities or sanctuary states. Pluralism has resulted in the destruction of the modern nation-state’s borders, and that is what the globalists and other assorted social engineers want. Nations that ignore the authority of Christ the King and His true Church become defenseless against their own false premises and thus must founder on the barbarism let loose by those premises as a creeping totalitarianism becomes acceptable to in order to keep “peace” by rewarding the lawbreakers and restricting the liberty of law-abiding citizens.

What I want to stress at this juncture, however, is that none of this would be necessary if we lived in a Catholic world, a world where men would be united primarily by the bonds of the Holy Faith. They have been torn asunder by the revolutions of Modernity, something that Pope Pius XI stressed in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

Peace indeed was signed in solemn conclave between the belligerents of the late War. This peace, however, was only written into treaties. It was not received into the hearts of men, who still cherish the desire to fight one another and to continue to menace in a most serious manner the quiet and stability of civil society. Unfortunately the law of violence held sway so long that it has weakened and almost obliterated all traces of those natural feelings of love and mercy which the law of Christian charity has done so much to encourage. Nor has this illusory peace, written only on paper, served as yet to reawaken similar noble sentiments in the souls of men. On the contrary, there has been born a spirit of violence and of hatred which, because it has been indulged in for so long, has become almost second nature in many men. There has followed the blind rule of the inferior parts of the soul over the superior, that rule of the lower elements "fighting against the law of the mind," which St. Paul grieved over. (Rom. vii, 23)

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.

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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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.)

Although it might be too late for the United States of America, the ultimate solution has always rested in in the conversion of men and their nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. Catholicism is indeed the one and only foundation of personal and social order. If you never remember anything else that I write, I ask you to remember that as it is nothing other than simple Catholic truth.

The conversion of our own beloved nation depends in no small measure on our own daily conversion away sin as we seek to grow in holiness with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Every Rosary we pray helps to plant the seeds for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and thus the restoration of Christendom in the world and of the Church Militant on the face of this earth. Never underestimate the power of our simple prayers and the simple performance of our daily duties as members of the Mystical Body of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to plant seeds whose flowering may not occur until many years after we have died and have faced our Particular Judgment.

Let us turn to Our Lady of Guadalupe to ask her intercession for justice to prevail for the sake of those caught up in the vortex of illegal immigration and for security and order to be restored to the borders of the United States of America and within our cities, which have been cesspools of illegality precisely because her Divine Son’s Social Reign has been rejected in favor a lawlessness that comes only from hell and leads there for all eternity.

On the Feast of Saint Agatha

Saint Agatha, whose feast we celebrate today, refused to compromise on any point of the Faith. Unlike the conciliarists, many of whom have bowed down before the images of false gods and/or have permitted their "ministers" to conduct services in once Catholic churches, including the Chapel of the Apparitions at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, Saint Agatha condemned the false gods when praising them could have saved her very life:

