The Only Verdict That Matters Belongs to Christ the King

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way before I discuss the real subject of this commentary.

First, it should go without saying that the conviction of former President Donald John Trump on all thirty-four counts of falsifying business records to conceal a “crime” that was never identified on the basis of alleged violations of misdemeanors whose statute of limitations had expired in 2019 to “corrupt” an election even those the entries were made after the 2016 election and were not illegal in the first place is a manifest travesty of justice. Donald John Trump was put through a Soviet-style show trial brought by a prosecutor who vowed to “get Trump” and turn the judicial system in the County of New York, New York, into means to effect a judicial bill of attainder against him solely because he defeated Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton in 2016 and is currently running against the man who sits and drools in the White House at this time, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

Second, it should also go without saying that the judge in the case of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Juan Merchan, repeatedly violated the defendant’s basic constitutional rights, including the right to be made aware of the charges against him and his violating a basic principle of American jurisprudence by instructing that they need agree unanimously on what laws defendant Trump was said to have violated as long as they were in agreement that some unspecified laws had been broken. Merchan’s egregious misconduct as well as the whole perversion of justice on the natural level was summarized very succinctly by an occasional critic of the former President, the editorial board of the New York Post:

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan got their way Thursday, maneuvering a jury of former President Donald Trump’s peers into finding him guilty of . . . something.

We’ll have to wait to find out exactly what, since Merchan had told the jurors they didn’t even have to agree on what exactly Trump did wrong: They could individually choose any of the (vague) theories the prosecution presented as to what other crime was committed to turn the supposed misdemeanors into felonies.

The violations of basic fairness in the trial were legion: Merchan wouldn’t let the defense call an expert witness to testify that no federal campaign-finance law was violated; he routinely shut down the defense while letting the prosecution get away with gross violations, including telling multiple outright lies in its closing statement.

Not to mention indulging graphic and utterly irrelevant testimony from Stormy Daniels.

In this context, you can see why jurors didn’t realize that the only testimony indicating criminal intent on Trump’s part (something utterly necessary for a guilty verdict) came from Michael Cohen, a confessed serial liar who admitted to a personal vendetta against the defendant.

Nor see that Bragg’s team didn’t even show that Trump had actually falsified any business records.

All that should get the verdict tossed on appeal, but for now President Biden’s campaign can and will call Trump a “convicted felon” every minute through Election Day.

That is: Bragg and Merchan have completely prostituted the justice system for a purely political purpose.

Bragg ran for office vowing to get Trump; he coordinated with the Biden Justice Department in reviving a case that his immediate predecessor had refused to bring, one centering on charges that the feds had refused to pursue — and tried it in the courtroom of a judge whose daughter is a Democratic operative.

A judge who, again, repeatedly proved himself in the tank for the prosecution.

Whether the verdict will actually harm Trump’s chances in November is another grand unknown: Some polling even suggests that the guilty verdict will help him among likely voters — because it’s proof that Democrats have weaponized the justice system against him.

Which they certainly have.

And so given reason even to voters furious at Trump over Jan. 6 to choose him over Biden, because this lawfare campaign (along with the perversion of justice to protect Hunter Biden, and so Joe) is an obscene assault on the pillars of our democracy.

As is, by the way, the left’s yearslong attack on the legitimacy of the entire US Supreme Court, simply because some rulings don’t go the progressives’ way.

The rule of law — including impartial courts and ethical prosecutors — is fundamental to the survival of this republic, and of trust in democracy.

Yet most of the modern Democratic Party that Biden happily leads (or, arguably, is led by) cares only about power.

All Biden’s other disasters aside, that by itself is ample reason for the court of public opinion to vote him [out] come Election Day. (Trump falls victim to a prostituted court of law — more reason to vote out Biden in November.)

There is also an op-ed commentary in the Wall Street Journal that summarizes the egregious facts very well:

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is still trying to imprison his chief political rival—including for alleged offenses similar to ones that Justice’s special counsel believes Mr. Biden himself committed. (Justice won’t charge Mr. Biden—the special counsel reported that our current president is too cognitively impaired to prosecute.) But when it comes to jailing Donald Trump, the possibly good news for Mr. Biden and clearly bad news for our republic is that friendly Democrats in New York City appear to have done the dirty work for him.

