Do Not Go Looking for the Political Tooth Fairy in 2024, part two

The Cirque du Naturalisme is in full swing. All manner of well-meaning people keep hoping against hope that “things will get “better,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that a secularized Calvinist materialism is the American religion and that the only real substantive difference between the two organized crime families of naturalism is that one believes in the use of coercive power of the civil state to achieve an “equitable” distribution of wealth according to the dictates of globalist elites while other believes in the capitalist spirit of free (although sometimes government subsidized) market to increase wealth and thus the happiness of voters. Nothing ever really changes except that the globalist elites, enabled by many establishment figures within the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right,” gain more power while the bulk of citizens in “fly over country” are subjected to an ever-increasing surveillance of their daily actions in the name of “national security,” more and more government regulations to limit legitimate human liberties in the name of “saving the planet,” and higher and higher rates charged by usurious lenders to purchase motor vehicles, large appliances and to obtain funding for entrepreneurial enterprises.

To believe that “things will get better” if the 2024 elections turns out the “right way” is to ignore the fact that nations that are steeped in the promotion, celebration, and glorification of sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance will never know any kind of respite from the violent conflicts that have riven this failed experiment in pluralism that must, perforce, evolve over time into the totalitarianism that has descended upon us. Very few people understand that there is a straight line from heresy/blasphemy/sacrilege to the undermining of the ends proper to Holy Matrimony to baby killing, “brain death”/human organ vivisection, the starvation and dehydration of brain-damaged human beings, “palliative care”/hospice, to random violent attacks on the streets of American cities, to the outright worship of the dirt out of which God created man and breathed into him a rational, immortal soul that is the stamp of His very image and likeness.

There is no putting this Humpty Dumpty back together again. There is no getting the naturalist toothpaste out of the bottle of metastasizing heresies patented by Dr. Luther and then developed by Drs. Calvin, Cranmer, Knox, Wesley, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho, Fidel, et al. No political tooth fairy is going to wave a magic wand and make any nation great again when its people live in obstinate rebellion against the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and Natural Law and think nothing of sending of places themselves and their children in front of television/computer screens to have their eyes and ears polluted with sights and sounds that lead them further and further into sewers of impurity, indecency, immodesty, incivility, irreverence, and material and carnal self-indulgence.

Material well-being is not the measure of national greatness, and the only standard of genuine human liberty is the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, as It is lifted high by Holy Mother Church. In this regard, therefore, it is useful to remind the readers of this site of the truths contained in Orestes Brownson’s 1846 essay, “National Greatness,” which demonstrates the materialism inherent in the American founding and embedded deep in the fabric of what passes for electoral politics. I will make a few interjections that I have not made before when quoting “National Greatness” in the past:

What, then, is true national greatness? We answer, that nation is greatest in which man may most easily and effectually fulfil the true and proper end of man. The nation, under the point of view we here consider the subject, is in the people. Its greatness must, then, be in the greatness of the people. The people are a collection or aggregation of individuals, and their greatness taken collectively is simply their greatness taken individually. Consequently the greatness of a nation is the greatness of the individuals that compose it. The question of national greatness resolves itself, therefore, into the question of individual greatness. The greatness of the individual consists in his fulfilling the great ends of his existence, the ends for which Almighty God made him and placed him here. No man is truly great who neglects life's great ends, nor can one be said in truth to approach greatness any further than he fulfils them.

Interjection Number One:

Mind you, Orestes Brownson wrote this essay in 1846, two years after he converted to Catholicism and he summarized the essence of Catholic teaching in the spirit that would be expressed sixty years later by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man’s supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

The civil state has a duty to help to foster those conditions wherein men can best sanctify and thus save their immortal souls as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. There can be no true reform of societies without the reform of men, and the reform of men is made possible only by the Sanctifying Graces administered exclusively by the true Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. The best summary of this can be found in Pope Pius XI’s condemnation of Nazism, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, that was issued two days before his condemnation of Marxist Communism in Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937:

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.)

As we know so very well, most men alive today live for base pleasures without any thought of the supernatural. Men are thus prone to believe in the nonexistent “salvific” power of this or that political ideology du jour (the “woke” movement of “progressivism, which is but another name for Bolshevism) and/or in the equally nonexistent “salvific” powers of this or that political figure, whether of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” or “right,” which leads to nothing other than endless agitation and utterly needless divisions on matters that exist in the nature of things and are thus not subject to human debate, “revision” or “rejection.”

Anyhow, the diabolical electoral system that creates such agitation and division, which is the exact opposite of the peace and unity that is produced by the Catholic Faith, has been rigged from its beginning to be an instrument of disorder and chaos. This is so because the men who founded the United States of America had a contempt for the “old ways” of Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages, believing themselves to be the evangelists, if you will, of what the gnostic political scientist Leo Strauss called “the new science of politics.” This “new science” was designed to blunt the force of the true Faith in public life by convincing one and all that it is “enough” to be “Americans” and that it is possible to pursue the common temporal good without reference to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they are explicated by Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which rests the very fate of nations.

