Naturally Absurd, part three

Brethren: Walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, so that you do not do what you would. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, anger, quarrels, factions, parties, envies, murders, drunkenness, carousings, and suchlike. And concerning these I warn you, as I have warned you, that they who do such things will not attain the kingdom of God. But of the fruit of the Spirit is: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity. Against such things there is no law. And they who belong to Christ have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires. (Galatians 5: 16-24.)

Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, which was read at Holy Mass yesterday, Sunday, September 6, 2020, the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, perfectly describes the state of thoroughgoing agitation that exists in the world today as most people, including many fully traditional Catholics, permit themselves to be agitated by the works of the flesh.

That is, the adversary, who hates us as we are made in the image and likeness of God, Whom he hates but knows he cannot destroy, and thus desires to keep us in states of continuous agitation and turmoil, uses the frailties of fallen human nature and lack of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces extant in this time of apostasy and betrayal to convince well-meaning people that there can be some short term, naturalistic, political, constitutional, legal, interdenominational or nondenominational way to “prolong” an appearance of social order and comity that is but an illusion of his, the adversary’s own making in the first place. This agitation, based as it is in the long term, inevitable and inexorable consequences of the devil’s promotions of immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, anger, quarrels, factions, parties, envies, murders, drunkenness, carousing and suchlike, reaches a fevered pitch during the American quadrennial exercise of madness known as a presidential election cycle as even believing Catholics lose their minds, which they permit to bombarded by the endless stream of Calvinist and Judeo-Masonic naturalism by the likes of Fox News and similar agents of agitation, as they forget that the United States of America is undergoing a just chastisement for its two hundred forty-four years of religious indifferentism and naturalism that have been highlighted by the following evils:

  1. Constant blasphemies committed against Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints.
  2. The exporting of Protestantism and Freemasonry in once proudly Catholic countries.
  3. The invasion and occupation of Catholic countries by armed military force.
  4. The liberalization of divorce laws in many states in the late Nineteenth Century.
  5. The establishment of public schooling as the means to indoctrinate Catholic immigrants—first from Ireland and then all throughout formerly Catholic Europe—in the ways of “democracy,” religious indifferentism, egalitarianism, materialism, majoritarianism and everything else pertaining to Americanism.
  6. Immodesty of dress and the rank impurity and indecency of stage plays, motion pictures, magazines, books, television programming, etc.
  7. The acceptance of contraception and its subsequent exportation all over the globe by means of American taxpayer dollars.
  8. The exportation of the perversities associated with the pestilential vice of the sin of Sodom and its related sins.
  9. The institutionalization of the surgical execution of the innocent preborn—and anyone else thereafter—who is deemed to suffer from a “poor quality of life,” which has “widened the killing field,” so to speak, for “medical professionals” to kill anyone they choose to kill over and beyond their manufactured myth of “brain death” that has been used to justify human vivisection for “their bodily organs.

Why is it so difficult for believing Catholics to look beyond the agitation of the moment to recognize that it is impossible to pursue the common temporal good when things that are repugnant to the peace and happiness of eternity are protected under the cover of the civil law and celebrated by most Americans, no matter whether which, if any, of the two major political parties they favor, all throughout the nooks and crannies of what passes for “popular culture” these days?

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.)

I fail to see or to understand why even believing Catholics cannot grasp these truths?

Well, actually, there are plenty of reasons why most Catholics, including most of those who have come to reject the nonexistent legitimacy of the conciliar “popes” and that what most people think is the Catholic Church is but a counterfeit church with false teaching and false sacramental rites, get caught up in the quadrennial madness engendered by the Calvinist and Judeo-Masonic American electoral system that divides people into warring camps of naturalism in the belief that one set of naturalistic principles is “safe” than another even evils get more and more institutionalized no matter which camp prevails in any given election. Most people fail to see that the devil without his tail is more dangerous than the devil with his tail.

It is necessary to review a bit of the history of how Catholics in the United States of America fell for the trap of naturalism that was set for them from the very beginning and wound up believing that some kind of “secular salvation” was to be found in one or the other of the two organized crime families of naturalism.

Undermining Catholicism From Its Very Inception

The Protestant Revolt unleashed a violent, blood assault upon the true Church and her members. Although it is certainly the case that the Dutch Calvinists were brutal in the execution of the Martyrs of Gorkhum (see note below) and that the Swiss Calvinists hunted down and killed Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen for daring to contradict their heresies that come from the devil himself, the violent assaults against Catholics that were unleashed during the Protestant Revolt were the most harsh in England and Ireland. Over 72,000 Catholics were killed in England after King Henry VIII had himself declared "supreme head of the Church in England" by an act of the Parliament in 1534 and the time of his death of 1547 (this figure is found in Dr. Warren Carroll's The Cleaving of Christendom). Another violent outburst against Catholics took place during the reign of Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, who employed the notorious "priest-catcher," Richard Topcliffe, who had a private torture rack in the basement of his house that he used to "stretch" priests by as much as a much as a foot!

Weary of the persecutions and the heavy taxation and the suppression of the Mass, those Catholics from England and Ireland who fled to the United States of America in its infancy in the early part of the Nineteenth Century were "relieved" to find that they could practice their Faith openly and without persecution from the Federal government. To be sure, many of these immigrants faced unjust discrimination from Protestant and Masonic nativists. Much violence was done to them and to their persons on occasion. Various state laws discriminated against Catholics. Other state laws were designed to insure the "Americanization" of the Irish immigrants, which is why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the behest of the Unitarian named Horace Mann, created the first state department of education in 1837 as a means of "standardizing" educational standards in public schools so that the children of Catholic immigrants would learn the ways of religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

Despite the persecutions and the attempts to neutralize their Faith, however, most Catholics in the Nineteenth Century , including most bishops and priests, were "grateful" to be able to practice the Faith openly and to have their devotions and processions. Very few saw the inherent dangers of the religiously indifferentist nature of the Constitution of the United States of America and saw it as a "virtue" to be able to live side-by-side with non-Catholics in a country that was said, albeit falsely, to be founded on some generic sense of "Christian" principles. Very few realized that the devil had raised up the bloodthirsty Protestant revolutionaries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries to make the "nice and tolerant" Protestants of the United States of America seem trustworthy by comparison, lulling many Catholics to sleep in the belief that the American Constitution, far from being a threat to the integrity to the Faith and an offense to the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, was a "model" of true "religious liberty" for the rest of the world.

One of the many ironies in all this is that those Protestants who were manifestly intolerant towards Catholic immigrants in the Nineteenth Century understood the obligations of the Catholic Faith that Catholics were supposed to fulfill, including seeking the conversion of their country to Catholicism. Protestant apologists such as Charles Marshall as late as 1927 were better versed in papal encyclical letters and in their actual meaning and binding nature that most Catholics, including the Governor of the State of New York, at the time, Alfred Emanuel Smith, who said “what the hades is an encyclical letter” after Marshall wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly discussing Pope Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, and Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895; and Pope Pius XI’s Quas Primas, December 11, 1925. Smith’s formal reply, which was ghostwritten by the heroic Catholic chaplain of World War I, Monsignor Francis Duffy, denied that Catholic Social Teaching had any binding obligation upon Catholics in general and that it certainly did not apply to the United States of America. In other words, the Protestant understood Catholic Social Teaching better than Monsignor Duffy, who had been raised in an ethos of the celebration of the American founding by  men he did not realize hated the Catholic Faith, mocked Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother, and who believe that irreligion would triumph over “religious superstition” of the sort they believed characterized Catholicism. (For my detailed discussion of the Marshall-Smith (Duffy) colloquy, please see. Appendix C below.)

Many Protestants of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, up to the election of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the “Second” Vatican Council’s official “reconciliation” with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity, did not realize that most of the Catholic immigrants and their descendants wanted was to practice their Faith, which most of them did admirably well, and to have their own devotional lives while seeking to establish themselves as “good Americans” who posed no threat to “democratic values.” The Protestants knew what Catholics should have believed and how they should have acted. Imagine what the United States of America would have looked like if Catholics had been taught about Holy Mother Church’s Social Teaching and had acted accordingly?

Although fallen human nature is prone to seek self-interest at the expense of the common good and in violation of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, it is also true that a system of pure naturalism that leaves no room for the pursuit of the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity, must devolve rather quickly into organized corruption founded in the false belief that to the "victors belong the spoils," meaning that moral right is determined by the outcomes of elections. Those who win elections are thus empowered to steal at will and to govern as they want without regard for the moment of their Particular Judgments, which can come at any time.

Pope Pius XI noted this phenomenon in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Aranco Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

This is even truer today than it was ninety-eight years ago.

From Overt Hostility to Upward Mobility Through the Democratic Party

Catholic immigrants to the United States of America, first those from Ireland and then, after the War between the States and during the Kulturkampf in Germany and the Risorgimento in Italy, those from eastern and southern Europe, plunged headlong into this spectator sport of electoral politics as it provided them with the fastest means of upward social and economic mobility at a time when there was overt--and sometimes quite violent--discrimination against them on the part of know-nothings and other assorted naturalists associated with Freemasonry.

Catholic immigrants to the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century faced overt hostility, up to and including violence, from thugs of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic nativists. Father Pierre Jean De Smet, S.J., who had to sneak away from his family in Belgium to study for the priesthood in the United States of America, where he was ordained and was especially beloved by the Indians of the Northwest, experienced the violent state of affairs facing Catholic immigrants in the Nineteenth Century:

The Carbonari, then numerous in America, received their orders direct from European lodges. They edited a paper, L’Eco d’Italia, and labored unceasingly to prejudice the people against the Church and trammel the authority of the Bishops. In the hope of recovering their waning influence, the Protestant ministers made common cause with the revolutionaries. This was the beginning of a vast conspiracy, which imperiled, for a time, Catholic liberty in the United States.

The Know-Nothings, a new society, began to be organized about 1852. Theirs was a secret order, which bound its members by a solemn oath. It was formed, ostensibly, to defend the rights of the poor against European invasion. “America is for Americans” was its slogan. With this object in view, they endeavored to have severe naturalization laws enacted against the new arrivals from Europe, and exclude citizens born of foreign parents from holding public offices. In reality, these fanatics combated not so much the foreign immigration as the fidelity of Europeans, especially the Irish, to the Church of Rome. To base calumnies they added murder, pillage, incendiarism, and, before long, found an occasion for opening the campaign. In the spring of 1853 the Papal Nuncio to Brazil, Archbishop Bedini, arrived in New York, bringing the Sovereign Pontiff’s blessing to the faithful in the United States. He was charged, moreover, to investigate the conditions of Catholicism in the great Republic.

The Know-Nothings saw in this mission a grave attack upon American liberties. Their newspapers denounced the perfidious and ambitious intrigues of Rome. The apostate priest Gavazzi came from London and placed his eloquence at the service of his follow-socialists and friends. For several months he followed the Envoy form one city to the other, vomiting forth lies, threatening him with dire reprisals, and through fiery denunciation endeavored to stir up the masses against the “Papists.”

From vituperation and abuse there was but one step to action. On Christmas day in Cincinnati a band of assassins attempted to do away with the Nuncio. Driven off by the police, they revenged themselves by burning him in effigy. This odious scene was enacted in several towns. Conditions pointing to renewed attacks, Archbishop Bedini was forced to depart after a short sojourn in the United States. But the hostilities did not cease with the departure of the Nuncio. The campaign lasted for three years, attended by violent outrages and attacks, and armed forces had presently to interfere to defend life and property. A witness of these disorders, Father De Smet draws a gloomy picture of existing conditions in his letters. “The times are becoming terrible for Catholics in these unhappy States. Nowhere in the world do honest men enjoy less liberty.”

“European demagogues, followers of Kossuth, Mazzini, etc., have sworn to exterminate us. Seven Catholic churches have been sacked and burned; those courageous enough to defend them have been assassinated.” “The future grows darker, and we are menaced from every side. If our enemies succeed in electing a President from ranks–until now the chances have been in their favor–Catholics will be debarred from practicing their religion; our churches and schools will be burned and pillaged, and murder will result from these brawls. During this present time [1854] over twenty thousand Catholics have fled to other countries seeking refuge from persecution, and many more talk of following them. The right to defame and exile is the order of the day in this great Republic, now the rendezvous of the demagogues and outlaws of every country.”

No laws were enacted for the protection of Catholics, and in some States the authorities were openly hostile. “The legislators of New York and Pennsylvania are now busy with the temporal affairs of the Church, which they wish take out of the hands of the Bishops. These States have taken the initiative, and others will soon follow. In Massachusetts, a mischief-making inquisition has just been instituted, with the object of investigating affairs in religious houses. In Boston, a committee of twenty-four rascals, chosen from among the legislators, of which sixty are Protestant ministers, searched and inspected a convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.”

While making a tour of the Jesuit houses with the Provincial, Father De Smet more than once braved the fury of the fanatics. In Cincinnati, a priest could not show himself in the street without being insulted by renegade Germans, Swiss, and Italians. In Louisville, thirty Catholics were killed in an open square and burned alive in their houses. Those who attempted to flee were driven back into the flames at the point of pistols and knives. Even in St. Louis, several attempts were made in one week upon the lives of citizens. The Jesuits were not spared. At Ellsworth, Maine, Father Bapst was taken by force from the house of a Catholic where he was hearing confessions, was covered with pitch, rolled in feathers, tied, swung by his hands and feet to a pole, and carried through the city to the accompaniment of gross insults. (Father E. Lavaille, S.J., The Life of Father De Smet, S.J. (1801-1873): Apostle of the Rocky Mountains, published originally in 1915 by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, New York, and reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 2000 with the additions and the subtitle, “Apostle of the Rocky Mountains.” pp. 262-265.)

This was not taught in American history classes fifty years ago when I was in high school, and it is certainly not being taught today, is it?

Interestingly, the aforementioned-Know Nothing Party (or American Party), was actually formed in 1845 by the first Talmudist elected to Congress, Lewis Charles Levin. Levin formed the Know Nothings not to oppose immigration in general but to protest the influx of German and Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States of America. In other words, the Know Nothing Party was founded by a Jew to oppose the immigration of Catholics to this country because he wanted to preserve the "American way," which, of course, provides plenty of space for the devil and his false religions, starting with Talmudism, of course, while seeking to intimidate Catholics in this country from knowing anything about, no less proclaiming openly, the Social Reign of Christ the King over men and their nations. Americanism is thus an expression of the Talmudic ethos that celebrates error while scorning the truth including Truth Incarnate Himself. 

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

Political bosses and sub-bosses of the Democratic Party in major urban areas opened their doors wide to these Catholic immigrants out of pure political and pecuniary self-interest, not out of an altruistic concern for justice to be done to the persecuted immigrants. And it is out of gratitude to the Democratic Party machinery for its role in the socialization of Catholics into the American "mainstream" that explains the reflexive loyalty of many Catholics to what has become the organized crime family of the naturalistic "left" no matter its institutional support for all manner of moral evils.

Additionally, the many, although not all, of the Catholic bishops in the United States of America were allied with either the Democratic or Republican Parties The arch-Americanist Archbishop John Ireland, the Archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota, from 1884 to 1918, was one of those who as a rabid Republican who wanted to stamp out all vestiges of foreign influence upon Catholic immigrants, especially those who were of German origin. Ireland wanted all trace of German language, culture, and traditions eradicated from the minds of German Americans and from being express in their personal devotional lives in any way.

The late Dr. Justin Walsh, a superb historian, chronicled Ireland’s relentless efforts in behalf of Americanism and to suppress the influence of Germanic traditions and language upon German immigrants to the United States of America and as tried to exert his considerable Americanist influence in the Republican Party to his own advantage and that of one his ideological acolytes who was a priest in the Diocese of Rochester, which was headed at the by the anti-Americanist Bishop Bernard McQuaid. One can also see that Ireland sought to pave the road for what became conciliarism’s false ecumenism and de facto religious indifferentism:

In marking the centenary of John Carroll's installation as the first Bishop of Baltimore, 1889 also marked the centennial of the French Revolution. Perhaps Archbishop John Ireland had the latter in mind when he said at the celebration of the former, "It was the religion of Christ that first whispered into the ears of the world the sacred words: charity, brotherhood, liberty." Ireland's "sacred words" were suspiciously akin to the Masonic tripod of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" that had sparked the bloodbath in France a century earlier. Whatever he had in mind in reducing the "religion of Christ" to Jacobin sloganeering, Ireland was clear on one point. A few days before the formal dedication of the Catholic University of America (CUA), he addressed the question of why such an institution was needed. "This is an intellectual age," said the Archbishop. "Catholics must excel in religious knowledge [and] be in the foreground of intellectual movements of all kinds."2

In this manner John Ireland paid obeisance to the need for a national university built on the twin pillars of Catholicism and Americanism. The first building was dedicated in November 1889, and the CUA welcomed its first students in January 1890. The opening coincided with the unfolding of several unrelated events that brought the Americanist issue to the fore. We will discuss these in this two-part article.

First, John Ireland was trying to merge public and parochial schools in his diocese while simultaneously creating a new ecclesiastical province with himself at its head. If Ireland succeeded, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan would become a province [The words provinces, metropolitan, and suffragan are used frequently throughout this story. Their definitions are found at the end of the article.] headed by Archbishop Michael Heiss of Milwaukee while St. Paul would be elevated to metropolitan status with suffragan sees in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Archbishop Heiss had two good reasons to oppose Ireland: one, he led a knot of bishops in the Middle West who sought special privileges for German immigrants, privileges that Ireland believed would permanently retard the Americanization of German Catholics; and two, instead of merging public and parochial schools Heiss wanted the two absolutely separated. The Milwaukee prelate acted in the face of a state law that mandated criteria which parochial schools could not meet. According to Heiss Catholic parents had a "divine right" to ignore the requirements. There was more! In New York City Fr. Edward McGlynn, an outspoken champion of the Knights of Labor, endorsed Henry George, Labor's candidate for mayor. George had called for the abolition of private property in his book Progress and Poverty. In 1891 Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan condemned the book and tried to silence McGlynn. When the priest refused to submit he became a cause celebre in Americanist circles; Keane even suggested he might hire McGlynn to teach at Catholic University. At that point Corrigan, supported by his suffragan, Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, asked Rome to place George's book on the Index and condemn the Knights of Labor as a secret society forbidden to Catholics.

While the actions of Corrigan and McQuaid showed that not all Irish clerics were in lockstep with the Americanists, the Irish clique rallied behind McGlynn. Cardinal Gibbons, America's only Cardinal, sided with Ireland on the school question and endorsed O'Connell's effort in Rome to make St. Paul a metropolitan see. For his part, Ireland joined Gibbons, Keane, and O'Connell in favor of McGlynn and the Knights of Labor. This was the general situation in the summer of 1890 when John Ireland addressed the annual convention of the National Education Association.

The teachers provided a platform so Ireland could explain what they saw as contradictory stands by the Church vis-à-vis public schools. In Wisconsin Heiss had all but endorsed a boycott of state schools; in Minnesota Ireland called for a merger of the parochial and public systems. Bishop Ireland's "Faribault-Stillwater Plan" was operative in two overwhelmingly Catholic communities where nuns were paid by the state for teaching secular subjects on condition that religious instruction be confined to "after regular school hours." In his address the Archbishop spelled out why he thought the plan could save "Christian denominations" from the specter of "irreligion." In implementing the plan, said Ireland, "I would permeate [state schools] with the religion of the majority of the children of the land, be this religion as Protestant as Protestantism can be." He justified his religious indifferentism on grounds that state schools "tend to eliminate religion from the minds and hearts" of youth.

I am Catholic...to the tiniest fibre of my heart [but] believe me, my Protestant fellow-citizens, I am absolutely sincere when I declare that I speak for the weal of Protestantism as well as that of Catholicism.

He ended on a pleading note:

Let me be your ally in warding off from the country irreligion, the destroyer of Christian life and...civilization. What we have to fear is the materialism that does not see beyond the universe a living personal God, and the agnosticism that reduces Him to an unknown perhaps.3

Ireland's plan went nowhere because the public schools adamantly opposed it. Also, the prelate's attention was diverted by the sudden death of Archbishop Heiss.

A crisis arose in April, 1890, when Bishop Frederick Katzer of Green Bay, Wisconsin, became the likely choice to fill the vacancy in Milwaukee. Ireland, who once said that Katzer "knows as little about America as a Huron [Indian]," moved to prevent such an eventuality. He saw that Katzer's elevation would increase German influence in the Church and threaten St. Paul as a metropolitan see. Or, as Ireland put it in a letter to Cardinal Gibbons, the Bishop of Green Bay was "a man thoroughly German and thoroughly unfit to be an archbishop." He added that "This Milwaukee question is a most important one for the American Church, and I will rely on your enlightened co-operation in solving it." Within a month Ireland wrote to Denis O'Connell in Rome to suggest his own candidate: "John Lancaster Spalding is the only man for Milwaukee. We may as well decide that at once and work up to it."4

John Ireland and his allies lost Milwaukee because they alienated a sufficient number of Churchmen to swing the contest to Katzer and because John Spalding dropped out of the running for personal reasons. The fight had pitted Americanists against Germans in a bitter ecclesiastical brawl that spanned 15 months. It ended in August, 1891, with Katzer installed as Cardinal Gibbons preached the sermon. "Woe to him...who would destroy or impair [the] blessed harmony that reigns among...the fair fields of the Church in America," the Cardinal proclaimed. He ended with a veiled warning to the Germanizers:

The Author of our being has stamped in the human breast a love for one's country and therefore patriotism is a sentiment commended by Almighty God Himself. Let us glory in the title of American citizen. We owe our allegiance to one country, and that country is America. We must be in harmony with our political institutions. It matters not whether this is the land of our birth or our adoption. It is the land of our destiny.5

As 1891 ended the Germans had Milwaukee. Gibbons had delivered a speech that he intended as a coup de grace to Germanizers. Ireland had won metropolitan status for his see city thanks to Denis O'Connell's effort in Rome. And the Americanist heresy was preparing to move to a wider stage at the Chicago World's Fair.

In 1890 Congress passed a bill allowing cities to compete for the right to host an exhibition in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. Chicago won and in 1893, 12 million people visited a Columbian Exposition devoted to "the material and artistic achievements" of America that was in fact a display of crass materialism unlike anything the world had yet seen. Edison's recently-invented electric light literally changed night into day along a carnival-like "midway" featuring such exotic attractions as "Little Egypt" performing her "dance of seven veils." Also featured was the first "ferris wheel." For those inclined to more sedate attractions, there were numerous congresses scheduled to examine "pressing literary, scientific, and religious problems of the times." The gathering that generated the most excitement was the so-called "Parliament of Religions," scheduled for two weeks in September and at which Rome inexplicably agreed to let Catholics "exchange ideas" with Protestants, Jews, Confucianists, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and "representatives of many other sects."

As rector of the CUA, John J. Keane orchestrated participation in a display of unrestrained religious indifferentism, long held by the Church to be dangerous to the Faith. Cardinal Gibbons, the highest-ranking prelate in the United States, offered the opening prayer on September 11. Overflowing with ecumenism, he recited the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors....For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever! Amen [emphasis on characteristically Protestant words added]." Bishop Keane seemed awestruck describing how "representatives of the principal religions...passed in procession down the central aisle" for the solemn opening: "A marvelous spectacle it was—that grouping of all races and tongues, that variety of national costumes and religious insignia, with the purple robe and gentle figure of our beloved cardinal for center piece."

The "marvelous spectacle" was reprised at the closing ceremony on September 28 when Gibbons again offered the Protestant Lord's Prayer. During the congress the Cardinal spoke on "interdenominational co-operation" and John Ireland delivered an address on his favorite theme about how much America meant to Catholicism. John Keane seemed especially pleased, lauding the proceedings in a souvenir volume as an "assemblage of intelligent and conscientious men, presenting their religious convictions without minimizing, without acrimony, without controversy, with love and truth and humanity."6

Bishop Keane spent much of 1894 urging Catholics to broaden their participation in such events. He started in January with an article in the Bulletin de l'Institut Catholique of Paris. The article advocated a kind of worldwide replication of the Columbian Exposition so that Catholics might evangelize the modern world.

The great discovery [of America]...inaugurated a Providential revolution, a progress in the condition of society and in the whole organization of human life....A distinctive feature in the mission of America is the reunion of the long-divided children of God by the destruction of barriers and enmities which separate race from race. Why could not something of the kind be done with regard to religious divisions and enmities? Why should not religious congresses combine in an international congress of religions where all might meet in mutual tolerance and charity, where all forms of religion might rise up together against all forms of irreligion?7

In an address before the International Scientific Congress of Catholics in Brussels the following September, Keane expanded his vision to encompass the whole world.

When we studied a map of Europe we saw it marked with little divisions—lines that represent not merely territorial boundaries but jealousy and hatred and hostility and division of hearts, expressed in God knows how many millions of men armed to destroy the world. Now, from all these nations God has permitted emigration to us. All nations...among us...live together fraternally without enmity. God has privileged America to destroy those traditions of national jealousies, which you in Europe perpetuate, to mold them all in American unity....I have but to look round me and see how the human race is setting itself more and more to hate hatred and enmity. Humanity is beyond question striving for gentler manners and a greater extension of charity. But is it not the aim of religion to unite man with God and his fellow brethren? Religion is charity! Even though we could not agree about creeds, is it not possible to [agree] about charity?

Keane concluded with the amazing statement that, "because of certain prejudices," the Church would never convene a Parliament of Religions. But, "since it is absolutely decided that the Congress will meet, Catholic Church or no Catholic Church, our participation is a matter of necessity" [emphasis added].8

Orthodox Catholics considered Catholic participation in religious congresses occasions of scandal and therefore sinful. Other events of 1894 heightened anti-Americanist sentiment. John Ireland's reckless intervention in the ecclesiastical and secular politics of New York state was one. The dismissal of conservative professors at the Catholic University was another.

The trouble in New York originated at the Plenary Council of 1884 when Bishop Ireland defended Catholic membership in the Grand Army of the Republic and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He had served as a chaplain for both groups in spite of the fact that Rome had barred the faithful from joining either. In the late 1880s Gibbons, Keane, and O'Connell opposed Archbishop Corrigan and Rome on behalf of Fr. McGlynn and the Knights of Labor. By then promotion of secret societies had become endemic to the Americanist heresy, putting it at odds with orthodox Churchmen.

Rome's policy, of course, was based upon statements by Leo XIII in Humanum Genus [On Freemasonry, 1884]  in which the Pope specifically warned the faithful to beware of organizations associated with Masonry that "hide their real character under the mask of universal toleration, of respect for all religions, of the mania of reconciling the maxims of the Gospel with those of revolution." Regarding the unity of all secret societies, Leo added:

There are several organized bodies which, though differing in name, in ceremonial, in form and origin, are nevertheless so bound together by community of purpose and by the similarity of their main opinions, as to make in fact one thing with the sect of the Freemasons, which is a kind of center whence they all go forth, and whither they all return. Now, these no longer show a desire to remain concealed; for they hold their meetings in the daylight and before the public eye, and publish their own newspaper organs; and yet, when thoroughly understood, they are found still to retain the nature and the habits of secret societies. There are many things like mysteries which it is the fixed rule to hide with extreme care, not only from strangers, but from very many members also; such as their secret and final designs, the names of the chief leaders, and certain inner and secret meetings, as well as their decisions, and the ways and means of carrying them out.9

In 1894, after Rome added the Knights of Pythias, the Elks, and the International Order of Odd Fellows to the forbidden groups, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore was so incensed he refused to publish the decree. Francesco Cardinal Satolli, the apostolic delegate to the United States, reported Gibbons to Rome for "insubordination" but no action was taken against the Cardinal.10

In the spring of 1894, the Archbishop of St. Paul intervened to defeat Bishop Bernard McQuaid when the latter ran for the so-called Catholic seat on the State Board of Education. While the legislature which would make the selection met, John Ireland "busied himself in writing letters from far Minnesota" in favor of McQuaid's opponent. Fr. Sylvester Malone, an outspoken supporter of suspended priest, Edward McGlynn, said that he would work for the disappearance of parochial schools which he termed "un-American." The election "was none of [Ireland's] business" said an irate McQuaid. "He [knew] that the Archbishop of New York and his suffragans wanted the election of a candidate [McQuaid] having the power and the will to protect the interests of the Catholic schools." But Ireland persisted, and a Republican-controlled legislature elected Fr. Malone.

During the next October John Ireland went to New York City and spent a month prior to Election Day lambasting Democrats for being "wet" on the liquor question whereas the Archbishop and Republicans were "dry." The climax came at a giant rally featuring Benjamin Harrison. Ireland seated himself next to the former president "who was flattered by my presence. As I saw for myself, in attending the rally I had done a deed with happy results for the Church." William McKinley, a U.S. Senator from Ohio, and Theodore Roosevelt, a New York State Representative, were also present. Although neither sat next to Benjamin Harrison, both future presidents had the pleasure of meeting the Archbishop of St. Paul.11

On the First Sunday of Advent in 1894 (the third Sunday after Election Day) Bernard McQuaid, "mitered and with crozier in hand," rose in his cathedral to denounce the interloper from Minnesota. "John Ireland was guilty of unseemly action contrary to episcopal dignity, and one which is a scandal for right-minded Catholics," McQuaid began. He continued:

If we are to believe the newspapers, Minnesota stands in great need of being purified and His Grace might have found ample scope there for the exercise of his political zeal. But...it was not love of good government which induced Archbishop Ireland to spend so many weeks in New York, away from his diocese, where the law relative to residence obliged him to be.

No, McQuaid insisted, Ireland came "to acquit himself of a debt to the Republican party [for electing Fr. Malone to the board of regents]." McQuaid added that an appeal to Rome might be necessary to teach the "conspirators"—his term for Ireland, Gibbons, Keane, and O'Connell—to stay home and tend their respective flocks. To forestall action by Rome, Ireland wrote to Propaganda [i.e., the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, established for dealing with all ecclesiastical affairs in missions of the Latin rite throughout the world and having jurisdiction over all foreign missions—Ed.] about McQuaid's pique: "My letters had...more effect than all the effort he and his friends made in their own state. He was defeated, and he won't forgive me for that."12

It was clear by 1895 that Americanist views were incompatible with orthodox Catholicism. In the spiritual realm Keane was hell-bent on fostering interdenominational congresses. In the temporal realm Ireland, and to a lesser extent Gibbons, had peculiar penchants for meddling in things better left alone by Churchmen. In such a situation action by Rome was inevitable. It came on January 6 when Leo XIII addressed Longinqua Oceani to American bishops.

