Declaring Independence from the Declaration of Independence

Vice President of the United States of America Kamala Harris, who has been referred as “President Harris” by the octogenarian keeper of classified documents next in “secure” location next to his Corvette in his garage in Wilmington, Delaware, President in Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr, caused quite a stir on Sunday, January 22, 2023, the Third Sunday after the Epiphany and the Commemoration of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, when she made omitted the phrase “right to life” from her recitation of rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as she addressed pro-aborts on the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court of the United States of America’s decisions in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton:

So we are here together because we collectively believe and know America is a promise.  America is a promise.  It is a promise of freedom and liberty — not for some, but for all.  (Applause.)
 
A promise we made in the Declaration of Independence that we are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  (Applause.)
 
Be clear.  These rights were not bestowed upon us.  They belong to us as Americans.  (Applause.) (Remarks by Vice President Harris on the 50th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade.)

Although it is not the principal purpose of this commentary to discuss the pro-abortion Harris’s confounding of liberty with license, it is perhaps useful here to remind readers of this site that the Holy Mother Catholic Church teaches us that authentic liberty is that natural condition of human being wherein he is able to choose after what is good and true in accordance with the precepts of Divine Revelation and the dictates of right reason. Liberty is not "license," that is, unrestrained physical freedom. No one is morally "free" to do everything he desires to do. One is only morally "free" to do what is right. Error has no rights. God grants no civil "right," whether in the Divine Positive Law or the Natural Law, to the promotion of sin under the cover of the civil law as a
“right.”

Writing in his Apostolical Letter to the longtime (1877-1921) Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, Pope Leo XIII noted the American penchant for confounding liberty with license, which is what Kamala Harris, who had a long record of ruthlessly persecuting courageous pro-life advocate David Daleiden of the Centers for Medical Research when she was the Attorney General of the State of California, did in her address of six days ago:

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. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

Our nature is made to know, love, and to serve the true God of Divine Revelation, as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church. Sin is a rebellion against the very purpose for which we have been created, and those who persist in it unrepentantly will come to live in anger because they are in rebellion against God and the very purpose for which they have been create and thus must strike out with all manner of invectives at all who call sin by its proper name and oppose its promotion in public life and under cover of the civil law. Moreover, those who sin unrepentantly and persist in it wantonly invariably seek to demand unanimous approval of their wretchedness in order to assuage themselves and their misinformed consciences.

One of the many consequences of lack of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces flowing out into the world involves the false, infantile belief that to criticize someone for anything is to “hate” him.

Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and many of his supporters are quick to denounce any and all criticize of him and his lawless policies as racists who are filled with resentment against a black president (who happens to half Caucasian as well, of course).

To oppose the chemical and surgical slaughter of the innocent preborn is said to engage in a “war against women.”

Those who oppose the promotion of the sin of Sodom under the cover of civil law and all throughout what passes for popular culture are said to “hate” homosexuals, lesbians, mutants and other practitioners of perverse sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. “Homophobia” has even been denounced by officials of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

To support the legitimate enforcement of the immigration laws to secure the integrity of the borders and the public health and safety of the citizens of the United States of America is said to be
“anti-immigrant.”

To point out that Mohammedans who commit acts of terror around the world are being completely faithful to the blasphemous Koran is said to be “Islamophobia.”

Any number of like examples could be given.

Each example, however, is nothing other than infantilism, that is, the emotional reaction of a child steeped in disordered self-love who wants to use every manipulative emotional trick in the book to get his way.

As I used to explain to my students during the thirty some years of my college teaching career that had a brief reprise last year before ending suddenly (in part, although only in part, because I refused to be “neutral” on matters of moral right and wrong and was vocal about the demand that had been made for me to maintain such “neutrality”), the precepts of the Natural Law require those who serve in the civil government to exercise statesmanship, that is, to do what is correct, not what is expedient for their retention of popular support and thus of their hold on power. This requires a civil office-holder to go against the grain of “public opinion” even to the point of forfeiting popularity, human respect and career success.

We must please God, not men. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ really meant it when He said:

[26] For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul? (Matthew 16:27.)

Human nature being what it is, however, those amongst the citizenry who do not want to hear hard truths recoil into a form of infantile behavior as though to say to some civil potentate who, for example, might be opposed to the slaughter of the innocent preborn and to the perverse, indecent absurdity that is “gay marriage, “You’re mean! You’re nasty. You’re a hater. Well, I hate you, too!”