I return now to Orestes Brownson’s National Greatness:

In order, then, to determine in what true national greatness consists, we must determine in what consists true individual greatness; and in order to determine in what true individual greatness consists, we must determine what is the true end of man; that is, what is the end to which Almighty God has appointed man, and which he is while here to labor to secure. What, then, is the end of man?  For what has our Maker placed us here? To what has he bidden us aspire? Were we placed here merely to be born and to die,-to live for a moment, continue our species, toil, suffer, drop into the grave to rot, and be no more for ever? If this be our end, true greatness will consist in living for this life only, and in being great in that which pertains to this life. The greatest man will be he who succeeds best in amassing the goods of this world, in securing its honors and luxuries, or simply in multiplying for himself the means of sensual enjoyment. In a word, the greatest man will be he who most abounds in wealth and luxury.

We mean not to say, that, in point of fact, wealth and luxury, worldly honors and sensual gratifications, are the chief goods of even this life; but simply that they would be, if this were our only life, if our destiny were a destiny to be accomplished in this world. It is because this world is not our home, because we are merely travellers through it, and our destination is a world beyond it, that the life of justice and sanctity yields us even here our truest and most substantial pleasure. But confine man to this life, let it be true that he has no destiny beyond it, and nothing could, relatively to him, be called great or good, not included under the heads of wealth and luxury. Nothing could be counted or conceived of as of the least value to him that does not directly or indirectly minister to his sensual enjoyment. No infidel moralist has ever been able, without going out of his own system, or want of system, to conceive of any thing higher, nobler, more valuable, than sensual pleasure.

But this life is not our only life, and our destiny is not accomplished here. The grave is not our final doom; this world is not our home; we were not created for this world alone; and there is for us a life beyond this life. But even this, if we stop with it, does not answer our question. We may conceive of a future life as the simple continuation of our present natural life, and such the future life is conceived to be by not a few among us, who nevertheless flatter themselves that they are firm believers in the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel. Every being may be said to have a natural destiny or end, which its nature is fitted and intended to gain. The Creator, in creating a being with a given nature, has given that being a pledge of the means and conditions of fulfilling it, of attaining to its natural end. Man has evidently been created with a nature that does not and cannot find its complete fulfilment in this life. He has a natural capacity for more than is actually attainable here. In this capacity he has the promise or pledge of his Maker that he shall live again.

Interjection Number Two:

Material well-being is not the end of human existence. Holy Mother Church is not indifferent to material well-being, but its pursuit must a byproduct of using one’s God-given talents honestly for His greater honor and glory and with a sense of moderation and temperance. Pope Leo XIII explained this in Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891:

But the Church, with Jesus Christ as her Master and Guide, aims higher still. She lays down precepts yet more perfect, and tries to bind class to class in friendliness and good feeling. The things of earth cannot be understood or valued aright without taking into consideration the life to come, the life that will know no death. Exclude the idea of futurity, and forthwith the very notion of what is good and right would perish; nay, the whole scheme of the universe would become a dark and unfathomable mystery. The great truth which we learn from nature herself is also the grand Christian dogma on which religion rests as on its foundation -- that, when we have given up this present life, then shall we really begin to live. God has not created us for the perishable and transitory things of earth, but for things heavenly and everlasting; He has given us this world as a place of exile, and not as our abiding place. As for riches and the other things which men call good and desirable, whether we have them in abundance, or are lacking in them -- so far as eternal happiness is concerned -- it makes no difference; the only important thing is to use them aright. Jesus Christ, when He redeemed us with plentiful redemption, took not away the pains and sorrows which in such large proportion are woven together in the web of our mortal life. He transformed them into motives of virtue and occasions of merit; and no man can hope for eternal reward unless he follow in the blood-stained footprints of his Savior. "If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him."Christ's labors and sufferings, accepted of His own free will, have marvelously sweetened all suffering and all labor. And not only by His example, but by His grace and by the hope held forth of everlasting recompense, has He made pain and grief more easy to endure; "for that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation, worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory."

Therefore, those whom fortune favors are warned that riches do not bring freedom from sorrow and are of no avail for eternal happiness, but rather are obstacles; that the rich should tremble at the threatenings of Jesus Christ -- threatenings so unwonted in the mouth of our Lord -- and that a most strict account must be given to the Supreme Judge for all we possess. The chief and most excellent rule for the right use of money is one the heathen philosophers hinted at, but which the Church has traced out clearly, and has not only made known to men's minds, but has impressed upon their lives. It rests on the principle that it is one thing to have a right to the possession of money and another to have a right to use money as one ills. Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary. "It is lawful," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "for a man to hold private property; and it is also necessary for the carrying on of human existence.'' But if the question be asked: How must one's possessions be used? -- the Church replies without hesitation in the words of the same holy Doctor: "Man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need. Whence the apostle saith, 'Command the rich of this world . . to offer with no stint, to apportion largely'." True, no one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for his own needs and those of his household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly his condition in life, "for no one ought to live other than becomingly." But, when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one's standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over. "Of that which remaineth, give alms." It is duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity -- a duty not enforced by human law. But the laws and judgments of men must yield place to the laws and judgments of Christ the true God, who in many ways urges on His followers the practice of almsgiving -- "It is more blessed to give than to receive"; and who will count a kindness done or refused to the poor as done or refused to Himself -- "As long as you did it to one of My least brethren you did it to Me." To sum up, then, what has been said: Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God's providence, for the benefit of others. "He that hath a talent," said St. Gregory the Great, "let him see that he hide it not; he that hath abundance, let him quicken himself to mercy and generosity; he that hath art and skill, let him do his best to share the use and the utility hereof with his neighbor."