The Pope began by noting that the United States had a "good Constitution" and as a result Catholicism was unhindered, protected alike by law and the impartial administration of justice. Nonetheless the Holy Father warned that "it would be an error to conclude that America furnishes an example of the ideal condition for the Church or that it is always lawful and expedient that civil and religious affairs should be disjoined and kept apart." According to the Pope, in a formal letter addressed to all American bishops, it would be an error to say that religious liberty and the separation of Church and State were beneficial to the Catholic Church. In explicit refutation of Gibbons's notion that American liberty caused the Church to "blossom like a rose," the Pope asserted that if the Catholic religion "is safe among you and is even blessed with increase" it was "entirely due to the divine fruitfulness of the Church." He concluded tellingly that "the fruit would be still more abundant if the Church enjoyed not only liberty but the favor of...laws and...protection of the public power."13

Few, if any, heeded the Holy Father's warnings. They redoubled their efforts, with immediately dire consequences for Denis O'Connell and John Keane. O'Connell fell first when, in the summer of 1895, he was removed as rector of the North American College. His cohorts unsuccessfully defended him, although Gibbons did succeed in keeping him in Rome as rector of the Cardinal's titular church. From this vantage point O'Connell became "a kind of liason officer of the American hierarchy, and more particularly its left wing" until he returned to the United States in 1903.14 Catholic liberals claim that "the suppositious liberalism of the Catholic University" was responsible for the dismissal in 1896 of John J. Keane. In fact the liberalism of neither the CUA nor its rector was "suppositious." As the California Volksfreund noted, "It was clear enough from the beginning that Americanism was interwoven with the plan for the...University." This newspaper called instead for something that Keane could never provide: "a Catholic University with Catholic professors [where] the doctrine of the Catholic, and not of an American Church, is taught."15 (Heresy Blossoms Like a Rose.)

Pope Leo XIII’s concerns about the influence of Americanism upon Catholics—and through them upon Catholics in the rest of the world—were quite justified as our fourth to last true Holy Father thus far understood full well that Americanism, if left unchecked, would result in a situation where Catholics would look at the Church through the distorting lenses of naturalism and “democracy” that lead to constant agitation and irritation rather than seeing the events of the world through the eyes of the Holy Faith and thus remain calm in the midst of all personal, social or ecclesiastical storms.

It is not for nothing that Pope Leo XIII concluded that Americanism, if characterized by the ethos that he had critiqued and condemned in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, would signify that the heresy was meant to serve as an inspirational model for the rest of the world:

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. (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolical Letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

In other words, Pope Leo XIII understood that Catholics were being converted by the ethos of Americanism to view Holy Mother Church through the eyes of the world rather than to view the world through the eyes of the Holy Faith even though they did not realize that this was the case, making the matter all the more grave to souls and even for the common temporal good of the nation itself. The Americanist bishops believed that there had to be an “accommodation” with the spirit of the world, a point, of course, that has been made on this site endless numbers of times and is the thesis of volume one of Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics.)

Monsignor Henri Delassus documented Americanism's beliefs concerning the "universal" mission of Americanism to "evangelize" the Church, if you will, by quoting one of the early biographers of the proto-Americanist, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, Abbot Klein:

“American Catholicism" is not, in the thought of is promoters, a way of thinking and of practicing Catholicism solely in the contingent and changing things that would be common to the United States, in accordance with the particular conditions that are found on American soil. If this had been so, we would not have believed it incumbent upon us to be concerned with it.

No, their pretension is to speak to the entire universe: "The ear of the world is open to our thinking, if we know what to say to them," Msgr. [Bishop of Richmond, John] Keane had written to the Congress of Brussels. And in fact they are speaking, and their word has not been without echo upon each part of France. If, at least, they had not put into the ear of the world anything other than what the Church leaves to our free discussion; but, no, as we shall see, we shall come to understand that their words are more or less imposed upon that which belongs to the very fundamentals of the Catholic faith.

The Abbot Klein had said in the preface he gave to The Life of Fr. Hecker: "His [Fr. Hecker's] unique and original work is to have shown the profound harmonies joining the new state of the human spirit to the true Christianity." "The American ideas that he recommended are, he knew, those which GOD wanted all civilized people of our time to be at home with  ..."

"The times are solemn," Msgr. Ireland had said, in his discourse, The Church and the Age. "At such an epoch of history ... the desire to know is intense ... The ambition of the spirit, fired up by the marvelous success in every field of human knowledge ... The human heart lets itself go to the strangest ideals ... Something new! Such is the ordered word of humanity, and to renew all things is its firm resolution.

"The moment is opportune for men of talent and character among the children of the Church of God. Today the routine of old times is dead;  today the ordinary means lead to the decrepitude of the aged; the crisis demands something new, something extraordinary; and it is upon this condition that the Church shall record the greatest of victories in the greatest of historical ages" (Discourse given in the Cathedral of Baltimore, October 18, 1893, on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Episcopal consecration of Cardinal Gibbons.) (Monsignor Henri Delassus, Americanism and the Anti-Christian Conspiracy, available from Catholic Action Resource Center, pp. 9-10.)

Behold the "fruit" of this accommodation.

Indeed, behold a "church," albeit a false one, that exists in the entire world after having been tested in the laboratory of Americanism in spite of Pope Leo XIII's prophetic warning about it more than one hundred eleven years ago now:

For it [an adherence to the condemned precepts of Americanism] would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive of and desire the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world. (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolical Letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

As noted in a recent commentary, Archbishop John Ireland himself was a rabid supporter of the unjust and immoral Spanish-American War (see The Heresy of Americanism and the Spanish-American War) and his fellow Americanist, James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore from 1877 to 1921, worked very hard in support of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s decision to intervene in the unjust, immoral and needless “Great War” that pitted many formerly Catholic nations against each other as Wilson sought to “make the world ‘safe’ for democracy,” by which he meant the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the elimination of all traces of Catholic influences upon governmental policy, public law and popular culture. In other words, Wilson was a more refined version of United States Senator Kamala Harris (D-People’s Republic of Newsomornia; see Kamala Harris's Threat to Religious Believers ).

The American bishops even formed the National Catholic War Council  (NCWC) in 1917 to support the war effort and to convince the suspicious anti-Catholic Wilson that American Catholics could be trusted to support the war despite its being waged against some of the lands from which they and/or their ancestors had emigrated. The ad hoc NCWC was renamed the National Catholic Welfare Council in 1919, a name it retained until 1966 when Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI began to implement the “Second” Vatican Council’s call for permanently established national bishops’ conferences along the pioneering model of the NCWC, which became known until 2001 as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and the conference’s public policy arm, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC), which was an instrument of leftism, perversity, “social and economic justice, “pacifism,” feminism, environmentalism and pantheism from which emanated all manner of measures designed to “lead” Catholics into what has become Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s brave new world of sin and apostasy in the Twenty-first Century and that served as ready avenue of support for pro-abort Catholics in public life after the Supreme Court of the United States of America had decriminalized the surgical execution of children from the moment of conception up to and including the day of birth in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. The NCCB and USSC became the United States Conference of Catholic “Bishops” in 2001.  From its very outset, therefore, what is now the USCCB supported the policies of a rabidly anti-Catholic president who, though not a Freemason himself, was completely imbued with the ethos of Masonry and was indifferent to the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico while pursuing a war against all traces of the Holy Faith in Europe. This should  be kept in mind for later in this commentary as all Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing right now is to give his own antipapal imprimatur, if you will, to what is believed by most people in the world to be the Catholic Church’s thinly disguised support for every single pro-abortion politician around the world and particularly for the election of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., at this time.

The "identification" of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that a story was told in the 1930s of a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, who was praying a Novena to Saint Monica for the return of her son to the Faith. A friend asked her what had happened to her son. The woman praying the Novena said in great distress, "He's become a Republican!" Yes, being a Democrat and being a Catholic were considered to be inseparable by the lion's share of Catholics in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries.

This alliance of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that they overlooked the blatant anti-Catholicism of the likes of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt time and time again. After all, it was the "party" that mattered. Oh, it was too bad that Wilson supported the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico. Catholics just voted for the Democratic Party, which permitted Franklin Roosevelt, who, unlike his statist predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he worked as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, cultivated friendships with Catholic prelates in order to coopt them into supporting his own statist plans, to unleash a veritable campaign team of Catholic bishops and priests to denounce any "conservative" Catholic who dared to criticize his policies. As noted in We're Not in Kansas Any More in 2009, Roosevelt unleashed the "Right Reverend New Dealer," Monsignor John A. Ryan, to denounce the courageous Father Charles Coughlin for him during his re-election campaign in 1936. And Francis Cardinal Spellman was known as "FDR's errand boy in a miter."

It was, however, after World War II that fissures began to break in the solid Catholic support for the Democratic Party. The threat posed by the spread of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe and the fall of China to the forces of Mao Zedong in 1949 led some Catholics to turn more and more to the Republican Party, convincing themselves that they could purge that stronghold of anti-Catholic Masons and nativists and transform it into a bastion of "conservatism" to turn back the New Deal and to win the Cold War. Additionally, American pluralism made matters that are beyond debate subjects for endless debate that were subject to the whims of plebiscites, executives, legislators and judges, thus manifesting more clearly the cracks in the Masonry, shall we say, that had existed amongst the American hierarchy prior to the “Second” Vatican Council that became very pronounced as Montini/Paul the Sick appointed one like-minded leftist and sodomite-friendly, if not sodomites to the conciliar “hierarchy” before and then after the implementation of conciliarism’s invalid rite of episcopal consecration in 1969.

Fissures Among the Americanists in the Conciliar Hierarchy

1960: Demonstrating their desire to do everything possible to assure the election of United States Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Richard “Cardinal” Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston, and Francis Cardinal Spellman, travelled to Puerto Rico to campaign against the efforts of the Puerto Rican bishops to work against a referendum in support of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s draconian birth control program:

In 1960, the Puerto Rico hierarchy decided to make one last concerted effort to drive the Sangerite forces from the island. The Catholic resistance was led by two American Bishops--James F. Davis of San Juan and James E. McManus of Ponce. The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico helped to organize a national political party--the Christian Action Party (CAP). The new political front was composed primarily of Catholic laymen and its platform included opposition to existing permissive legislation on birth control and sterilization.

When increasing numbers of CAP flags began to fly from the rooftops of Puerto Rico's Catholic homes, the leaders of the opposition parties, who favored turning Puerto Rico into an international Sangerite playground for massive U.S.-based contraceptive/abortifacient/sterilization experimental programs, became increasingly concerned for their own political futures. Then unexpected help arrived in the unlikely person of His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York.

One month before the hotly contested national election, Spellman arrived in Puerto Rico ostensibly to preside over two formal Church functions. While on the island, Spellman agreed to meet with CAP's major political rival, Governor Luis Munoz Marin, leader of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) and a supporter of federal population control programs for Puerto Rico.

In an interview that followed his meeting with Munoz, Spellman, known for years as FDR's errand boy with a miter, claimed that politics were outside his purview. The cardinal's statement was interpreted by the press as an indictment of the partisan politics of Bishops Davis and McManus. To underscore his message, as soon as Spellman returned to the States he made a public statement in opposition to the latest directives of the Puerto Rico bishops prohibiting Catholics from voting for Munoz and his anti-life PDP cohorts. Catholic voters in Puerto Rico should vote their conscience without the threat of Church penalties, Spellman said.

Boston's Cardinal Cushing, John F. Kennedy's "political godfather," joined Spellman in expressed "feigned horror" at the thought of ecclesiastical authority attempting to dictate political voting. "This has never been a part of our history, and I pray God that it will never be!" said Cushing. Cushing's main concern was not the Puerto Rican people. His main worry was that the flack caused by the Puerto Rican birth control affair might overflow into the upcoming presidential campaign and hurt John Kennedy's bid for the White House.

The national election turned out to be a political disaster for CAP. Munoz and the PDP won by a landslide. Bishop Davis was forced to end the tragic state of confusion among the Catholic laity by declaring just before the election that no penalties would be imposed on those who voted for PDP.  

Two years later, with the knowledge and approval of the American hierarchy and the Holy See, the Puerto Rican hierarchy was pressured into singing a secret concordat of "non-interference" in government-sponsored birth control programs--a sop being that the programs would now include instruction in the "rhythm method." While insisting on their right to hold and express legitimate opposition to such programs, the Puerto Rican bishops promised they would "never impose their own moral doctrines upon individuals who do not accept the Catholic teaching."

When the Sangerite storm hit the mainland in the late 1960s, AmChurch would echo this same theme song, opening the floodgates to a multi-billion dollar federal-life-prevention (and destruction) program. (Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 647-649)

One can see that the anti-liturgical Sillonist, Jansenist, Modernist and Rosicrucian named Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, a lover of Latin, you understand, was already hard at work effecting his “aggiornamento” in Puerto Rico of the sort that that has made possible Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s own “aggiornamento” to pro-aborts, sodomites, lesbians, transvestites, mutants and all out-and-out Marxists.

1964: Relieved that they no longer had to work behind closed doors and that Roncalli’s “window” open to the world was in the process of being smashed by Montini/Paul VI and the “Second” Vatican Council, some fully uncloseted Modernists and unabashed moral relativists, including the notorious Father Charles Curran of the Diocese of Rochester and the uber-notorious “Father Death, Robert Drinan, S.J., advised the Kennedy family how to support the surgical execution of the innocent preborn in public life while maintaining their “good standing” as Catholics:

For faithful Roman Catholics, the thought of yet another pro-choice Kennedy positioned to campaign for the unlimited right to abortion is discouraging. Yet if Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of Catholics John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is appointed to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton, abortion-rights advocates will have just such a champion.

Ms. Kennedy was so concerned to assure pro-abortion leaders in New York, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Dec. 18, that on the same day Ms. Kennedy telephoned New York Gov. David Patterson to declare interest in the Senate seat, "one of her first calls was to an abortion rights group, indicating she will be strongly pro-choice."

Within the first week of her candidacy, Ms. Kennedy promised to work for several causes, including same-sex marriage and abortion rights. In responding to a series of 15 questions posed by the New York Times on Dec. 21, Ms. Kennedy said that, while she believes "young women facing unwanted pregnancies should have the advice of caring adults," she would oppose legislation that would require minors to notify a parent before obtaining an abortion. On the crucial question of whether she supports any state or federal restrictions on late-term abortions, Ms. Kennedy chose to say only that she "supports Roe v. Wade, which prohibits third trimester abortions except when the life or health of the mother is at risk." Presumably Ms. Kennedy knows that this effectively means an unlimited right to abortion -- including late-stage abortion -- because the "health of the mother" can be so broadly defined that it includes the psychological distress that can accompany an unintended pregnancy.

Ms. Kennedy's commitment to abortion rights is shared by other prominent family members, including Kerry Kennedy Cuomo and Maryland's former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Some may recall the 2000 Democratic Convention when Caroline and her uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, addressed the convention to reassure all those gathered that the Democratic Party would continue to provide women with the right to choose abortion -- even into the ninth month. At that convention, the party's nominee, Al Gore, formerly a pro-life advocate, pledged his opposition to parental notification and embraced partial-birth abortion. Several of those in attendance, including former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had been pro-life at one time. But by 2000 nearly every delegate in the convention hall was on the pro-choice side -- and those who weren't simply kept quiet about it.

Caroline Kennedy knows that any Kennedy desiring higher office in the Democratic Party must now carry the torch of abortion rights throughout any race. But this was not always the case. Despite Ms. Kennedy's description of Barack Obama, in a New York Times op-ed, as a "man like my father," there is no evidence that JFK was pro-choice like Mr. Obama. Abortion-rights issues were in the fledgling stage at the state level in New York and California in the early 1960s. They were not a national concern.

Even Ted Kennedy, who gets a 100% pro-choice rating from the abortion-rights group Naral, was at one time pro-life. In fact, in 1971, a full year after New York had legalized abortion, the Massachusetts senator was still championing the rights of the unborn. In a letter to a constituent dated Aug. 3, 1971, he wrote: "When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."

But that all changed in the early '70s, when Democratic politicians first figured out that the powerful abortion lobby could fill their campaign coffers (and attract new liberal voters). Politicians also began to realize that, despite the Catholic Church's teachings to the contrary, its bishops and priests had ended their public role of responding negatively to those who promoted a pro-choice agenda.

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing "cover" for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a "clear conscience."

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book "The Birth of Bioethics" (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that "distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue." It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians "might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order."

Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: "The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion."  ( See WSJ.com - Opinion: How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma. David Paterson, a pro-abortion Catholic, ultimately chose another pro-abortion Catholic, Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been the junior senator of the State of New York since January 26, 2009. For a review of David Paterson's moral corruption, see Little Caesars All (Pizza! Pizza!)

Thus began process of soothing the consciences of Catholic in public life who wanted to remain au courant and not pose as a sign of contradiction by their complete fidelity to the Sign of Contradiction, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church has deep roots in the heresy of Americanism, as the ground work for groundwork for moral relativism had been laid at Hyannisport the year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, invalidating a long unenforced Connecticut statute banning the sale of contraceptives to married couples.

1965: Emboldened by his success in Puerto Rico, Richard “Cardinal” Cushing, the Kennedy family’s principal ecclesiastical enabler, said that he had no business interfering in the legislative judgments of Catholics who served in the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the state legislature), thus giving a fully developed apologia for the “I’m personally abortion to [name moral evil: contraception, abortion] but can’t ‘impose’ my morality on non-Catholics”:

Early in the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts legislature took up a proposal to repeal the state's Birth Control law, which barred the use of contraceptives. (As a matter of historical interest, the repeal effort was sponsored by a young state representative named Michael Dukakis, who would be the Democratic Party's candidate for the US presidency 23 years later.) In a state where Catholics constituted a voting majority, and dominated the legislature, the prospects for repeal appeared remote. Then on June 22, Cardinal Cushing appeared on a local radio program, "An Afternoon with Haywood Vincent,” and effectively scuttled the opposition.

Cardinal Cushing announced:

“My position in this matter is that birth control in accordance with artificial means is immoral, and not permissible. But this is Catholic teaching. I am also convinced that I should not impose my position—moral beliefs or religious beliefs—upon those of other faiths.”

Warming to the subject, the cardinal told his radio audience that "I could not in conscience approve the legislation" that had been proposed. However, he quickly added, "I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others."

So there it was: the "personally opposed" argument, in fully developed form, enunciated by a Prince of the Church nearly 40 years ago! Notice how the unvarying teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemned artificial contraception as an offense against natural law, is reduced here to a matter of the cardinal's personal belief. And notice how he makes no effort to persuade legislators with the force of his arguments; any such effort is condemned in advance as a bid to "impose" his opinion.

Cardinal Cushing conceded that in the past, Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter the Birth Control law. "But my thinking has changed on that matter," he reported, "for the simple reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do."

(Notice that the Catholic position is reduced still further here, to a matter of purely sectarian belief—as if it would be impossible for a non-Catholic to support the purpose of the Birth Control law. The cardinal did not explain why that law was enacted in 1899 by the heirs of the Puritans in Massachusetts, long before Catholics came to power in the legislature.)

Before the end of his fateful radio broadcast, Cardinal Cushing gave his advice to the Catholic members of the Massachusetts legislature: "If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. You represent them. You don't represent the Catholic Church."

Dozens of Catholic legislators did vote for the bill, and the Birth Control law was abolished. Perhaps more important in the long run, the "personally opposed" politician had his rationale. (Cushing's Use of The "Personally Opposed" Argument.)

Today’s Pontius Pilates had lots and lots of help from true bishops and true priests in the 1960s and the 1970s as their consciences were massaged to make it possible for them to support each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance without any semblance of ecclesiastical sanction whatsoever. Quite instead, the “peace and justice” bishops and faux bishops gave their full support to their liked-minded adherents of their true shared religion: leftism.

It is no accident that the “peace and justice” crowd at the now-named United States Conference of Catholic Bishops associated with one pro-abortion and pro-sodomite group after another, many of which received funding from both Catholic Charities and the “Catholic Campaign for Human Development (see the following two news stories of the past decade, although like examples abound today all around the world: Signs of Apostasy Abound and Randy Engel on Catholic Relief Services.)

1973: The fissures in the American conciliar hierarchy opened up wider than the Grand Canyon immediately following the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, as the “peace and justice” crowd reaffirmed Catholics in public life to take Cushing’s “personally opposed” position and while the “conservatives” were divided amongst themselves between incrementalists and absolutists in their efforts to reverse those Court decisions and to restore full legal protection to the innocent preborn without exception. The incrementalists advocated doing what they deemed subjectively to be “possible” while the absolutists sought to evangelize in behalf of a firm no exceptions policy that had to be reflected in public law, although neither set of divided “pro-life” Catholics in the conciliar structures at time understood that the very fact the surgical assassination of the innocent preborn was even up for debate was the result of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and their own false church’s “official reconciliation” with the foundational anti-Incarnational principles of the modern civil state.

One of the most maddening phrases around is the "pro-life" slogan, which is meant to convey that someone is opposed to the surgical killing of innocent babies in their mothers' wombs. The slogan, however, is precisely that, a slogan. As I have tried to communicate endlessly in the past two decades or more since refusing to apply the slogan to careerist politicians of the naturalist "right" in the organized crime family of naturalism that is the Republican Party, the phrase "pro-life" is misused in the realm of partisan politics and public discourse, usually by leaders or representatives of "establishment" "pro-life" organizations such as the National Not So-Right-to-Life Committee and its state affiliates, who actually support the chemical assassination of children in all instances and who support the surgical slicing and dicing of children in what they call the "hard cases."

The National Not-So-Right-Life Committee itself, being a completely secular organization, although it grew out of the work Monsignor James T. McHugh, that notorious protege of a notorious criminal against the innocence and purity of children, Mary Calderone, who helped to devise and promote the rot of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandment (see Origins of Classroom Instruction in Matters of Purity in Catholic Schools and  The McHugh Chronicles), at the Family Life Bureau of the so-called United States Catholic Conference in the late-1960s, takes no stand against contraception and actually supports the nonexistent "right" of mothers to kill their innocent preborn children in the event that their own lives are said to be in jeopardy from carrying their babies to birth. What is thus considered to be the "leader" of the "pro-life" movement in the United States of America actually supports direct, intentional surgical abortion in cases where it is alleged that a mother's life is in jeopardy as a matter of principle, not as a matter of what they would consider to be legislative expediency.

Indeed, the American “bishops” have long spoken empty words about the surgical killing of the innocent preborn. They have also indemnified and emboldened every Catholic pro-abortion politician and office-holder by refusing to excommunicate them from their non-Catholic sect that poses as the Catholic Church, starting with how the likes of two formerly “pro-life” Catholic United States Senators, Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware), were able to switch their positions after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, without having been warned and then excommunicated. The “bishops” worried about a backlash, although the truth is that they emboldened the forces of bodily death in the United States of America just as surely as the “Second” Vatican Council turned them into active agents of spiritual death by the promotion of propositions condemned by our true popes and by staging a liturgical abomination that has convinced most baptized Catholics that they might as well belong to the world rather than bother to go to the community fellowship meeting posing as a the “Eucharistic celebration.”

Even the conciliar “bishops’” weak-kneed efforts to oppose surgical baby-killing was based upon the false premise of the "life of the mother exception” that they have embraced as an integral, indispensable part of every legislative proposal introduced in Congress without even attempting to pressure supposedly pro-life members of various legislatures, including those in both houses of the Congress of the United States of America, believing that doing so will help to convince "reasonable" people that they and the politicians they support are not "radicals" or "extremists," that such concessions are "necessary" to make in the realm prudence.

This is, of course, the exact same moral casuistry that gave us "natural family planning" and explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that has corrupted what passes for Catholic moral theology in so many places that high level officials in the Vatican itself can speak of "therapeutic" abortions as being within the moral law (see So Long to the Fifth Commandment and Rotten To The Very Roots).

Some tried very hard to warn the "bishops" as early as the first years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, that the acceptance of "exceptions" would lead to the further institutionalization of baby-killing under the cover of the civil law in the mistaken belief that some killings would be prevented.

One of those who did so was Mrs. Randy Engel, the Director of the U.S. Coalition for Life, who testified in 1974. before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the United States Senate Committee for the Judiciary. Mrs. Engel saw things with prophetic clarity: there could never be any compromise with the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, and for this, of course, she has been hated by the "pro-life establishment" ever since:

I am Randy Engel, National Director of the United States Coalition for Life, an international research center and clearing- house specializing in domestic federal anti-life programs within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Agency for International Development. Thank you for your invitation to appear before the sub-committee today in order that I may express the views of the Coalition, its distinguished national and international board of advisors, some of whom have already testified at earlier Senate hearings on the Human Life Amendment, and that of thousands of grassroots people whom we have had the honor of serving on a day to day basis since the Coalition opened its offices almost two years ago. 

Mr. Chairman, about four months ago, the Coalition filed with your office, the transcript of a speech made by Louise Tyrer, M.D., Family Planning Division of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, before the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians' 12th Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee on Tuesday, April 16, 1974, on the status of the various Human Life Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. (Attachment A) According to Dr. Tyrer' s assessment of the Congressional scene there are two basic approaches. One - a "state's rights" approach which would return the power of lawmaking in the area of abortion to the individual States. The second - which would guarantee the full protection of the law to the unborn child from the moment of fertilization. The "State's rights" approach she states, and correctly so, is unacceptable to the majority of Pro-Life people yet very attractive to the legislators because "it sought of takes the ones off their backs from making any decisions."

The remainder of her talk stresses the necessity of stalling the hearings of this sub-committee by having Planned Parenthood physicians flood the sub-committee with requests to testify. This, Dr. Tyrer suggests would be politically expedient and politically NECESSARY for you Mr. Chairman, in order to keep the amendments bottled up in sub-committee until you had gone through the election process in the Fall. Now, Mr. Chairman, I have no desire to embarrass you in any manner. Not because I fell Dr. Tyrer was incorrect in her judgment of the political realities of the Senate and House Committees dealing with the abortion issue or her assessment that stalling these subcommittee hearings by dragging them out month by month would be politically expedient for you and others who might prefer not to have a roll call vote on a Human Life Amendment before election time. But rather, because with few exceptions, almost every Senator and Representative in Congress would like nothing better than to get rid of the abortion issue tomorrow, if not before, or at least dump the matter back into the lap of the State legislatures.

This is not our affair - they say.

The massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent unborn children is not a federal matter - they say.

We are not responsible for the Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973 which is now the law of the land - they say.

Well, I am here Mr. Chairman to tell you and every other Senator and Congressman that like it or not - Abortion IS your affair. That the massive slaughter of unborn children in this country IS a proper matter of federal concern. Moreover that this Congress IS directly responsible for the almost inevitable Supreme Court decision which stripped unborn children of their inalienable right to life. Congress IS responsible because over the last ten years it has permitted an anti-life philosophy and anti-life programs and policies to become matters of NATIONAL POLICY, promoted and supported by tax dollars.

It is the Federal Government - at all levels - Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches - which has posed the greatest threat to unborn children in recent years. The Executive Branch because it has failed to correct the anti-life abuses primarily within the bureaucracies of HEW and AID and has permitted key anti-life leaders such as Dr. Louis Hellman the Office of Population Affairs and Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, Director Population Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Affairs [and the man who coined the phrase "Natural Family Planning"] to remain in office. The Legislative Branch, because it has authorized legislation and appropriated funds year after year to initiate, promote and sustain anti-life programs in virtually every conceivable federal bureaucracy including the Office of Economic Opportunity, Office of Environmental Education, Office of Education, Department of Defense Office of Population Affairs (HEW), National Institutes of Health, Agriculture Department, Food and Drug Administration, Public Health Service Social Security, MedicAID, Aid to Dependent Children, U.S. Information Agency Population Office(AID). Contraceptive Research Branch (NIH) Federal Communication Commission).

As I said the Supreme Court abortion decision was an inevitable one. All the cliches of that decision - terms like "unwanted children", "a woman's right to control her own body.", the population explosion stem from the Sangerite ethic. It represented the culmination of more than half a century of dedication and tireless efforts by the Sangerites and the Malthusians to convince the American public of the righteousness of the CAUSE and to elevate the SANGERITE-MALTHUSIAN philosophy to that of Public Policy .

This final achievement is portrayed quite candidly in this book Breeding Ourselves to Death - the Story of the Hugh Moore Fund by abortion leader Lawrence Lader. In the section on gaining Congressional Support, former N.Y. Senator Kenneth Keating, then newly appointed National Director of the Population Crisis Committee tells about eating in the Senate Dining Room where he could spread the gospel of family planning among old friends, particularly among the Republican leadership. This fight to influence by other population control leaders in Congress goes on today.

But what does all this have to do with this subcommittee hearing on the Human Life Amendment? Simply this:

For more than a year the Hogan-Helms Human Life Amendment and similar bills have been buried in the House, where Representative Don Edwards has refused to hold hearings, and in the Senate - hearings are dragged out month after month to get Senators and Representatives through the November watershed without a floor vote on such as the HLA.

Obviously there is no sense of urgency about the matter, with the exception of a handful of dedicated men, the Congress doesn't appear to be the least concerned that its inaction will result in the death of hundreds of thousands of unborn children. The fact that millions of federal tax dollars are used to promote a myriad of anti-life schemes- from direct abortion payments (Medicaid-ADC; to the research development and promoting of new abortion techniques to the indoctrination of young children of an anti-life ethic appears to raise no particular concern at family planning authorization or appropriation hearings.

Equally obvious is the fact that under these conditions we will have a difficult time getting a Human Life Amendment passed by both Houses of Congress and on its way to the states for ratification. My purpose here today is to point out the current commitment of the Federal Government including this Congress to the anti-life establishment, and briefly how such a commitment was obtained and at what price.

Mr. Chairman, this Congress OWES its vigorous support for a Human Life Amendment which would protect Human Life from conception until natural death to the American people. The Coalition would agree that the Hogan-Helms Amendment or the newer Roncallo Amendment would provide such protection.

Apart from the merit of these amendments themselves, we feel that Congress should recognize the fact that through its indifference, ignorance and its inability to withstand the pressures of the anti-life movement, it must bear its share of guilt for the 1973 Abortion decision, and its share of responsibility in seeing a Human Life Amendment is passed to protect the unborn child.

Your responsibility, Mr. Chairman, in this matter is very plain. As for our part, I believe the Coalition and the Pro-Life Movement in the U. S. will continue to fight at all levels - including the Halls of Congress and yes, even in Senate dining rooms - to educate and to promote an ideal that is as revolutionary in our day as the Sangerite ideal was fifty years ago. That ideal is based on the sanctity and innate goodness of all human life. (Full text of "Abortion : hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.)

Even though the efforts made by Mrs. Engel and others, including the efforts of the indefatigable late United States Representative Angelo Roncallo (R-Massapequa, New York), were valiant, we can see now with perfect hindsight that which was not understood by very many at the time: that these noble efforts were doomed to failure precisely because the "pro-life establishment," headed by the National Not-So-Right to Life Committee, rallied around the constitutional amendment that had been proposed by United States Senator James Buckley (C-New York; the "c" reflects Buckley's election in a three-way race in 1970 as the candidate of the Conservative Party of the State of New York) that permitted the "life of the mother" exception. Only four American bishops, Timothy Cardinal Manning of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, John Cardinal Krol of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Humberto Medeiros of the Archdiocese of Boston and John Cardinal Cody of the Archdiocese of Chicago testified against the Buckley Amendment on the grounds that the civil law could never permit the direct taking of a single, solitary innocent human life from the first moment of conception through all subsequent stages until natural death. These cardinals, however, although part of the conciliar church by that time, were opposed by the entire "pro-life" establishment whose machinations were being orchestrated, at least to a very large extent, by the then Monsignor James Timothy McHugh of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. McHugh did not have a qualm of conscience whatsoever about the "life of the mother exception" as a matter of legislative expediency or as a core moral principle of the National Right to Life Committee his work at the then named Family Life Bureau of the United States Catholic Conference helped to launch.