I would look around a classroom after explaining this, smiling as I did so before saying: “Now, I am sure that none of you ever said to your parents, ‘You’re mean! You’re nasty! You hate me. You just don’t want me to be happy, do you? Well, I hate you, too’ when you did not get your way.” Most students would laugh. Indeed, some of their eyes lit up as though to say, “I get it!”

Unfortunately, however, most people in the world today, including most Catholics, sad to say, don’t “get it,” believing that to criticize the Argentine Apostate is to “hate” him even though he is the one guilty of hating God as He has revealed Himself to us through His Sacred Deposit Faith. It is to hate no one to criticize him for doing or saying something that is wrong.

Does a physician “hate” a diabetic when he tells him to change his diet?

Does a physician “hate” a patient who is overweight when telling him to lose weight?

Does a teacher “hate” a student when telling him that his answer is wrong on an examination, that there are not, for example, fifty-nine states in the United States of America, or that two plus two does not equal seventeen?

We make mistakes. We must be corrected if we do not recognize our mistakes and correct them on our own in cooperation with the graces sent to us by Our Lady.

Although there are times that we will be criticized unjustly, each of which is an opportunity to reparation to Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for what our sins, having transcended time, accused Him during His Passion and Death of being “guilty,” there are others when criticism is perfectly valid. To reject justifiable criticism as a sign of “hatred” on the part of a critic is to emote in an infantile manner.

The Sophists of Modernity are every bit irrational and demagogic as were the Sophists of antiquity who put Socrates on trial for his life for “corrupting” the youth of Athens by claiming that truth exists in the objective order of things and does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity. Relativists believe that nothing is absolutely true, and they are absolute in their conviction that nothing is absolutely true. Relativists are thus absolutists who believe dogmatically in their promotion of relativism and positively evangelical in their effort to impose relativism upon everyone else, especially believing Catholics.

Kamala Harris is a crusader on behalf of a social dogmatism based upon neither Divine Revelation nor natural reason but upon the desire to tickle the itching ears of the multitude:

[1] I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming, and his kingdom: [2] Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. [3] For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: [4] And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables. [5] But be thou vigilant, labour in all things, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill thy ministry. Be sober. (2 Tim. 4: 1-15.)

There is no moral liberty to kill innocent human beings at any stage of life.

There is no moral liberty to commit sins, whether natural or unnatural against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

There is no moral liberty to speak indecently, to dress immodestly, nor to act as though there is no law about human law and nothing to restrain human appetites other than the brute power of the civil state.

An intellectually honest person, which Kamala Harris is not, would have the humility to consider the following statements about the nature of true liberty and what happens when it is confounded with license:

But a much more grave, and indeed very bitter, sorrow increased in Our heart - a sorrow by which We confess that We were crushed, overwhelmed and torn in two - from the twenty-second article of the constitution in which We saw, not only that "liberty of religion and of conscience" (to use the same words found in the article) were permitted by the force of the constitution, but also that assistance and patronage were promised both to this liberty and also to the ministers of these different forms of "religion". There is certainly no need of many words, in addressing you, to make you fully recognize by how lethal a wound the Catholic religion in France is struck by this article. For when the liberty of all "religions" is indiscriminately asserted, by this very fact truth is confounded with error and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, the Church, outside of which there can be no salvation, is set on a par with the sects of heretics and with Judaic perfidy itself. For when favour and patronage is promised even to the sects of heretics and their ministers, not only their persons, but also their very errors, are tolerated and fostered: a system of errors in which is contained that fatal and never sufficiently to be deplored HERESY which, as St. Augustine says (de Haeresibus, no.72), "asserts that all heretics proceed correctly and tell the truth: which is so absurd that it seems incredible to me." (Pope Pius VII, Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814.)

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?

The Church has always taken action to destroy the plague of bad books. This was true even in apostolic times for we read that the apostles themselves burned a large number of books. It may be enough to consult the laws of the fifth Council of the Lateran on this matter and the Constitution which Leo X published afterwards lest "that which has been discovered advantageous for the increase of the faith and the spread of useful arts be converted to the contrary use and work harm for the salvation of the faithful." This also was of great concern to the fathers of Trent, who applied a remedy against this great evil by publishing that wholesome decree concerning the Index of books which contain false doctrine."We must fight valiantly," Clement XIII says in an encyclical letter about the banning of bad books, "as much as the matter itself demands and must exterminate the deadly poison of so many books; for never will the material for error be withdrawn, unless the criminal sources of depravity perish in flames." Thus it is evident that this Holy See has always striven, throughout the ages, to condemn and to remove suspect and harmful books. The teaching of those who reject the censure of books as too heavy and onerous a burden causes immense harm to the Catholic people and to this See. They are even so depraved as to affirm that it is contrary to the principles of law, and they deny the Church the right to decree and to maintain it. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only passport to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Remember, the one and only standard of authentic human liberty is the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as It is held high by Holy Mother Church. All other concepts of freedom are false and injurious to the good of souls and to the right ordering of men and their nations.