The obscene spectacle in a Manhattan courtroom seemed to be an almost daily reminder that the protections for the accused that we all learned about in school do not exist for Donald Trump in the chambers of Juan Merchan, who allowed falsehoods to be repeated to a jury, allowed prejudicial irrelevant testimony to paint the defendant in the worst possible light, and allowed a prosecutor with an obvious bias against the defendant to bring the case in the first place. To top it off, as the defendant prepared for trial he was not even told precisely how he was supposed to have committed felonies.

Reader Fred LaSor responds to the New York verdict:

I would like to comment. I can’t. I’m so angry about the immorality of this decision all I can do is shout at the heavens. I don’t like Trump; I would likely not have voted for him before this decision. (Nor would I have voted for Biden, a true lost soul.). Now I plan to donate to Trump’s campaign.

I lived for many years in the Third World. I’ve seen it all before.

Former prosecutor and CNN fixture Elie Honig writes in New York magazine:

The judge donated money — a tiny amount, $35, but in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind — to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the judge earmarked for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to “Re-elect Donald Trump, MAGA forever!”? Absolutely not.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office in an overwhelmingly Democratic county by touting his Trump-hunting prowess. He bizarrely (and falsely) boasted on the campaign trail, “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times.” (Disclosure: Both Bragg and Trump’s lead counsel, Todd Blanche, are friends and former colleagues of mine at the Southern District of New York.)

Most importantly, the DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process. That’s not on the jury. That’s on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did.

The district attorney’s press office and its flaks often proclaim that falsification of business records charges are “commonplace” and, indeed, the office’s “bread and butter.” That’s true only if you draw definitional lines so broad as to render them meaningless. Of course the DA charges falsification quite frequently; virtually any fraud case involves some sort of fake documentation.

But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever.

Mr. Honig isn’t blaming the jury for a case he calls “an ill-conceived, unjustified mess.” He writes:

Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.

Among its many destructive consequences, the sham prosecution in Manhattan attacked the results of the 2016 election and invited people to dispute future elections. Writing before this week’s verdict, Jason Willick noted in the Washington Post:

The linchpin of prosecutor Joshua Steinglass’s closing argument for convicting Donald Trump was that he conspired “to manipulate and defraud the voters” by suppressing damaging allegations of extramarital liaisons. That suppression “could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Steinglass said.

In other words, Trump might not have stolen the office outright, but he gained it illicitly by deceiving the electorate. This soft form of election denial that New York prosecutors teased might be more corrosive than its unhinged bamboo-ballot manifestations because it allows even intelligent and informed people — especially intelligent and informed people — to reject political outcomes they don’t like.

In many, if not most, political campaigns, Americans learn about facts that could have been relevant to their vote only after their vote is cast. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign settled a claim in 2022 with the Federal Election Commission that it did not properly disclose expenses for opposition research that turned up false information about Trump’s Russia ties. If Trump is convicted in New York, prosecutors will have created a legal and political road map for partisans to attack the legitimacy of any election after the fact.

If Gov. Kathy Hochul (D., N.Y.) has the strength of character that Joe Biden obviously lacks, she will immediately pardon Mr. Trump to help voters freely choose our president and to help repair the damage her fellow Democrats are doing to the American justice system. (A Good Reason to Vote for Trump. Other good summaries of the injustice visited upon former President Trump can be found at: Bragg’s thrill kill in Manhattan could prove short-lived on appeal, Bragg’s thrill kill in Manhattan could prove short-lived on appeal, and Sen. Tom Cotton: New York Trump Trial "Was Rigged From The Very Beginning".)

These are good summaries of the injustices committed against former President Donald John Trump in the rigged courtroom of Juan Merchan, who was really a co-prosecutor of Alvin “give illegal immigrant gang members who violated attack police officers a plea bargain even after they had fled New York” Bragg and among others, the former third ranking political official within Merrick Garland’s Ministry of Injustice, Matthew Colangelo, who quit the administration of Joseph Robinette Biden. Jr., to join Bragg’s team in the prosecution of Trump.

However, the purpose of this brief commentary is not to get bogged down in the details of injustices committed in the natural order of things here. The purpose of this commentary is note once again that this is all the logical consequence of a system of governance not founded upon right principles, that is, a system of governance whose chief governing document, the Constitution of the United States of America, admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words for its interpretation by men who are themselves prisoners of the written word and thus either incapable or unwilling to submit themselves in humility and docility to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.

To be sure, fallen men have always sought to punish their enemies, which is why Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ taught us as follow in the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy.  44 But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you:  45 That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

 46 For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this?  47 And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this?  48 Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5: 43-48.)