No, the well-intentioned efforts of Mrs. Engel and her associates were doomed from the start as, unbeknownst to them, a false church had arisen filled with men who had lost the Catholic Faith, men who had surrendered to the prevailing ethos of Judeo-Masonry, a surrender that has devastated the world in which we live and that must be considered nothing other than one of the worst chastisements of our time for neither Popes Pius XI or XII consecrating Russia collegially to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops. Treasonous priests/presbyters and their leftist apparatchiks and toadies worked against efforts to provide full constitutional protection. And this is what must happen when men who claim to be Catholic make their "reconciliations" with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity.

Just as Democrats and Republicans agree on the basic naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of the American founding, disagreeing on the specifics as to the conduct of public policy in light of those principles, so is it the case that "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics accept those same false principles as they diverge on the specifics of public policy according to the political "camp" which they believe represents the best means of achieving various goals. Both "liberal" and "conservatives" Catholics are as one in rejecting these simple truths of the Catholic Faith as binding upon their consciences and that they apply to the concrete circumstances to be found in the United States of America, believing that their naturalistic or non-denominational ideas and plans and strategies can "win the day" for their respective causes:

. . 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.)

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.)

No one in the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s officialdom believes a word of these statements of Catholic truth that had been made by Pope Saint Pius X. Instead, the American “bishops” viewed conciliarism as an advantage that could be used to retard evils they refused to recognize were the result of logical consequences of the Protestant Revolution and thus proceeded apace with an incrementalist approach that divided the “pro-life” movement beyond repair.

1974: Realizing that they would never be sanctioned by anyone what they believed to be the Catholic hierarchy in the United States of America, one Catholic in public life after another, including those who had once been “pro-life,” began to mouth the “personally opposed” slogan that had been developed in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, a decade earlier and then endorsed by Richard Cushing himself a year after that.

As I have noted on this site in the past, the late Mario Matthew Cuomo said in a debate held in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1974. among the three individuals vying for the Democrat Party lieutenant governorship nomination (State Assemblyman Anthony Olivieri and State Senator Mary Anne Krupsak were Cuomo's opponents), that he would have voted against the 1970 bill that decriminalized surgical baby-killing in the first trimester of life in the State of New York if he had been a member of the New York State Legislature at that time. And it was the case that Cuomo, then an attorney with an office on Court Street in Brooklyn, New York, had been called upon by the Diocese of Brooklyn to speak against abortion to various parish organizations and other groups as its official representative.

Defeated in his bid to be the Democrat Party lieutenant governor nominee in 1974, Cuomo learned to parrot the line that had been mastered by his political mentor, then United States Representative Hugh Leo Carey, who was elected as Governor of the State of New York in 1974 and served two terms, that he was "personally opposed to abortion, but would never impose" his "morality upon others." Cuomo, was appointed by Carey to be the Secretary of State of the State of New York in January of 1975, used this line repeatedly when he ran unsuccessfully for the Democrat Party nomination for the Mayoralty of the City of New York in 1977 and when he ran in the general election that year as the nominee of the Liberal Party of the State of New York against the pro-abortion Democrat nominee, then United States Representative Edward Irving Koch, and the Republican Party nominee, the pro-abortion New York State Senator Roy Goodman, and the Conservative Party nominee, radio talk show host Barry Farber.

Defeated by Koch in the general election for Mayor of the City of New York in 1977, Cuomo won the Democrat Party nomination for lieutenant governor in 1978 (then Lieutenant Governor Krupsak, also a pro-abortion Catholic, challenged her pro-abortion Catholic Governor, Hugh Carey, unsuccessfully in a primary that year), and was Carey's heir apparent in 1982 when the latter chose not to seek a third term. Cuomo turned the tables on his old adversary Koch, defeating him in hard fought primary in 1982 for the Democrat Party's gubernatorial nomination, going on to defeat Rite Aid magnate Lew Lehrman, the nominee of the Republican and Conservative parties, and the Right to Life Party nominee, Robert Bohnar. Cuomo loudly defended "abortion rights" during that 1982 general election campaign and was known to telephone priests in various conciliar parishes if he got wind of any criticism uttered about him from pulpits during sermons.

Cuomo's support for "abortion rights" came to the national forefront in 1984 after the conciliar "bishop" of Scranton, John Joseph O'Connor, was appointed to be the conciliar "archbishop" of New York. Even before his "installation" at Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Monday, March 19, 1984, O'Connor told longtime WNBC-TV newsman Gabe Pressman that he, O'Connor, "was sick and tired" of politicians who say that they are "personally opposed" to abortion while supporting a nonexistent "right" of a woman to choose to kill her preborn baby. This inflamed Cuomo, who has quite a temper, who started a war of words with the new "archbishop." Things escalated rather rapidly, and O'Connor refused to recognize Cuomo's presence at his installation "Mass" on March 19, 1984, while recognizing Mayor Koch of the City of New York, the Mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, William Wilson. Cuomo was livid. I know. I saw him process out of Saint Patrick's Cathedral as he walked right in front of where I was sitting in the right transept. He was not a happy camper.

Cuomo sought to provide "intellectual muscle" to the "I'm personally opposed to abortion" position in the address that he gave at the behest of Hartford's Mark of Apostasy, Father Richard P. McBrien, then the Chairman of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, on Thursday, September 13, 1984:

The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose.

We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.

This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experience in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a persuasive and dominant concern. . . .

As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created. We thought church doctrine was clear on this. Life or fetal life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine justices of the Supreme Court and my neighbor disagree with me. A fetus is different from an appendix or a set of tonsils. At the very least, even if the argument is made by some scientists or some theologians that in the early stages of fetal development we can’t discern human life, the full potential of human life is indisputably there. That—to my less subtle mind—by itself should demand respect, caution, indeed . . . reverence.

But not everyone in our society agrees.

And those who don’t—those who endorse legalized abortions—aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards. In many cases, the proponents of legal abortion are the very people who have worked with Catholics to realize the goals of social justice set out in papal encyclicals: the American Lutheran Church, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, B’nai B’rith Women, the Women of the Episcopal Church. There are just a few of the religious organizations that don’t share the church’s position on abortion.

Certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics, however sincere or severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers, no pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the church from criticism.

But if the breadth, intensity, and sincerity of opposition to church teaching shouldn’t be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can’t help but determine our ability—our realistic, political ability—to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don’t need it but for the believers who reject it.

And it is here, in our attempt to find a political answer to abortion—an answer beyond our private observance of Catholic morality— that we encounter controversy within and without the church over how and in what degree to press the case that our morality should be everybody else’s, and to what effect.

I repeat, there is no church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism. There is neither an encyclical nor a catechism that spells out a political strategy for achieving legislative goals.

And so the Catholic trying to make moral and prudent judgments in the political realm must discern which, if any, of the actions one could take would be best.  (American Rhetoric: Mario Cuomo --"Religious Belief and Public Morality) 

Apart from the disregard of the facts of biology that young attorney Mario Matthew Cuomo used to provide to groups before which he spoke as a representative of the Diocese of Brooklyn in the 1960s, Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo--Mario Pilate/Pontius Cuomo, an admirer of the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., had the audacity to refer to "our" morality when referring to the immutable and eternally binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law that proscribe the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being. God's laws apply to everyone without regard to whether anyone accepts them. Civil law must be conformed to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in all that pertains to the good of souls, and Catholics have the positive moral obligation to work in behalf of such a conformity. Catholics are not permitted to privately hold one thing while publicly speaking and acting in a contradictory manner.

Pope Leo XIII made this abundantly clear in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885: 

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Along with other Catholic pro-aborts in public life, Cuomo supported the legal "right" of mothers to support the execution of their babies under cover of law, attempting to cover himself in a mantra of not seeking to "impose" "his" morality upon others, while doing precisely that when it came to the issue of capital punishment. Cuomo said that it was his moral duty as a Catholic to oppose capital punishment even though a majority of the citizens of the State of New York desired its restoration. What hubris. What incredible arrogance to consign the innocent preborn to cruel, merciless deaths under cover of law while criminals convicted of heinous crimes after the exhausting of the levers of due process of law are considered to be above the ultimate punishment for their crimes.

1977-1983: The first alleged success of the pragmatists in the pro-life movement came in 1977 when Representative Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) was able to attach an amendment to the funding of Medicaid that prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions for poor women except in cases where a mother's life was said to be endangered. The legislation containing the Hyde Amendment, which was "liberalized" in 1993 to include the rape and incest exceptions, was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. Far from being a success, however, the Hyde Amendment conceded the false idea that innocent human beings could be put to death under cover of law and that American taxpayers could licitly pay for their savage murders. The flawed nature of the single exception contained in the original Hyde Amendment was the basis of its eventual, if not inevitable, expansion sixteen years later.

The principal legislative effort during the administration of President Ronald Reagan centered on efforts to pass a constitutional amendment that was introduced by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). The Hatch Amendment would have reversed Roe v. Wade by establishing the principle that the right to permit or restrict abortion was held solely by the state legislatures, not by Federal or state courts. This fatally flawed piece of legislation conceded that a human institution, a state legislature, had the authority to permit something that was proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. If it had been approved by a two-thirds majority in Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the nation's state legislatures, the Hatch Amendment would have enshrined abortion as matter of legal right whose exact parameters were subject to the deliberation of state legislators. This morally repugnant legislative initiative was "hatched" by the then Monsignor James T. McHugh of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and endorsed very strongly by the full body of American bishops, save for Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Baton Rouge, and the National Right to Life Committee, which lobbied very hard for its passage in Congress.

The failure of the Hatch Amendment led to the pragmatists to adopt "incrementalism" as their buzzword. As legislative efforts to reverse Roe v. Wade had proved unsuccessful, the only thing that could be done was to limit abortion around the margins. Thus, such initiatives as "parental consent" legislation at the state level became the focus of the National Right to Life Committee and its state affiliate organizations. Again, this was and remains a morally flawed effort. No one has the right to give his consent to his daughter to murder his grandchild inside of her womb. The legal "experts" at the National Right to Life Committee have contended ad nauseam that parental consent laws have been crafted so as to pass the scrutiny of constitutional challenges in Federal and state courts. Well, not only are these laws morally flawed of their nature, they include a judicial bypass provision whereby a minor woman can get a judge's order to kill her child without the "consent" or her parents. Planned Parenthood and related organizations are more than willing to fill out the boilerplate forms necessary to secure the judicial bypass for one of their "clients."'

1983: Meanwhile, the social justice crowd at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference were busy opposing President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s nuclear arms modernization and buildup, the intervention of the United States of America against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the placement of Pershing II Cruise Missiles in Europe, and Reagan’s economic policies.

Although drafted principally by minions in the USCC with the assistance of “social justice” “bishops, the NCCB issued its Challenge of Peace “pastoral letter” in 1983 as a rebuke to Reagan’s defense policies and then “Economic Justice for All” in 1986 to express opposition to the president’s “supply side” economics that had revived the American economy from the economic doldrums into which it  had fallen under President James Earl “The Appeaser” Carter, Jr.

Not to be outdone, Joseph “Cardinal” Bernardin, who was a true bishop, developed his “consistent ethic of life” (seamless garment) to provide a specious justification for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion candidates for public office if those candidates and/or officeholders were in favor of statist programs of economic redistributionism based upon confiscatory taxes and massive regulation of private property, opposed to the death penalty and opposed to Reagan’s foreign and defense policies. As will be seen below, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has expanded the scope of the “consistent ethic of life” to include opposition to “global warming” and support for illegal immigration.

It was no accident that Bernardin gave his address, “A Consistent Ethic of Life,” at Fordham University in the Borough of the Bronx, New York, on December 6, 1983, at a time when the aforementioned Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo was being discussed as a possible Democratic Party presidential candidate. Bernardin desired to give Catholic voters a moral “green light” to vote for Cuomo or some other Catholic on a pro-abortion national ticket. That “someone else” turned out to be Geraldine Anne Ferraro-Zaccaro in 1984.

Here is part of what Bernardin said thirty-seven years ago:

The substance of a Catholic position on a consistent ethic of life is rooted in a religious vision. But the citizenry of the United States is radically pluralistic in moral and religious conviction. So we face the challenge of stating our case, which is shaped in terms of our faith and our religious convictions, in non-religious terms which others of different faith convictions might find morally persuasive. . . . As we seek to shape and share the vision of a consistent ethic of life, I suggest a style governed by the following rule: We should maintain and clearly communicate our religious convictions but also maintain our civil courtesy. We should be vigorous in stating a case and attentive in hearing another's case; we should test everyone's logic but not question his or her motives. ("A Consistent Ethic of Life: An American-Catholic Dialogue".).

To what must a Catholic listen on the issue of the taking of innocent human life? Those who support the chemical and/or surgical taking of innocent human life in the womb do not have a "case." They have lies. Such people, if they are non-Catholics, must be converted to the Catholic Faith. Those who are Catholics must be told that they excommunicate themselves from the Church's maternal bosom by supporting willful murder, one the four crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

The Bernardin approach to "life issues" contrasts, of course, very sharply with that of the true popes of the Catholic Church, who taught clearly and unequivocally that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. We do not speak in "non-religious" terms. We make proper Catholic distinctions when speaking about moral issues, remembering always to speak as Catholics at all times without ever dissenting from anything contained within the Deposit of Faith at any time for any reason, something that Pope Leo XIII made clear Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

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

The very reason that contraception and abortion are part of our culture and protected by civil law is because the Protestant Revolution overthrew the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century in many parts of Europe and the revolutions and movements inspired by the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry finished the job in the rest while creating entirely new nations elsewhere, such as in the United States of America, whose people were to celebrate religious "diversity" as a "protection" against tyranny and a "guarantee" of individual liberties rather than as the means by which the devil can propagate and then institutionalize Every Error Imaginable.

1989-1993, the Emergence of Lee Atwater’s Big Tent: Partisans of President George Herbert Walker Bush, such as the man who succeeded Lee Atwater as Chairman of the Republican National Committee following Atwater’s death, Richard Bond, blamed Bush’s defeat on the pro-life plank in the Republican party platform, to say nothing of the “intolerant” speech given by Patrick Joseph Buchanan at the party’s national nominating convention in Houston, Texas, in 1992. Thus, completely pro-abortion candidates were embraced by the Republican Party around the nation (Christine Todd Whitman for Governor of New Jersey in 1993; Rudolph Giuliani for Mayor of the City of New York in 1993; Richard Riordan for Mayor of the City of Los Angeles in 1994; George Pataki for Governor of the State of New York in 1994; Tom Ridge for Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1994; Susan Collins for U.S. Senator from Maine in 1996; Olympia Snowe for U.S. Senator from Maine in 1994; Susan Molinari and Rick Lazio for seats in the House of Representatives in the 1990s, and on and on and on). These completely pro-abortion Republican candidates were enabled at almost every turn by the National Right to Life Committee’s political action committee and the political action committees of its state affiliates. Candidates of conscience were condemned as being tools of the pro-aborts to keep “good” Republicans out of office. Those attempting to keep the life issue alive in the context of electoral politics were denounced as unrealistic dreamers who did not live in the real world and who did not want to accept the imperfections of American party politics. In essence a Republican pro-abort was better than a Democrat pro-abort.

Indeed, the betrayal of the pro-life cause within the ranks of the leadership of the Republican Party was quite vast as early as 1990. It was in that year that Herbert London, a professor of public administration at New York University, sought the Republican Party nomination for Governor of the State of New York. As an observant Jew, London did make the life of the mother exception. However, his opposition to abortion on demand even with that immoral and unnecessary exception was thought to be a political liability by then Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato. According to what London told me in 1998 when I was challenging D’Amato for the Senatorial nomination of the New York State Right to Life Party, D’Amato told him the following: “Herb, change your position from pro-life to pro-choice and you’ll be this party’s nominee for governor.”

D’Amato denies such a conversation took place. London stands by his account, which I believe is true. Rejecting London, the Republican Party chose a nonentity pro-abort by the name of Pierre Rinfret, who barely finished second in the statewide voting in November of 1990, just 22,000 votes ahead of London, who received the nomination of the Conservative Party. Mario Cuomo got a free pass back to a third term as Governor of New York. My own vote that year, four years after I had run for Lieutenant Governor on the Right to Life Party line with Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon, went for the Right to Life Party nominee.

Determined not to take any chances with the life issue in 1994, D’Amato groomed a little known State Senator, George Pataki, who had once been rhetorically “pro-life,” and presented him as the man who could finally get Cuomo out of the governor’s mansion in Albany, New York. Many pro-life activists took leave of their senses at this time, convincing themselves that Pataki just “had” to say he was “pro-choice” in order to beat Cuomo. I posed the following question to these folks when I spoke with them: Why should I vote for a liar who is afraid to defend the truth? Of course, I also raised what turned out to be the real truth of the matter: what if Pataki really has changed what little mind he possesses? What if he really is pro-abortion? Doesn’t that matter to you. Sadly, it did not. And Pataki, who has governed in such a way as to make Cuomo’s twelve years look like an exercise in fiscal conservatism, has used the pulpit provided him by the governorship of New York to support abortion and contraception and sodomy, marching proudly in the so-called “Gay Pride Parade” down Fifth Avenue each year. Amazingly, a man who had run for Mayor on the Conservative and Right to Life Party lines against Rudolph Giuliani and David Dinkins in 1993, George Marlin, was one of the first to jump on the Pataki bandwagon, contradicting the very rationale for his own candidacy against Giuliani by doing so. And it should not be overlooked that Pataki, along with D’Amato, were among the fiercest demagogues smearing Patrick Joseph Buchanan with the charge of anti-Semitism when he ran for President in 1996.

As all of this was going on within the Republican Party at the state and local levels, Republican Senators enabled Bill Clinton’s anti-life policies at almost every turn between in 1993 and 1994. Apart from voting for the chemical abortion of babies by means of “family planning programs” (something that was in force during the Reagan and Bush I years), all but three Republican Senators (Bob Smith, Jesse Helms, Don Nickles) voted to confirm the notorious pro-abort, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to the United States Supreme Court in 1993. Some people told me at the time that Republicans had to vote for Ginsburg lest they be accused of being opposed to a Jewish woman! Never mind babies. Never mind truth. No, human respect and political expediency mattered more than anything else. It came as no surprise, therefore, that all but eight Republican Senators voted to confirm the pro-abortion Stephen Breyer in 1994. Almost all of Clinton’s 180 pro-abortion nominees to the Federal judiciary between 1993 and 1996 were confirmed by so-called “pro-life” Republican Senators.

Furthermore, then Senate Minority Leader Robert Joseph Dole told CSPAN in January of 1993 that he proudly supported Clinton’s Executive Order to permit fetal tissue experimentation, something that he voted to support on the floor of the Senate one month later (along with the “pro-life” junior Senator from New York, Alfonse M. D’Amato). The so-called Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Bill (FACE) passed with the overwhelming support of allegedly “prolife” Republicans in both houses of Congress in 1994. And Republicans did nothing to try to reverse Clinton’s Executive Order authorize the United States Food and Drug Administration to conduct tests on the human pesticide, RU-486.

Indeed, Republicans were silent in 1995, when they actually controlled both houses of Congress, as a report in The New York Times indicated that women were getting pregnant deliberately in order to participate in the tests of the French abortion pill, but their focus groups had latched onto what was thought to be a winning “wedge” issue: crushed skull (partial birth) abortion.

As I have written over and over again since 1995 when a bill, twice vetoed by then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, sought to conditionally partial-birth abortions was introduced in 1995, the effort to focus on one method of killing in the latter stages of pregnancy was another morally flawed effort that did nothing to save lives as it lowered the bar on truth another notch or two by reducing the then "gold standard" of "pro-life" politics to be conditional opposition to the execution of children by partially extracting them from their mother's wombs so that their heads can be cut open with scissors.

Loads upon loads of people were howling at me from 1995 through 2007 when I pointed out time and time again that the legislation to partially ban partial-birth abortion, thrice vetoed by President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and then signed into law by President George Walker Bush in 2003 before being sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart, April 18, 2007, was immoral on its face in that it permitted a "life of the mother" exception and that it made it appear as though killing a baby in the later stages of pregnancy was a greater crime morally than doing so in the earlier stages, which is simply not so.

This is what I wrote at the time:

1. The direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being is equally morally heinous no matter the age at which the human being is killed. That is, the killing of six week old child in his mother's womb is the same crime morally as the direct, intentional killing of a ninety year old man.

2. The particular method by which a human being is killed does not make the act of killing any more immoral than the use of another method, admitting that it is permissible in the administration of civil justice for legislators and jurists to take into consideration such methods when legislating and meting out punishments for those adjudged guilty after due process of law of having committed acts that of their nature are in opposition to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment.

3. Thus it is that the use of the baby-killing method invented by a Dr. Martin Haskell, known "medically" as "intact dilation and extraction," to provide a means of killing a baby that was less "invasive" and thus allegedly less is no more morally heinous than the killing of an innocent preborn baby by means a suction vacuum machine that is twenty-nine times more powerful than the home vacuum cleaner.

4. The use of "intact dilation and extraction" is no more morally heinous than the killing of an innocent preborn baby by means of the use of various injections, including that of potassium chloride, into the baby so as to kill it in the womb before it is passed out stillborn or taken out by means of a Caesarian section.

5. The use of "intact dilation and extraction" is no more morally heinous the the killing of an innocent preborn baby by means of the use of what is known as the "hysterotomy," a procedure by which a preborn baby is killed by the use of a procedure similar to a Caesarian section, except that the child's neck is twisted in the womb before it is removed. (The hysterotomy was made famous in the case of Dr. Kenneth Edelin.)

6. The use of "intact dilation and extraction" is no more morally heinous than the "dilation and evacuation" method of killing a baby by means of carving up a baby in the uterus and then extracting his remains with forceps.

7. Those, including some conciliar bishops, have said that partial birth abortion is infanticide have missed the point entirely: each and every abortion kills a living baby deader than dead. Each abortion, whether chemically induced or surgically performed, is infanticide. (See Every Abortion Kills a Baby Dead).

8. The Partial Birth Abortion bill that is now the law of the land contains an immoral "life of the mother" exception, meaning that this procedure of killing a baby will still be used. And it will be used not only in cases where it is alleged that a mother's life is "endangered." Do we really think that those who kill for a living are going to be scrupulously honest about observing the exact conditions of the "life of the mother" exception?

9. Baby-killers will simply resort to the dilation and evacuation means of killing children if they cannot justify the use of partial birth abortion, meaning, as I have been contended since 1995, that zero babies will be saved by the law and by yesterday's decision in Gonzales v. Carhart. Indeed, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy went to great lengths to remind those who challenged the law that the other procedures, which he described in great detail, would remain perfectly legal. Justice Kennedy also explained that baby-killers who "accidentally" turned a dilation and evacuation killing of a child into an intact dilation and extraction (partial birth abortion) killing of a child would face no legal liability:

This reasoning, however, does not take account of the Act's intent requirements, which preclude liability from attaching to an accidental intact D&E. If a doctor's intent at the outset is to perform a D&E in which the fetus would not be delivered to either of the Act's anatomical landmarks, but the fetus nonetheless is delivered past one of those points, the requisite and prohibited scienter is not present. 18 U. S. C. §1531(b)(1)(A) (2000 ed., Supp. IV). When a doctor in that situation completes an abortion by performing an intact D&E, the doctor does not violate the Act. It is true that intent to cause a result may sometimes be inferred if a person "knows that that result is practically certain to follow from his conduct." 1 LaFave §5.2(a), at 341. Yet abortion doctors intending at the outset to perform a standard D&E procedure will not know that a prohibited abortion "is practically certain to follow from" their conduct. Ibid. A fetus is only delivered largely intact in a small fraction of the overall number of D&E abortions. Planned Parenthood, 320 F. Supp. 2d, at 965. (Gonzales v. Carhart)

10. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, baby-killers will still be able to kill babies in the later stages of pregnancy by the use of the saline solution abortion and the hysterotomy and the dilation and evacuation (and even an actual hysterectomy performed for reasons of killing a preborn child and to honor a woman's elective wishes to render herself sterile from that point forward). The belief that a "victory" was won yesterday is an illusion of the worst sort.

The whole of the "incrementalist" approach to "restoring" legal protection to the innocent preborn is based upon the lie that it is "necessary" to concede in civil law that there are some circumstances in which a baby can be directly targeted for execution. This lie is itself premised upon the false belief that baby-killers will be scrupulous in observing the "exceptions" that the incrementalists get enacted into law. As I noted consistently throughout the course of the last twenty-five years or so:

Do we really think that those who kill for a living are going to be scrupulously honest about observing the exact conditions of the "life of the mother" exception? 

In other words, those who believe at present that the "gold standard" of being "pro-life" in American politics today is opposition to Federal taxpayer funding of Planned Barrenhood while shifting that funding to "community health centers" that provide the same immoral "services" by dispensing abortifacient contraceptives have permitted themselves to be deceived very badly, yes, as badly as they were deceived during the administration of President George Walker Bush, who, if you recall, permitted Federal taxpayer funds to be used for research on "fetal stem cell lines" that had been "harvested" before 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 9, 2001. (See Appendix A for the full details of George Walker Bush’s fraudulent “pro-life” record that was enabled consistently by the so-called “National Right to Life Committee” and its political action committee’s website, Life News, not to be confused with Lifesite news. Appendix B contains the fraudulent “pro-life” record of Willard Mitt Romney, the “lesser evil” in 2012. Does anyone think that, after Romney has done to undermine the Trump administration in the past two years, this preening, self-righteous, sanctimonious, flip-flopping Mormon would have governed substantially differently than Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro or that the perpetual war hawk named John Sidney McCain III would have been anything other than another incarnation of George Herbert Walker Bush? Talk about realism. It is important to pay attention to what happens after elections and not be whipped up into a frenzy during them for those who choose to think that some kind of “good” is going to be done as sins that cry out to Heaven keep being promoted no matter which one of the organized crime families of the naturalist “left” controls the White House and each of the two houses of the Congress of the United States of America.)

The “pro-life” movement has consistently surrendered to the so-called “lesser evil” in the name of pragmatism without realizing that this approach has further institutionalized the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn to such an extent that it is now impossible, humanly speaking, to think that scores upon scores of millions of women who have killed their babies are going to accept any roll back of what they have been convinced is their “right” and as even most “pro-life” Americans, including most Catholics, no matter where they stand across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide in this time of apostasy and betrayal, believe in “exceptions” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment in the so-called “hard cases.” The blithe acceptance of the “lesser of two evils” anesthetizes people to the absolute good as they become satisfied that “all is well” with token efforts that are designed principally to burnish the credentials of politicians with the “base” without actually threatening the institutionalization of one moral evil after another, including sodomy and sodomite “marriage” at this time and, most likely, open pedophilia and polygamy, which goes by the euphemism of “polyamorous” now), at some point in the near future.

A Closed Tent on the Left, A Big Tent on the Right

One of the chief differences between the organized crime family of the naturalist "left," is that the partisans of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" make no compromises when it comes to the false principles that they support.

That is, unlike the members of the organized crime family of the naturalist "right,” the partisans of the false opposite of the naturalist "left" are not afraid to take firm, outspoken and consistent stands in support of one moral evil under cover of the civil law after another. Professional "leftists" do not permit themselves to be deterred in pursuit of evil by focus groups by taking positions on that many Republicans, including United States Senator Willard Mitt Romney (R? Michigan, Massachusetts, Utah), said in 2012 said were "divisive" (see Only So Much Tolerance In The Republican Big Tent and Herods To The Naturalist Right, Herods To The Naturalist Left). The lefties and pinkos and weirdos of the false opposite of the naturalist “left”, are loud and they are in the face of anyone who will listen to them, knowing full well that their system of indoctrination that includes America's concentration camps and the mass media (entertainment, news, advertising) have taken full advantage of the anti-Incarantional errors of Modernity that were let loose as a result of the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King to convince nearly half of the citizens of voting age of this country that they, the pro-death and pro-perversity advocates, are in the "mainstream" of American life while anyone and everyone who opposes them are "extremists."

Professional naturalists in the organized crime family of the naturalist "right" are petrified of any charge of extremism on "social issues" that would never be considered "open for debate" in a land whose citizens are duly submissive to the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the Catholic Church. Petrified. Truly petrified. This is why they will revert to form if President Donald John Trump loses his bid for reelection on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and blame the “social issues” for Trump’s loss.  

Not so with the leftists. They support unrestricted baby-killing on demand without any fear of offending "moderate" or "swing" voters. The support special "rights," including that of marriage itself, for those engaged in unnatural acts of perversion in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments knowing full well that popular support for this unspeakable abomination is growing every year and that it will only be a matter of time, if God does not intervene before then with a direct chastisement upon this nation for its promotion of sin under cover of the civil law and throughout the nooks and crannies of popular culture, before their hapless opponents in the organized crime family of the "right" drop all mention of "traditional marriage.”

Remember this as well: Donald John Trump made sure that his former Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and former Acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Allen Grennell, spoke about national security and the Russian collusion delusion at the Republican National Convention as though it is perfectly normal for a “married” sodomite to be accepted in public life. This is but a consequence of pluralism’s many divides that encourages those who oppose evil to accept small doses of it incrementally without noticing that they—and their country—have been overwhelmed by a plethora of evil in the process.’

Pope Leo XIII warned us about how the toleration of evil out of a legitimate concern for public comity winds up increasing the amount of evils that wind up being tolerated over the course of time:

These evils have become accepted, mainstreamed, institutionalized in law and heralded in popular “culture” because the more people get accustomed to the spread of evil incrementally out of the fear of its spreading more rapidly is the more that it becomes impossible to reverse their institutionalization as to fight evil with means merely human results in its triumph of the course of time.

Pope Leo XIII put the matter this way in Libertas Praestantissium, June 20, 1884:

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

And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless license of which We have spoken, they exceed all limits, and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty. And because the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, and the unerring teacher of morals, is forced utterly to reprobate and condemn tolerance of such an abandoned and criminal character, they calumniate her as being wanting in patience and gentleness, and thus fail to see that, in so doing, they impute to her as a fault what is in reality a matter for commendation. But, in spite of all this show of tolerance, it very often happens that, while they profess themselves ready to lavish liberty on all in the greatest profusion, they are utterly intolerant toward the Catholic Church, by refusing to allow her the liberty of being herself free. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)

This is not a matter of ethereal speculation having nothing to with the real lives of human beings. Not at all. The heresy of religious liberty, which is at the heart of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, devastates souls. The belief that those who belong to false religions have a "civil right" to propagate themselves and that their false beliefs can contribute to the betterment of society make it impossible to exclude those false religions from making their presence felt everywhere in society, especially in "educational" institutions, where the tender souls of the young become ready prey to false ideas that are propagandized by charismatic professors. This is true in the United States of America and elsewhere in the allegedly "free" world of "democratic republics.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not want us to spend our lives in endless agitation as needless debates about those things that are beyond debate as they are part of Divine Revelation and/or the Natural Law.

How can social order be established and maintained upon a welter of religious, philosophical, cultural, social, economic and moral errors in a land where most people are, objectively speaking, steeped in states of Mortal Sin that wound their ability to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus choose wisely in accordance with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law?

Regardless of what happens in 2020, Donald John Trump will not be on the ballot in 2024, and it is entirely possible that someone such as Richard Allen Grennell might be a vice presidential running mate for someone such as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley?