As for those who possess not the gifts of fortune, they are taught by the Church that in God's sight poverty is no disgrace, and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in earning their bread by labor. This is enforced by what we see in Christ Himself, who, "whereas He was rich, for our sakes became poor''; and who, being the Son of God, and God Himself, chose to seem and to be considered the son of a carpenter -- nay, did not disdain to spend a great part of His life as a carpenter Himself. "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?"

From contemplation of this divine Model, it is more easy to understand that the true worth and nobility of man lie in his moral qualities, that is, in virtue; that virtue is, moreover, the common inheritance of men, equally within the reach of high and low, rich and poor; and that virtue, and virtue alone, wherever found, will be followed by the rewards of everlasting happiness. Nay, God Himself seems to incline rather to those who suffer misfortune; for Jesus Christ calls the poor "blessed"; He lovingly invites those in labor and grief to come to Him for solace; and He displays the tenderest charity toward the lowly and the oppressed. These reflections cannot fail to keep down the pride of the well-to-do, and to give heart to the unfortunate; to move the former to be generous and the latter to be moderate in their desires. Thus, the separation which pride would set up tends to disappear, nor will it be difficult to make rich and poor join hands in friendly concord. (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.)

One can see that the recent convert Orestes Brownson had been given great graces by Our Lady to write so clearly on themes that our true popes themselves would elucidate at length several decades later as one secular political ideology after another rose to the surface to promise “salvation” (the “better world”) without the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, and I return herewith to “National Greatness”:

The promises of God cannot fail. Man therefore must and will live again. But this is only the pledge, so to speak, of a natural immortality, and reveals to us only a natural destiny. It is only a continuation of our natural life in another world. The end we are to labor for, and the means we are to adopt to gain it, must be precisely what they would be in case our life were to terminate at the grave. Our future life being still a natural life, what is wisest and best for that portion we are now living would be wisest and best for that portion we are hereafter to live. Hence, what is wisest and best for time would be wisest and best for eternity.

Hence it is that we find so many who, though professing belief in a future life, judge all things as if this life were our only life. They look to the future life only as the continuation of the present, and expect from it only the completion of their natural destiny. They agree in all their moral judgments, in all their estimates of the worth of things or of actions, with those who believe in no future life at all. They profess to hope for a future life, but live only for time; because their future life is to be only a continuation of time. Hence they say, as we ourselves were for years accustomed to say, He who lives wisely for time lives wisely for eternity; create a heaven here, and you will have done your best to secure your title to a heaven hereafter.

Hence it is that the morality of many who profess to be Christians is the same which is adopted and defended by infidels. This is so obviously the case, that we not unfrequently find men who call themselves Christians commending downright unbelievers in Christianity as good moral men, and who see no reason why the morality of the infidel should not be the same in kind as the morality of the Christian. Hence it is supposed that morality may be taught in our schools, without teaching any peculiar or distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Morality, we are told, is independent of religion, and not a few regard it as sufficient without religion. So common has this mode of thinking and speaking become amongst us, that we heard the other day a tolerably intelligent Catholic, who would by no means admit himself to be deficient in the understanding or practice of his Catholic duties, say, that, if a man were only a good moral man, he did not care what was his distinctive religious belief. Many who go further, and contend that religion is necessary to morality, contend for its necessity only as a sort of police establishment. It is necessary, be cause the natural sanctions of the moral law are not quite sufficient to secure obedience, and religion must be called in by its hopes and fears to strengthen them.

Pope Leo XIII wrote about a concept of morality divorced from supernatural faith in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established (by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

There is no naturalistic, electoral, political, or legal way out of the mess in which we find ourselves. We are witnessing the manifestation of the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles, a degeneration that includes social decadence and nihilism.

Our destiny is supernatural, not natural, and national greatness must be defined by the pursuit of personal holiness as befits redeemed creatures:

Now all this is perfectly consistent and right, if it be true that man has only a natural destiny. We ought, in such a case, to judge all things which concern us precisely as if this were our only life. Religion could be of no value further than it strengthened the police, kept people from picking one another's pockets or cutting one another's throats. But man's destiny is not natural, but supernatural. Almighty God created him with a specific nature, but not for an end in the order of that nature, or to be attained by its simple fulfilment. He created him to his own image and likeness, but appointed him to a supernatural destiny,-to an end above what is attainable by the fulfilment of his nature,- to an end not promised in his nature, and which is not be stowed as the reward of fulfilling it. This end is to know and love God; but in a sense far higher than we can know and love him by our natural powers, and as he is now beheld through a glass, darkly, or seen dimly through the medium of his works, as we see the cause in the effect. It is to see him face to face, and to know and love him with a knowledge and love the same in kind, though not in degree, with which God knows and loves himself ;-this is the end for which man was intended, and which it is made his duty and his high privilege to seek. But this end surpasses the utmost capacity of our nature, and requires not only a supernatural revelation of God, but the supernatural elevation of our nature itself. It consists in our being made partakers of the divine nature in an ineffable sense, and in a sense above that in which we partake of it in being created after the image and likeness of God. Hence, St. Peter says, "By whom [Jesus Christ] he hath given us very great and precious promises, that by these you may be made partakers of his divine nature." So also St. John :-" We are now the sons of God, and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; because we shall see him as he is."