Not the First Time that the Phrase “Right to Life” Has Been Omitted by a Pro-Abort

There are times when I feel like the late actor Joe Flynn, a Catholic faithful, whose stock line as Captain Wallace Burton Binghamton on McHale’s Navy was “I just want to scream” whenever his ploys to court-martial the crew of the fictional PT-73 went awry.

Yes, I just want to scream as so many commentators in the secular world, especially those who are young and many others who are so immersed in the dog and pony shows of the moment that they do not remember what has happened even in the recent past, have acted as though Kamala Harris’s omission of the phrase “right to life” from the Declaration was something that had not happened before.  Well, it has happened before, and more than a little bit, and one of those who did so during his presidency was none other than Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro:

At a Democratic fundraiser on Monday night, President Obama once again misquoted the Declaration of Independence’s most famous sentence and once again omitted its reference to our “Creator.” According to the text of his remarks published on the official White House website, he said: “[W]hat makes this place [America] special is not something physical.  It has to do with this idea that was started by 13 colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire, and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”  

The first time that something happens and is met with publicity and criticism, it could well be an accident or part of the learning curve — like the first time one bows down to foreign royalty when other U.S. presidents haven’t; or the first time one issues a public apology abroad for past (real or imagined) American sins in a way that other presidents haven’t. But the second time, the assumption must be that it’s probably deliberate — and that makes it all the more appalling. Other presidents didn’t deliberately misquote the Declaration, and they didn’t leave out (or rewrite) the words about our rights being endowed by our Creator. 

The first time President Obama misquoted the Declaration in this way, when addressing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute a month ago, I wrote:

“Only two plausible explanations spring to mind.  One is that President Obama isn’t very familiar with the most famous passage in the document that founded this nation; that even when plainly reading from a teleprompter, he wasn’t able to quote it correctly.  The other is that President Obama doesn’t subscribe to the Declaration’s rather central claim that our rights come from our ‘Creator’ (also referred to in the Declaration as ‘Nature’s God’ and ‘the Supreme Judge of the World’).”

At this point, the second explanation certainly seems like the likelier one. Last month, President Obama stumbled a bit, pausing and then misquoting the passage in question in a couple of different places. The other night, he quoted the passage flawlessly, except that “they are endowed by their Creator” was replaced with “each of us are [sic] endowed.”  The precision with which he quoted the rest of the passage makes his revision of one particular part seem less likely to have been an accident.

When asked by a reporter about omitting the reference to our Creator the last time (and on another occasion when he wasn’t quoting from the document but was merely paraphrasing and thus cannot, in all fairness, be said to have referenced it incorrectly), Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s full reply was, “I haven’t seen the comments, Lester [Kinsolving], but I can assure you the president believes in the Declaration of Independence.”  It was a flimsy, and somewhat curious, response — as the topic of belief hadn't even been raised.

But, in any event, does the president believe in the Declaration?  As I’ve noted, his administration’s 29-page overview to the U.N. on the respect, or disregard, for rights shown in America and throughout American history, doesn’t contain a single meaningful reference to the Declaration, its affirmation of certain unalienable rights, or its claim about the source of those rights.  His presidential victory speech last Election Night incorrectly dated this nation’s existence from the writing of the Constitution, not from the signing of the Declaration.  His Independence Day remarks in 2009 managed to avoid mentioning, or quoting from, the Declaration at all.  

The president’s omission (or revision) of language that’s not only central to our country’s history, identity, and philosophy, but also to most of his fellow countrymen’s hearts, stands in stark contrast to other presidents' repeated offerings of thanks to God and their clear conviction that our rights do in fact come from Him. (Obama Misquotes Declaration of Independence, Again.)