Jorge’s Sidin’ With Biden

This is all a diabolical trap from beginning to end, one that is made more diabolical by the simple fact that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is pulling out all the proverbial stops to help get rid of a man he despises, Donald John Trump, and to aid and abet the pro-abortion, pro-perversity “devout” Catholic named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and his virulent anti-Catholic running mate, Kamala Harris.

Consider the fact that the conciliar “bishop” of San Diego, California, Robert McElroy, openly equated the willful slaughter of the innocent preborn earlier this year:

SAN DIEGO, California, February 7, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The Bishop of San Diego has made the case that “climate change” could be considered “uniquely preeminent in Catholic social teaching” since the potential death toll due to man-made temperature rise is “larger” than abortion and “threatens the very future of humanity.”

In a speech titled “Conscience, Candidates and Discipleship in Voting,” which Bishop Robert J. McElroy delivered at the University of San Diego yesterday, the bishop said that Catholic voters need to discern where their priorities lie in the upcoming 2020 election. 

“Frequently in discussions of the application of Catholic social teaching to voting, the question is raised whether one issue has a unique priority among all of the other issues in its claim upon believers in the current election cycle. Some have categorized abortion in that way. Others, climate change. This question deserves deeper scrutiny,” he said. 

The bishop went on to list four points that he said should be considered when setting priorities.

Against the backdrop of these two monumental threats to human life, how can one evaluate the competing claims that either abortion or climate change should be uniquely preeminent in Catholic social teaching regarding the formation of Americans as citizens and believers? Four points should be considered.

  1. There is no mandate in universal Catholic social teaching that gives a categorical priority to either of these issues as uniquely determinative of the common good.
  2. The death toll from abortion is more immediate, but the long-term death toll from unchecked climate change is larger and threatens the very future of humanity.

Interjection Number One:

The earth was made by God for His greater honor and glory human beings and it will end in His time, not man’s.

Human life can never be equated with the “protection of the environment. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem human beings, not the earth.

The draconian predictions about deaths to be caused by “climate changed” have been made for over fifty years now. They are pure fantasy, examples of junk science by the anti-population crowd.

Back to Layman McElroy:

Both abortion and the environment are core life issues in Catholic teaching.

  1. The designation of either of these issues as the preeminent question in Catholic social teaching at this time in the United States will inevitably be hijacked by partisan forces to propose that Catholics have an overriding duty to vote for candidates that espouse that position. Recent electoral history shows this to be a certainty.

Interjection Number Two:

What hubris!

There is nothing “partisan” about defending the inviolability of innocent human life and seeking to restore full, unconditional legal protection to preborn children.

By “partisan,” of course, Robert McElroy meant that any discussion of abortion in the political realm to the exclusion of “protecting the environment” would work to the advantage of President Donald John Trump, making him a “partisan” of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” in the clothing of an equivocating wolf.

McElroy and to Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo that they are going to have to reckon with Christ the King at the time of their Particular Judgments for their attempting to equate the direct, willful murder of innocent human beings under the cover of the civil with the “potential” for what would be, at best, the indirect deaths of people caused by “climate change,” noting that it is the sins of men that worsen the physical state of the elements as God, the very Creator all things, visible and invisible, does indeed chastise sinners by storms, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, Tsunamis and like catastrophes. It the sin of men that cause many, although not all, of the problems in the order of creation, including those in the natural world, just as Original Sin rent asunder the perfect balance and ordering of the world as God Himself had created it. Mind you, this is merely to illustrate what might be the cause if the “science” warning us about “climate change” was accurate and without an ideological predilection, which it is not.

Moreover, our true popes have explained that, yes, the taking of innocent human life in the womb under the cover of the civil law bring the Avenger of innocent blood down on the heads of civil magistrates such as those who are constantly being provided cover by the conciliar revolutionaries:

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.)

Pope Pius XI noted that infants hidden in their mothers’ wombs hold first place when there is question of the defense of human life, and, of course, he warned public officials who support the daily slaughter of these innocents that “God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven.”

Pope Sixtus V wrote about abortion as follows while explaining that the horror of the babies’ souls being consigned to Limbo for all eternity was a direct consequence of their execution in their mothers’ wombs:

"For who would not detest a crime as execrable as this — a crime whose consequence is that not just bodies, but — still worse! — even souls, are, as it were, cast away? The soul of the unborn infant bears the imprint of God’s image! It is a soul for whose redemption Christ our Lord shed His precious blood, a soul capable of eternal blessedness and destined for the company of angels! Who, therefore, would not condemn and punish with the utmost severity the desecration committed by one who has excluded such a soul from the blessed vision of God? Such a one has done all he or she could possibly have done to prevent this soul from reaching the place prepared for it in heaven, and has deprived God of the service of this His own creature." (translation by Reverend Brian Harrison, Could Limbo Be 'Abolished'?)

No “priority” given the extinction of innocent human life in the womb?

Well, this is so in the world of Modernity and in Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s world of theological, liturgical, pastoral, and moral relativism that are but various aspects of Modernism itself.

Bergoglio, though, is not going to let the current American election cycle pass without trying to shape it in some way to his liking, although it should be noted in this regard that Catholics who are already committed to the full agenda of statism and moral evils that have been promoted for decades now by the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” do not need any persuading from “Pope Francis” to cast as many votes for the Biden/Harris ticket that they can get away with casting.

Nonetheless, however, the Argentine Apostate does want to shape the “narrative” as much as he can, and it is in this regard that note should be taken of his newest “encyclical letter, All Brothers, which he will go to Assisi, Italy, to sign as he continues to misappropriate the truth about Saint Francis of Assisi, who hated heresy and sought to convert Mohammedans to the Catholic Faith, on October 3, 2020, precisely thirty-one days before the American presidential election is to be held. One can be assured that, apart from being a document that builds on the Judeo-Masonic Abu Dhabi accord, Bergoglio will be emphasizing the need to serve the “poor,” the “migrant” and the “marginalized” in yet another exercise in abject naturalism:

Pope Francis will visit the Italian town of Assisi on 3 October to sign a new encyclical.

In a statement released on Saturday, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, said the encyclical is entitled Fratelli tutti or "All Brothers” on fraternity and social friendship.

The title, whose official English-language version has not yet been released, is a reference to the writings of St. Francis: "Let us all, brothers, consider the Good Shepherd who to save His sheep bore the suffering of the Cross" (Admonitions, 6, 1: FF155).

The Holy Father will arrive in Assisi in the afternoon where he will celebrate Holy Mass at the Tomb of St. Francis, which will be followed by the signing of the encyclical.

The visit will take place in private, without the participation of the faithful.

Assisi waiting with gratitude

In a statement, the Bishop of Assisi, Domenico Sorrentino, said the town awaits the Pope’s visit with "emotion and gratitude".

He went on to say, "While the world is suffering a pandemic that makes so many peoples lives difficult, and makes us feel for brothers in pain, we cannot but feel the need to become above all brothers in love."

"This gesture of Pope Francis," concluded the Bishop, "gives us new courage and strength to 'restart' in the name of the fraternity that unites us all."

Central to magisterium

The title of the Pope's new encyclical recalls a central theme of his magisterium. On the evening of his election to the papacy on 13 March 2013, Pope Francis first greeted the world with the word "brothers".

The theme of fraternity is also present in his constant embrace of migrants, epitomized in his pastoral visit to Lampedusa. 

His signing of the Document on Human Fraternity in Abu Dhabi in 2019 marks one more example of Pope Francis' dedication to promoting brotherly love. (Argentine Apostate to Sign New Enyclical on October 3 in Assisi.)

Fratelli tutti, whose very title is causing angst among the “gender inclusive” police (see New Encyclical Could be dearailed by its seemingly “sexist” title),  will be yet another step in the establishment of that One World Ecumenical Church that was prophesied as follows by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon? Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Everything about the counterfeit church of conciliarism is untrue, starting with its claim to be the Catholic Church when it is, of course, her counterfeit ape, a home of veritable figures of Antichrist, men who fear not to blaspheme God, reaffirm adherents of false religions in their falsehoods to the point of their very deaths, stage sacrilegious liturgical events that would have shocked even the pagans of yore, and propagate every manner of false doctrine that has been condemned solemnly by the authority of Holy Mother Church. Yet it is in this false church that the Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., a complete shill for the Red Chinese (see If Biden Wins, China Wins - and America Loses ), not only maintains his “good standing” but is held in the highest regard by “Pope Francis” and many of his “bishops” here in the United States of America (see  Abiding Biden And His Counsel and Silence In The Face Of Advancing Evils) and at the highest levels of the Vatican in its conciliar captivity because of his support for statism, globalism, “economic justice, the suppression of “reactionary” beliefs and for his plans to protect the “environment.” The fact that Biden supports the chemical and execution of the innocent preborn and is fully supportive of the homosexualist collective not only means nothing to the Argentine Apostate and his closest fellow fiends but  has enhanced his standing with them.

How can I make such an assertion?

Well, consider the recent words of “Archbishop” Vincenzo Paglia, the president of the so-called Pontifical Academy for Life that is so “inclusive” that has among its members several outright pro-aborts:

BOGOTA, Colombia — The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life said Catholic groups need to use mercy and compassion in anti-abortion campaigns as they seek to “transform” those who do not support the rights of unborn children.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia spoke at the second online meeting of the Pan-American Network for the Right to Life, when he was asked by audience members what the church could do to counter politicians who say that they are Catholic but support abortion and whether one solution would be excommunicating them.

The archbishop replied that while supporting abortion is certainly against Catholic doctrine, it is not enough to simply “condemn the sin.”

“The members of our Christian community must understand that our mandate is to save, more than to condemn,” the archbishop said. “Convert rather than exclude. And transform rather than eliminate.”

“As a church, we need to have a greater capacity to influence those who are in error,” said Paglia, who delivered a session on the lessons learned from St. John Paul II’s encyclical, “The Gospel of Life.”

The Pan-American Network for the Right to Life is a coalition of scholars, priests, church members and anti-abortion groups, created in 2018. Its members meet regularly to discuss ways in which pro-life policies can be supported in Latin America and the Caribbean. (Use Mercy to Transform Those Who Favor Abortion.)

This rubbish is straight from the files of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII’s opening address at the “Second” Vatican Council on Saturday, October 11, 1962, as the world was about to roiled over the Cuban Missile Crisis:

In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.

We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.

In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by men's own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfilment of God's superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church. . . . .

At the outset of the Second Vatican Council, it is evident, as always, that the truth of the Lord will remain forever. We see, in fact, as one age succeeds another, that the opinions of men follow one another and exclude each other. And often errors vanish as quickly as they arise, like fog before the sun The Church has always opposed these errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She consider that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations. (Angelo Roncalli/ John XXIII's Opening Address)

"But all such error is so manifestly contrary to rightness and goodness, and produces fatal results, that our contemporaries show every inclination to condemn it of their own accord"?

Behold the proliferation of error and confusion and ambiguity and uncertainty that has taken place as a result of this benign view of error that was expressed by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, who was under suspicion of heresy during the pontificate of Pope Saint Pius X.

This proliferation of error is so pronounced and so widespread in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that the average Catholic, noting, of course, exceptions here and there, has become so very accustomed to apostasy that he is incapable of recognizing that is a Mortal Sin, objectively speaking, for a Catholic to enter into a place of false worship and then to praise that place of diabolical rites as "sacred" and to praise the "values" held by the adherents of that false religion, and many Catholics today do not believe that there is anything wrong with contraception, abortion and perversity, no less to provide their electoral support to one pro-abort in public life after another.

Insofar as Paglia’s desiring not to condemn pro-aborts in public life, it should be remembered that this, too, is boilerplate conciliarspeak. One American “bishop” after another has spoken in this manner, although there are exceptions, including “Bishop” Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, who has said no Catholic can vote for a pro-abortion candidate. The results of the “nonjudgmental” approach taken by the self-serving conciliar “bishops,” mostly because they are afraid of losing their precious tax-exempt status that was a tool designed by United States Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas) to silence “pastors” in Texas who were opposed to his electoral career, speak for themselves:

How did over thirty years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York).

How did over twenty-four years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late William Brennan, a Catholic who cast a vote in favor the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United  States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January, 22, 1973, while he served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. decisions he reaffirmed in subsequent cases?

How did twenty years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Thomas P. O'Neill (D-Massachusetts)?

How did over thirty-six years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachussets)?

How did over thirty-three years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Representative Geraldine Anne Ferraro-Zaccarro (D-New York).

How has over thirty-five years of "engagement and dialogue changed former Governor of New York Mario Matthew Cuomo?

How has over thirty-one years of "engagement and dialogue" changed former Mayor of the City of New York Rudolph William Giuliani?

How has twenty-five years of "engagement and dialogue" changed current Governor of New York, Andrew Mark Cuomo?

How have eleven years of "engagement and dialogue" changed United States Senator Kirsten Gillebrand (D-New York).

How have forty-seven years of "engagement and dialogue" changed the former Vice President of the United States of America, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware; see, for example, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Demagogue Update).

Now, this does not mean that President Donald John Trump, who is only partly pro-life as he supports exceptions to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment and supports contraception, is a champion of moral truth. To be sure, he has taken administrative actions that are commendable, although some, such as the Mexico City Policy, are so porous as to beyond laughable, but each of these administrative actions are fully reversible by a future president. The shifting sands of Modernity are such that those who are opposed to the prevailing moral evils of the day must settle for increasingly smaller and smaller crumbs from those who profess to be “pro-life” without noticing that those crumbs will get blown away with the winds of “change” if any given presidential election results in the election of committed, unapologetic and absolutist pro-aborts, who are never afraid to exercise the full might of administrative powers to advance and further institutionalize moral evils that destroy souls and hence the very fabric of social order.

For all the sound and fury of the farce that is politics in a pluralist nation founded on one set of errors after another that have metastasized wildly over the course of its lifetime, especially in the past fifty years given the lack of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces in the world, the truth is that none of those in the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” and very few of those in the organized crime family of the naturalist “right” understand that all personal and social problems are the result of Original and our own Actual Sins. No one in public life today recognizes that “sin maketh nations miserable” and that the only way for nations to be renewed and reformed is by the reform of individual lives in cooperation with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Nations built on a structure of errors must lead to unhappiness, hatred, violence, and needless conflicts over matters that are beyond human debate over time. What is there to “prolong,” what is there to “maintain” when most men are, objective speaking while leaving the judgment to God alone, in states of Mortal Sin, thus leaving them less capable of seeing the truth and then acting in accord with it? Those who think that there is a political way to “hold back the tide” of evil are permitting themselves to be badly deluded.

Catholics in public life today have been indemnified in their support for one moral evil after another by various and sundry officials of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, doing so at the present time with the tacit support of the ever-merciful Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a veritable Judas Iscariot who is selling out the truths of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, including the truth of His Social Reign over men and their nations, to placate his Talmudic friends who have promoted these very evils with such ready abandon for such a long time now.

About the Lesser of Two Evils

As always is the case every four years, there is much discussion about the “lesser of two evils.” As always is the case every four years, I attempt to make distinctions about the “lesser evils” while having never denied that it is permissible to vote for a supposedly “lesser evil,” explaining only that there can never be any moral imperative to do so.

Many have written that a vote in favor of a "lesser evil" candidate is the morally "prudent" choice. This is nothing other than a subjective judgment in the practical order of things that binds the consciences of no one. Moreover, as I have attempted to demonstrate once again at length thus far in this article as I have done in so many others as well, is to illustrate that such a strategy in the practical order of things has only emboldened career politicians to feed pro-life some rhetoric now and again a few crumbs to keep them on their naturalist reservation.

Obviously, this is a matter where Catholics of good will can disagree. Those of us who reject the "lesser of two evils" argument in the context of the realities that face us today and in light of the practical consequences of decades' worth of concessions made to support supposed "lesser evils" must concede that it is permissible in some cases to accept such a situation, and I noted in part two of this series that it can be said that the situation in 2020 is different in some respects than that of 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012.

Donald John Trump is not Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., George Walker Bush, John Sidney McCain III or Willard Mitt Romney, especially as regards most of his nominees to serve on the Federal judidicary Granted, However, neither is the president “the new Constantine” as some Catholics have made him out to be in their flights of delirium about his administration, which has suffered from the outset not only because of the coordinated effort led by Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, James Brien Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Sally Yates, and a whole host of other nogoodniks to undermine it at every turn, but because Trump himself was, as I have noted on so many occasions since his elected on November 8, 2016, simply unprepared to govern and had not given any substantive about how to “drain the swamp” by having a bevvy of confirmable nominees to serve in each of the approximately 3500 sub-Cabinet positions nor about who to place in the nearly 1200 positions to be filled in the Executive Office of the White House.

Moreover, Trump has never seen the importance of being restrained in the use of the nefarious means of communication called “twitter” and thus needlessly alienated many people who had voted for him but have grown tired since then of his constant complaining and obsessing about what is said about him by the professional leftists in the mainslime media. A “conservative” commentator, Robert Merry, put the matter this way a few days ago:

If President Trump loses his reelection bid in November, as appears likely, the greatest victims of his presidency will have been his own constituency—the Americans who have given him his consistent but sub-par approval rating of between 39 percent and 43 percent throughout his tenure.

And when the new Democratic regime takes over, those people will become its target of choice . . . .

rump supporters can see the shape of things to come when they witness Black Lives Matter protesters accosting people in restaurants and bars, yelling “silence is violence” into their faces and demanding gestures of support. They can’t miss the implications of protests turning into violent riots, with property destroyed, businesses obliterated, downtowns turned into war zones, even violence perpetrated on innocent people with the wrong views—all while police forces in cities throughout America, hobbled by anti-police zealotry (or intimidation) on the part of liberal local officials, stand by and watch. The Trump voters know that these small-business owners are people like themselves (though no doubt with a higher proportion of immigrants), whose security and livelihoods matter not at all to the cadres of destruction. 

 These people may not be as well-educated as the folks of the top 10 percent that constitute the core of the elites, but they’re not dumb. And they know that they represent the ultimate target, the final hardcore opposition to the globalist, open-border, free-trade, American exceptionalism, BLM, power-hungry elites of America. And, when they see windows smashed, businesses destroyed, cars ablaze, cities in chaos, and Democratic politicians ignoring all of it, they can’t help taking it a bit personally. 

What went wrong? Trump went wrong. He built his constituency by exposing to America the fundamental political reality of 2016—namely, the widening chasm between Middle America and its bicoastal elites of big media, government officials, think tanks, big tech, burgeoning financial institutions, the federal deep state, and mavens of popular culture. He pulled his voters together into a tight knot of political support born of fear and intimidation and self-interest. But then he couldn’t build on it. He could never take his 43 percent support and find a way to add another 10 percent by devising policies designed to operate on the political margin. 

Bill Clinton had a word for it—“triangulation,” meaning the art of building coalitions of people and institutions that constitute majority sentiment on well-chosen issues. A well-crafted grand strategy on immigration probably could have served the purpose, had there been sufficient compromise involved. A success on the health care issue would have helped. A big factor could have been a foreign policy success fulfilling the president’s promise of reducing America’s military footprint overseas. A use of language and a comportment signifying a sense of national unity, at least to the point of creating a majority coalition, could have helped tremendously—and would have been easy to do.  

But Trump couldn’t do any of it. The result was that he couldn’t get beyond his core constituency and hence probably can’t be reelected. That likely will leave that core constituency in the lurch as the nation continues the politics of rancor, recrimination, and abuse under a new Democratic regime.  (After Trump’s Loss, Deplorables will the Democrats’ First Target.)

Leaving aside Mr. Merry’s apparent obviousness to the simple fact that Catholicism, not conservatism of any kind, no less American conservatism, is the one and only foundation of a just social order, albeit not an infallible guarantor of such order given the vagaries of fallen human nature, there is an irony in his very accurate analysis from a purely naturalistic perspective. The irony is this: That President Donald John Trump will “triangulate” in a second term if his reelection campaign survives his own self-inflicted wounds, including but not limited to opening up his yap to Robert Woodward and the latter’s recording device, and the onslaught of litigation that will ensue following an indecisive result in fifth-three days as well as the violence that will intensify where it has taken place thus far for the past four months and spread to other places all across he country. Trump has a vested interest in “triangulation” in a second term, which seems unlikely at this writing (then again, I did not think Trump was going to win four years ago, a judgment I shared with then-candidate Trump, of course), because (a) he will no longer need his own political base; and (b) he will want to do anything and everything possible to advance Ivanka Trump Kushner as his successor so that the wunderkinds of Kabbalism, the Kushners, could continue and expand upon his policies for another four to eight years.

However, Trump’s lack of discipline, especially with his Ralph Kramden-like BIIIIIIIIIIIIG MOUTH!!!, will most likely be his undoing even though he is running against a mentally declining shill for Red China who, if elected, will probably cede a great deal of governing authority to Kamala Harris and her desire to stifle as much of whatever dissenting views remain after January 20, 2021.

We are cooked, ladies and gentlemen.

All the discussion of light and darkness on the part of Father Carlo Maria Vigano misses the simple point that no one who is steeped in naturalism has any share in the light of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order (for an analysis of Vigano’s recent letter to the president, see Naturalist Heresy in Vigano’s Letter to President Trump). Men without principles and who know nothing of First and Last Things are relatively easy prey for those who are committed unequivocally to the promotion of absolutist principles in support of one moral evil after another. Such is the trap in which we find ourselves, and those who think that is there is any kind of electoral way out of it are deluding themselves very badly.

Perhaps I can explain things as follows: We have come to a pretty sad state of affairs when misguided supporters of President Donald John Trump, eager to show their support for him and to be “in the face” of the organized, armed and well-funded forces of anarchism and violence of the naturalist “left,” believe that it is productive to confront armed thugs and are willing to lay down their lives for their “president.” As tragic as the killing of the Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon, and the attacks upon the president’s supporters elsewhere are, Christ the King is the sole standard of truth. We have not been baptized and confirmed to bear witness to the point of our deaths in behalf of a “new Constantine” who remains his absolute worst enemy amongst all the honest-to-goodness conspirators are aiming to defeat him and then to put him in jail for the rest of his life.

Street conflicts with armed thugs are useless. We must pray for the conversion of all in public life and that, if at all possible in this fallen world, for malefactors to be brought to justice, but to permitted oneself to be so worked up  as to be blinded to the fact that we are living in a chastisement that the nation deserves for its sins is irresponsible at this point.

When the “Lesser Evil” Obscures the Objective Good

My concern, however, has always been with the fact that the refusal of so many Catholics to look at the evils that have been institutionalized by the supposedly “lesser evils” in Republican administrations, and it is this regard that there was probably no one more capable of exposing these evils than the late Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus Foundation. Though a Calvinist, Howard Phillips chronicled the betrayal of moral truth in the Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 administrations relentlessly and methodically in his Howard Phillips Issues and Strategies Bulletin. Those who want to wax about the “lesser evils” argument have an obligation to inform themselves as to what their supposed “lesser evils” actually do—or don’t do—when in power. As one correspondent put it to me to recently, “The issue in this campaign, for me, is who is higher the bigger and bolder ‘rainbow flag.’ Why do I have to choose between the boldest and the simply bold supporters of the sodomite agenda. I chose,” he wrote, “to have nothing to do with either flag as evil wins in the end.” Good point.

As Bishop Geraldo de Proenca Sigaud, the Bishop of Jacarezinho, Parma, Brazil from January 1, 1947, and the Archbishop of Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil, from December 20, 1960, to September 10, 1960, noted:  

"Among the many ways the Revolution permeates surreptitiously into the stronghold of the Church, the first door is called the 'lesser evil.' This tactic may be compared with the famous Trojan Horse. Catholic doctrine teaches that if we cannot avoid some evil we may choose to permit some lesser evil in order to avoid the greater evil on condition we do not directly commit evil ourselves.

"[HOWEVER]...

"(1) The liberals think a lesser evil is a small evil that is not worth fighting against;

"(2) Very many Catholics and even priests are of the opinion that conflict harms the Church as if She were not by Her very nature militant. This is why they allow evil to occupy without combating it under the pretext of prudence, charity, and apostolic diplomacy.

"(3) THEY DO NOT REALIZE THAT EVIL--EVEN A LESSER EVIL-IS ALWAYS AN EVIL, and that is why they do not seek to limit or suppress it. They live daily with the "lesser evil" and thus they forget the greater good as something horrible. For example, the separation of Church and State and that divorce be allowed among Catholics." (Bishop Geraldo de Proenca Sigaud, as cited by Hugh Akins in Synagogue Rising.) 

Sedeplenist, resist-while-recognize author Mr. Hugh Akins, in whose Synagogue Rising Bishop Geraldo de Proenca Sigaud’s analysis of the “lesser of two evils” is found, is publishing a new book: Donald Trump: America’s Last Conservative Hope or Zionist Psychopath, which he describes as follows on his website:

Of course the Left is destroying America and warring against Christianity, but so is much of the Right, and getting away with imposing more totalitarian tyranny than the liberals could ever get away with – the status quo Big Government socialists masquerading as conservatives; men such as President Trump being one of the worst offenders ever.

The paramount questions are these: can a politician sincerely believe that all human life is sacred, as Trump sanctimoniously proclaims, at the same time his deliberate policies are bringing unprecedented death, destruction and human suffering all over the world – some 10-15 million right now facing famine in Yemen (Christians among them) thanks in great part to Trump’s strategic support of Saudi Arabia – and which belligerent policies could well result in unleashing upon mankind a cataclysmic nuclear Third World War?  Can such a man be truly pro-life at the same time a pathologically aggressive Zionist – at home (Police State Totalitarianism over a fake pandemic) and abroad (endless wars for Israel who are the real terrorists in the Middle East) – all in accordance with the demonic directives of the infamous and historically authentic Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?

The answer to such burning questions is found within these pages. 

Here is the REAL Donald Trump; the man you have not been permitted to know; the serial Judaizer whose massive crimes even the most respected leaders of both American Conservatism and the Traditional Catholic Movement are deceptively covering up;  Here, in this bold new book, Trump’s extensive history with organized crime (especially the Jewish Mafia whose criminal network extends from Moscow to Tel Aviv to New York City, and now more than ever to Washington, DC); his absolute subservience to the Wall Street Oligarchy; his many broken campaign promises and unbroken continuity with most of his liberal predecessors’ most ruinous far-left policies; his total embodiment of the Judeo-Masonic Deep State which consists of both a Left and a Right Wing; his anti-conservative socialist bent; his absolute Zionist fanaticism, making him no less a war-crazed, mass-murdering psychopath than his predecessors Obama, Bush and Clinton; his war against Christ the King and the common good by what amounts to the systematic communization of America – all according to the Secret Sect at the top of the Pyramid of World Power and their Synagogue of Satan, to whom Trump has long ago sold his soul.

Many of the proofs, too long buried by conservatives and liberals alike, have been resurrected by the author and recorded in this book.

The bottom line: no matter who wins the election of 2020, the victory will go to the Overlords of the Antichristian Conspiracy, as it has for a century-and-a-half.  But even as the apocalyptic storm approaches, the author shares with his readers sound reasons for a transcending hope. (http://ca-rc.com/).

This is a very pertinent analysis of our situation, although I would note that Mr. Akins missed an essential point when not explaining that President Donald John Trump is partly pro-life and partly pro-abortion as no one who accepts a single “exception” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment as a matter of principle is truly “pro-life” nor can be termed as such.

We continue to be as trapped as apostasy now as we have ever been in the United States of America. We continue to suffer the long term consequences of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ King, and most people do not realize that all we are experiencing now in the civil and ecclesiastical realms is simply a preparation for Antichrist.

A reader familiar with the work of this website used the “lesser of two evils” argument to compare the false opposites of the Ratzinger wing of the counterfeit church of conciliarism with the Bergoglio by way of discussing the situation of the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and “right” here in the United States of America.

It's a very similar situation to having a Ratzinger playing pretend Pope. Far more damaging than Bergoglio, whose apostasy is blatant, had Ratzinger and men like him continued to be elected, I fear I would have been more than content to accept my little indult compromise and cease any further questioning, happy to stomach these "lesser" evils. 

If anyone is so inclined to vote in this election, it is imperative that they understand the fact that they are voting for the lesser of two evils, and not be filled with the illusion that by voting, the problems this nation faces which stems from the flawed principles it is founded on will magically be resolved. 

It would appear to me that while material cooperation with the lesser of two evils by voting is permissible and licit, I struggle to see how that translates to a moral obligation to vote, like some people seem to be implying. All I know now is that I desire a vote-free monarchy more than ever so as to not have to deal with this terrible quibbling every election season! 

The day of such a monarchy will come at a time of God’s choosing.

In the meantime, though, it is good to review the wisdom contained in the following passage from Pope Pius XI’s first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

This chastisement is for us all as none of us innocent of the guilt of our sins. We need to make reparation for our sins. We must accept this chastisement with joy and gratitude, recognizing that Catholics are called to embrace whatever crosses God in His ineffable Providence sees fit to give unto them for His own greater honor and glory and for the sanctification and salvation of our own souls as the consecrated slaves of His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. We should fear only about offending God by means of sins of omission and commission, by our tepidity, by our worldliness, by the ready ease to which we subject ourselves to the daily bombardment of agitation that, to quote Pope Pius XI in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 22, 1922, leads to the mania of seeking out, if not believing in, the ability of “sterile solutions” to save “what little remains of the existing ruin”:

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

Authority itself lost its hold upon mankind, for it had lost that sound and unquestionable justification for its right to command on the one hand and to be obeyed on the other. Society, quite logically and inevitably, was shaken to its very depths and even threatened with destruction, since there was left to it no longer a stable foundation, everything having been reduced to a series of conflicts, to the domination of the majority, or to the supremacy of special interests.

Again, legislation was passed which did not recognize that either God or Jesus Christ had any rights over marriage -- an erroneous view which debased matrimony to the level of a mere civil contract, despite the fact that Jesus Himself had called it a "great sacrament" (Ephesians v, 32) and had made it the holy and sanctifying symbol of that indissoluble union which binds Him to His Church. The high ideals and pure sentiments with which the Church has always surrounded the idea of the family, the germ of all social life, these were lowered, were unappreciated, or became confused in the minds of many. As a consequence, the correct ideals of family government, and with them those of family peace, were destroyed; the stability and unity of the family itself were menaced and undermined, and, worst of all, the very sanctuary of the home was more and more frequently profaned by acts of sinful lust and soul-destroying egotism -- all of which could not but result in poisoning and drying up the very sources of domestic and social life.

Added to all this, God and Jesus Christ, as well as His doctrines, were banished from the school. As a sad but inevitable consequence, the school became not only secular and non-religious but openly atheistical and anti-religious. In such circumstances it was easy to persuade poor ignorant children that neither God nor religion are of any importance as far as their daily lives are concerned. God's name, moreover, was scarcely ever mentioned in such schools unless it were perchance to blaspheme Him or to ridicule His Church. Thus, the school forcibly deprived of the right to teach anything about God or His law could not but fail in its efforts to really educate, that is, to lead children to the practice of virtue, for the school lacked the fundamental principles which underlie the possession of a knowledge of God and the means necessary to strengthen the will in its efforts toward good and in its avoidance of sin. Gone, too, was all possibility of ever laying a solid groundwork for peace, order, and prosperity, either in the family or in social relations. Thus the principles based on the spiritualistic philosophy of Christianity having been obscured or destroyed in the minds of many, a triumphant materialism served to prepare mankind for the propaganda of anarchy and of social hatred which was let loose on such a great scale.