This fact in these times is overlooked. Men have wished to rationalize the Gospel, to find a philosophic basis for the mysteries of faith. In attempting this, they have labored to bring the whole of divine revelation, within the domain of reason, and have been led to exclude, as no part of it whatever they found themselves unable to bring within that domain. Reason is necessarily restricted to the order of nature, and can in no instance, of itself, go out of that order. Hence, revelation has come very widely to be regarded as only a republication of the natural law, as at best 'only a running commentary on it, designed simply to explain the natural order, and not to reveal any thing above it.

Men who claim to be Christians, and even ministers of the Gospel, everywhere abound, who have no faith in the supernatural order, scarcely a conception of it. We spent nearly two hours the other day trying to enable a Protestant minister, and him by no means a weak or ignorant one, even to conceive of the supernatural; but in vain. So perverted had his mind become by the false theologies of modern times, that he could attach no meaning to the assertion, "There is a supernatural order." He could use the word supernatural, but it had no meaning for his mind not within the order of nature. Thousands are in the same sad condition. To them nature is all, and all is nature. Indeed, the word nature itself has no definite meaning for them. If a man by a word raise the dead, it is natural; if Moses smite the rock and living waters gush forth, it is natural,-all by a natural power, a natural law. Travelling in the same direction, they lose themselves in a wilderness of absurdities.

Yes, most men today have no faith in the supernatural order and scarcely a conception of it. Nature is indeed everything to most men, and, to call to man the quote from Father Faber’s The Precious Blood that I cited in part one of this commentary, “the very air we breathe is Pelagian.” Pelagianism is the essence of Lockean liberalism, and it is the essence of American conservativism. The belief that we can “do something” without Our Lord and His true Faith is nothing other than the old deception that the adversary used to convince Eve and Adam through her to disobey God and eat of the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that He had forbidden them to eat, and this is why the American founding’s errors have brought us to the point of a not-so-soft totalitarianism that can never be fought with means merely natural.

I return now to “National Greatness”:

Natural laws cease to be laws imposed on nature, laws she must obey, and from which she cannot withdraw herself, and become forces, agents, creators. It is not strange, then that they lose sight of the supernatural destiny of man, and look only for a natura1 destiny, to be obtained not as a reward for obedience to grace, but as the natural consequence of the cultivation or development of our natural powers.  Read the writings of the celebrated Dr. Channing, or of the school which he founded or to which he was attached, and you shall never find a single recognition of the supernatural order, properly so called,-any allusion to a supernatural destiny. The highest end you will find presented is that to which we may attain by the unfolding of our higher nature, of our natural sentiments of love and reverence. The school goes so far as to contend that our nature is susceptible of an unbounded good, and that our natural sentiments of love and reverence are capable of an infinite expansion. Yet these are rational Christians, and they boast of their reason! They talk of the absurdities of Catholic theology, and see no absurdity in supposing that a finite nature may be infinitely expanded, or that a nature can be something more than it is without any thing super-natural.

But this by the way. The true end for which man is to live is the supernatural end to which we are appointed, the beatitude which God hath promised to all that love and serve him here. His true end is not the fulfilment of nature, but what the sacred Scriptures term "eternal life"; and "This is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." We cannot know God, without loving him. Hence we say, the end of man is to know and love God. But to know him intuitively, as he knows himself; for we are to see him as he is, -not as he appears through the medium of his works, but as he is in himself. We cannot thus know him naturally, for thus to know him exceeds the power of the highest possible created intelligence. We must be like him, before we can see him as he is,-be made, in a supernatural sense, partakers of his divine nature. To know him intuitively as he is in himself, is, however, the glorious destiny to which we are appointed, and to which we may attain, if we will. A more glorious destiny we cannot desire. In it we possess God himself, who is the sovereign good. Even here we find our highest good in knowing the truth and loving goodness, dim as is our view of the one, and feeble as is our hold of the other. What must it be, then, when we come to behold, by the light of glory, our God face to face, with no cloud intervening to obscure his infinite beauty, no distance between us and his ineffable love? Well may it be said, "Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what our God hath prepared for them that love him." He will reward them with no inferior, no created good; but will give them himself, will himself be their portion for ever.