No, what Kamala Harris did six days ago is not anything new. It is the par for the course for those who fear not the just judgment of Christ the King on their immortal souls when they die and who believe that the following words of Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, can be ignored with impunity:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

By the same token, however, it is also infuriating that so many people, including so many Catholics, continue to project their own beliefs into the mind of the Deist named Thomas Jefferson, who did believe in the living and true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, and who was so rationalistic that he took out all of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s miracles from his translation of the New Testament

Thomas Jefferson hated Christ the King and His true Church:

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

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death. This letter is quoted in its entirety in Dr. Paul Peterson’s now out-of-print Readings in American Democracy. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1979, pp. 28-29. )

Jefferson’s letter to Roger Weightman, written just ten days before his death on July 4, 1826, precisely fifty years to the day after the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence (a date of death his shared with his one-time friend turned adversary and then friend again, John Adams), demonstrates clearly this wretched naturalist’s hope for a world freed from the shackles of what he believed to be “monkish superstition.” It is generally not a good thing to go before Christ the King at the moment of one’s Particular Judgment after having written about “monkish superstition.”

Moreover, Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence contained no reference at all even to the generic sort of Judeo-Masonic “Creator” and “Supreme Judge of the Universe” that found their way into the text approved by the delegates of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 2, 1776, and promulgated on this day two hundred forty years ago, although there was a reference to “nature’s God,” which is the not the same thing as the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity.

Here is the text of the beginning and the end of Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, leaving out the deist’s bill of particulars against British King George III, many of whose repressive measures cited by Jefferson have been used by presidential administrations since the time of the War Between the States:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, & to assume among the powers of the earth the equal & independant station to which the laws of nature & of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the change.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles & organising it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. but when a long train of abuses & usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government & to provide new guards for their future security. such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; & such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former systems of government. the history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which no one fact stands single or solitary to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest, all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood. . . .

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injury. a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of 12 years only, on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. we have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend a jurisdiction over these our states. we have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement here, no one of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these were effected at the expence of our own blood & treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain: that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league & amity with them: but that submission to their parliament was no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea, if history may be credited: and we appealed to their native justice & magnanimity, as well as to the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which were likely to interrupt our correspondence & connection. they too have been deaf to the voice of justice & of consanguinity, & when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power. at this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade & deluge us in blood. these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. we might have been a free & great people together; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. be it so, since they will have it: the road to glory & happiness is open to us too; we will climb it in a separate state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!

We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name & by authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce a11 allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Britain & all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve & break off all political connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us & the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert and declare these a colonies to be free and independant states, and that as free & independant states they shall hereafter have power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, & to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honour. (Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence.)

Why trifle with "fidelity" to the words in the Declaration of Independence when Thomas Jefferson himself excluded the word "Creator" from his original draft and when one considers that this hideous libertine hated Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church, showing himself to be an enemy of God and thus a menace to any true concept of social order? 

Moreover, Jefferson's final draft made generic references to an impersonal deity ("Creator," "Nature's God," Supreme Judge of the University") that were used to signify that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, was a matter of conplete indifference to men and the fate of their nations. 

However, the Incarnation has taken place. Christ the King was born in anonymity in Bethelehem and died in infamy on the gibbet of the Holy Cross on Good Friday before rising gloriously from the dead on Easter Sunday forty days before His triumphant Ascension into Heaven. Our Redeemer King has founded His true Church, the Catholic Church, as the sole means of human sanctification and salvation, and try as many "freethinkers" and ideologues of one stripe or another have tried since Pentecost Sunday, there is no substitute for the true Faith, something that Pope Pius XI, writing in his stinging condemnation of Nazi racialism in Mit Brennedner Sorge, March 17, 1937, noted with great emphasis:

Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community -- however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things -- whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side. (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.) 

Pope Pius XI went on to explain that the reform societies is premised upon the reform of the lives of men by means of Sanctifying Grace:

And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.  (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)

In other words, order in the world is premised upon order in the souls of men, who need Sanctifying Grace to overcome their sins and to make reparation for them while seeking to pursue the heights of personal sanctification. Catholic sanctity built and maintained Western civilization for nearly a thousand years, not the pursuit of “dreams” and “destinies” according to the dictates of Judeo-Masonic religious indifferentism.

Contrast Thomas Jefferson's religiously indifferentist rought draft—and even the draft that was promulgated on July 4, 1776—with the Magna Carta, which was composed to restrain the tyrannical impulses of King John, the son of King Henry II, who uttered the infamous words “Will no one rid me of this mettlesome priest?” that resulted in the murder of Saint Thomas Becket on December 29, 1170:

In the first place we have conceded to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs for ever that the English church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we wish that it be thus observed. This is apparent from the fact that we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English church, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III., before the quarrel arose between us and our barons. This freedom we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs for ever. . . .

Thus, we wish and we firmly ordain that the English church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom  shall  have  and  keep  all  these  previously  determined  liberties,  rights,  and concessions, well and in peace, freely and quietly, in their fullness and integrity, for themselves and their heirs, from us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever, as is previously described here. (Magna Carta, June 15, 1215.)