Is it to be wondered at then that, with the widespread refusal to accept the principles of true Christian wisdom, the seeds of discord sown everywhere should find a kindly soil in which to grow and should come to fruit in that most tremendous struggle, the Great War, which unfortunately did not serve to lessen but increased, by its acts of violence and of bloodshed, the international and social animosities which already existed? (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Concilio, December 23, 1922.)

Any questions?

Father Frederick William Faber explained the allure of naturalism in his own day in an England that had finally become "tolerant" of Catholics, many of whom responded to this "tolerance" by becoming as worldly as their Protestant countrymen, many of whose descendants today have reverted back to their pre-Christian Druid origins:

All devotions have their characteristics; all of them have their own theological meanings. We must say something, therefore, upon the characteristics of the devotion to the Precious Blood. In reality the whole Treatise has more or less illustrated this matter. But something still remains to be said, and something will bear to be repeated. We will take the last first. Devotion to the Precious Blood is the devotional expression of the prominent and characteristic teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul is the apostle of redeeming grace. A devout study of his epistles would be our deliverance from most of the errors of the day. He is truly the apostle of all ages. To each age doubtless he seems to have a special mission. Certainly his mission to our is very special. The very air we breathe is Pelagian. Our heresies are only novel shapes of an old Pelagianism. The spirit of the world is eminently Pelagian. Hence it comes to pass that wrong theories among us are always constructed round a nuclear of Pelagianism; and Pelagianism is just the heresy which is least able to breathe in the atmosphere of St. Paul. It is the age of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, of the acquired as opposed to the infused, of the active as opposed to the passive. This is what I said in an earlier chapter, and here repeat. Now, this exclusive fondness for the natural is on the whole very captivating. It takes with the young, because it saves thought. It does not explain difficulties; but it lessens the number of difficulties to be explained. It takes with the idle; it dispenses from slowness and research. It takes with the unimaginative, because it withdraws just the very element in religion which teases them. It takes with the worldly, because it subtracts the enthusiasm from piety and the sacrifice from spirituality. It takes with the controversial, because it is a short road and a shallow ford. It forms a school of thought which, while it admits that we have an abundance of grace, intimates that we are not much better for it. It merges privileges in responsibilities, and makes the sovereignty of God odious by representing it as insidious. All this whole spirit, with all its ramifications, perishes in the sweet fires of devotion to the Precious Blood.

The time is also one of libertinage; and a time of libertinage is always, with a kind of practical logic, one of infidelity. Whatever brings out God's side in creation, and magnifies his incessant supernatural operation in it, is the controversy which infidelity can least withstand. Now, the devotion to the Precious Blood does this in a very remarkable way. It shows that the true significance in every thing is to be found in the scheme of redemption, apart from which it is useless to discuss the problems of creation. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, written in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 258-259.)

This is just as much a description of our own days as it was of Father Faber's.

Indeed, Father Faber was merely describing naturalism's hatred for the Holy Faith, a hatred that is from Hell and that is meant to send souls there for all eternity as disorder is sown into the hearts and souls of men to be spread abroad in one nation after another as even well-meaning people come to believe that there is some naturalistic "remedy" for the evils of naturalism that are at the proximate root of our personal and social problems today. Even most Catholics, including most traditionally-minded all up and down and across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, are steeped in some kind of Pelagianism, the belief that man is more or less "self-redemptive" and that "he" can "solve" whatever problems he faces by stirring up within him the natural strength or "energy" or "life force" to do so. Pelagianism is of the essence of the spirit of Americanism. It is of the essence of spirit of Modernity with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "official reconciliation."

For our parts, we must simply rely upon the help of Our Lady in these times of needless divisions, endless arguments over matters that are inarguable and to avoid the temptation of believing that this or any other election is going to “save America” or “hold back the tide of evil” or “prolong things” as we have known them.

Once again, although I get accused of being “unrealistic” and “idealistic,” permit me to reiterate once more that I am a Catholic realist who tries to assess the state of affairs in the world as they really exist and to analyze them as best as I can despite my own limitations, shortcomings and sins in light of root cases and always informed by First and Last Things.

Nations that do not submit themselves to the sweet yoke of Christ the King and that do not publicly honor and the Mother of God, whose most holy name must be ever on our lips, must fall into the abyss of misery, chaos, violence, disarray, endless agitation and, ultimately, in totalitarianism. There is no great “conservative” awakening ahead of us even if President Donald John Trump wins on November 3, 2020.

In truth, good readers, we are living at a time very similar to that of Holy Mother Church’s infancy during her first three hundred years. It was about those times and our own that Our Lord forewarned us:

Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of men. For they will deliver you up in councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. And you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles: But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.

The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come. The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?

Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me. (Matthew 10: 16-40.)

Today, September 10, 2019, is the Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, who lived most of his life in the Thirteenth Century and died in the year 1305. The readings in Matins in today’s Divine Office describe how Saint Nicholas of Tolentino was so impressed with a sermon on contempt of the world given by an Augstinian monk that he joined the order himself immediately thereafter:

This Nicholas is called Nicholas of Tolentino, because he lived in that town for most part of his life. He was born at St. Angelo, a place near Fermo, in the March of Ancona, about the year 1245. His parents were godly people, and in their desire to have children, vowed and made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Nicholas at Bari, where they were assured of their wish, and therefore gave the name of Nicholas to the son whom they received. From his childhood the lad gave many good signs, but especially as regarded abstinence. In his seventh year, in imitation of his blessed name-sake, he began to fast upon several days in the week, which custom he always kept, and was content with only bread and water.

After he reached man's estate, he enlisted himself in the army of the clergy, and was preferred to a Canonry. One day he chanced to hear a sermon upon contempt of the world delivered by a preacher of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine, and was so moved by it that he forthwith entered that Order. As a Friar he was most strictly observant of that way of life. He subdued his body with rough clothing, stripes, and an iron chain. He never ate meat, and seldom any relish to his meals. And he was a burning and shining light of love, lowliness, long-suffering, and all other graces.

 He persisted in constant and earnest prayer, notwithstanding many troubles from the assaults of Satan, who sometimes even flogged him. Every night for six months before his death he heard Angels singing with such sweetness, that it was a fore-taste of the happiness of heaven, and he would often repeat the words of the Apostle I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ Phil. i. 23. Lastly, he foretold to his brethren the day of his death, which was the 10th day of September 1306. After his death also he was famous for miracles, and when due investigation had been made thereof, Pope Eugene IV enrolled his name among those of the Saints. (Matins, Divine Office, Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, September 10.)

I don’t know about you, but I know I fall far from the spirit of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, and I am very much aware of how much I have offended God by means of my sins and thus of the need to make even more reparation for them than I am doing. To advance in sanctity, however, we must do more than we are doing, and the example of austerity and mortification practiced by Saint Nicholas of Tolentino should inspire us to increase our voluntary sacrifices and to accept the penances of the present moment with peace, tranquility, joy and thanksgiving.

Mindful that this is the third day of the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., wrote the following prayer in honor of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino:

Good and faithful servant, thou hast entered into the joy of the Lord. He has broken thy bonds; and from heaven, where thou art now reigning, thou repeatest to us those worlds which determined the sanctity of thy life on earth: ‘Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. For the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof.’ How much a man thus forgetful of earth can do for his fellow-men is evinced by the gift thou didst receive of solacing all the miseries around thee, and succouring the souls in purgatory. The successor of St. Peter was not deceived, when, in ranking thee among the saints, he counted on thy power in heaven to bring back society from its long continued state of disturbance to the paths of peace. May that word of thy beloved disciple which thou has just echoed to us, sink into our souls as a seed of salvation, and there yield the fruits that it produced in thee: detachment from all temporal things and a longing for eternal realities; that humble simplicity of the soul’s eye which makes life a peaceful journey towards God; and lastly, that purity, which made thee the friend of angels and the favourite of Mary. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Volume 14, Time after Pentecost, Book V, pp. 186-187.)

We must remain at peace as we pray as many Rosary’s each day as our state-in-life permits as we pray for a true pope to be restored on the Throne of Saint Peter so that he can consecrate Russia  collegially with all the world’s true bishops to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart in fulfillment of Our Lady’s Fatima Message and thus restore a period of peace before the final battle that will take place between Christ the King and Antichrist.

Pray the Rosary daily!

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

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 Nicholas of Tolentino, pray for us.

 

Saints Protus and Hyacinth, pray for us.

Appendix A

A Brief Summary of George Walker Bush's Actual Anti-Life Record

Although I have assessed the horrific anti-life record of the presidency of George Walker Bush a great deal in my writing between 2001 and 2009, it might be wise to review the facts (yes, just the facts ma'am) once again), leaving aside, of course, the fact that thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed, wounded or displaced from their country as a result of the "pro-life" president's attempt at regime change there to replace one set of corrupt thugs with another set of corrupt thugs who have the respectable "cover" provided them by having been elected (sort of sounds like the United States of America, doesn't it):  

1) George Walker Bush said constantly in 1999 and 200 during his campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination that abortion was a "difficult" issue about which people of "good will" could disagree. What's difficult about knowing that killing a baby is morally wrong? Would he say that people of "good will" could disagree about racism or anti-Semitism?

2) George Walker Bush support "exceptions" to the Fifth Commandment's absolute prohibitions to the direct, intentional taking of any innocent human life. When challenged by Dr. Alan Keys in a televised debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December of 1999 as to how he could justify the killing of preborn babies under any circumstances, the then Texas Governor grimaced, visibly annoyed at having been forced to confront his own mutually contradictory position, and said: "I can't explain it. It's just how I feel." Bush does not realize that he is not pro-life, that he is simply less pro-abortion than others in public life who are unconditionally pro-abortion.

3) George Walker Bush denied in his first debate with then Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., held on October 3, 2000, at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, that he could do anything to reverse the United States Food and Drug Administration's authorization to market RU-486, the human pesticide, unless it had been determined to be "unsafe" for women. What about the fact that that pill is always deadly for babies?

BUSH: I don't think a president can unilaterally overturn it. The FDA has made its decision.

MODERATOR: That means you wouldn't, through appointments, to the FDA and ask them to --

BUSH: I think once a decision has been made, it's been made unless it's proven to be unsafe to women.

GORE: Jim, the question you asked, if I heard you correctly, was would he support legislation to overturn it. And if I heard the statement day before yesterday, you said you would order -- he said he would order his FDA appointee to review the decision. Now that sounds to me a little bit different. I just think that we ought to support the decision.

BUSH: I said I would make sure that women would be safe who used the drug.  (2000 Debate Transcript) [Droleskey comment: Uh, Mister Former President, the President of the United States of America can make appointments to the Food and Drug Administration who could indeed overturn such a decision by means of an administrative fiat. Moreover, the human pesticide, RU-486, is lethal to babies, Mister Former President.] 

4) George Walker Bush said consistently throughout his eight years as President of the United States of America that he was working for the day when every child would be welcomed in life and protected by law." How can one claim that he is in favor of "welcoming every child and protecting him "by law" when he believes that the civil law licitly can permit the killing of certain children at certain times? How can one claim that he is in favor of "welcoming every child" and protecting him "by law" when he campaigned actively for politicians in his own political party who were completely pro-abortion (Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Susan Collins, Olympia Snow Arlen Specter--whom Bush endorsed over a partly pro-life/partly pro-abortion opponent, Patrick Toomey, in a Republican Party primary in 2004, et al.)? How can one claim that he is in favor of "welcoming every child" and protecting him "by law" when he appointed pro-abort after pro-abort. some of whom are listed above, to the upper echelons of his administration. Some of others over the years were Tom Ridge, Michael Mukasey, Alberto Gonzales, The Supreme Court? John Roberts and Samuel Alito? Sure. Remember Harriet Miers? If you don't, read these articles: The Triumph of Protestantism and Posturing and Preening.

5) George Walker Bush was proud of the fact that his administration increased the amount of money being spent by our tax dollars on domestic and international "family planning" programs, which, of course, dispatched innocent preborn babies to death by chemical means. Here is a letter sent in behalf of then President Bush to United States Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) on May 25, 2006:

The Honorable Carolyn B. Maloney
House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515


Dear Ms. Maloney:

Thank you for your letter to President Bush to request his views on access to birth control. The President has asked that I respond on his behalf. This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception.

The Department of Health and Human Services faithfully executes laws establishing Federal programs to provide contraception and family planning services. The Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid are each significant providers of family planning services.

Additionally, this Administration strongly supports teaching abstinence to young people as the only 100 percent effective means of preventing pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).


I will provide this response to the other signatories of your letter.
Sincerely yours, John O. Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary for Health (Bush Supports Contraception Letter) 

Contraception, of course, of its very evil nature, over and above the fact that most contraceptives serve as abortifacients that kill babies chemically or act to expel fertilized human beings from implanting in the uterus, is denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage.

6) George Walker Bush made announced at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 9, 2001, that he was going to permitted the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research on embryonic human beings whose "lines" were created before the time of his announcement. In so doing, of course, Bush authorized the death of those human beings and at the same time justify the immoral, evil practice of in vitro fertilization while doing nothing to stop the privately funded death and destruction of such embryonic human beings on those "lines" created after the date and time of his announcement:

My administration must decide whether to allow federal funds, your tax dollars, to be used for scientific research on stem cells derived from human embryos.  A large number of these embryos already exist.  They are the product of a process called in vitro fertilization, which helps so many couples conceive children.  When doctors match sperm and egg to create life outside the womb, they usually produce more embryos than are planted in the mother.  Once a couple successfully has children, or if they are unsuccessful, the additional embryos remain frozen in laboratories. (Remarks by the President on Stem Cell Research.)  

This is what I wrote at the time in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos:

Indeed, this whole controversy is the direct result of the rejection of the teaching authority of the Church on matters of faith and morals, as well as on matters of fundamental justice. For it is the rejection of the Deposit of Faith our Lord entrusted to Holy Mother Church that gave rise to the ethos of secularism and religious indifferentism, which became the breeding grounds for secularism and relativism and positivism.

A world steeped in all manner of secular political ideologies comes not only to reject the Deposit of Faith but to make war against all that is contained therein, especially as it relates to matters of the sanctity of marital relations and the stability of the family.

Contraception gave rise to abortion. Contraception also gave rise to the mentality which resulted in artificial conception. If a child's conception can be prevented as suits "partners," then it stands to reason that a child can be conceived "on demand" by using the latest technology science has to offer.

The Church has condemned artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization on a number of occasions as offenses to the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity of marital relations. Yet it is the very rejection of the Church's affirmation of what is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law which leads people, including George W. Bush, into thinking that artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization are morally licit to help couples deal with the problem of childlessness, ignoring the simple little truth that no one is entitled to a child.

Children are gifts from God to be accepted according to His plan for a particular couple. If a married couple cannot have a child on their own, they can adopt -- or they can use their time to be of greater service to the cause of the Church in the evangelization of the true Faith. No one, however, is entitled to a child.

Indeed, the whole tragedy of harvesting the stem cells of living human beings has arisen as a result of discoveries made by scientists experimenting on human beings conceived in fertility clinics to help couples conceive artificially.

That George W. Bush endorses this immoral enterprise (which is big business, by the way) and actually commends it as a way to "help" couples is deplorable.

It is as though he is saying the following: "We are not going to kill any more Jews for their body parts. We will only use the body parts of the Jews we have killed already. After all, we have people who will benefit from this research, do we not?"

Living human embryos do not have the "potential" for life, as Bush asserted on August 9, 2001. They are living human beings! To seek to profit from their destruction is ghoulish, and will only wind up encouraging the private sector to fund all stem-cell research, creating more "stem cell lines" from the destruction of living human beings. ("Preposterous," Christ or Chaos, September, 2001)  

Mrs. Judie Brown, the president and founder of the American Life League, wrote a retrospective on Caesar Georgii Bushus Ignoramus's stem cell decision some years later:

You have probably heard that right at the top of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's agenda is the promise of "hope to families with devastating diseases."

What she is promising, of course, is a Congressional action that will result in tons of federal tax dollars being spent on failed research using the dead bodies of embryonic children.

The White House, of course, is saying "the president has made it clear he believes in stem cell research so much -- the administration has done more to finance stem cell research, embryonic and otherwise, than any administration in history."

You see, Bush never really banned research using the bodies of embryonic children, he merely curtailed how much research could be done using tax dollars. So it would appear that everyone ... Democrat and Republican ... is on the same page.

The tragic reality underlying such statements is that over the course of the last 34 years, politicians and a whole lot of pro-lifers have let the principle of personhood slide away into oblivion for the sake of winning elections. And the result is staring us all in the face. (Embryo Wars.)

7) The George Walker Bush version of the "Mexico City" policy, as the "gag" order that prohibited international family planning organizations from killing babies on an "elective" basis on their premises or referring women to abortuaries was called, was fraught with holes and exceptions as to make it an utter sham that convinces the average "pro-life" American that "something" is being done to save lives when the truth of the matter is that Bush's executive order permitted employees of international "family planning" agencies in foreign countries to refer for abortions on their own time in any off-site location of their choosing. In other words, the "Bush 43" "Mexico City" policy permitted an employee of the International Planned Parenthood chapter in Nairobi, Kenya, for example to say, "Look, there are things I can't tell you now. Meet me at the Nairobi McDonald's after I get out of work. I can tell you more then." The employee was then free to speak frankly about surgical abortion, to recommend the killing of a child as the only "sensible" option, to recommend a specific baby-killer and a specific place for the baby to be killed.

Here are the specific conditions outlined by the Bush executive order that re instituted the "Mexico City" policy in 2001:

1) American taxpayer funds are only denied to organizations that promote abortion as a means of "family planning." This means that direct counseling in behalf of abortion can be done if a woman claims some that she falls into one of the three usual "exceptions" (rape, incest, alleged threats to her life) for seeking an abortion.

2) Employees of international "family planning" organizations may meet with their clients off of the premises of those organizations to counsel them to use abortion as a means of "family planning" and to direct them where to kill their babies surgically.

3) International "family planning" organizations can propagate in behalf of abortion abroad as long as they "segregate" their funds. That is, such organizations must use "private" funds for promoting abortion, not the monies provided by the Federal government of the United States of America. There is, however, no accounting oversight to determine how these funds are "segregated," if they are in fact "segregated" at all.

Moreover, as noted above, the domestic and international "family planning" programs that were funded to the hilt by the administration of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce. Cheney killed untold hundreds of thousands of children each year by means of chemical abortifacients. Mrs. Judie Brown, the founder and President of the American Life League, explained it as follows on December 18, 2007:

While many are celebrating the Congressional passage of a bill that contains the Mexico City Policy, there are those of us who are not so quick to throw a party.

The policy was contained in a piece of legislation that also provides an increase in funding for Planned Parenthood. But that's not really the worst of it.

The Mexico City Policy contains exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother ... standard fare for the pro-life politicos these days. The problem is, they fail to point out that the Mexico City Policy does not and cannot prohibit our tax dollars from paying for abortion; it can only prevent our tax dollars from paying for some abortions. Why, you may ask, did I use the word "some"?

Well, the Mexico City Policy will pay for surgical abortion in the cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother in addition to paying for chemical abortions caused by RU-486, the morning-after pill and the various birth control methods that can cause abortion.

Further, it is not clear what happens when an organization agrees to refrain from paying for abortion with U.S. tax dollars, but chooses to use those dollars to pay for other "services," thus freeing up other money to subsidize the killing.

In other words, the Mexico City Policy is fraught with problems that result in death.

So when some claim that America is no longer an "exporter of death," they are really not being totally honest with the public. America is still the number one exporter and subsidizer of preborn child killing, period. Of that there is no doubt. (AMERICA'S DEADLY EXPORT) 

8) George Walker Bush's Food and Drug Administration not only did not reverse the Clinton Food and Drug and Administration to market RU-496, the French abortion pill, the human pesticide. The Bush administration fully funded the use of RU-486 in both domestic and international "family planning" programs. Moreover, George Walker Bush's Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter sales of the so-called "Plan B" "emergency contraceptive" that is, of course, an abortifacient:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today announced approval of Plan B, a contraceptive drug, as an over-the-counter (OTC) option for women aged 18 and older. Plan B is often referred to as emergency contraception or the "morning after pill." It contains an ingredient used in prescription birth control pills--only in the case of Plan B, each pill contains a higher dose and the product has a different dosing regimen. Like other birth control pills, Plan B has been available to all women as a prescription drug. When used as directed, Plan B effectively and safely prevents pregnancy. Plan B will remain available as a prescription-only product for women age 17 and under.

Duramed, a subsidiary of Barr Pharmaceuticals, will make Plan B available with a rigorous labeling, packaging, education, distribution and monitoring program. In the CARE (Convenient Access, Responsible Education) program Duramed commits to:

  • Provide consumers and healthcare professionals with labeling and education about the appropriate use of prescription and OTC Plan B, including an informational toll-free number for questions about Plan B;
  • Ensure that distribution of Plan B will only be through licensed drug wholesalers, retail operations with pharmacy services, and clinics with licensed healthcare practitioners, and not through convenience stores or other retail outlets where it could be made available to younger women without a prescription;
  • Packaging designed to hold both OTC and prescription Plan B. Plan B will be stocked by pharmacies behind the counter because it cannot be dispensed without a prescription or proof of age; and
  • Monitor the effectiveness of the age restriction and the safe distribution of OTC Plan B to consumers 18 and above and prescription Plan B to women under 18.

Today's action concludes an extensive process that included obtaining expert advice from a joint meeting of two FDA advisory committees and providing an opportunity for public comment on issues regarding the scientific and policy questions associated with the application to switch Plan B to OTC use. Duramed's application raised novel issues regarding simultaneously marketing both prescription and non-prescription Plan B for emergency contraception, but for different populations, in a single package.

The agency remains committed to a careful and rigorous scientific process for resolving novel issues in order to fulfill its responsibility to protect the health of all Americans. (FDA Approves Over-the-Counter Access for Plan B for Women 18 and Over .) 

Where was the outrage from Catholics when this decision was announced?  

Where were the e-mails sent out in a frenzy to oppose this decision?  

Where were the voices to denounce George Walker Bush for what he was, a consummate "pro-life" fraud from beginning to end?  Where?  

Indeed, I have met Catholics, both in the clergy and laity alike, who, upon being informed of this fact, shrug their shoulders and say, "Gore or Kerry would have done worse. Obama is doing worse now " And this is supposed to exculpate one from not hav ingdenounced Bush at the time did these terrible things? Reprehensible. Absolutely reprehensible.

9) The partial, conditional ban on partial-birth abortions remains little more than a political ruse designed to convince "pro-life" voters that something substantive was being done to stop the killing of babies. There is a needless "life of the mother" exception in the ban, meaning that babies are still being killed by this method if it can be claimed that a mother's life is endangered. Moreover, killing a baby by which is termed medically by the euphemism of "intact dilation and extraction" is no more morally heinous than killing a baby by any other method at any other age. Killing a baby by means of a suction abortion or by a saline solution abortion or by a dilation and evacuation abortion (where the baby is carved up by a butcher inside of the birth canal) is no less morally heinous than partial-birth abortion. Each is the same crime before God: willful murder, one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

Also, as I have pointed out repeatedly since this issue came to forefront of public debate over twenty years ago, there are two methods--the hysterotomy and dilation and evacuation--by which babies may be killed in the later stages of pregnancy. These methods can still be used to kill babies in the later stages of pregnancy with complete legal impunity. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy specifically referred to these two methods when upholding the constitutionality of the partial-birth abortion ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, April 18, 2007:

D&E and intact D&E are not the only second-trimester abortion methods. Doctors also may abort a fetus through medical induction. The doctor medicates the woman to induce labor, and contractions occur to deliver the fetus. Induction, which unlike D&E should occur in a hospital, can last as little as 6 hours but can take longer than 48. It accounts for about five percent of second-trimester abortions before 20 weeks of gestation and 15 percent of those after 20 weeks. Doctors turn to two other methods of second-trimester abortion, hysterotomy and hysterectomy, only in emergency situations because they carry increased risk of complications. In a hysterotomy, as in a cesarean section, the doctor removes the fetus by making an incision through the abdomen and uterine wall to gain access to the uterine cavity. A hysterectomy requires the removal of the entire uterus. These two procedures represent about .07% of second-trimester abortions. Nat. Abortion Federation, 330 F. Supp. 2d, at 467; Planned Parenthood, supra, at 962-963. (Text of the Court's Opinion; see also An Illusion of a Victory.) 

10) George Walker Bush's first Solicitor General of the United States of America, Theodore Olson, submitted the following brief to the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Joseph Scheidler v. National Organization for Women to argue that the sidewalk counseling activities of pro-life champion Joseph Scheidler, the founder of the Pro-Life Action Network, constituted "banditry" under terms of the Hobbs Act of 1946 as he was depriving legitimate business, abortuaries, of their income. Can anyone say "pro-life fraud," thank you very much? 

"It is irrelevant under the Hobbs Act whether the defendant is motivated by an economic purpose, as the lower courts that have addressed the issue have correctly recognized. The text of the Hobbs Act contains no requirement of an economic motive. As explained, when a person uses force or threats to compel a business to cede control over what goods or services the business will offer, the defendant obtains the victim's property by acquiring the power to decide how the business will be conducted. That conclusion holds true whether or not the defendant has a profit-making objective.

"A contrary conclusion would allow a defendant to hijack legitimate businesses by wrongful acts of violence, threats, or fear simply because the defendant had a non-economic objective. That result would defeat the government's strong interest in protecting interstate commerce under the Hobbs Act by prosecuting extortionists who are motivated by causes other than financial gain. For instance, an economic motive requirement would immunize a defendant from prosecution under the Hobbs Act even though the defendant threatened acts of murder against a bank that loaned money to foreign nations whose policies the defendant opposed, against a retail store that sold products to which the defendant objected, or against any other business that used its land or other valuable property for a purpose that the defendant found unpalatable.

"Those acts have deleterious effects on interstate commerce, whether or not the defendant directs the use of such property for his own financial gain. To exempt such conduct from the Hobbs Act would retreat from the Act's purpose to 'protect the right of citizens of this country to market their products without any interference from lawless bandits.' In sum, when the defendant uses wrongful force or threats to wrest control over the victim's business decisions, the defendant obtains that property interest." (Brief of United States Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson in the case of Joseph Scheidler v. National Organization for Women, December 4, 2002.)

This could go on interminably. Although wearying, I have compiled this list yet again because I know that people forget and need to be reminded of basic facts that are always fresh in my mind as this my area of study and of active personal involvement for a long time. It is important to keep these facts in mind, especially to realize that Theodore Olson, has led efforts to reverse California Proposition 8 (see Meathead Meets Meathead and Irreversible By Means Merely Human), believed that saving babies from death was akin to stealing money from baby-killers in violation of interstate commerce! He made this argument in behalf of the "pro-life" administration of President George Walker Bush and Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney. Don't any of you think that George Walker Bush was "pro-life." He was an indemnifier of baby-killers in this country who funded chemical baby-killing in all instances and whose administration funded surgical baby-killing in the "hard cases."

The fact that the current completely pro-abortion team of President Barack Hussein Obama and Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., are doing more terrible things should not make us pine for the "good old days" of Bush-Cheney. Those days were not so "good" for preborn babies in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world, to say nothing for innocent lives in Iraq and Afghanistan who were subject to indiscriminate American bombing or other military action and/or who have suffered from the destabilization of their countries by the American presence there.

Appendix B

Willard Mitt Romney’s Anti-Life Record

As taken from other articles on this website

What is even more tragic is that so many Americans who are opposed to abortion shut their eyes to the truth about Romney’s lack of convictions about anything not having to do with his false religion and with the visage he sees in the mirror when he was running for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2008 and again in 2012. Here is this “man of character’s” true track record, starting with a transcript of his debate with the egregious pro-abortion, pro-Soviet, pro-sodomite, pro-everything bad Senator Edward Moore Kennedy in 1994:

Q. Mr. Romney, you personally oppose abortion and as a church leader have advised women not to have an abortion. Given that, how could you in good conscience support a law that enables women to have an abortion, and even lets the Government pay for it? If abortion is morally wrong, aren't you responsible for discouraging it?

ROMNEY One of the great things about our nation, Sally [ Sally Jacobs of The Boston Globe ] , is that we're each entitled to have strong personal beliefs, and we encourage other people to do the same. But as a nation we recognize the right of all people to believe as they want, and not to impose our beliefs on other people. I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country; I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate.

I believe that Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice. And my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign. Too much has been written about religion in this race. I'm proud of my religious heritage; I am proud of the values that it's taught me. But if you want to know my position on issues, ask me and I'll tell you. I think the low point of this race was when my opponent and their family decided to make religion an issue in this campaign -- brought it out, attacked me for it. I think that's a mistake. I think the time has passed for that. John Kennedy was the one who fought that battle; let that battle live for all of us of all faiths.

KENNEDY I would agree with Mr. Romney that religion has no place in this campaign. And the best way to make sure that it doesn't is not to talk any further about it, and I don't intend to do so.

On the question of the choice issue, I have supported Roe v. Wade. I am pro-choice; my opponent is multiple choice.

I have not only introduced the freedom-of-choice legislation but I have fought -- wrote and saw successfully passed -- the clinic access bill that will permit women to be able to practice their constitutional rights in selection of abortion. And I have also led the fight against judges in the Supreme Court of the United States that refuse to permit a woman's right to choose. (THE 1994 CAMPAIGN; Excerpt From Debate By Kennedy And Romney; The Real Romney, a video clip of this exchange.)

Take a look also at comments Romney made eight years later when running for Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

How did this "man of principle" this "staunch defender of the inviolability of innocent human life under cover of the civil law," arrive at his pro-death position in 1994 and 2002? By pure political expediency, that's how:

In 1993, Mitt Romney was a successful businessman with an urge to enter public life and a plan to challenge Ted Kennedy for a Senate seat from Massachusetts.

Romney was also a high-ranking official in the Mormon church -- in charge of all church affairs in the Boston area -- with a dilemma over abortion. Romney was personally pro-life, and the church was pro-life, but a majority of the Massachusetts electorate was decidedly pro-choice.

How Romney handled that dilemma is described in a new book, "Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics," by Boston journalist Ronald Scott. A Mormon who admires Romney but has had his share of disagreements with him, Scott knew Romney from local church matters in the late 1980s.

Scott had worked for Time Inc., and in the fall of 1993, he says, Romney asked him for advice on how to handle various issues the media might pursue in a Senate campaign. Scott gave his advice in a couple of phone conversations and a memo. In the course of the conversations, Scott says, Romney outlined his views on the abortion problem.

According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan's former pollster whom Romney had hired for the '94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life.

In November 1993, according to Scott, Romney said he and Wirthlin, a Mormon whose brother and father were high-ranking church officials, traveled to Salt Lake City to meet with church elders. Gathering in the Church Administration Building, Romney, in Scott's words, "laid out for church leaders ... what his public position would be on abortion -- personally opposed but willing to let others decide for themselves."

By Scott's account, Romney wasn't seeking approval or permission; he was telling the officials what he was going to do. Scott quotes a "senior church leader" saying Romney "didn't ask what his position should be, nor did he ask the brethren to endorse his position. He came to explain, and his explanation was consistent with church teachings and policies."