But this supernatural destiny, since it is supernatural, is not naturally attainable. We may cultivate all our natural powers, we may fill up the highest and broadest capacities of our nature, realize the highest ideal, and yet be infinitely, -we use the word in its strict sense,-infinitely below it. It is not attained to by "self-culture," by the development and exercise of our highest natural powers, including even the boasted sentiments of love and reverence. It is nothing that is due, or ever can be due, to our nature. It is a gift, and can be obtained only as bestowed. But it will be bestowed only on the obedient, and is bestowed as the reward of obedience. Our destiny is eternal life, and the condition of obtaining it is obedience. Obedience is not, as some of the sects teach, the end for which we were made. We were made not that we might obey God, but that we might possess God, and we obey him as the condition of possessing him. (National Greatness. This was written when Orestes Brownson was fresh with enthusiasm for the Holy Faith. After his insistence that Holy Mother Church has primacy over the civil state got him in big trouble with the American bishops, he eventually became a supporter of the Americanist notions of religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and he also became a critic of The Syllabus of Errors. The early phase of Brownson’s Catholic years represented his best grasp of the Holy Faith, therefore.)

True national greatness requires an adherence to the Holy Faith. There are no shortcuts. None.

Nothing now is really substantially different than in the past except that we are only witnessing the manifestation of the perfection of inherent degeneracy of the American founding principles, which in themselves represent a rejection of Divine Revelation, the authority of Holy Mother Church and of the necessity for men to have their intellects truly enlightened and their wills strengthened by having belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

There is no secular, naturalistic or electoral means to hold back a tide of evil that has been gathering strength since the Renaissance and, most especially, after Martin Luther tacked those ninety-five theses onto the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517. 

Entire nations of men, including the United States of America, of course, cannot keep offending Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by continuing to kill the innocent preborn by surgical and chemical means, promote perversity and its multifaceted vices as "human rights," speak profanely and blasphemously, dress immodestly and indecently, and pursue one material pleasure after another without calling down upon themselves His Holy wrath. 

Although many are putting their “hope” once again in former President Donald John Trump despite all the power he gave to the pseudo-scientist named Anthony Fauci and the great experiment in social control he engineered in the name of “public health” as the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued rigid, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all medical protocols that denied both the individuality of patients and the medical freedom that physicians should have to use their own best judgments in light of person’s medical history and the exact nature of the condition with which they may be afflicted, the forces-that-be are ready, willing, and able to circumvent the “will of the people” IF Trump defeats the corrupt octogenarian from Delaware on November 5, 2024. Imagine what the powers-that-be would do if Donald John Trump, who is a total creature of the natural and carnal without any understanding of how his blasphemies offend the majesty of the Holy Name nor how his narcissistic belief that “he” can “solve” problems that are caused by Original and Actual Sins, actually stood for Christ the King and His true Church?

As it stands, however, the battle between the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and the naturalist “right” will not last forever. The forces of darkness preparing the way for Antichrist must eliminate the naturalists of the “right” so that the “true church” of globalist totalitarianism, and one of the means that these forces considered using in 2016 was to send fake electors to the Capitol. In other words, men such as Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (aka Madame Defarge)’s campaign manager, John Podesta, proposed doing exactly what Donald John Trump unwisely proposed doing in 2020 (see Put Not Your Trust in Princes: In the Children of Men in Who There is No Salvation) and for which he has been indicted as conspiring to commit “fraud” against the United States of America:

A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat… They cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede...

But Mr. Podesta… shocked the organizers… he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office…

News that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief rejected a legal election result, even in a hypothetical simulation, was obvious catnip to conservative media, which took about ten minutes to repackage Smith’s story using the same alarmist headline format marking earlier TIP write-ups. Breitbart published “Democrats’ ‘War Game’ for Election Includes West Coast Secession, Possible Civil War,” and a cascade of further red-state freakouts seemed inevitable.

“At that point,” says Nils Gilman, COO and EVP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, who served alongside Brooks as TIP’s other co-founder, “we decided we needed to be out about having run this exercise, to prevent the allegation that this was a ‘shadowy cabal’ — not that that narrative didn’t take hold anyways.”

The final TIP report was released the next day, August 3rd, 2020. Titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” the full text was, as any person attempting an objective read will grasp, sensational.

The Podesta episode was worse than reported, with the secession proposal coming on “advice from President Obama,” used as leverage to a) secure statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico b) divide California into five states to increase its Senate representation, and c) “eliminate the Electoral College,” among other things. TIP authors also warned Trump’s behavior could “push other actors, including, potentially, some in the Democratic Party, to similarly engage in practices that depart from traditional rule of law norms, out of perceived self-defense.”

More tellingly, there were multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness. TIP authors concluded that “as an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage” in the upcoming election, and chided participants that “planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” They added the key observation that “a reliance on elites observing norms are [sic] not the answer here.”

Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.”

This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.”

That incident acquires new significance now in light not only of this NBC story, but also the dismal 2024 poll numbers for Biden, a host of unusually candid calls for preemptive action to prevent Trump from taking office, the bold efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in states like Colorado and Maine, and those lesser-publicized, but equally important campaigns to keep third party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy from gaining ballot access in key states. (Is the Electoral Fix Already In?)