What a difference five hundred sixty-one years can make in the life of the world.

The Magna Carta was an expression of the sentiments of Catholics who were faithful sons of Holy Mother Church, men who sought the approbation of the great Pope Innocent III, who advanced the reforming work of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic de Guzman as they founded their respective religious communities, in order to assure a just administration of the laws in the English realm.

The Declaration of Independence was written by men who were the products of a revolution against Christendom. The Protestants among their number thus believed in corrupted heretical version of what they thought was Christianity, and Charles Carroll, a Catholic who was the signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a Freemason

Dr. John C. Rao, an associate professor of History at Saint John’s University, New York, explained the assault on history and truth in which Catholics themselves have participated by worshiping at the altar of the founding plaster saints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What most intrigues me as an historian is the sustained assault on Catholic History which such Patricide reflects. War on history has, of course, been declared everywhere in Christendom today. Rome has reduced the world before the1960’s to a house of horrors useful only in providing topics for self-deprecating addresses before frenzied anti-Catholic audiences out for blood. Local dioceses bulldoze their past with a passion matched only by Nicolae Ceausescu in pre-1989 Romania. Many elderly Catholics whom I know will deny on a stack of bibles all memory of doctrines and customs which I heard them piously repeat and saw them fervently practice in my childhood in the 1950’s. (For the rest of this superb commentary, please see Founding Fathers 666, Church Fathers 0.)

Although written about seventeen ago now, Dr. Rao’s analysis, despite his belief that the counterfeit church of conciliarism is the Catholic Church, is timeless as he is an historian who looks at the world through the eyes of the Holy Faith, not through the star-spangled lenses of the heresy of Americanism.

Sadly, though, many Catholics still try to defend the Declaration of Independence as being influenced by various principles set forth by Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Robert Bellarmine without realizing that those influences were attenuated by the time of the rationalistic Eighteenth Century by men who viewed those writings through the corrupted lenses of naturalism and not those of the true Faith.

The founding principles, no matter the intentions of those who held them, were bound to result in the situation in which we find ourselves at the present time as it is a lie to believe that men can be indifferent, both individually and collectively, to the Incarnation, Nativity, Public Life and Ministry, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven of Our Blessed Lord and Jesus Christ yet pursue “civic virtue” and justice over the course of the long term.

Catholicism is the one and only means of human salvation and it is the only true means of providing a just social order, admitting, of course, that the vagaries of fallen human nature are such that there will always be problems, whether great or small, as a result of the Actual Sins of Men. The extent of social problems depends upon the extent to which men attempt, despite their own weaknesses, to cooperate with the graces won for us by Our Lord during His Passion and Death and that are administered unto them by the working of God the Holy Ghost through by means of Sacramental and Actual Graces to reform their lives and to make reparation for their sins. Catholicism is not a panacea. It is, however, the necessary precondition for a just social order, whose maintenance depends upon the free will choices made by individual men and their readiness to submit themselves entirely to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.

The spirit of the American founding, therefore, is both Protestant and Judeo-Masonic, and it matters not how many of the founders were Freemasons as each was affected by the spirit of Masonry regardless of their membership (or lack thereof) in one of the lodges. This spirit of Judeo-Masonry is cancerous, which is why it is irrelevant for Catholic defenders of the founding principles to seek to exonerate their heroes because not all of them were Freemasons. Pope Leo XIII explained in Humanum Genus, April 20 1884, that it is not the membership in Masonic lodges that matters. It is Freemasonry’s all pervasive spirit of religious indifferentism and naturalism that matters, and that spirit of Freemasonry infects many Catholics without their even knowing it, something that has been the case from the very beginning of this nation.

Here is what Pope Leo XIII wrote in Humanum Genus on this point:

For, from what We have above most clearly shown, that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view -- namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism.

What We have said, and are about to say, must be understood of the sect of the Freemasons taken generically, and in so far as it comprises the associations kindred to it and confederated with it, but not of the individual members of them. There may be persons amongst these, and not a few who, although not free from the guilt of having entangled themselves in such associations, yet are neither themselves partners in their criminal acts nor aware of the ultimate object which they are endeavoring to attain. In the same way, some of the affiliated societies, perhaps, by no means approve of the extreme conclusions which they would, if consistent, embrace as necessarily following from their common principles, did not their very foulness strike them with horror. Some of these, again, are led by circumstances of times and places either to aim at smaller things than the others usually attempt or than they themselves would wish to attempt. They are not, however, for this reason, to be reckoned as alien to the masonic federation; for the masonic federation is to be judged not so much by the things which it has done, or brought to completion, as by the sum of its pronounced opinions. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