According to Scott, some of the leaders were unhappy with Romney's plan and let him know it. "I may not have burned bridges, but a few of them were singed and smoking," Romney told Scott in a phone conversation.

In Scott's account, Romney displayed plenty of independence from church influence. But why did he feel the need to brief church leaders in the first place? The Romney campaign declined to comment on that or any other aspect of Scott's book. A Mormon church spokesman said only, "I do not know of the meeting, but it is our policy not to comment on private meetings anyway."

Scott has his own view. "[Romney] was not obliged to brief them," Scott said in an interview. "He probably was obliged to let them know as a matter of courtesy before he would take some stands on various issues that would raise eyebrows, because he was a fairly important officer of the church."

In any event, the episode points to a brief period in Romney's life in which his role as a church official and as an emerging political figure overlapped. (Romney declared his candidacy for the Senate on Feb. 2, 1994, and stepped down as a Mormon leader on March 20.)

Romney went on to lose in a campaign that featured Kennedy attacking Romney's religion. Romney pointed out the irony of Kennedy -- whose brother John F. Kennedy faced attacks on his Catholicism in the 1960 presidential campaign -- launching religion-based attacks, but to no avail.

If Romney is the 2012 Republican nominee, he will surely face similar stuff. Much of it will undoubtedly be ugly and unjustified. But there will also be simple questions about Romney's role as a church official at the start of his political career. (Mitt Romney Used Polls to Determine Campaign Position on Abortion.)

This "staunch defender" of the inviolability of innocent human life under cover of the civil law has boasted that he vetoed a bill passed by the Massachusetts General Court, the state legislature, that would have permitted the sale of the so-called Plan B emergency abortifacient to minor girls. That is not the whole story, nor does it say anything about his RomneyCare prototype of ObamaCare specifically included a provision for the appointment of a representative from Planned Parenthood on the state panel overseeing implementation of Romney's version of socialized medicine that has skyrocketed medical and insurance costs in the Bay State:

You should be quite familiar by now with the fact that Mitt Romney gave $150.00 to Planned Parenthood in 1994 when claiming he had always been pro-abortion.

You should also know that in 2004, Mitt Romney says he personally converted to the pro-life position. In fact, according to ABC News on June 14, 2007, “Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has long cited a November 2004 meeting with a Harvard stem-cell researcher as the moment that changed his long-held stance of supporting abortion rights to his current ‘pro-life’ position opposing legal abortion. But several actions Romney took mere months after that meeting call into question how deep-seated his conversion truly was.”

What was one of those actions?

Two months after his pro-life conversion, Mitt Romney appointed Matthew Nestor to the bench in Massachusetts. Romney seeming bowed to political pressure making Nestor a judge even after Nestor, according to the Boston Globe as far back as 1994, had campaigned for political office championing his pro-abortion views.

One year after his pro-life conversion, in July of 2005, Mitt Romney vetoed legislation that would expand the use of the morning after pill arguing that it would contribute to abortions. But just three months later Mitt Romney slid back and signed a bill that expanded state subsidized access to the morning after pill.

Writing in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2005, Stephanie Ebbert noted:

Governor Mitt Romney has signed a bill that could expand the number of people who get family-planning services, including the morning-after pill, confusing some abortion and contraception foes who had been heartened by his earlier veto of an emergency contraception bill. … The services include the distribution of condoms, abortion counseling, and the distribution of emergency contraception, or morning after pills, by prescription …

But that’s nothing. Two whole years after the pro-life view had settled into Mitt Romney’s conscience and a year after Mitt Romney had vetoed legislation expanding access to the morning after pill, he expanded access to abortion and gave Planned Parenthood new rights under state law. Yes, that Planned Parenthood.

Mitt Romney is really proud of Romneycare. He champions it as a great healthcare reform for Massachusetts. At one point he claimed it could be a model for the nation, though he now denies that.

According to States News Service on October 2, 2006,

“The following information was released by the Massachusetts Office of the Governor: Governor Mitt Romney today officially launched Commonwealth Care, an innovative health insurance product that will allow thousands of uninsured Massachusetts residents to purchase private health insurance products at affordable rates. Commonwealth Care is a key component of the state’s landmark healthcare reform law approved by the Governor in April. ‘We are now on the road to getting everyone health insurance in Massachusetts,’ said Governor Romney. … ‘Today, we celebrate a great beginning.’

Romney loves to take credit for it.

The law, in addition to providing healthcare coverage for the uninsured and forcing everyone to have insurance, expanded abortion services in the State of Massachusetts. It also required that one member of the MassHealth Payment Policy Board be appointed by Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts.

From Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006:

SECTION 3. Chapter 6A of the General Laws is hereby amended by inserting after section 16I the following 6 sections: . . . Section 16M. (a) There shall be a MassHealth payment policy advisory board. The board shall consist of the secretary of health and human services or his designee, who shall serve as chair, the commissioner of health care financing and policy, and 12 other members: … 1 member appointed by Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts … (Massachusetts General Court Website, www.mass.gov, Accessed 2/5/07)

In 2007, Mitt Romney was still denying his healthcare plan did this.

QUESTION: “I noticed some of the conservative groups back in Massachusetts, they complain about there’s a Planned Parenthood rep mandate to be on the planning board for the health care plan. Is that something you just had to deal with in negotiating with the legislature?”

ROMNEY: “It’s certainly not something that was in my bill.” (Eric Krol, “Full Text Of Romney Interview,” [Arlington Heights, IL] Daily Herald, 6/17/07)

Except it was. Apparently, like with Obamacare, you had to pass the bill to find out what was in it, but once passed, Romney never read it. (Mitt Romney Not Only Gave Money to Planned Parenthood, He Gave It Power; for a very comprehensive review of Willard Mitt Romney's supposed "conversion" on the issue on abortion, please see How Pro-Life Is Mitt Romney?)

It doesn’t stop with this, though.

One of Romney’s own campaign aides in 2012 said, after winning enough delegate votes to secure the Republican Party presidential nomination, that the former Governor of Massachusetts could have a “Etch-A-Sketch” makeover for the general election:

Is Mitt Romney an Etch-A-Sketch candidate, one whose positions can be erased with a shake, ready for a new and different drawing?

That’s an analogy that’s getting a lot of discussion today in the Washington professional political class following a comment made by senior Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom on CNN. Asked whether conservatives Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich had pushed Mr. Romney so far to the right that he’ll have trouble with moderates in a general election, Mr. Fehrnstrom said that wouldn’t be a problem.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart it all over again,” Fehrnstrom said.

That comment – which appears to imply that Romney can forget what he’s said and take new stands in the fall – came bouncing back to whack the Romney camp faster than a SuperBall pitched against a concrete wall. The Santorum campaign sent out an email alerting reporters to Fehrnstrom’s words, claiming they’re proof that Romney is a Massachusetts moderate.

“We all knew Mitt Romney didn’t have any core convictions, but we appreciate his staff going on national television to affirm that point for anyone who had any doubts,” said Santorum national communications director Hogan Gridley in a statement.

Gingrich piled on, adding via Twitter that “Etch-A-Sketch is a great toy but a losing strategy. We need a nominee w/bold conservative solutions.”

Democratic strategists gleefully retweeted these remarks, hoping to sow chaos in the GOP ranks, while the blogosphere resounded with Romney critics opining as to what other toys he has in his closet: My Little Phony, Gumby, a Hot Wheels Dog Carrier, and so forth.

Very funny. But will this incident hurt Romney, or simply launch a flotilla of bad jokes? We’re guessing the latter. It’ll be gone faster than you can erase a ... well, you know. Etch-A-Sketch references stop here. We promise.

Why? First of all, Romney’s had a pretty good week, in case you didn’t notice. He won the Illinois primary in a walk. Jeb Bush endorsed him, in essence saying to others in the GOP, “it’s time to end this now.”

In other words, Romney has pretty much won. All that’s left is for Santorum and Gingrich to realize that they’ve become zombie candidates. Fehrnstrom’s comments won’t help rivals who have already lost. (Etch-A-Sketch: Can Mitt Romney shake off his aide's Mr. Potato Head Comment?)

Seeking to quickly move on after one of his spokesman blotted out what should have been a banner day for his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney promised wary conservatives that he would not change course if he becomes the Republican nominee.

Speaking to reporters after a town hall meeting in Arbutus, Md., Romney clarified an aide's statement that he would view the start of the general election campaign like an Etch-A-Sketch, suggesting that he could adjust positions he took in a primary campaign dominated by conservatives to please a more centrist electorate in November.

Asked whether Romney’s positions in the primary might be too far to the right to win in November, Eric Fehrnstrom said on CNN: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

Though Fehrnstrom was specifically asked about Romney’s political positions possibly changing, Romney portrayed the comments as being about his organization. Should he be the nominee, Romney said, the nature of the campaign certainly would change "organizationally." But "the issues I'm running on will be exactly the same."

"I'm running as a conservative Republican. I was a conservative Republican governor. I'll be running as a conservative Republican nominee," he said. "The policies and positions are exactly the same."

The Romney campaign had hoped to spend the day talking about its double-digit triumph in Illinois on Tuesday and the endorsement of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. At a town hall meeting outside Baltimore, Romney sought to keep his focus on President Obama, mocking his trip out West to talk about energy prices.

But his rivals seized on the comments from Fehrnstrom, forcing Romney to respond.

A Rick Santorum campaign spokesman showed up at the site of Romney's Maryland campaign kickoff event to hand out miniature versions of the Etch-A-Sketch.

Fehrnstrom's analogy, Alice Stewart told reporters, "confirms what a lot of conservatives have been afraid of. He used to be pro-abortion, he used to be pro-gay marriage, he used to be for a Wall Street bailout, climate change. Now he's talking a different language, but the campaign acknowledged that if need be, if he won the primary, he'd go right back to the middle in order to win the general." (Romney clarifies Etch-A-Sketch remarks to reporter.)

Actually, this is nothing new. Naturalists who are the creatures of focus group polling and the advice given them by their political handlers and marketers always change their positions in order to win as winning is the only thing that matters in American politics. Nothing else.

Most of those who participate as gladiators in the naturalist farce and circus that is electoral politics count on the simple fact that they can use an "Etch-A-Sketch" strategy to campaign for office because most voters themselves live "Etch-A-Sketch" lives in that they do not remember the events of past campaigns or the policy positions they had taken once in office.

Yet it is that Romney considers himself be “better” than President Trump.

Romney is a craven opportunist. He was one at Bain Capital. He was one when he was running for the United States Senate in 1994 against the late Edward Moore Kennedy, whose own lack of character was never mentioned by Romney. He was one when he ran for the governorship of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2002, and he was one when he ran for president in 2008 and 2012. Romney was an opportunist when he invested in Stericycle, unconcerned about its practices of disposing of the remains of babies butchered in America’s killing centers, abortuaries (see Blood Money Talks Loud And Clear). Romney may not have known what Stericycle did. However, he did not care as the company was a good investment for him. Willard Mitt Romney’s character is as much defined by the “bottom line” as that of the man he criticizes so hypocritically, President Donald John Trump.

Willard Mitt Romney is a man of such “virtuous character” that he felt compelled to throw then United States Representative Tod Akin (R-Missouri) under the bus in 2012 when the latter rightly, albeit clumsily, expressed his opposition to abortion in those rare cases when a woman has conceived a child as a result of a forcible attack upon her:

Rejecting Democratic efforts to convince voters that Republicans would “wage a war on women” with their policies, Mitt Romney offered an unusual defense of his Massachusetts healthcare plan in an interview that aired Sunday, and offered another condemnation of Missouri Congressman Todd Akin.

Akin created an uproar and major political problem for his party when he made the baseless assertion in an interview last Sunday that after a “legitimate rape,” women have a biological mechanism to prevent a pregnancy.

Asked during an interview with Fox News Sunday about the political consequences Akin’s comment has had for his party, Romney said he believed it was “a terrible statement” on Akin’s part, and called it “uninformed,” “outrageous and offensive.”

“I think I’ve distanced myself from the thing he said as far as I possibly can,” he said, arguing that Democrats were using the statement to cast a shadow on his entire party.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Romney to respond to the charge from Democrats that their party offers more support and choice in situations of abortion, rape or birth control and women’s health in general.

“With regards to women’s healthcare — look I’m the guy who was able to get healthcare for all the women and men in my state,” Romney said. “They’re just talking about at the federal level. We actually did something and we did it without cutting Medicare and without raising taxes. I’m very proud of what we did and the fact that we helped women, and men and children in our state,” he said pivoting to an attack on Obama’s record on Medicare.

Addressing contraceptives, Romney said he and other Republicans “of course … recognize that people should have a right to use contraceptives. There’s absolutely no validity whatsoever to the Obama effort to try and bring that up.”

Romney has, however, vowed to end federal funding of Planned Parenthood, which, along with other services, provides contraceptives to those who cannot otherwise afford them.

Steering into the issue of abortion, Romney made the case for his opposition to abortion, which he believes should be banned except in the case of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk. (His running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would outlaw abortion even in cases of rape or incest, though he has said recently that he was “comfortable” with Romney’s position because “it's a good step in the right direction.”)

On abortion, Romney said: “That is something where men and women have alternative views on that, or different views. We look at an issue like that with great seriousness and sobriety and recognize that different people have reached different conclusions,” Romney continued. “But it’s not just men who think one way, women also in many cases are pro-life. There are two lives at stake: the child — the unborn child and the mom — and I care for both of them.”

Earlier in his political career, Romney was a strong advocate of abortion rights. His position switched before his first run for president in 2008. (Romney Defends Self, Party on Assault, Abortion and Women.)

This is what I wrote at the time after Romney’s cowardly attack on Tod Akin:

Permit me to introduce you to your "lesser of two evils" in 2012.

See Willard Mitt Romney condemn Todd Akin.

See Willard Mitt Romney boast about RomneyCare, the prototype of ObamaCare.

See Paul Davis Ryan say that the very "exceptions" that paved the way for the decriminalization of surgical baby killing in several states in the 1960s and thus for the American genocide to take place on a nationwide basis following the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, are a "step in the right direction." What, Representative Ryan, is this the kind of logic you picked up listening to your "heavy metal" noise?

See Willard Mitt Romney once again state his firm support for the "right" of Americans to use contraceptives, each of which denies the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and most of which actually kill innocent human beings.

See Willard Mitt Romney parrot Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., George Walker Bush and John Sidney McCain III, saying that "different people have reached different conclusions." Yes, your "pro-life" "champion" of 2012.

Please, please, please. Do not tell me that the movie 2016 should cause us to accept Romney because Obama is so bad and that conditions will be so much more worse in 2016 if he is re-elected on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. You mean to tell me you need a motion picture to inform you that Barack Hussein Obama has a Third World Marxist view on role of the United States of America in the world and the redistribution of wealth here at home as the Federal government arrogates more and more powers unto itself?

Look Willard Mitt Romney's statements above and ask yourselves how "things" will get "better in 2016 with such a man in the White House, a man who believes that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the devil are "spirit brothers," a man who believes that what matters most in the life of a nation is "the money, the money, the money, the money," a man who is a complete and total slave to the policies of the State of Israel.

Once again, believe what you want. Act as you will. Vote as many times as you want as it is, after all, Obama's "Chicago Way." 

It was actually worse than all this as Romney’s campaign, desperate to find some means to reach “swing” voters in Ohio, Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New Mexico, actually ran a campaign advertisement touting his “moderate views” about baby-killing:

Mitt Romney’s campaign, in an effort to appeal to women who hold more moderate views on reproductive issues, is releasing a new commercial that highlights his support for contraception and abortion in limited circumstances.

“You know, those ads say Mitt Romney would ban all abortions and contraception seemed a bit extreme, so I looked into it,” says a woman identified as Sarah Minto, who is shown on camera searching on Google for “Romney on abortion.”

Ms. Minto adds: “It turns out Romney doesn’t oppose contraception at all. In fact, he thinks abortion should be an option in cases of rape, incest or to save a mother’s life.”

The ad is Mr. Romney’s most aggressive attempt to rebut attempts by the Obama campaign to paint him as extreme on women’s rights.

Mr. Romney has long struggled with women. All year polls have shown President Obama with a sizeable advantage. But as the race tightens in the final three weeks before the election – and one major poll showing this week that the Republican nominee is significantly narrowing the gender gap – the Romney campaign is moving dramatically to showcase its more moderate positions.

This strategy is not without risk. Many socially conservative Republicans have long been wary of Mr. Romney, who as a candidate for United States Senate said that abortion should be “safe and legal” and touted his pro-gay rights positions.

Reproductive rights have continued to bedevil Mr. Romney over the course of this election. Just last week he raised eyebrows when he denied to the editorial board of The Des Moines Register that he would pursue anti-abortion legislation. “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” he said.

Mr. Romney’s advisers have long said that they believed the election would turn on the economy, and that is where Ms. Minto ends her statement in the ad.

“I’m more concerned about the debt our children will be left with,” she says as she looks into the camera. “I voted for President Obama last time. We just can’t afford 4 more years.” (Romney Ad Touts Moderate Views on Abortion.)

Oh, I have more about the Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., of 2012, Willard Mitt Romney.

Romney’s 2012 campaign featured women who downplayed the “divisive” “social issues”:

What is missing from the all-inclusive spot? Any discussion of the social issues — abortion, same-sex marriage, insurance coverage for birth control — that have at times engulfed the Republican nominating contest. “We don’t talk social issues,” said Mary Ann Carter, policy director for the Young Guns Network, who manages the pavilion, as several young women from the convention milled about the space sipping coffee and shopping for souvenirs. “We talk about the economy. We talk about health care. We talk about energy.”

This refrain is often heard in and around the convention these days. In dozens of interviews, women at the convention made clear that social issues are now taking a back seat. Even those who passionately agree (or disagree) with the new conservative party platform — calling for traditional marriage, public display of the Ten Commandments and a sweeping ban on abortion — did not seem to want to discuss the subject. (The one exception was Mr. Romney’s sister Jane, who on Wednesday declared that if Mr. Romney is elected president, a ban on abortion is “never going to happen.”)

Instead, women at the convention preferred to point to opening night on Tuesday, when a parade of Republican women took to the podium, including Ann Romney, who spoke about her family, and Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, who preached a gospel of economic empowerment, free of meddlesome government rules and regulations.

Being visible was one way, Republican women said, to counter the Obama campaign’s charge that their party is waging a war on women.

“They’re doing the soft love approach,” said Sandra Stroman, a convention participant from Chester, S.C. “They’re holding up our women in this party and putting those women in front of the cameras, saying, ‘Here are our Republican women. Do they look like we have waged war against them?’ ”

With the intention of appealing to voters beyond the party’s base, many Republican women are simply avoiding the mention of abortion or gay rights because they are seen as too divisive in such a close, contentious race. Some acknowledge deliberately playing down their own views as a strategic move. Instead, they want to talk about the economy, just like the Romney campaign.

“Anything that gives women the idea that they can’t find friends in the Republican Party is unhelpful,” said Kristen Soltis, a pollster who is an adviser to Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC.  (Republican Women Play Down Social Issues.)

Do you remember these facts?

Why is it that so many people were so agitated seven years ago?

Sure, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro is a statist who had no regard for the laws of God or of man, and he is still helping to mastermind the coup against President Donald John Trump. A “President” Willard Mitt Romney would have governed little differently than Obama/Soetoro did. That is a fact that few people wanted to accept in 2012, and it is a fact that so few people want to recognize now.

Willard Mitt Romney just wanted to get elected. He is no man of virtue at all. He is a craven opportunist who is now champing at the bit to be praised by the mainslime media as he attempts to carve out the role as “the conscience of the Senate,” although it is my surmise that Marco Rubio will play tag team with him in this regard. Romney remains an opportunist as he seeks to create a rebel niche for himself to launch yet a third quest for the presidency next year, especially if Trump is impeached by the United States House of Representatives, which seems probable to occur, and then tried by the United States Senate. Count on Romney to be one of several Republicans (joined by Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Marco Rubio) who will vote for the president’s conviction on bogus charges of high crimes and misdemeanors. That won’t be enough to effect the president’s removal, but it would position Romney as a “man of courage” in the eyes of the mainslime media, which is what he wants.

Ultimately, good readers, the country is divided not by Donald John Trump’s style and policies, many of which, especially pertaining to the supposed “rights” of those practicing the sin of Sodom and its related vices, are actually in agreement with those of Willard Mitt Romney’s nor by the president’s justified decision to stand firm, at least for now, about border security or to denounce foreign leaders who countries have been feeding at the trough provided them by American taxpayers since World War II. The United States of America is divided as error divides and only Catholicism unites. This is something that neither Mormon Romney nor the nominal Protestant, Trump, understand or accept. However, it is nevertheless true. Although Catholicism is not a guarantor of social order, it is the necessary precondition for it. Period. Error Engenders Hate and Agitation, Christ the King Engeenders True Charity and Peace. I will simply keep reminding you all that this is all a gigantic trap that was unleashed by the Protestant Revolution and has been institutionalized by the forces of naturalism that have a vested interest in keeping us agitated over events that have as their only remedy the daily conversion of men and their nations to the sweet yoke of Christ the King as they rely so tenderly upon the loving intercession of Our Lady, she is our Immaculate Queen, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary.

Appendix C

Material from Cut from the Same Cloth, November 7, 2007

The subordination of the Catholic Faith to the falsehoods of the American founding was so well-grounded by 1928 that the first Catholic to be nominated by a major political party for the office of President of the United States of America, Alfred E. Smith, the Governor of New York from 1919-1920 and again from 1923-1928, a Democrat who later broke with the Democrat Party over his gubernatorial successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Smith, though an honest man concerned about "good government" and devoted to the Faith in his own personal life, was clueless about the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. He had dropped out of parochial school at the age of fourteen to support his family following the death of his father, never receiving any schooling thereafter, not that he would have learned about the Social Reign of Christ the King had he continued in his studies. He was imbued in the Americanist errors of separation of Church and State and of religious liberty from his earliest days, making him oblivious to the fact that a Protestant attorney in the City of New York by the name of Charles C. Marshall, who was very much opposed to Catholic Social Teaching, nevertheless had a better, firmer grasp on it than Smith, who had been so immersed in the Americanist ethos that he believed the words "Catholicism" and "Americanism" were synonymous with each other.

One will see that Charles Marshall's letter to Smith, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in April of 1927, contained an absolutely marvelous understanding of Catholic Social Teaching. Marshall rejected that teaching. He exalted the rights of the civil state over the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Marshall had studied the social encyclical letters and knew their content better than Smith, who had not studied them at all, and better than contemporary Americanist Catholics and the conciliarists who believe that the teaching contained therein has become "obsolete." Here is Charles Marshall's open letter to then Governor of the State of New York, Alfred Emmanuel Smith, Jr., who had unsuccessfully sought the Democrat Party presidential nomination in 1924 and appeared to be the front-runner for the party's 1928 presidential nomination: 

Sir: —

The American people take pride in viewing the progress of an American citizen from the humble estate in which his life began toward the highest office within the gift of the nation. It is for this reason that your candidacy for the Presidential nomination has stirred the enthusiasm of a great body of your fellow citizens. They know and rejoice in the hardship and the struggle of which have fashioned you as a leader of men. They know your fidelity to the morality you have advocated in public and private life and to the religion you have revered; your great record of public trusts successfully and honestly discharged; your spirit of fair play, and justice even to your political opponents. Partisanship bids fair to quail before the challenge of your personality, and men who vote habitually against your party are pondering your candidacy with sincere respect; and yet—through all this tribute there is a note of doubt, a sinister accent of interrogation, not as to intentional rectitude and moral purpose, but as to certain conceptions which your fellow citizens attribute to you as a loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic, which in their minds are irreconcilable with that Constitution which as President you must support and defend, and with the principles of civil and religious liberty on which American institutions are based.

To this consideration no word of yours, or on your behalf, has yet been addressed. Its discussion in the interests of the public weal is obviously necessary, and yet a strange reticence avoids it, often with the unjust and withering attribution of bigotry or prejudice as the unworthy motive of its introduction. Undoubtedly a large part of the public would gladly avoid a subject the discussion of which is so unhappily associated with rancor and malevolence, and yet to avoid the subject is to neglect the profoundest interests in our national welfare.

American life has developed into a variety of religious beliefs and ethical systems, religious and nonreligious, whose claims press more and more upon public attention. None of these presents a more definite philosophy or makes a more positive demand upon the attention and reason of mankind than your venerable Church, which recently at Chicago, in the greatest religious demonstration that the world has ever seen, declared her presence and her power in American life. Is not the time ripe and the occasion opportune for a declaration, if it can be made, that shall clear away all doubt as to the reconcilability of her status and her claims with American constitutional principles? With such a statement the only question as to your proud eligibility to the Presidential office would disappear, and the doubts of your fellow citizens not of the Roman Catholic Church would be instantly resolved in your favor.

The conceptions to which we refer are not superficial. They are of the very life and being of that Church, determining its status and its relation to the State, and to the great masses of men whose convictions deny them the privilege of membership in that Church. Surely the more conscientious the Roman Catholic, and the more loyal to his Church, the more sincere and unqualified should be his acceptance of such conceptions.

These conceptions have been recognized before by Roman Catholics as a potential obstacle to their participation in public office, Pope Leo XIII himself declaring, in one of his encyclical letters, that “it may in some places be true that for most urgent and just reasons it is by no means expedient for (Roman) Catholics to engage in public affairs or to take an active part in politics.”

It is indeed true that a loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic could and would discharge his oath of office with absolute fidelity to his moral standards. As to that in general, and as to you in particular, your fellow citizens entertain no doubt. But those moral standards differ essentially from the moral standards of all men not Roman Catholics. They are derived from the basic political doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, asserted against repeated challenges for fifteen hundred years, that God has divided all power over men between the secular State and that Church. Thus Pope Leo XIII, in 1885, in his encyclical letter on The Christian Constitution of States, says: “The Almighty has appointed the charge of the human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things.”

The deduction is inevitable that, as all power over human affairs, not given to the State by God, is given by God to the Roman Catholic Church, no other churches or religious or ethical societies have in theory any direct power from God and are without direct divine sanction, and therefore without natural right to function on the same basis as the Roman Catholic Church in the religious and moral affairs of the State. The result is that that Church, if true to her basic political doctrine, is hopelessly committed to that intolerance that has disfigured so much of her history. This is frankly admitted by Roman Catholic authorities.

Pope Pius IX in the famous Syllabus (1864) said:

“To hold that national churches, withdrawn from the authority of the Roman Pontiff and altogether separated, can be established, is error.”

That great compendium of Roman Catholic teaching, the Catholic Encyclopedia, declares that the Roman Catholic Church “regards dogmatic intolerance, not alone as her incontestable right, but as her sacred duty.” It is obvious that such convictions leave nothing in theory of the religious and moral rights of those who are not Roman Catholics. And, indeed, that is Roman Catholic, teaching and the inevitable deduction from Roman Catholic claims, if we use the word “rights” strictly. Other churches, other religious societies, are tolerated in the State, not by right, but by favor.

Pope Leo XIII is explicit on this point:

“The (Roman Catholic) Church, indeed, deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion, but does not, on that account, condemn those rulers who, for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil, allow patiently custom or usage to be a kind of sanction for each kind of religion having its place in the State.”

That is, there is not a lawful equality of other religious with that of the Roman Catholic Church, but that Church will allow state authorities for politic reasons—that is, by favor, but not by right—to tolerate other religious societies. We would ask, sir, whether such favors can be accepted in place of rights by those owning the name of freemen?

II

Furthermore, the doctrine of the Two Powers, in effect and theory, inevitable makes the Roman Catholic Church at times sovereign and paramount over the State. It is true that in theory the doctrine assigns to the secular State jurisdiction over secular matters and to the Roman Catholic Church jurisdiction over matters of faith and morals, each jurisdiction being exclusive of the other within undisputed lines. But the universal experience of mankind has demonstrated, and reason teaches, that many questions must arise between the State and the Roman Catholic Church in respect to which it is impossible to determine to the satisfaction of both in which jurisdiction the matter at issue lies.

Here arises the irrepressible conflict. Shall the State or the Roman Catholic Church determine? The Constitution of the United States clearly ordains that the State shall determine the question. The Roman Catholic Church demands for itself the sole right to determine it, and holds that within the limits of that claim it is superior to and supreme over the State. The Catholic Encyclopedia clearly so declares: “In case of direct contradiction, making it impossible for both jurisdictions to be exercised, the jurisdiction of the Church prevails and that of the State is excluded.” And Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus asserted: “To say in the case of conflicting laws enacted by the Two Powers, the civil law prevails, is error.”

Extreme as such a conclusion may appear, it is inevitable in Roman Catholic philosophy. That Church by the very theory of her existence cannot yield, because what she claims as her right and her truth she claims is hers by the “direct act of God”; in her theory, God himself directly forbids. The State cannot yield because of a great mass of citizens who are not Roman Catholics. By its constitutional law and in the nature of things, practices of religion in its opinion inconsistent with its peace and safety are unlawful; the law of its being—the law of necessity—forbids. If we could all concede the “divine and exclusive” claims of the Roman Catholic Church, conflict would be eliminated; but, as it is, there is a wide consensus of opinion that those claims are false in fact and in flat conflict with the very being and order of the State.

In our constitutional order this consensus is bulwarked on the doctrine of the Supreme Court of the United States that our religious liberty and our constitutional guaranties thereof are subject to the supreme qualification that religious “practices inconsistent with the peace and safety of the State shall not be justified.” (Watson v. Jones 13 Wall. P. 579)

The Roman Catholic Church, of course, makes no claim, and never has made any claim, to jurisdiction over matters that in her opinion are solely secular and civil. She makes the claim obviously only when the matter in question is not, in her opinion, solely secular and civil. But as determination of jurisdiction, in a conflict with the State, rests solely in her sovereign discretion, no argument is needed to show that she may in theory and effect annihilate the rights of all who are not Roman Catholics, sweeping into the jurisdiction of a single religious society the most important interests of human well-being. The education of youth, the institution of marriage, the international relations of the State, and its domestic peace, as we shall proceed to show, are, in certain exigencies, wrested from the jurisdiction of the State, in which all citizens share, and confided to the jurisdiction of a single religious society in which all citizens cannot share, great numbers being excluded by the barriers of religious belief. Do you, sir, regard such claims as tolerable in a republic that calls itself free?

And, in addition to all this, the exclusive powers of the Roman Catholic Church are claimed by her to be vested in and exercised by a sovereignty that is not only created therefor by the special act of God, but is foreign and extraterritorial to these United States and to all secular states. This sovereignty, by the highest Roman Catholic authority, that of Pope Leo XIII, is not only superior in theory to the sovereignty of the secular State, but is substituted upon earth in place of the authority of God himself. . . .

It follows naturally on all this that there is a conflict between authoritative Roman Catholic claims on the one side and our constitutional law and principles on the other. Pope Leo XIII says:

“It is not lawful for the State, any more than for the individual, either to disregard all religious duties or to hold in equal favor different kinds of religion.” But the Constitution of the United States declares otherwise: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Thus the Constitution declares the United States shall hold in equal favor different kinds of religion or no religion and the Pope declares it is not lawful to hold them in equal favor. Is there not here a quandary for that man who is at once a loyal churchman and a loyal citizen? . . .