This gets to the point I made in part one of this two-part series:

Things have degenerated so badly that which have reached a point where well-meaning and truly patriotic Americans think they there is some human means to reverse the gradual transformation of the government of the United States of America into a monstrous web of a permanent bureaucracy that seeks to control every aspect of human life to the point of monitoring private conversations and proscribing the public utterance of ideas and beliefs contrary to those that the apparatchiks themselves hold and advance to the point where the country has been, in effect, the “People’s Republic of America” or the Union of Soviet Socialist America.

We have been eyewitnesses to the dissolution of the southern border and an invasion of our country that has been made possible by a president who refuses to enforce border security laws that are among those he swore to uphold, and we have seen abject insanity take over every nook and cranny of the Federal government of the United States of America by certifiable lunatics who want to divide Americans by race and to force Americans to accept the absurd, irrational delusion that ther are more than two sexes.

As noted before, however, no one—no, not Donald John Trump and not Nikki Haley, the war mongering Bush wannabe who refused to answer a simple question recently whether a man can “become” a woman—in the false opposite of the naturalist “right” believes in the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church as each is a son or daughter of the rotten fruit of that Divine Plan's violent overthrow wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the forces of Judeo-Masonry that are committed to the elimination of the Holy Name of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, from public discourse as all manner of evils become accepted gradually over time as "regrettable realities" about which we can do very little. After all, we have to win an election. right? Things will get "better" after that, right.

This is but sheer deception. Does anyone really think that the organized forces of the “left” would react with civility if Donald John Trump does defeat the decrepit gasbag Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., on November 5, 2024? The “left,” funded by the usual suspects, would harass electors pledged to vote for Trump on Monday, December 17, 2024, at their homes, places of work and wherever it is they choose to shop and eat. The “left” would not go gently into that good night as they have long believed that “democracy” is defined solely by their ability to gain and retain the levers of power and that the enemies of “democracy” are anyone and everyone who dares to disagree with them or challenge their hegemony over law, education, the “arts,” the commentariat class, “science,” finance, commerce, and industry.

The “left” never believes than anything, including elections, is “settled” unless they get their way on whatever cause du jour is being promoted. It is their “way” or “democracy” is under attack, which is why it is probably a good idea to remind readers that Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the great Dominican foe of Modernism and the Twentieth Century’s greatest exponent of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, explained the flaws inherent in democracies that lead to their decay and dissolution over time:

Democracy is an imperfect regime, as a regime in ratione regiminis, as a result of the lack of unity and continuity in the direction of interior and exterior affairs. Also this regime should only be for the perfect already capable of directing themselves—those virtuous and competent enough to pronounce as is fitting upon the very complicated problems on which the life of a great people depends. But it is always true to say as Saint Thomas noted that these virtuous and competent men are extremely rare; and democracy, supposing such perfection among subjects, cannot give it to them. From this point of view, democracy is a bit in politics what quietism is in spirituality; it supposes man has arrived, at the age or the state of perfection, even though he still may be a child. In treating him as a perfect person, democracy does not give him what is required to become one.

Since true virtue united to true competence is a rare thing among men, since the majority among them are incapable of governing and they have a need of being led, the regime which is the best for them is the one which can make up for their imperfection. This regimen perfectum in ratione regiminis, by reason of unity, continuity, and efficacy of direction towards a single end which is difficult to achieve is monarchy. Above all a tempered monarchy which is always attentive to the different forms of national activity. It is better than democracy or than the feudal regime. Monarchy assures the interior and exterior peace of a great nation, and permits her to long endure. (Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On Royal Government,” translated by Andrew Strain, On Royal Government)

Pope Pius IX prophetically what would happen when the “societies” (Freemasonry then, Freemasonry and the cabal of globalist elites who plot the demise of us peons and plan a diet of insects for those who are deemed “fit’ enough to live at present) got hold of the fraud that is the universal franchise:

To allow the masses, invariably uninformed and impulsive, to make decisions on the most serious matters, is this not to hand oneself over to chance and deliberately run towards the abyss? Yes, it would be more appropriate to call universal suffrage universal madness and, when the secret societies have taken control of it as is all too often the case, universal falsehood." (Pope Pius IX, Statement to French pilgrims, May 5, 1874, cited by Abbe Georges de Nantes, CCR # 333, p. 24.)

This prophetic statement has come true in our own time.

Dr. George O’Brien, writing a century ago, explained the totalitarianism that must arise as a result of Protestantism’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the true Church, that Catholic Church:

The thesis we have endeavoured to present in this essay is, that the two great dominating schools of modern economic thought have a common origin. The capitalist school, which, basing its position on the unfettered right of the individual to do what he will with his own, demands the restriction of government interference in economic and social affairs within the narrowest  possible limits, and the socialist school, which, basing its position on the complete subordination of the individual to society, demands the socialization of all the means of production, if not all of wealth, face each other today as the only two solutions of the social question; they are bitterly hostile towards each other, and mutually intolerant and each is at the same weakened and provoked by the other. In one respect, and in one respect only, are they identical--they can both be shown to be the result of the Protestant Reformation.