Men who fear not the just judgment of Christ the King on their immortal souls when they die will feel free to live as they desire without regard to any eternal consequences. What matters to these poor souls is the here and now.

Indeed, one of the ways that the Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without whose Divinely received teaching and sanctifying offices there can be no true social order, continues to contribute to the decay of Western civilization is the path that it opened up to the acceptance of the amorality of Niccolo Machiavelli as the basis of political rule and statecraft. This is a point that I made consistently in my over three decades as a college professor of political science as I explained that politics and governance in the modern world have been shaped by Machiavelli’s embrace of amorality, that is, the undertaking of actions without regard to objective principles of the moral order that do not depend human acceptance for their binding force or validity.

Our true popes have gone to great lengths that there is never any circumstance in which the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law can be ignored in favor of moral expediency. Pope Saint Pius X did so on several occasions, including in Singulari Quadam, September 24, 1912:

Accordingly, We first of all declare that all Catholics have a sacred and inviolable duty, both in private and public life, to obey and firmly adhere to and fearlessly profess the principles of Christian truth enunciated by the teaching office of the Catholic Church. In particular We mean those principles which Our Predecessor has most wisely laid down in the encyclical letter "Rerum Novarum." We know that the Bishops of Prussia followed these most faithfully in their deliberations at the Fulda Congress of 1900. You yourselves have summarized the fundamental ideas of these principles in your communications regarding this question.

These are fundamental principles: No matter what the Christian does, even in the realm of temporal goods, he cannot ignore the supernatural good. Rather, according to the dictates of Christian philosophy, he must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good. All his actions, insofar as they are morally either good or bad (that is to say, whether they agree or disagree with the natural and divine law), are subject to the judgment and judicial office of the Church. All who glory in the name of Christian, either individually or collectively, if they wish to remain true to their vocation, may not foster enmities and dissensions between the classes of civil society. On the contrary, they must promote mutual concord and charity. The social question and its associated controversies, such as the nature and duration of labor, the wages to be paid, and workingmen's strikes, are not simply economic in character. Therefore they cannot be numbered among those which can be settled apart from ecclesiastical authority. "The precise opposite is the truth. It is first of all moral and religious, and for that reason its solution is to be expected mainly from the moral law and the pronouncements of religion." (Pope Saint Pius X, Singulari Quadam, Sepetember 24, 1912.)

The modern world, shaped as it is by the anti-Incarnational lies of Judeo-Masonry and its hatred for the Social Reign of Christ the King and of the true Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, she who is our mater and magister (mother and teacher), is shaped by amorality in almost every aspect of public life and what passes for “popular culture” in these wicked times that celebrate every form of licentiousness, including wanton misuse of the gift that God has given to man to bring forth new souls to give Him honor and glory in this life and to spend all eternity with Him in Heaven after dying as faithful sons and daughters of Holy Mother Church and the subsequent killing off of children by self-centered parents who live without regard to their Particular Judgment and of outright perversity of the sort that destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gommorha.

Amorality is practiced by the members of each of the two major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America. Violations of the Seventh and Eighth Commandments are the norm, not the exception, today as politicians of the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and the “left” outdo each other in stealing what rightfully belongs to the taxpayers to aggrandize the power of the civil state and in lying about each other with a shameless disregard, borne of ignorance in many instances, of the fact that they will have to make an accounting of everything that they have ever thought, done or said when they face the Divine Judge, Christ the King, at the moment of their Particular Judgments.

Saint Alphonsus de Liguori explained that no one, including those who justify a fission between “private belief” and public action, will escape the strict scrutiny of every aspect of his life after he dies:

2. It is the common opinion of theologians, that at the very moment and in the very place in which the soul departs from the body, the divine tribunal is erected, the accusation is read, and the sentence is passed by Jesus Christ, the Judge. At this terrible tribunal each of us shall be presented to give an account of all our thoughts, of all our words, and of all our actions. "For we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done, whether it be good or evil." ( 2 Cor. v. 10.) When presented before an earthly judge criminals have been seen to fall into a cold sweat through fear. It is related of Piso, that so great and insufferable was the confusion, which he felt at the thought of appearing as a criminal before the senate that he killed himself. How great is the pain of a vassal, or of a son, in appearing before an angry prince or an enraged father, to account for some crime which he has committed! Oh! how much greater shall be the pain and confusion of the soul in standing, before Jesus Christ enraged against her for having despised him during her life! Speaking of judgment, St. Luke says: "Then you shall see the Son of Man." (Luke xxi. 27.) They shall see Jesus Christ as man, with the same wounds with which he ascended into heaven. "Great joy of the beholders!" says Robert the Abbot, "a great terror of those who are in expectation!" These wounds shall console the just, and shall terrify the wicked. In them sinners shall see the Redeemer’s love for themselves, and their ingratitude to him.