Americans indulge themselves in the felicitation that they have achieved an ideal religious situation in the United States. But Pope Leo, in his encyclical letter on Catholicity in the United States, asserts:

“It would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church.” The modern world reposes in the comfortable reflection that the severance of Church and State has ended a long and unhappy conflict, when the same Pope calls our attention to the error of supposing “that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.”

Is our law, then, in papal theory, no law? Is it contrary to natural right? Is it in conflict with the will and fiat of Almighty God? Clearly the Supreme Court and Pope Leo are profoundly at variance. Is it not obvious that such a difference of opinion, concerning the fundamental rights between two sovereignties operating within the same territory, may, even with the best intentions and the most sensitive consciences, be fruitful of political offenses that are odious among men?

Citizens who waver in your support would ask whether, as a Roman Catholic, you accept as authoritative the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that in case of contradiction, making it impossible for the jurisdiction of that Church and the jurisdiction of the State to agree, the jurisdiction of the Church shall prevail; whether, as statesman, you accept the teaching of the Supreme Court of the United States that, in matters of religious practices which in the opinion of the State are inconsistent with its peace and safety, the jurisdiction of the State shall prevail; and, if you accept both teachings, how you will reconcile them.

III

At the present time no question assumes greater importance than the education of youth. The legislatures of Tennessee, of Oregon, and of Nebraska have of late laid impious hands upon it and the judiciary has sternly curbed them. From what has been said above, it is clear that the claims of the Roman Catholic Church touching this point, more than those of any other institution, may conflict with the authority of the State.

It is true that in the famous Oregon School cases the Supreme Court of the United States held a state law unconstitutional that forbade parents to educate their children at church schools of every denomination. But there was no assertion in the law that the church schools in question gave instruction inconsistent with the peace and safety of the State and there was no allegation of that tenor in the pleadings. On the record the church schools were void of offense. But, had that feature existed in the cases, it would necessarily have led to a reversal of the decision. There would have been a conflict between Church and State as to whether the instruction was inconsistent with the peace and safety of the State. The Roman Catholic Church, if true to her doctrine and dogma, would have had to assert exclusive jurisdiction over the determination of this point. Equally the State, in self-preservation, would have had to assert exclusive jurisdiction. The conflict would have been irreconcilable. What would have been the results and what the test of a sincere and conscientious Roman Catholic in executive office or on the bench?

Nothing can be clearer to the American mind than that the plain political teaching of Pope Pius IX and of Pope Leo XIII, as set forth in their encyclical letters, is inconsistent with the peace and safety of the State within the meaning of those words as used by the Supreme Court of the United States in its great decision. That it is “not lawful for the State to hold in equal favor different kinds of religion”; that it is not universally lawful for the State and the Roman Catholic Church to be dissevered and divorced; that the various kinds of religion in theory have their place in the State, not by natural right, but by favor; that dogmatic intolerance is not alone the incontestable right of the Roman Catholic Church, but her sacred duty; that in the case of conflicting laws of the State and the Roman Catholic Church the law of that Church shall prevail, are propositions that would make up a strange textbook for the instruction of American youth.

VI

We have no desire to impute to the Roman Catholic Church aught but high and sincere motives in the assertion of her claims as one of the Two Powers. Her members believe in those claims, and, so believing, it is their conscientious duty to stand for them. We are satisfied if they will but concede that those claims, unless modified and historically redressed, precipitate an inevitable conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and the American State irreconcilable with domestic peace. With two illustrations—and those relating to English Christianity—we have done.

In the sixteenth century the decree of Pope Pius V in terms deposed Elizabeth, Queen of England, from the English throne and absolved her subjects from their allegiance. The result is well known. Much that pertained to the venerable forms of religion in the preceding centuries became associated in the popular mind of England with treason—even the Mass itself when celebrated in the Roman form. Roman Catholics were oppressed in their rights and privileges. Roman Catholic priests were forbidden within the realm. The mills of God turned slowly, but they turned. The Roman Catholics of England endured the penalties of hostile legislation with heroic fortitude and resignation. Public opinion slowly changed and gradually Roman Catholic disabilities were removed, and in 1850, under Cardinal Wiseman, the Roman Catholic Hierarchy was restored in England, with no other condition than that its sees should not use the ancient titles that the Hierarchy of the Church of England had retained. Peace and amity reigned within the realm, irrespective of different religions, and domestic repose marked a happy epoch. But the toleration and magnanimity of England bore strange fruit. Scarcely was the Roman Hierarchy restored to its ancient privileges when the astounding Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII appeared (1896), declaring to the world that the orders of the Church of England were void, her priests no priests, her bishops not bishops, and her sacraments so many empty forms.

But this was not all. Reaching hands back through three centuries, the Roman Pontiff drew from obscurity the case of John Felton, an English citizen who in 1570, contrary to the law of treason at that time on the statute book of England, posted on the walls of London the decree of Pope Pius V already referred to, deposing the English Queen. Felton was beatified in 1886 by the act of Pope Leo XIII.

The honors paid him were rendered three hundred years after his treasonable act. There lies their sinister import. They are no part of the medieval milieu; they belong to the modern world and must have judgment not by medieval but by modern standards. One would have supposed, in view of the critical situation in modern States in relation to the respect for authority of government and the obedience of citizens to the law, that the beautification might have been omitted. One would have supposed that the changes in political thought and theory through three hundred years would have dictated the wisdom of letting the dead past bury its dead, and the memory of blessed John Felton rest in peace with those abandoned political doctrines that inspired his heroic but unhappy deed.

Is the record of the Roman Catholic Church in England consistent, sir, in your opinion, with the peace and safety of the State?

Nothing will be of greater satisfaction to those of your fellow citizens who hesitate in their endorsement of your candidacy because of the religious issues involved than such a disclaimer by you of the convictions here imputed, or such an exposition by others of the questions here presented, as may justly turn public opinion in your favor.

Yours with great respect, Charles C. Marshall   (An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith.)

Ignoring Charles Marshall's contempt for the heroism of John Felton in defending the rights of Christ the King and His Vicar on earth, Pope Saint Pius V, against the hideous Queen of England, Elizabeth I, who presided over the cruel execution and torture of so many faithful Catholics, including Blessed Edmund Campion, S.J., his letter to Governor Alfred E. Smith, Jr., demonstrates that he had "gotten it" insofar as Catholic Social Teaching is concerned: the Constitution of the United States of America is incompatible with the Faith. From a Catholic point of view, of course, a subordination of the Faith to the Constitution winds up producing a situation where ordinary Catholics view through Church and her teaching, which is nothing other than the teaching of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.

Upon hearing of Charles Marshall's article, Governor Alfred E. Smith, Jr., is reported to have said, "What the [place of eternal damnation] is an encyclical." Smith turned to a Jewish judge friend of his, Joseph Proskauer, who suggested that Smith have a reply printed in his own time, although the actual work of the drafting of Smith's response, which ran in the May, 1927, issue of Atlantic Monthly, was done by a Father Francis Duffy, who was decorated by the governments of the United States of America and of France for his service as a military chaplain in World War I. Father Duffy, although certain a hero and a man who worked hard for the salvation of souls, was nevertheless an Americanist who believed that their private opinions on religious liberty and separation of Church and State were what mattered, not the teaching contained in encyclical letters that pertained, he believed, only to purely Catholic states and not as the idea to which all Catholics, no matter where they found themselves and under what conditions they lived, had to strive to plant the seeds to restore.

Indeed, Alfred E. Smith's response to Charles Marshall contained a most telling revelation about the extent to which Catholic Social Teaching on Church-State relations and religious liberty was not preached from the pulpit or taught in most Catholic schools:

By what right do you ask me to assume responsibility for any statement that may be made in any encyclical letter? I and all my children went to a parochial school. I never heard of any such stuff being taught or of anybody who claimed that it was.”

Here is the full text of Smith's ghost-written response, which received the approval of Patrick Cardinal Hayes, the Archbishop of New York, and met with the approval of at least one curial cardinal in the Vatican, demonstrating, of course, that those infected with Modernist ideas--or who so wanted to see American Catholics "succeed" that they were willing to suspend rationality in the process--were waiting for the "golden day" to arrive when Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors and the great encyclicals of Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, St. Pius X, and even of the then reigning pontiff, Pius XI, the great apostle of Christ the King, would be wiped away:

DEAR Sir: —

In your open letter to me in the April Atlantic Monthly you 'impute' to American Catholics views which, if held by them, would leave open to question the loyalty and devotion to this country and its Constitution of more than twenty million American Catholic citizens. I am grateful to you for defining this issue in the open and for your courteous expression of the satisfaction it will bring to my fellow citizens for me to give 'a disclaimer of the convictions' thus imputed. Without mental reservation I can and do make that disclaimer. These convictions are held neither by me nor by any other American Catholic, as far as I know. Before answering the argument of your letter, however, I must dispose of one of its implications. You put your questions to me in connection with my candidacy for the office of President of the United States. My attitude with respect to that candidacy was fully stated in my last inaugural address as Governor when, on January 1, 1927, I said: — 'I have no idea what the future has in store for me. Everyone else in the United States has some notion about it except myself. No man could stand before this intelligent gathering and say that he was not receptive to the greatest position the world has to give anyone. But I can say this, that I will do nothing to achieve it except to give to the people of the State the kind and character of service that will make me deserve it.'

I should be a poor American and a poor Catholic alike if I injected religious discussion into a political campaign. Therefore I would ask you to accept this answer from me not as a candidate for any public office but as an American citizen, honored with high elective office, meeting a challenge to his patriotism and his intellectual integrity. Moreover, I call your attention to the fact that I am only a layman. The Atlantic Monthly describes you as 'an experienced attorney' who 'has made himself an authority upon canon law.' I am neither a lawyer nor a theologian. What knowledge of law I have was gained in the course of my long experience in the Legislature and as Chief Executive of New York State. I had no such opportunity to study theology.

My first thought was to answer you with just the faith that is in me. But I knew instinctively that your conclusions could be logically proved false. It seemed right, therefore, to take counsel with someone schooled in the Church law, from whom I learned whatever is hereafter set forth in definite answer to the theological questions you raise. I selected one whose patriotism neither you nor any other man will question. He wears upon his breast the Distinguished Service Cross of our country, its Distinguished Service Medal, the Ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm of the French Republic. He was the Catholic Chaplain of the almost wholly Catholic 165th Regiment in the World War, Father Francis P. Duffy, now in the military service of my own State.

Taking your letter as a whole and reducing it to commonplace English, you imply that there is conflict between religious loyalty to the Catholic faith and patriotic loyalty to the United States. Everything that has actually happened to me during my long public career leads me to know that no such thing as that is true. I have taken an oath of office in this State nineteen times. Each time I swore to defend and maintain the Constitution of the United States. All of. this represents a period of public service in elective office almost continuous since 1903. I have never known any conflict between my official duties and my religious belief. No such conflict could exist. Certainly the people of this State recognize no such conflict. They have testified to my devotion to public duty by electing me to the highest office within their active gift four times. You yourself do me the honor, in addressing me, to refer to 'your fidelity to the morality you have advocated in public and private life and to the religion you have revered; your great record of public trusts successfully and honestly discharged.' During the years I have discharged these trusts I have been a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church. If there were conflict, I, of all men, could not have escaped it, because I have not been a silent man, but a battler for social and political reform. These battles would in their very nature disclose this conflict if there were any.

I regard public education as one of the foremost functions of government and I have supported to the last degree the State Department of Education in every effort to promote our public school system. The largest single item of increased appropriations under my administration appears in the educational group for the support of common schools. Since 1919, when I first became Governor, this item has grown from $9,000,000 to $82,500,000. My aim—and I may say I have succeeded in achieving it—has been legislation for child welfare, the protection of working men, women, and children, the modernization of the State's institutions for the care of helpless or unfortunate wards, the preservation of freedom of speech and opinion against the attack of war-time hysteria, and the complete reorganization of the structure of the government of the State.

I did not struggle for these things for any single element, but in the interest of all of the eleven million people who make up the State. In all of this work I had the support of churches of all denominations. I probably know as many ecclesiastics of my Church as any other layman. During my long and active public career I never received from any of them anything except cooperation and encouragement in the full and complete discharge of my duty to the State. Moreover, I am unable to understand how anything that I was taught to believe as a Catholic could possibly be in conflict with what is good citizenship. The essence of my faith is built upon the Commandments of God. The law of the land is built upon the Commandments of God. There can be no conflict between them. Instead of quarreling among ourselves over dogmatic principles, it would be infinitely better if we joined together in inculcating obedience to these Commandments in the hearts and minds of the youth of the country as the surest and best road to happiness on this earth and to peace in the world to come. This is the common ideal of all religions. What we need is more religion for our young people, not less; and the way to get more religion is to stop the bickering among our sects which can only have for its effect the creation of doubt in the minds of our youth as to whether or not it is necessary to pay attention to religion at all.

Then I know your imputations are false when I recall the long list of other public servants of my faith who have loyally served the State. You as a lawyer will probably agree that the office of Chief Justice of the United States is second not even to that of the President in its influence on the national development and policy. That court by its interpretation of the Federal Constitution is a check not only upon the President himself but upon Congress as well. During one fourth of its history it has been presided over by two Catholics, Roger Brooke Taney and Edward Douglass White. No one has suggested that the official conduct of either of these men was affected by any unwarranted religious influence or that played with them any part other than it should play in the life of every God-fearing man.

And I know your imputations are false when I recall the tens of thousands of young Catholics who have risked and sacrificed their lives in defense of our country. These fundamentals of life could not be true unless your imputations were false.

But, wishing to meet you on your own ground, I address myself to your definite questions, against which I have thus far made only general statements. I must first call attention to the fact that you often divorce sentences from their context in such a way as to give them something other than their real meaning. I will specify. You refer to the Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII as 'declaring to the world that the orders of the Church of England were void, her priests not priests,' and so forth. You say that this was the 'strange fruit' of the toleration of England to the Catholics. You imply that the Pope gratuitously issued an affront to the Anglican Church. In fact, this Apostolic Letter was an answer to a request made at the instance of priests of the Anglican Church for recognition by the Roman Catholic Church of the validity of their priestly orders. The request was based on the ground that they had been ordained in succession from the Roman Catholic priests who became the first priests of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Letter was a mere adverse answer to this request, ruling that Anglican priests were not Roman Catholic priests, and was in no sense the gratuitous insult which you suggest it to be. It was not directed against England or citizens of that Empire.

Again, you quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia that my Church 'regards dogmatic intolerance, not alone as her incontestable right, but as her sacred duty.' And you say that these words show that Catholics are taught to be politically, socially, and intellectually intolerant of all other people. If you had read the whole of that article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, you would know that the real meaning of these words is that for Catholics alone the Church recognizes no deviation from complete acceptance of its dogma. These words are used in a chapter dealing with that subject only. The very same article in another chapter dealing with toleration toward non-Catholics contains these words: 'The intolerant man is avoided as much as possible by every high-minded person.... The man who is tolerant in every emergency is alone lovable. The phrase 'dogmatic intolerance' does not mean that Catholics are to be dogmatically intolerant of other people, but merely that inside the Catholic Church they are to be intolerant of any variance from the dogma of the Church.

Similar criticism can be made of many of your quotations. But, beyond this, by what right do you ask me to assume responsibility for every statement that may be made in any encyclical letter? As you will find in the Catholic Encyclopedia (Vol. V, p. 414), these encyclicals are not articles of our faith. The Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, which you quote on the possible conflict between Church and State, is declared by Cardinal Newman to have 'no dogmatic force.' You seem to think that Catholics must be all alike in mind and in heart, as though they had been poured into and taken out of the same mould. You have no more right to ask me to defend as part of my faith every statement coming from a prelate than I should have to ask you to accept as an article of your religious faith every statement of an Episcopal bishop, or of your political faith every statement of a President of the United States. So little are these matters of the essence of my faith that I, a devout Catholic since childhood, never heard of them until I read your letter. Nor can you quote from the canons of our faith a syllable that would make us less good citizens than non-Catholics. In fact and in truth, I have been taught the spirit of tolerance, and when you, Mr. Marshall, as a Protestant Episcopalian, join with me in saying the Lord's Prayer, we both pray, not to 'My Father,' but to 'Our Father.'

But I go further to demonstrate that the true construction of your quotations by the leaders of Catholic thought is diametrically the opposite of what you suggest it to be.

I

Your first proposition is that Catholics believe that other religions should, in the United States, be tolerated only as a matter of favor and that there should be an established church. You may find some dream of an ideal of a Catholic State, having no relation whatever to actuality, somewhere described. But, voicing the best Catholic thought on this subject, Dr. John A. Ryan, Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America, writes in The State and the Church of the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, quoted by you:—

'In practice, however, the foregoing propositions have full application only to the completely Catholic State....The propositions of Pope Pius IX condemning the toleration of non-Catholic sects do not now, says Father Pohle, "apply even to Spain or the South American republics, to say nothing of countries possessing a greatly mixed population." He lays down the following general rule: "When several religions have firmly established themselves and taken root in the same territory, nothing else remains for the State than to exercise tolerance towards them all, or, as conditions exist to-day, to complete religious liberty for individual and religious bodies a principle of government."'

That is good Americanism and good Catholicism. And Father Pohle, one of the great writers of the Catholic Church, says further: — 'If religious freedom has been accepted and sworn to as a fundamental law in a constitution, the obligation to show this tolerance is binding in conscience.' The American prelates of our Church stoutly defend our constitutional declaration of equality of all religions before the law. Cardinal O'Connell has said:

'Thus to every American citizen has come the blessed inheritance of civil political, and religious liberty safeguarded by the American Constitution ... the right to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.'

Archbishop Ireland has said: 'The Constitution of the United States reads: "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It was a great leap forward on the part of the new nation towards personal liberty and the consecration of the rights of conscience.'

Archbishop Dowling, referring to any conceivable union of Church and State, says: 'So many conditions for its accomplishment are lacking in every government of the world that the thesis may well be relegated to the limbo of defunct controversies.'

I think you have taken your thesis from this limbo of defunct controversies. Archbishop Ireland again said: 'Religious freedom is the basic life of America, the cement running through all its walls and battlements, the safeguard of its peace and prosperity. Violate religious freedom against Catholics, our swords are at once unsheathed. Violate it in favor of Catholics, against non-Catholics, no less readily do they leap from the scabbard.'

Cardinal Gibbons has said: 'American Catholics rejoice in our separation of Church and State, and I can conceive no combination of circumstances likely to arise which would make a union desirable to either Church or State.... For ourselves we thank God that we live in America, "in this happy country of ours," to quote Mr. Roosevelt, where "religion and liberty are natural allies."'

And referring particularly to your quotation from Pope Pius IX, Dr. Ryan, in The State and the Church, says: 'Pope Pius IX did not intend to declare that separation is always unadvisable, for he had more than once expressed his satisfaction with the arrangement obtaining in the United States.' With these great Catholics I stand squarely in support of the provisions of the Constitution which guarantee religious freedom and equality.

II

I come now to the speculation with which theorists have played for generations as to the respective functions of Church and State. You claim that the Roman Catholic Church holds that, if conflict arises, the Church must prevail over the State. You write as though there were some Catholic authority or tribunal to decide with respect to such conflict. Of course there is no such thing. As Dr. Ryan writes: 'The Catholic doctrine concedes, nay, maintains, that the State is coordinate with the Church and equally independent and supreme in its own distinct sphere.'

What is the Protestant position? The Articles of Religion of your Protestant Episcopal Church (XXXVII) declare: 'The Power of the Civil Magistrate extendeth to all men, as well Clergy as Laity, in all things temporal; but hath no authority in things purely spiritual.'

Your Church, just as mine, is voicing the injunction of our common Saviour to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

What is this conflict about which you talk? It may exist in some lands which do not guarantee religious freedom. But in the wildest dreams of your imagination you cannot conjure up a possible conflict between religious principle and political duty in the United States, except on the unthinkable hypothesis, that some law were to be passed which violated the common morality of all God-fearing men. And if you can conjure up such a conflict, how would a Protestant resolve it? Obviously by the dictates of his conscience. That is exactly what a Catholic would do. There is no ecclesiastical tribunal which would have the slightest claim upon the obedience of Catholic communicants in the resolution of such a conflict. As Cardinal Gibbons said of the supposition that 'the Pope were to issue commands in purely civil matters':—

'He would be offending not only against civil society, but against God, and violating an authority as truly from God as his own. Any Catholic who clearly recognized this would not be bound to obey the Pope; or rather his conscience would bind him absolutely to disobey, because with Catholics conscience is the supreme law which under no circumstances can we ever lawfully disobey.' Archbishop Ireland said: 'To priest, to Bishop, or to Pope (I am willing to consider the hypothesis) who should attempt to rule in matters civil and political, to influence the citizen beyond the range of their own orbit of jurisdiction that are the things of God, the answer is quickly made: "Back to your own sphere of rights and duties, back to the things of God."'

Bishop England, referring to our Constitution, said: 'Let the Pope and the Cardinals and all the powers of the Catholic world united make the least encroachment on that Constitution, we will protect it with our lives. Summon a General Council—let that Council interfere in the mode of our electing but an assistant to a turnkey of a prison—we deny the right, we reject the usurpation.'

Our Supreme Court has marked out the spheres of influence of Church and State in a case from which you quote copiously, Watson v. Jones, 13 Wall. 729; but you refrain from quoting this statement: —

'The right to organize voluntary religious associations, to assist in the expression and dissemination of any religious doctrine, and to create tribunals for the decision of controverted questions of faith within the association and for the ecclesiastical government of all of the individual members, the congregation an officers within the general association, is, unquestioned.... It is of the essence of these religious unions and of their right to establish tribunals for the decision of questions arising among themselves that those decisions could be binding in all cases of ecclesiastical cognizance, subject only to such appeal as the organism itself provides for.'

That is the State's attitude toward the Church. Archbishop Ireland thus puts the Church's attitude toward the State:—

'To the Catholic obedience to law is a religious obligation, binding in God's name the conscience of the citizen ... Both Americanism and Catholicism bow to the sway of personal conscience."

Under our system of government the electorate entrusts to its officers of' every faith the solemn duty of action according to the dictates of conscience. I may fairly refer once more to my own record to support these truths. No man, cleric or lay, has ever directly or indirectly attempted to exercise Church influence on my administration of any office I have ever held, nor asked me to show special favor to Catholics or exercise discrimination against non-Catholics. It is a well-known fact that I have all of my appointments to public on the basis of merit and have never asked any man about his religious belief. In the first month of this year there gathered in the Capitol at the first Governor's cabinet that ever sat in this State. It was composed, under my appointment, of two Catholics, thirteen Protestants, and one Jew. The man closest to me in the administration of the government of the State of New York is he who bears the title of Assistant to the Governor. He had been connected with the Governor's office for thirty years, in subordinate capacities, until I promoted him to the position which makes him the sharer with me of my thought and hope and ambition in the administration of the State. He is a Protestant, a Republican, and a thirty-second-degree Mason. In my public life I have exemplified that separation of Church from State which is the faith of American Catholics today.

III

I next come to education. You admit that the Supreme Court guaranteed to Catholics the right to maintain their parochial schools; and you ask me whether they would have so ruled if it had been shown that children in parochial schools were taught that the State should show discrimination between religions, that Protestants should be recognized only as a matter of favor, that they should be intolerant to non-Catholics, and that the laws of the State could be flouted on the ground of the imaginary conflict. My summary answer is: I and all my children went to a parochial school. I never heard of any such stuff being taught or of anybody who claimed that it was. That any group of Catholics would teach it is unthinkable.

 

IV

 

You next challenge the action of the Rota in annulling the Marlborough marriage. You suggest that the Rota by annulling the marriage (where the civil courts recognized it, but granted only a divorce) is interfering with the jurisdiction. That might be so if anybody claimed that the decree of the Rota had any effect under the laws of America, or any other nation of the world. But you must know that it has no such effect and that nobody claims it has. The decree merely defined the status of the parties as communicants of the Church. Your Church refuses to recognize the ecclesiastical validity of divorces granted by the civil tribunals. Your Church has its tribunals to administer its laws for the government of its members as communicants of your Church. But their decrees have no bearing upon the status of your members as citizens of the United States. There is no difference in that respect between your tribunals and the Rota.

V

Finally you come to Mexico. By inference from the brief of a distinguished lawyer you intimate that it is the purpose of organized Catholics to seek intervention by the United States. Now I never read Mr. Guthrie's brief. I do not have to read it to reply to you, because the Pastoral Letter of the Catholic Episcopate of the United States in unmistakable words disclaimed any such intention. I do not see how, with complete candor, you could write to me about Mexico without quoting the following from that Pastoral Letter: —

'What, therefore, we have written is no call on the faithful here or elsewhere to purely human action. It is no interposition of our influence either as Bishops or as citizens to reach those who possess political power anywhere on earth, and least of all in our own country, to the end that they should intervene with armed force in the internal affairs of Mexico for the protection of the Church. Our duty is done when, by telling the story, we sound a warning to Christian civilization, that its foundations are again being attacked and undermined. For the rest, God will bring His will to pass in His own good time and in His own good way.'

My personal attitude, wholly consistent with that of my Church, is that I believe in peace on earth, good will to men, and that no country has a right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. I recognize the right of no church to ask armed intervention by this country in the affairs of another merely for the defense of the rights of a church. But I do recognize the propriety of Church action to request the good offices of this country to help the oppressed of any land, as those good offices have been so often used for the protection of Protestant missionaries in the Orient and the persecuted Jews of eastern Europe.

VI

I summarize my creed as an American Catholic. I believe in the worship of God according to the faith and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State and in the strict enforcement of the provisions of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I believe that no tribunal of any church has any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land, other than to establish the status of its own communicants within its own church. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith. I believe in the principled noninterference by this country in the internal affairs of other nations and that we should stand steadfastly against any such interference by whomsoever it may be urged. And I believe in the common brotherhood of man under the common fatherhood of God.

In this spirit I join with fellow Americans of all creeds in a fervent prayer that never again in this land will any public servant be challenged because of the faith in which he has tried to walk humbly with his God.

Very truly yours, Alfred E. Smith

One can see in Alfred Smith's ghost-written letter elements of truth and elements of error, making it a quintessential testimony to the influence of Americanism as a cornerstone of Modernism's view of Church-State relations. The mere fact that conditions at one point in time are not favorable to a restoration of Christendom does not mean that Catholics surrender to the principles of Modernity as an irreversible fact of the modern world. What did the conditions look like for the conversion of the world when the Apostles left the Upper Room in Jerusalem on Pentecost Sunday following the descent of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, upon them and Our Lady in tongues of flame? The surrender of Americanist Catholics and of Modernists and their contemporary progeny, the conciliarists, to the exigencies of the "modern" world and the "needs" of "modern" man is marked by a thorough rejection of the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church concerning Church-State relations and an indignant contention that it would be wrong, if not extremely harmful, even to pray for the happy reunion of Church and State.

"I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty"? The public school has no right to exist. The civil state has no right to impose a curriculum of study and to mandate that children follow it under the compulsion of the civil law. The public school was founded to advance the cause of the Americanist ideology, being particularly aggressive in the arrogation of the Natural Law right of parents to be the principal educators of their children and to inculcate Catholics in the ways of "egalitarianism" and "democracy" and "religious liberty." 

The gradual decline of American public schools into secularism was the only logical result that could occur, which Mr. Yates does not seem to understand and Al Smith would fail to recognize as a problem. That which is not founded in the true Faith is bound to decline over time. It was Protestantism's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that has been proximate cause for the descent of the world into madness in the past half of a millennium. The public school had been front and center of Judeo-Masonry's plan to attack the souls of children, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884:

What refers to domestic life in the teaching of the naturalists is almost all contained in the following declarations: that marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts, which can rightly be revoked by the will of those who made them, and that the civil rulers of the State have power over the matrimonial bond; that in the education of youth nothing is to be taught in the matter of religion as of certain and fixed opinion; and each one must be left at liberty to follow, when he comes of age, whatever he may prefer. To these things the Freemasons fully assent; and not only assent, but have long endeavored to make them into a law and institution. For in many countries, and those nominally Catholic, it is enacted that no marriages shall be considered lawful except those contracted by the civil rite; in other places the law permits divorce; and in others every effort is used to make it lawful as soon as may be. Thus, the time is quickly coming when marriages will be turned into another kind of contract -- that is into changeable and uncertain unions which fancy may join together, and which the same when changed may disunite.

With the greatest unanimity the sect of the Freemasons also endeavors to take to itself the education of youth. They think that they can easily mold to their opinions that soft and pliant age, and bend it whither they will; and that nothing can be more fitted than this to enable them to bring up the youth of the State after their own plan. Therefore, in the education and instruction of children they allow no share, either of teaching or of discipline, to the ministers of the Church; and in many places they have procured that the education of youth shall be exclusively in the hands of laymen, and that nothing which treats of the most important and most holy duties of men to God shall be introduced into the instructions on morals. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1888.)

Pope Pius XI, writing two and one-half years after the Marshall-Smith colloquy in Atlantic Monthly, reiterated the Catholic Church's consistent opposition to the "lay school," explaining that a parent could only send his child to such a school as a matter of necessity and after having gotten his pastor's explicit permission to do so:

From this it follows that the so-called "neutral" or "lay" school, from which religion is excluded, is contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist in practice; it is bound to become irreligious. There is no need to repeat what Our Predecessors have declared on this point, especially Pius IX and Leo Xlll, at times when laicism was beginning in a special manner to infest the public school. We renew and confirm their declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions. Neither can Catholics admit that other type of mixed school, (least of all the so-called "ecole unique," obligatory on all), in which the students are provided with separate religious instruction, but receive other lessons in common with non-Catholic pupils from non-Catholic teachers.

For the mere fact that a school gives some religious instruction (often extremely stinted), does not bring it into accord with the rights of the Church and of the Christian family, or make it a fit place for Catholic students. To be this, it is necessary that all the teaching and the whole organization of the school, and its teachers, syllabus and text-books in every branch, be regulated by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal supervision of the Church; so that Religion may be in very truth the foundation and crown of the youth's entire training; and this in every grade of school, not only the elementary, but the intermediate and the higher institutions of learning as well. To use the words of Leo XIII:

It is necessary not only that religious instruction be given to the young at certain fixed times, but also that every other subject taught, be permeated with Christian piety. If this is wanting, if this sacred atmosphere does not pervade and warm the hearts of masters and scholars alike, little good can be expected from any kind of learning, and considerable harm will often be the consequence.

And let no one say that in a nation where there are different religious beliefs, it is impossible to provide for public instruction otherwise than by neutral or mixed schools. In such a case it becomes the duty of the State, indeed it is the easier and more reasonable method of procedure, to leave free scope to the initiative of the Church and the family, while giving them such assistance as justice demands. That this can be done to the full satisfaction of families, and to the advantage of education and of public peace and tranquillity, is clear from the actual experience of some countries comprising different religious denominations. There the school legislation respects the rights of the family, and Catholics are free to follow their own system of teaching in schools that are entirely Catholic. Nor is distributive justice lost sight of, as is evidenced by the financial aid granted by the State to the several schools demanded by the families.