Yes, it is the sum of the "pronounced opinions" of Judeo-Masonry that matters, not any specific program or line of action, although there have been programs and lines of action (the establishment of public schools and the mandating of curricula of study, legislation liberalizing divorce, attempts at imposing laws forbidding the wearing of clerical garb in public and of the operation of parochial schools, the promotion of contraception and abortion, the rapid “normalization” of civil “marriage” for those engaged in perverse acts against nature, all other manner of licentiousness in civil law and public culture) that members of the lodges have undertaken over the course of this nation's history that were meant to be detrimental to the Faith. The Judeo-Masonic spirit convinces even believing Catholics that the social encyclical letters of our true popes don't apply to the United States of America, and that simple statements of Catholic truth, including the one below from Pope Saint Pius X's Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, have been made "obsolete" over the course of time:

For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.) 

Some Americanist Catholics have been so bold over the years as to assert that the Church has no business at all in pronouncing that she has universal principles for the governance of men and their nations that are binding upon the consciences of all men at all times, thus showing themselves to defect from the Faith by refusing to accept these plain words of Pope Pius XII in Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958: 

Assuming false and unjust premises, they are not afraid to take a position which would confine within a narrow scope the supreme teaching authority of the Church, claiming that there are certain questions -- such as those which concern social and economic matters -- in which Catholics may ignore the teachings and the directives of this Apostolic See.

This opinion -- it seems entirely unnecessary to demonstrate its existence -- is utterly false and full of error because, as We declared a few years ago to a special meeting of Our Venerable Brethren in the episcopacy:

"The power of the Church is in no sense limited to so-called 'strictly religious matters'; but the whole matter of the natural law, its institution, interpretation and application, in so far as the moral aspect is concerned, are within its power.

"By God's appointment the observance of the natural law concerns the way by which man must strive toward his supernatural end. The Church shows the way and is the guide and guardian of men with respect to their supernatural end."

This truth had already been wisely explained by Our Predecessor St. Pius X in his Encyclical Letter Singulari quadam of September 24, 1912, in which he made this statement: "All actions of a Christian man so far as they are morally either good or bad -- that is, so far as they agree with or are contrary to the natural and divine law -- fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church." (Pope Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958.) 

Pope Pius XII was condemning the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association's (the rump "church" created by the Red Chinese government that was more or less recognized in ade facto manner by the late Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007 that was reiterated in 2009; see Red China: Workshop for the New Ecclesiology prior to Jorge Mario Bergoglio's own sellout of faitful Catholics in Red China to that rump church in 2018) rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of social and economic matters. His condemnation applies just as much to anyone else, including Americanist Catholics, who reject the Social Reign of Christ the King and the authority of the Catholic Church to enunciate the moral principles that must guide governance and economics. No naturalist philosophy or program takes place of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, for its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

Alas, the Modern world is founded in a rejection of this simple truth. "Hope" is then to be placed in all manner of naturalists, whether they be of the "Enlightenment" or of the American founding or the French Revolution or Marxism-Leninism or any of the dozens of others of ideologies and "philosophies" claiming the ability to "improve" the world by means of the naturalistic formulae of Judeo-Masonry, many of which are embraced by various false religions, including that of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, as worthy of at least some respect in the practicalities of the "real" world. This is precisely the goal of the Judeo-Masonic spirit that Pope Leo XIII explicated in Humanum Genus:

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 eighteen years ago as a continuation of the work of the printed journal of the same name, Christ or Chaos, and in my book  Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism.

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 nor 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 landowners 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.

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.

Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:

1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.

2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.

3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.

4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.

5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.

6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.

7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.

8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.

9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her Indirect Power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.

10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are the basis of the actions of civil governance in all that pertains to the good of souls and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church. Civil leaders must, therefore, recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.

This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past twenty-five years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922).

The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:

1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation

3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.

4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.  

5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the words of Holy Writ are for a Protestant or to a Modernist, is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact. The likes of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton or Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., or Kamala Harris have no regard for the words of the Constitution or for the just laws passed by Congress, and Donald John Trump is plainly ignorant of some of the fact that there are seven articles in the Constitution and twenty-seven amendments to it since its ratification in 1788. We are governed by men who are contemptuous or law or wholly ignorant of it. Quite a state of affairs.

6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.

A nation founded on false premises, no matter the "good intentions" of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American "popular culture" destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some "naturalist" hero or idea by which to win the "culture wars," oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.