We have seen the direct connection which exists between these modern schools of economic thought and their common ancestor. Capitalism found its roots in the intensely individualistic spirit of Protestantism, in the spread of anti-authoritative ideas from the realm of religion into the realm of political and social thought, and, above all, in the distinctive Calvinist doctrine of a successful and prosperous career being the outward and visible sign by which the regenerated might be known. Socialism, on the other hand, derived encouragement from the violations of established and prescriptive rights of which the Reformation afforded so many examples, from the growth of heretical sects tainted with Communism, and from the overthrow of the orthodox doctrine on original sin, which opened the way to the idea of the perfectibility of man through institutions. But, apart from these direct influences, there were others, indirect, but equally important. Both these great schools of economic thought are characterized by exaggerations and excesses; the one lays too great stress on the importance of the individual, and other on the importance of the community; they are both departures, in opposite directions, from the correct mean of reconciliation and of individual liberty with social solidarity. These excesses and exaggerations are the result of the free play of private judgment unguided by authority, and could not have occurred if Europe had continued to recognize an infallible central authority in ethical affairs.

The science of economics is the science of men's relations with one another in the domain of acquiring and disposing of wealth, and is, therefore, like political science in another sphere, a branch of the science of ethics. In the Middle Ages, man's ethical conduct, like his religious conduct, was under the supervision and guidance of a single authority, which claimed at the same time the right to define and to enforce its teaching. The machinery for enforcing the observance of medieval ethical teaching was of a singularly effective kind; pressure was brought to bear upon the conscience of the individual through the medium of compulsory periodical consultations with a trained moral adviser, who was empowered to enforce obedience to his advice by the most potent spiritual sanctions. In this way, the whole conduct of man in relation to his neighbours was placed under the immediate guidance of the universally received ethical preceptor, and a common standard of action was ensured throughout the Christian world in the all the affairs of life. All economic transactions in particular were subject to the jealous scrutiny of the individual's spiritual director; and such matters as sales, loans, and so on, were considered reprehensible and punishable if not conducted in accordance with the Christian standards of commutative justice.

The whole of this elaborate system for the preservation of justice in the affairs of everyday life was shattered by the Reformation. The right of private judgment, which had first been asserted in matters of faith, rapidly spread into moral matters, and the attack on the dogmatic infallibility of the Church left Europe without an authority to which it could appeal on moral questions. The new Protestant churches were utterly unable to supply this want. The principle of private judgment on which they rested deprived them of any right to be listened to whenever they attempted to dictate moral precepts to their members, and henceforth the moral behaviour of the individual became a matter to be regulated by the promptings of his own conscience, or by such philosophical systems of ethics as he happened to approve. The secular state endeavoured to ensure that dishonesty amounting to actual theft or fraud should be kept in check, but this was a poor and ineffective substitute for the powerful weapon of the confessional. Authority having once broken down, it was but a single step from Protestantism to rationalism; and the way was opened to the development of all sorts of erroneous systems of morality. (Dr. George O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Efforts of the Reformation, IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003.)

The entire American regime is built on a web of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic lies. Catholics have been so uncritically immersed in these naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian lies for so long that even the believers among them look at the world in merely naturalistic terms, convincing themselves that there is something short of Catholicism that can serve, at least as a "stopgap measure," as the foundation of personal and social order. Catholics prone to the "leftist" bent of naturalism and those prone to the "rightist" bent of naturalism may disagree about many of the "details" of naturalism. However, both sets of Catholics are united in their quest to find some secular, religiously indifferentist, nondenominational or interdenominational means to create a "better" world, looking to the farce of electoral politics as the focal point in this quest.

This is an illusion. Indeed, this is delusional. It is madness.

A nation that is founded and sustained on a web of naturalistic lies must degenerate over the course of time. This degeneration has been aided by the fact that most Catholics have lost the true sacraments as a result of the conciliar revolution, plunging millions upon millions of them into abject paganism as they have lost any sense of the Faith and behave in a manner befitting their long ago barbarian ancestors in Europe before they were Christianized in the First Millennium of the Church. They want their money and their bread and circuses.

The babies?

The innocence of their own children?

Ah, we must live in the "real" world of endless pleasures and honors.

This world of Modernity has reached a point of no return as its lords are as one with the lords of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, and this world of Modernity was described as follows by Father Frederick William Faber in the Creator and Creature over one hundred sixty-three years ago now:

The question of worldliness is a very difficult one, and one which we would gladly have avoided, had it been in our power to do so. But it is in too many ways connected with our subject, to allow of its being passed over in silence. In the first place, a thoughtful objector will naturally say, If the relation between the Creator and the creature is such as has been laid down in the first eight chapters, and furthermore if it is as manifest and undeniable as it is urged to be, how comes it to pass that it is not more universally, or at least more readily, admitted than it is? Almost all the phenomena of the world betray a totally opposite conviction, and reveal to us an almost unanimous belief in men, that they are on a quite different footing with God from that one, which is here proclaimed to be the only true and tenable one. There must be at least some attempt to explain this discrepancy between what we see and what we are taught. The explanation, we reply, is to be found in what Christians call worldliness. It is this which stands in the way of God's honor, this which defrauds Him of the tribute due to Him from His creatures, this which blinds their eyes to His undeniable rights and prerogatives. How God's own world comes to stand between Himself and the rational soul, how friendship with it is enmity with Him--indeed an account of the whole matter must be gone into, in order to show, first, that the influence of the world does account for the non-reception of right views about God, and, secondly, that the world is in no condition to be called as a witness, because of the essential falsehood of its character. This identical falsehood about God is its very life, energy, significance, and condemnation. The right view of God is not unreal, because the world ignores it. On the contrary, it is because it is real that the unreal world ignores it, and the world's ignoring it is, so far forth, an argument in favor of the view.