In other countries of mixed creeds, things are otherwise, and a heavy burden weighs upon Catholics, who under the guidance of their Bishops and with the indefatigable cooperation of the clergy, secular and regular, support Catholic schools for their children entirely at their own expense; to this they feel obliged in conscience, and with a generosity and constancy worthy of all praise, they are firmly determined to make adequate provision for what they openly profess as their motto: "Catholic education in Catholic schools for all the Catholic youth." If such education is not aided from public funds, as distributive justice requires, certainly it may not be opposed by any civil authority ready to recognize the rights of the family, and the irreducible claims of legitimate liberty. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

While Catholics must obey just laws and respect the duly constituted authority of civil governments, working as best as they can within the framework in which they find themselves without exalting the nationalist, naturalist myths of that framework if it be opposed to the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, they can and must work to remind their fellow citizens that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ wants each person and each nation to come under His sway by means of a humble and docile submission to the authority of the true Church He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Alfred Smith and Father Francis Duffy did not understand this at all.

Alfred Smith's ghost-written letter to Charles C. Marshall of eighty years ago contains many errors, one of which involves the rejection of the teaching authority of encyclical letters. Father Duffy, Smith's ghost-writer, wanted to take refuge in the Catholic Encyclopedia, ignoring, however, these plain words that had been written by Pope Pius XI just three years, five months before his response to Charles Marshall was published in Atlantic Monthly:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Yes, Governor Smith and Father Duffy, the social encyclical letters are quite binding, the Catholic Encyclopedia to the contrary notwithstanding. Pope Pius XII reiterated this matter long about Al Smith and Father Francis Duffy had died:

Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say: "He who heareth you, heareth me"; and generally what is expounded and inculcated in Encyclical Letters already for other reasons appertains to Catholic doctrine. But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that that matter, according to the mind and will of the same Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

Father Duffy was a good and brave priest who cared deeply about the salvation of souls. Having been raised in an environment of Americanism, however, he sought to reconcile semi-Pelagian principles of self-redemption, which he did see as such, obviously, relying upon the hideous Americanists, John Ireland and James Gibbons to do so. Although Father Duffy contended in the open letter he ghostwrote for Al Smith that the necessity of a Catholic state applied only to purely Catholic states, entities that, for the most part, did not exist by that time because of the adversary's centuries-long revolt against Christendom begun in the Renaissance before makings its open assault during the Protestant Revolt and with the rise of Judeo-Masonry and all other related, naturalist, anti-Incarnational "philosophical" and "revolutionary" movements, Pope Leo XIII had indeed, as Charles Marshall noted, specifically addressed the situation of Chuch-State relations in the United States of America in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895:

Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority. (Pope Leo XIII, Longiqua Oceani,January 6, 1895.)

Pope Leo XIII was exhorting the Catholic bishops of the United States of America to work for the Catholicization of their country, something that most of them did not consider desirable or even necessary, thus setting the stage so very well for the rise of the likes of Angelo Roncalli and Giovanni Montini and Albino Luciani and Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, each of whom believed in the very separation of Church and State endorsed by Alfred Smith and Father Francis Duffy that had been condemned as a "thesis absolutely false" by Pope Saint Pius X. Meaning no disrespect to the late, courageous Father Duffy, the principle of non-contradiction teaches us that either he was correct or that Pope Saint Pius X, who placed no qualifications or modifications on the use of the words "absolutely false," correct. Just as Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston from 1944 to 1970 who once boasted before he died that he had never made a convert in his entire life, served as the enabler of the career of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, so did Father Francis Duffy serve as enabler of the career of Governor Alfred E. Smith, Jr., and for the cause of the condemned Americanist heresy that helped to spawn some of the very underpinnings of conciliarism itself.

Father Duffy also set up some straw men in the letter he ghostwrote for Governor Al Smith. The Catholic Church has never preached an intolerance for persons. She has indeed preached an intolerance for error and for the nonexistent "rights" of error, understanding that God has revealed the totality of His Divine Revelation solely to the Catholic Church so that men can see themselves and the world clearly through the eyes of the one and only true Faith and thus be better able to cooperate with the graces for them by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and that flow into human souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. Intolerance of error does not apply solely to the "internal" doctrine of the Catholic Church, as the ghostwritten Smith article contends. Oh, no, it applies at all times in all places, admitting that the practical reality of a given situation may require some degree of tolerance but only insofar as is necessary to avoid doing violence to individual conscience, never conceding anything at all to the "rights" of error, as both Pope Gregory XVI and Leo XIII made clear:

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? (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

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.

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 way 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.)

Father Francis Duffy, writing for Governor Al Smith, ignored Mirari Vos just as the conciliarists of today ignore it completely as though it was never written or as if Gregory XVI, who approved of the cult of Saint Philomena, the great wonderworker who was taken off of the general calendar of the counterfeit church of conciliarism by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII in 1961, was a veritable antipope. Doing so presaged conciliarism itself, as an article supportive of conciliarism's embrace of the errors contained in the Father Duffy letter ghostwritten for Al Smith published by America magazine indicates very clearly:

Poor Charles Marshall. He was completely routed by the combination of Al Smith and Father Duffy. But Charles Marshall actually had a point, a very good point. He kept insisting that the statements of Smith and Duffy about religious freedom reflected their own personal opinions, not the official teaching of the Catholic Church. And Marshall was correct about that. Smith and Duffy asserted that the teachings of the 19th-century popes on religious liberty were no longer operative (as a 20th-century presidential press secretary might put it), but they could not cite a single authoritative church document to prove their assertion. There was no such document, as Charles Marshall was well aware.

“Governor Smith, even plus the Reverend Father Duffy, is not the church,” Marshall maintained. Marshall received support from an old friend, Dr. Joseph G. H. Barry, who commented that “Al’s statements would probably have led him to the stake in the Middle Ages, whereas in the twentieth century they will perhaps lead him to the presidency.” Unknown to Marshall, and perhaps to Smith and Duffy as well, Cardinal Hayes sent a copy of Smith’s article to Cardinal John Bonzano in Rome. Bonzano, the former apostolic delegate to United States, called the article a capolavoro, a masterpiece, and added, “It was judged such by everyone here who knows conditions in America.”

It is not likely that the private comment of one curial cardinal would have cut much ice with Charles Marshall. But Marshall left open one slim possibility, one farfetched option that the Catholic Church might employ to convince him and other skeptics that the church was now committed to supporting religious freedom. That option, which seemed infinitely remote in 1927, was for the pope to reconvene the Vatican Council of 1869-70, and for the council to declare solemnly its acceptance of religious liberty. Marshall really did not expect that to happen.

But that infinitely remote possibility came to pass, in a slightly altered form, in 1959, when Pope John XXIII announced his intention of summoning an ecumenical council. It was not to be a resumption of Vatican I, but a brand new council, to be known as the Second Vatican Council. Among the most important documents that this council was to issue was the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (1965). How Al Smith and Father Duffy would have welcomed it! How they would have loved to be able to quote it in 1927. How surprised Charles Marshall would have been to see it.

For the first time in its long history, in the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” the Catholic Church stated unambiguously that “the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.... The Council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed Word of God and through reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed. Thus it is to become a civil right (No. 2).”

Never before had the highest authorities of the Catholic Church expressed such unqualified approval of the rights of conscience of every individual. Prior to Vatican II the official teaching of the church was that error should not be accorded the same rights as truth. The “Declaration on Religious Liberty” stated: “[T]he right to religious freedom has its foundation, not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it” (No. 2). (Monsignor Thomas Shelley, "Vatican II and American Politics," America, October 13, 2003.)

Unfortunately for the Americanists and for the conciliarists, religious liberty has been condemned as a heresy by Pope Pius VII:

For We had hoped, affairs having so happily changed, not only that all impediments organized against the Catholic religion in France would be removed with the utmost speed (as We have unceasingly demanded), but also that, as the opportunity presented itself, provision would also be made for her splendour and ornament. We saw at once that a deep silence was preserved in the constitution concerning this, and that there was not even any mention made of Almighty God, by whom kings reign and princes command. You will find it easy, Venerable Brother, to convince yourself of how grave, how bitter and how painful this matter was to Us, to whom has been committed by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Our Lord, the whole of Christendom. For how can We tolerate with equanimity that the Catholic religion, which France received in the first ages of the Church, which was confirmed in that very kingdom by the blood of so many most valiant martyrs, which by far the greatest part of the French race professes, and indeed bravely and constantly defended even among the most grave adversities and persecutions and dangers of recent years, and which, finally, that very dynasty to which the designated king belongs both professes and has defended with much zeal - that this Catholic, this most holy religion, We say, should not only not be declared to be the only one in the whole of France supported by the bulwark of the laws and by the authority of the Government, but should even, in the very restoration of the monarchy, be entirely passed over? 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, A

The Americanism of Governor Al Smith, which derived its intellectual muscle from Father Francis Duffy, helped to pave the way for then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy's address to Greater Houston Ministerial Association in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1960:

While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida--the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power--the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms--an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.

These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues--for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.

But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so--and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection--for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.

I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none--who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.

This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died."

And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died--when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches--when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom--and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey--but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.

I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition--to judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in Congress--on my declared stands against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools (which I have attended myself)--instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed church-state separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic.

I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts--why should you? But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their Presidency to Protestants and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would cite the record of the Catholic Church in such nations as Ireland and France--and the independence of such statesmen as Adenauer and De Gaulle.

But let me stress again that these are my views--for contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters--and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as President--on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject--I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

But if the time should ever come--and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible--when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith--nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.

If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.

But if, on the other hand, I should win the election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the Presidency--practically identical, I might add, to the oath I have taken for 14 years in the Congress. For without reservation, I can "solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution . . . so help me God. Address of Senator John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

Even Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., a supporter of Kennedy's who would be one of the principal progenitors of the "Second" Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae (and the author of many of the interventions made by American cardinals and bishops in its behalf), found Kennedy's strict personal separation of religious belief from the making of public policy decisions to be too stringent. Murray favored the American concept of the separation of Church and State, believing, as the conciliarist Ratzinger does, that such a separation permits Catholics to influence public policy and the direction of debate on it in the "marketplace of ideas." Leaving aside the inconvenient little truth that God and His true Church are owed recognition by the civil state, as summarized so succinctly by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, Father John Courtney Murray could not see that Kennedy's "more stringent" view of "separationism" was but the logical consequence of a religiously indifferentist civil state, as prophesied by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei.

Oh, before I continue, it should be noted that Senator Kennedy gave that address, which was written by Kennedy speech writer Theodore Sorensen, was delivered on the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary, which commemorates the victory King Jan Sobieski of Catholic Poland over the Mohammedan hordes at the Gates of Vienna, Austria, on September 13, 1683, as he, King Jan Sobieski, held the Rosary aloft and urged men to pray this great spiritual weapon that Our Lady gave to Saint Dominic to fight the Albigenses heresy.

One can see the great theological and intellectual "depth" demonstrated by a Catholic, Rudolph William Giuliani, who was born in the year Al Smith died, 1944, after 231 years of Americanist drivel of over forty years of conciliarist accommodationism with the principles of 1787 and 1789:

I believe in God, I pray to God, pray to Jesus for guidance and for help,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I have very, very strong views on religion that come about from having wanted to be a priest when I was younger and having studied theology for four years in college, it’s an area that I know really, really well academically. I understand the history of religion. Man and women’s relationship to God is one of the strongest, if not the strongest motivating thing in human history.” Pat Robertson Endorses Giuliani for President 

How's that for depth, now, folks? Giuliani knows theology "really, really well academically"?

All right, all right. Stop laughing. How about "Thou shalt not kill," Rudy. How about adhering to the following clear reminder of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

But, if the laws of the State are manifestly at variance with the divine law, containing enactments hurtful to the Church, or conveying injunctions adverse to the duties imposed by religion, or if they violate in the person of the supreme Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then, truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime; a crime, moreover, combined with misdemeanor against the State itself, inasmuch as every offense leveled against religion is also a sin against the State. Here anew it becomes evident how unjust is the reproach of sedition; for the obedience due to rulers and legislators is not refused, but there is a deviation from their will in those precepts only which they have no power to enjoin. Commands that are issued adversely to the honor due to God, and hence are beyond the scope of justice, must be looked upon as anything rather than laws. You are fully aware, venerable brothers, that this is the very contention of the Apostle St. Paul, who, in writing to Titus, after reminding Christians that they are "to be subject to princes and powers, and to obey at a word," at once adds: "And to be ready to every good work." Thereby he openly declares that, if laws of men contain injunctions contrary to the eternal law of God, it is right not to obey them. In like manner, the Prince of the Apostles gave this courageous and sublime answer to those who would have deprived him of the liberty of preaching the Gospel: "If it be just in the sight of God to hear you rather than God, judge ye, for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard."

Wherefore, to love both countries, that of earth below and that of heaven above, yet in such mode that the love of our heavenly surpass the love of our earthly home, and that human laws be never set above the divine law, is the essential duty of Christians, and the fountainhead, so to say, from which all other duties spring. The Redeemer of mankind of Himself has said: "For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth."[9] In like manner: "I am come to cast fire upon earth, and what will I but that it be kindled?'' In the knowledge of this truth, which constitutes the highest perfection of the mind; in divine charity which, in like manner, completes the will, all Christian life and liberty abide. This noble patrimony of truth and charity entrusted by Jesus Christ to the Church she defends and maintains ever with untiring endeavor and watchfulness.

But with what bitterness and in how many guises war has been waged against the Church it would be ill-timed now to urge. From the fact that it has been vouchsafed to human reason to snatch from nature, through the investigations of science, many of her treasured secrets and to apply them befittingly to the divers requirements of life, men have become possessed with so arrogant a sense of their own powers as already to consider themselves able to banish from social life the authority and empire of God. Led away by this delusion, they make over to human nature the dominion of which they think God has been despoiled; from nature, they maintain, we must seek the principle and rule of all truth; from nature, they aver, alone spring, and to it should be referred, all the duties that religious feeling prompts. Hence, they deny all revelation from on high, and all fealty due to the Christian teaching of morals as well as all obedience to the Church, and they go so far as to deny her power of making laws and exercising every other kind of right, even disallowing the Church any place among the civil institutions of the commonweal. These men aspire unjustly, and with their might strive, to gain control over public affairs and lay hands on the rudder of the State, in order that the legislation may the more easily be adapted to these principles, and the morals of the people influenced in accordance with them. Whence it comes to pass that in many countries Catholicism is either openly assailed or else secretly interfered with, full impunity being granted to the most pernicious doctrines, while the public profession of Christian truth is shackled oftentimes with manifold constraints.

Under such evil circumstances therefore, each one is bound in conscience to watch over himself, taking all means possible to preserve the faith inviolate in the depths of his soul, avoiding all risks, and arming himself on all occasions, especially against the various specious sophisms rife among non-believers. In order to safeguard this virtue of faith in its integrity, We declare it to be very profitable and consistent with the requirements of the time, that each one, according to the measure of his capacity and intelligence, should make a deep study of Christian doctrine, and imbue his mind with as perfect a knowledge as may be of those matters that are interwoven with religion and lie within the range of reason. And as it is necessary that faith should not only abide untarnished in the soul, but should grow with ever painstaking increase, the suppliant and humble entreaty of the apostles ought constantly to be addressed to God: "Increase our faith.''

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

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

This all goes to show that making one little bit of accommodation to error results in total corruption of truth. The men who founded the United States of America were happy to have the cooperation of willing Catholics while most, although not all, of them maintained that a free society and Catholicism could never coexist. They were correct about this. That is, the false concept of a society "free" from a submission to the Catholic Church cannot coexist with the Faith: it will either corrupt the faith of individual Catholics or it will be swallowed up by the prayers and good works of faithful Catholics seeking to plant the seeds for the conversion of individuals and of the whole nation to the Church's maternal bosom. One is not "free" if one is not under the mantle of the Catholic Church. One is a slave to one or another of a series of falsehoods if one is not yoked to the Most Sacred Heart of Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen. Justice and order, no less personal salvation, can never be built on falsehoods. One is not free as Our Lord means Him to be free, from the power of sin and eternal death, that is, unless he is a Catholic in a state of Sanctifying Grace.

Americanist Catholics have had to overlook the following empirical evidence of overt anti-Catholicism on the part of its founders as they praise these naturalist scoundrels and as they continue to extol American participation in unjust wars that planted Protestantism and Freemasonry in formerly Catholic lands from which these evils had been theretofore excluded:

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. (President John Adams: "A Defense of the [State] Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787-1788)

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)

Consider these remarks of James Madison, considered by many to be the "father" of the Constitution of the United States of America:

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."—letter to William Bradford, Jr„ April I, 1774

". . . Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."—spoken at the Virginia convention on ratification of the Constitution, June 1778

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."—-A Memorial and Remonstrance, addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785.

How about just two more of many anti-Catholic comments from Thomas Jefferson? Oh, why not?

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. (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. (Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death.)

Article 11 of the Treaty between the United States of America and Tripoli, June 10, 1797, reads as follows:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Although Catholics in the United States of America were able to sanctify and to save their souls in the years leading up to the "Second" Vatican Council, exhibiting wonderful devotion to the Faith in their own personal lives and participating in Corpus Christi and Rosary processions, there was a subtle cancer eating away at the life of the Faith. That cancer was--and remains--Americanism, now enshrined as of the cornerstones of conciliarism. It is no accident that most Catholics today have "attitudes" about matters of Faith and morals that are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. This is all the rotten fruit of a state that is religiously indifferentist and a pluralist culture that is steeped in all of the combined errors of naturalism, kept in its place by the organized forces of naturalism represented by Judeo-Masonry. Anyone who thinks that ecumenism, whether of the political or ecclesiastical variety, is going to retard one little bit of the evils we face today is at odds with Pope Saint Pius X, who wrote:

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; 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. The new Sillonists cannot pretend that they are merely working on “the ground of practical realities” where differences of belief do not matter. Their leader is so conscious of the influence which the convictions of the mind have upon the result of the action, that he invites them, whatever religion they may belong to, “to provide on the ground of practical realities, the proof of the excellence of their personal convictions.” And with good reason: indeed, all practical results reflect the nature of one’s religious convictions, just as the limbs of a man down to his finger-tips, owe their very shape to the principle of life that dwells in his body.

This being said, what must be thought of the promiscuity in which young Catholics will be caught up with heterodox and unbelieving folk in a work of this nature? Is it not a thousand-fold more dangerous for them than a neutral association? What are we to think of this appeal to all the heterodox, and to all the unbelievers, to prove the excellence of their convictions in the social sphere in a sort of apologetic contest? Has not this contest lasted for nineteen centuries in conditions less dangerous for the faith of Catholics? And was it not all to the credit of the Catholic Church? What are we to think of this respect for all errors, and of this strange invitation made by a Catholic to all the dissidents to strengthen their convictions through study so that they may have more and more abundant sources of fresh forces? What are we to think of an association in which all religions and even Free-Thought may express themselves openly and in complete freedom? For the Sillonists who, in public lectures and elsewhere, proudly proclaim their personal faith, certainly do not intend to silence others nor do they intend to prevent a Protestant from asserting his Protestantism, and the skeptic from affirming his skepticism. Finally, what are we to think of a Catholic who, on entering his study group, leaves his Catholicism outside the door so as not to alarm his comrades who, “dreaming of disinterested social action, are not inclined to make it serve the triumph of interests, coteries and even convictions whatever they may be”? Such is the profession of faith of the New Democratic Committee for Social Action which has taken over the main objective of the previous organization and which, they say, “breaking the double meaning which surround the Greater Sillon both in reactionary and anti-clerical circles”, is now open to all men “who respect moral and religious forces and who are convinced that no genuine social emancipation is possible without the leaven of generous idealism.” (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

The great bulwark that kept the faithful on the straight and narrow path to personal sanctity during the pre-conciliar era was the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, which at least reminded Catholics of the fact that there is a God Who judges, a God Whom they had to receive in Holy Communion on their knees, a God Who expected them to go to Confession every week, a God Who was pleased with their outward acts of penance that were signs of an interior disposition to be ready to meet Him at the moment of their Particular Judgments at any time. The replacement of this bulwark with the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo Missae, which enshrines the spirit of Modernity in the name of the "inculturation" of the Gospel, in the lives of over ninety-nine percent of Catholics worldwide, including in the United States of America, took down the strongest single bastion protecting Catholics from plunging headlong into the spirit of the world around them. Is it any wonder that so many Catholics have no problem whatsoever with their brethren who support the taking of innocent preborn lives under cover of law, whether by surgical or chemical means, justifying their doing so by adverting to the "American way"?

Americanism and conciliarism are cut from the same Modernist cloth. We must pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary very fervently to protect ourselves from being influenced into believing that the Catholic social order is a "thing of the past" and that we must make our "accommodation" to the "principles" of 1787 and 1789. Pope Leo XIII, writing in Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892, reminded Catholics in Italy that there can be no such accommodation. This is as true as it was then nearly 115 years ago:

Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God.

Poor Al Smith never heard this "kind of stuff" because it was not preached in the United States of America. Such "stuff" only elsewhere, maybe only Italy, as in the case of Custodi Di Quella Fede. He would not have had a thirty-second degree Freemason for an aide nor would ever have endorsed the gubernatorial candidacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt if Father Francis Duffy or some other bishop or priest in the United States was not so willing to consider the United States of America exempt from the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the nature of Church-State relations. Al Smith never was forced to consider the simple truth that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ means for all men everywhere to subordinate their own lives and those of their nations to Him through His true Church, understanding the the whole of social order depends upon the sanctification of individual men, as Pope Saint Pius X noted in Notre Charge Apostolique and as Pope Leo XIII had stated so clearly in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

Those who go astray from the road wander far from the goal they aim at. Similarly, if the pure and true light of truth be rejected, men's minds must necessarily be darkened and their souls deceived by deplorably false ideas. What hope of salvation can they have who abandon the very principle and fountain of life? Christ alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life (John xiv., 6). If He be abandoned the three necessary conditions of salvation are removed.

It is surely unnecessary to prove, what experience constantly shows and what each individual feels in himself, even in the very midst of all temporal prosperity-that in God alone can the human will find absolute and perfect peace. God is the only end of man. All our life on earth is the truthful and exact image of a pilgrimage. Now Christ is the "Way," for we can never reach God, the supreme and ultimate good, by this toilsome and doubtful road of mortal life, except with Christ as our leader and guide. How so? Firstly and chiefly by His grace; but this would remain "void" in man if the precepts of His law were neglected. For, as was necessarily the case after Jesus Christ had won our salvation, He left behind Him His Law for the protection and welfare of the human race, under the guidance of which men, converted from evil life, might safely tend towards God. "Going, teach ye all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matthew xxviii., 19-20). "Keep my commandments" john xiv., 15). Hence it will be understood that in the Christian religion the first and most necessary condition is docility to the precepts of Jesus Christ, absolute loyalty of will towards Him as Lord and King. A serious duty, and one which oftentimes calls for strenuous labour, earnest endeavour, and perseverance! For although by Our Redeemer's grace human nature hath been regenerated, still there remains in each individual a certain debility and tendency to evil. Various natural appetites attract man on one side and the other; the allurements of the material world impel his soul to follow after what is pleasant rather than the law of Christ. Still we must strive our best and resist our natural inclinations with all our strength "unto the obedience of Christ." For unless they obey reason they become our masters, and carrying the whole man away from Christ, make him their slave. "Men of corrupt mind, who have made shipwreck of the faith, cannot help being slaves. . . They are slaves to a threefold concupiscence: of will, of pride, or of outward show" (St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, 37). In this contest every man must be prepared to undergo hard ships and troubles for Christ's sake. It is difficult to reject what so powerfully entices and delights. It is hard and painful to despise the supposed goods of the senses and of fortune for the will and precepts of Christ our Lord. But the Christian is absolutely obliged to be firm, and patient in suffering, if he wish to lead a Christian life. Have we forgotten of what Body and of what Head we are the members? "Having joy set before Him, He endured the Cross," and He bade us deny ourselves. The very dignity of human nature depends upon this disposition of mind. For, as even the ancient Pagan philosophy perceived, to be master of oneself and to make the lower part of the soul, obey the superior part, is so far from being a weakness of will that it is really a noble power, in consonance with right reason and most worthy of a man. Moreover, to bear and to suffer is the ordinary condition of man. Man can no more create for himself a life free from suffering and filled with all happiness that he can abrogate the decrees of his Divine Maker, who has willed that the consequences of original sin should be perpetual. It is reasonable, therefore, not to expect an end to troubles in this world, but rather to steel one's soul to bear troubles, by which we are taught to look forward with certainty to supreme happiness. Christ has not promised eternal bliss in heaven to riches, nor to a life of ease, to honours or to power, but to longsuffering and to tears, to the love of justice and to cleanness of heart.

From this it may clearly be seen what con sequences are to be expected from that false pride which, rejecting our Saviour's Kingship, places man at the summit of all things and declares that human nature must rule supreme. And yet, this supreme rule can neither be attained nor even defined. The rule of Jesus Christ derives its form and its power from Divine Love: a holy and orderly charity is both its foundation and its crown. Its necessary consequences are the strict fulfilment of duty, respect of mutual rights, the estimation of the things of heaven above those of earth, the preference of the love of God to all things. But this supremacy of man, which openly rejects Christ, or at least ignores Him, is entirely founded upon selfishness, knowing neither charity nor selfdevotion. Man may indeed be king, through Jesus Christ: but only on condition that he first of all obey God, and diligently seek his rule of life in God's law. By the law of Christ we mean not only the natural precepts of morality and the Ancient Law, all of which Jesus Christ has perfected and crowned by His declaration, explanation and sanction; but also the rest of His doctrine and His own peculiar institutions. Of these the chief is His Church. Indeed whatsoever things Christ has instituted are most fully contained in His Church. Moreover, He willed to perpetuate the office assigned to Him by His Father by means of the ministry of the Church so gloriously founded by Himself. On the one hand He confided to her all the means of men's salvation, on the other He most solemnly commanded men to be subject to her and to obey her diligently, and to follow her even as Himself: "He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth Me" (Luke x, 16). Wherefore the law of Christ must be sought in the Church. Christ is man's "Way"; the Church also is his "Way"-Christ of Himself and by His very nature, the Church by His commission and the communication of His power. Hence all who would find salvation apart from the Church, are led astray and strive in vain.

As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must necessarily tend to ruin if they go astray from "The Way." The Son of God, the Creator and Redeemer of mankind, is King and Lord of the earth, and holds supreme dominion over men, both individually and collectively. "And He gave Him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve Him" (Daniel vii., 14). "I am appointed King by Him . . . I will give Thee the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession" (Psalm ii., 6, 8). Therefore the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil thing for the common weal wherever Christianity does not hold the place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very end is lost sight of, for which, under God's providence, human society has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature. But when men's minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at.

Just as it is the height of misfortune to go astray from the "Way," so is it to abandon the "Truth." Christ Himself is the first, absolute and essential "Truth," inasmuch as He is the Word of God, consubstantial and co-eternal with the Father, He and the Father being One. "I am the Way and the Truth." Wherefore if the Truth be sought by the human intellect, it must first of all submit it to Jesus Christ, and securely rest upon His teaching, since therein Truth itself speaketh. There are innumerable and extensive fields of thought, properly belonging to the human mind, in which it may have free scope for its investigations and speculations, and that not only agreeably to its nature, but even by a necessity of its nature. But what is unlawful and unnatural is that the human mind should refuse to be restricted within its proper limits, and, throwing aside its becoming modesty, should refuse to acknowledge Christ's teaching. This teaching, upon which our salvation depends, is almost entirely about God and the things of God. No human wisdom has invented it, but the Son of God hath received and drunk it in entirely from His Father: "The words which thou gavest me, I have given to them" john xvii., 8). Hence this teaching necessarily embraces many subjects which are not indeed contrary to reasonfor that would be an impossibility-but so exalted that we can no more attain them by our own reasoning than we can comprehend God as He is in Himself. If there be so many things hidden and veiled by nature, which no human ingenuity can explain, and yet which no man in his senses can doubt, it would be an abuse of liberty to refuse to accept those which are entirely above nature, because their essence cannot be discovered. To reject dogma is simply to deny Christianity. Our intellect must bow humbly and reverently "unto the obedience of Christ," so that it be held captive by His divinity and authority: "bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians x., 5). Such obedience Christ requires, and justly so. For He is God, and as such holds supreme dominion over man's intellect as well as over his will. By obeying Christ with his intellect man by no means acts in a servile manner, but in complete accordance with his reason and his natural dignity. For by his will he yields, not to the authority of any man, but to that of God, the author of his being, and the first principle to Whom he is subject by the very law of his nature. He does not suffer himself to be forced by the theories of any human teacher, but by the eternal and unchangeable truth. Hence he attains at one and the same time the natural good of the intellect and his own liberty. For the truth which proceeds from the teaching of Christ clearly demonstrates the real nature and value of every being; and man, being endowed with this knowledge, if he but obey the truth as perceived, will make all things subject to himself, not himself to them; his appetites to his reason, not his reason to his appetites. Thus the slavery of sin and falsehood will be shaken off, and the most perfect liberty attained: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" john viii., 32). It is, then, evident that those whose intellect rejects the yoke of Christ are obstinately striving against God. Having shaken off God's authority, they are by no means freer, for they will fall beneath some human sway. They are sure to choose someone whom they will listen to, obey, and follow as their guide. Moreover, they withdraw their intellect from the communication of divine truths, and thus limit it within a narrower circle of knowledge, so that they are less fitted to succeed in the pursuit even of natural science. For there are in nature very many things whose apprehension or explanation is greatly aided by the light of divine truth. Not unfrequently, too, God, in order to chastise their pride, does not permit men to see the truth, and thus they are punished in the things wherein they sin. This is why we often see men of great intellectual power and erudition making the grossest blunders even in natural science. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Want to know true liberty, both personal and civil, which the Catholic Church has always promoted, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888?

Pray and work for the restoration of Christendom, which starts with the building up of the Kingship of Christ in our own immortal souls. We must overcome obstacles to Christ's Kingship in our immortal souls, getting ourselves to the daily offering of the Mass of the ages in the catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to its false shepherds, spending time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, offering up all of our sufferings and sacrifices and penances and mortifications and humiliations to the Most Sacred Heart of Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen.

The devil hates the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. Consider a secular newspaper account, contained in the Workers' Solidarity publication in Barcelona, Spain, of the jubilation that was felt in the murder of so many bishops and priests during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939):

The Church must disappear forever. . . . The wretched little Catholic holes no loner exist. The torches of the people have pulverized them. In their place rises a free spirit that has nothing in common with the masochism which incubates in the naves of the cathedrals. But it is necessary to tear up the Church by the roots. For this we must take by force all its goods that rightly belong to the people. Religious orders must be dissolved. Bishops and cardinals must be shot.  (Quoted in Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade, Christendom Press, 1996, p. 111.)

The government of the United States of America under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the darling of so many Catholic bishops and priests, did not help the Catholics who were being persecuted in Spain. The government of the United States of America under the administration of Thomas Woodrow Wilson actually aided the Masonic revolutionaries who were putting Catholics to death by the thousands. The America bishops? As testified to by Alfred Smith's ghostwritten letter itself, they urged non-intervention in behalf of saving the Catholics who were being martyred.