The practical atheism that is upon us at this time is only the logical consequence of the belief that the Incarnation of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by the power of God the Holy Ghost in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother is a matter of social, political, cultural, and legal indifference, something that Pope Leo XIII summarized in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The words of our true popes are either true or they are not. If they are true, which they are, of course, then they are merely expressions of what is in fact true and thus binding upon all men in all places at all times without exception.

Yes, true, we live in the midst of a world where these truths are rejected by most Catholics, principally because they (and their parents and grandparents and great grandparents) were never taught anything about them by the true bishops of the past or by their worthy successors in the Americanist heresy, the faux bishops of the United States of America.

Some might argue that we have do “what we can” to retard evils, making whatever compromises in the practical order of things that appear to be justified by the circumstances, including voting for odious candidates who will not only not retard evils but will make sure that they become more and more institutionalized and as they themselves become willing enablers and accomplices in the growth of the “soft” totalitarianism of the modern police state.

There is nothing that I can write that will dissuade people form believing what they want to believe. 

As one who has followed politics since the presidential election of 1956 when I was five years of age and who has made its study my life’s work as a college professor, writer and speaker, I know all too well that the trajectory of degeneration that has occurred in the past six and one-half decades despite all of the most well-intentioned efforts to “stop” this or that boogeyman or to oppose or to support this or that Congressional legislation. Futility awaits those who put their hopes in the ability of naturalists to combat the evils that are caused by naturalism.

Pope Leo XIII was very clear on this one point:

The Church, it is certain, at no time and in no particular is deserted by God; hence, there is no reason why she should be alarmed at the wickedness of men; but in the case of nations falling away from Christian virtue there is not a like ground of assurance, "for sin maketh nations miserable." If every bygone age has experienced the force of this truth, wherefore should not our own? There are, in truth, very many signs which proclaim that just punishments are already menacing, and the condition of modern States tends to confirm this belief, since we perceive many of them in sad plight from intestine disorders, and not one entirely exempt. But, should those leagued together in wickedness hurry onward in the road they have boldly chosen, should they increase in influence and power in proportion as they make headway in their evil purposes and crafty schemes, there will be ground to fear lest the very foundations nature has laid for States to rest upon be utterly destroyed. Nor can such misgivings be removed by any mere human effort, especially as a vast number of men, having rejected the Christian faith, are on that account justly incurring the penalty of their pride, since blinded by their passions they search in vain for truth, laying hold on the false for the true, and thinking themselves wise when they call "evil good, and good evil," and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness." It is therefore necessary that God come to the rescue, and that, mindful of His mercy, He turn an eye of compassion on human society.  (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

Men today, blinded and made miserable by their own sins, do indeed lay hold on the false for the true and consider themselves very wise when they call "evil good, and good evil" and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness."

Total trust in the Mother of God and her Fatima Message as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits to console the good God and to make reparation for our own sins, each of which has worsened both the state of the world-at-large and the state of the Church Militant here on earth in this time of apostasy and betrayal.

We must pray today to Saint Peter Nolasco, whose feast day this is, to help ransom us from our own slavery to sin and worldliness so that we can pray to Our Lady more purely and be more confident, without being presumptuous, of her maternal intercession and protection now, and at the hour of our death.

Dom Prosper Gueranger gave us this summary of Saint Peter Nolasco’s noble work, to which he had been called by Our Lady herself:

The Ransomer of Captives, Peter Nolasco, is thus brought before us by the Calendar, a few days after having given us the Feast of his master, Raymund of Pegnafort. Both of them offer to the Divine Redeemer the thousands of Christians they ransomed from slavery. It is an appropriate homage, for it was the result of the charity, which first began in Bethlehem, in the heart of the Infant Jesus, and was afterwards so fervently practised by these two Saints.

Peter was born in France, but made Spain his adopted country, because it offered him such grand opportunities for zeal and self-sacrifice. In imitation of our Redeemer, he devoted himself to the ransom of his brethren; he made himself a prisoner to procure them their liberty; and remained in exile, that they might once more enjoy the happiness of home. His devotedness was blessed by God. He founded a new Religious Order in the Church, composed of generous hearted men, who, for six hundred years, prayed, toiled, and spent their lives, in obtaining the blessing of liberty to countless Captives, who would else have led their whole lives in chains, exposed to the imminent danger of losing their faith.