But not only does this question of worldliness present itself to us in connection with the whole teaching of the first eight chapters; it is implicated in the two objections which have already been considered, namely, the difficulty of salvation and the fewness of the saved. If it is easy to be saved, whence the grave semblance of its difficulty? If the majority of adult catholics are actually saved, because salvation is easy, why it is necessary to draw so largely on the unknown regions of the death-bed, in order to make up our majority? Why should not salvation be almost universal, if the pardon of sin is so easy, grace so abundant, and all that is wanted is a real earnestness about the interests of our souls? If you acknowledge, as you do, that the look of men's lives, even of the lives of believers, is not as if they were going to be saved, and that they are going to be saved in reality in spite of appearances, what is the explanation of these appearances, when the whole process is so plain and easy? To all this the answer is, that sin is a partial explanation, and the devil is a partial explanation, but that the grand secret lies in worldliness. That is the chief disturbing force, the prime counteracting power. It is this mainly, which keeps down the number of the saved; it is this which makes the matter seem so difficult which is intrinsically so easy; nay, it is this which is a real difficulty, though not such an overwhelming one as to make salvation positively difficult as a whole. Plainly then the phenomenon of worldliness must be considered here, else it will seem as if an evident objection, and truly the weightiest of all objections, had not been taken into account, and thus an air of insecurity will be thrown, not only over the answer to the preceding two objections, but also over the whole argument of the first eight chapters. (Father Frederick Faber, The Creator and Creature, written 1856 and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 314-315. The entirely of this passage is appended below.)

We must remember the truth that it is impossible to realize sustained a right ordering of men and their nations as long as they seek to protect that which is repugnant to the peace and happiness of eternity under the cover of the civil law:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Although the proximate antecedent roots to the chastisement that faces us today date back to certain elements of the Renaissance and, as mentioned earlier, the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent rise and triumph of naturalism, the rapid promotion of evil under cover of the civil law has occurred in the past fifty years in no small measure as a result of the counterfeit church of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with the principles of Modernity and as a result of its sacramentally barren liturgical rites that have predisposed so many millions of Catholics to embrace the "secular magisterium" of the world and to scoff at any residue of Catholic teaching that remains in that conciliar church.

We, though, must be reminded of the truths taught by such great apostles of Christ the King as the late Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie, whose writing had the support of Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X and Benedict XV (the latter two long after Cardinal Pie's death, having studied his writings in great depth and approving of them without any complaint), wrote in the Nineteenth Century:

"If Jesus Christ," proclaims Msgr. Pie in a magnificent pastoral instruction, "if Jesus Christ Who is our light whereby we are drawn out of the seat of darkness and from the shadow of death, and Who has given to the world the treasure of truth and grace, if He has not enriched the world, I mean to say the social and political world itself, from the great evils which prevail in the heart of paganism, then it is to say that the work of Jesus Christ is not a divine work. Even more so: if the Gospel which would save men is incapable of procuring the actual progress of peoples, if the revealed light which is profitable to individuals is detrimental to society at large, if the scepter of Christ, sweet and beneficial to souls, and perhaps to families, is harmful and unacceptable for cities and empires; in other words, if Jesus Christ to whom the Prophets had promised and to Whom His Father had given the nations as a heritage, is not able to exercise His authority over them for it would be to their detriment and temporal disadvantage, it would have to be concluded that Jesus Christ is not God". . . .

"To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say that the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine."

In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:

"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies."

Fr. de St. Just asks, in conclusion:

"Could it be proven in clearer terms that social atheism conduces to individualistic atheism?" (Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center.) 

Our hope, therefore, is in Christ the King, not in political "saviours" of the "left" or the "right" nor in "conservative" "cardinals" who refuse to recognize that they have enable heresy and error, including religious liberty, separation of Church and State and false ecumenism, in their own right

We need Our Lady's help, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, in these troubling times as without the graces she sends us we will be prone to view the world through the eyes of naturalism and not through the supernatural eyes of the Catholic Faith.

The world in which we live knoweth not Christ the King and His true Church and knoweth not that sin, which maketh men and their nations miserable, is more deadly than any virus, including the coronavirus.

We must make more sacrifices.

We must pray more Rosaries.

We must, if at all possible in this time of apostasy and betrayal, spend more time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer.

Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, and it is because the lords of conciliarism have abandoned the Catholic Faith and exalted "Man" and his "ability" to "better" the world that we find ourselves deep in an abyss caused by the concentration of almost all philosophical errors and theological heresies that have been known in salvation history from which the only escape is through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as we continue to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits. 

Our Lady, Help of Christians, 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 John Bosco, pray for us.

Saint Dominic Savio, pray for us. 

Saint Maria Domenica Mazzarello, pray for us.