S. Agatha the virgin was right fair, noble body and of heart, and was rich of goods. This glorious virgin served God in the city of Catania, leading a pure and holy life. Quintianus the provost of Sicily, being of a low lineage, was lecherous, avaricious, and a miscreant and paynim, and for to accomplish his evil desires fleshly, and to have riches, did do take S. Agatha to be presented and brought tofore him, and began to behold her with a lecherous sight; and for to have her himself, he would have induced her to make sacrifice unto the idols. And when he saw her firm in her purpose, he put her in the keeping of a woman named Aphrodisia, which had nine daughters, over foul, like unto the mother. This did he for to induce S. Agatha to do his will within thirty days. Aphrodisia and her daughters entreated the holy virgin to consent to the will of the provost, and sometime they made to her great promises of temporal goods and of great eases, and sometimes they made to her menaces of grievous torments for to suffer, and great pains, to which S. Agatha answered freely: My courage and my thought be so firmly founded upon the firm stone of Jesu Christ, that for no pain it may not be changed; your words be but wind, your promises be but rain, and your menaces be as rivers that pass, and how well that all these things hurtle at the foundement of my courage, yet for that it shall not move. In this manner answered she, and alway wept in making her prayers, and much great desire had she to come to Jesu Christ by martyrdom and by torments. When Aphrodisia saw well that in no wise she would be moved, she went to the provost Quintianus, and said to him: Sooner should the stones wax soft, and iron turn to soft lead, than turn the courage of this maid, or to take from her the christian faith. I and my daughters have done none other thing night ne day, one after another, but to labour how we might turn her heart to your consenting. I have promised her in your name your precious adornments, clothes of gold, houses, lands, towns, servants, and great meinys, and all this she despiseth and reputeth them at no value. When Quintianus heard this, anon he made her to come tofore him in judgment, and demanded her of her lineage, and at the last he would constrain her to make sacrifice unto the idols. And S. Agatha answered that they were no gods, but were devils that were in the idols made of marble and of wood, and overgilt. Quintianus said: Choose one of two; or do sacrifice to our gods, or thou shalt suffer pain and torments. S. Agatha said: Thou sayst that they be gods because thy wife was such an one as was Venus, thy goddess, and thou thyself as Jupiter, which was an homicide and evil. Quintianus said: It appeareth well that thou wilt suffer torments, in that thou sayst to me villainy. S. Agatha said: I marvel much that so wise a man is become such a fool, that thou sayest of them to be thy gods, whose life thou ne thy wife will follow. If they be good I would that thy life were like unto theirs; and if thou refusest their life, then art thou of one accord with me. Say then that they be evil and so foul, and forsake their living, and be not of such life as thy gods were. Quintianus said: What goest thou thus vainly speaking? make sacrifice unto the gods, or if thou do not I shall make thee to die by divers torments. S. Agatha abode firm and stable in the faith. Then Quintianus did do put her in a dark prison, and she went also gladly, and with as good will as she had been prayed to go to a wedding. (The Life of S. Agatha.)

Unlike, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Saint Agatha refused any kind of fellowship with false gods. The conciliar “popes,” including Comrade Bergoglio, are downright chummy with them.

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., wrote the following panegyric to Saint Agatha:

How lovely are thy Palms, Agatha! But how long and cruel was thy combat for them! The day was thine; thy faith and thy virginity triumphed but the battle-field was streamed with thy blood, and thy glorious wounds bear testimony to the Angels how stern was the courage of thy fidelity to Jesus, thy Spouse. When thine enemies left thee, it was to Him thou didst look up; and then thy soul flew to its rest, in the Bosom of thy King and God. The whole Church keeps feast to-day, praising her Lord in thee, great Martyr and Virgin! She knows the love thou bearest her, and how, amidst the joys of heaven, her interests and her wants are the object of thy prayers. Thou art our Sister; be, too, our Mother, by interceding for us. Centuries have passed away since that day, whereon thy soul quitted the body thou hadst sanctified by purity and suffering; but the great battle between the spirit and the flesh is still waging here on earth, and will so to the end of time. Assist us in the struggle; keep up within our hearts the holy fire, which the world and our passions are ever seeking to quench.

It is now the season, when every Christian should renew his whole being by repentance and compunction. We know the power of thy prayer; let it procure us these gifts: the fear of God, which keeps down the workings of corrupt nature; the spirit of penance, which repairs the injuries caused by our sins; and a solid love for our dear Lord, which sweetens the yoke, and ensures perseverance. More than once, a whole people has witnessed how a relic of thine, thy Veil, has checked the stream of lava which rolled down the sides of Etna; we are threatened with a torrent of vice, which will drive the world back to pagan corruption, unless Divine Mercy stay its wild fury; and prayers such as thine can obtain it for us. Delay not, O Agatha! – each day gives strength to the danger. Not a nation but what is now infected with the poison of a literature that is infidel and immoral; by thy prayers keep the poisonous cup from them that have not tasted, neutralise its power in them that have drunk its venom of death. Oh! spare us the shame of seeing our Europe the slave of sensuality, and the dupe of hell. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)

With confident assurance in the intercession of Our Lady, especially by means of our daily recitation of her Most Holy Rosary, as we seek to offer up the trials of the present time as the consecrated slaves of her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, without looking for results while tenderly clinging to her so that we can avoid the pitfalls of the present era and die in a state of Sanctifying Grace as members of Holy Mother Church, she who makes no room for idols or falsehoods and is alone in keeping the Holy Faith intact and inviolate.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of Guadalupe, 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.

Saint Agatha, pray for us.

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