Glory to the Blessed Mother of God, who raised up these Redeemers of Captives! Glory to the Catholic Church, whose children they were! But above all, glory be to our Emmanuel, who, on his entrance into this world, thus spoke to his Eternal Father: Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldst not, neither are they pleasing to thee—but a Body thou hast fitted unto me. Then, said I, behold I come: that is, Behold, I come to offer myself as a Sacrifice. The Divine Infant has infused this same spirit of love for mankind (for whom he so mercifully became the Ransom) into the hearts of such men as the Saint of today: they saw what God had done for man, and they felt it a necessity to go and sacrifice themselves for the redemption of their suffering fellow creatures.

Our Lord rewarded St. Peter Nolasco, by calling him to heaven, at that very hour, wherein, twelve hundred years before, himself had been born in Bethlehem. It was on Christmas Night that the Redeemer of Captives was united to Jesus, the Redeemer of Mankind. Peter’s last hymn on earth was the 110th Psalm; and as his faltering voice uttered the words: He hath sent Redemption to his people; he hath commanded his covenant for ever, his soul took its flight to heaven. . . .

Thou, O Jesus ! earnest to cast fire upon the earth, and thy desire is that it be enkindled in the hearts of men. Thy desire was accomplished in Peter Nolasco, and the children of his Order. Thus dost thou permit men to co-operate with thee in the designs of thy sweet mercy, and, by thus restoring harmony between man and his Creator, thou hast once more given to the earth the blessing of fraternal love between man and man. Sweet Infant Jesus! we cannot love thee, without loving all mankind; and thou, who art our Ransom and our Victim, wiliest that we, also, be ready to lay down our lives for one another.

Thou, Peter ! wast the Apostle and the model of this fraternal charity; and our God rewarded thee by calling thee to himself on the anniversary of the Birth of Jesus. That sweet Mystery, which so often encouraged thee in thy holy labours, has now been revealed to thee in all its glory. Thy eyes now behold that Jesus as the great King, the Son of the Eternal Father, before whom the very Angels tremble. Mary is no longer the poor humble Mother, leaning over the Crib, where lies her Son; she now delights thy gaze with her queenly beauty, seated as she is on a throne nearest to that of the divine Majesty. Thou art at home amidst all this glory, for heaven was made for souls that love as thine did. Heaven is the land of love, and love so filled thy heart even when on earth, that it was the principle of thy whole life.

Pray for us, that we may have a clearer knowledge of this love of God and our neighbour, which makes us like to God. It is written, that he that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him (1 John 4:16); intercede for us, that the Mystery of Charity, which we are now celebrating, may transform us into Him, who is the one object of all our love during this season of grace. May we love our fellow-creatures as ourselves; bear with them, excuse their weaknesses, and serve them. May our good example encourage them, and our words edify them; may we comfort them and win them to the service of God by our kindness, and our charities.

Pray for France, which is thy country, and for Spain, where thou didst institute thy grand Order. Protect the precious remnants of that Order, by whose means thou didst work such miracles of charity. Console all prisoners and captives. Obtain for all men that holy Liberty of Children of God, of which the Apostle speaks, (Romans 8:21) and which consists in obedience to the law of God. When this liberty is in man’s soul, he never can be a slave; but when the inner man is enslaved, the outward man never can be free. Oh! pray that the fetters of false doctrines and passions may be broken, and then the world will enjoy that true Liberty, which would soon put an end to tyranny, and make tyrants impossible. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Saint Peter Nolasco, January 28.)

It is instructive to highlight the last paragraph in Dom Prosper Gueranger’s prayer to Saint Peter Nolasco:

Obtain for all men that holy Liberty of Children of God, of which the Apostle speaks, (Romans 8:21) and which consists in obedience to the law of God. When this liberty is in man’s soul, he never can be a slave; but when the inner man is enslaved, the outward man never can be free. Oh! pray that the fetters of false doctrines and passions may be broken, and then the world will enjoy that true Liberty, which would soon put an end to tyranny, and make tyrants impossible.

True liberty consists not of “choosing” to kill innocent human beings nor to practice any kind of vice, whether natural or unnatural.

True liberty consists in that liberty of the “Children of God” and “which consists in obedience to the law of God” as “when this liberty is in man’s soul, he can never be a slave; but when the inner man is enslaved, the outward man can never be free.”

May we pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary with increased fervor every day so that the “fetters of false doctrines and passions may be broken so that the world will enjoy true liberty that “makes tyrants impossible.”

Let us lift high the Cross of Christ the King, He Who is the King of men and their nations even though most men do not realize this and even though most nations seek to suppress all mention of His Holy Name and mock any possibility that He is their King, the King Who will come in glory to judge the living and dead.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Peter Nolasco, pray for us.

Saint Agnes, pray for us.