3. "Who," says the Prophet Nahum, "can stand before the face of his indignation ?" (i. 6.) How great, then, shall be the terror of a soul that finds herself in sin before this Judge, the first time she shall see him, and see him full of wrath! St. Basil says that she shall be tortured more by her shame and confusion than by the very fire of hell. ”Horridior quam ignis, erit pudor." Philip the Second rebuked one of his domestics for having told him a lie. ”Is it thus," said the king to him, ”you deceive me?" The domestic, after having returned home, died of grief. The Scripture tells us, that when Joseph reproved his brethren, saying: ”I am Joseph, whom you sold," they were unable to answer through fear, and remained silent. ”His brethren could not answer him, being struck with exceeding great fear." (Gen. xlv. 3.) Now what answer shall sinners make to Jesus Christ when he shall say to them: I am your Redeemer and your Judge, whom you have so much despised. Where shall the miserable beings fly, says St. Augustine, when they shall see an angry Judge above, hell open below, on one side their own sins accusing them, and on the other the devils dragging them to punishment, and their conscience burning them within? “Above shall be an enraged Judge below, a horrid chaos on the right, sins accusing him on the left, demons dragging him to punishment within, a burning conscience! Whither shall a sinner, beset in this manner, fly ?"Perhaps he will cry for mercy? But how, asks Eusebius Emissenus, can he dare to implore mercy, when he must first render an account of his contempt for the mercy which Jesus Christ has shown to him?” With what face will you, who are to be first judged for contempt of mercy, ask for mercy?" But let us come to the rendering of the accounts. . . .

11. How great shall be the joy of a soul when, at death, she hears from Jesus Christ these sweet words: ”Well done, good and faithful servant; because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." (Matt. xxv. 21.) Equally great shall be the anguish and despair of a guilty soul, that shall see herself driven away by the Judge with the following words: ”Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire" (verse 41). Oh! what a terrible thunderclap shall that sentence be to her!”Oh! how frightfully," says the Carthusian, "shall that thunder resound!" Eusebius writes, that the terror of sinners at hearing their condemnation shall be so great that, if they could, they would die again. “The wicked shall be seized with such terror at the sight of the Judge pronouncing sentence that, if they were not immortal, they should die a second time." But, brethren, let us, before the termination of this sermon, make some reflections which will be profitable to us. St. Thomas of Villanova says, that some listen to discourses on the judgment and condemnation of the wicked with as little concern as if they they themselves were secure against these things, or as if the day of judgment were never to arive for them. "Heu quam securi hæc dicimus et audimus, quasi nos non tangeret hæc sententia, aut quasi dies hæc nunquam esset venturus!" (Conc, i., de Jud.) The saint then asks: Is it not great folly to entertain security in so perilous an affair? "Quæ est ista stulta securitas in discrimine tanto?" There are some, says St. Augustine, who, though they live in sin, cannot imagine that God will send them to hell. ”Will God," they say, ”really condemn us ?" Brethren, adds the saint, do not speak thus. So, many of the damned did not believe that they should be sent to hell; but the end came, and, according to the threat of Ezechiel, they have been cast into that place of darkness. "The end is come, the end is come... and I will send my wrath upon thee, and I will judge thee." (Ezec. vii. 2, 3.) Sinners, perhaps vengeance is at hand for you, and still you laugh and sleep in sin. Who will not tremble at the words of the Baptist: ”For now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree, therefore, that doth not yield good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire." (Matt, iii. 10.) He says, that every tree that does not bring forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire; and he promises that, with regard to the trees, which represent sinners, the axe is already laid to the roots that is, chastisement is at hand. Dearly beloved brethren, let us follow the counsel of the Holy Ghost "Before judgment, prepare thee justice." (Eccl. xviii. 19.) Let us adjust our accounts before the day of accounts. Let us seek God, now that we can find him; for the time shall come when we will wish, but shall not be able to find him. ”You shall seek me, and shall not find me." (John vii. 36.)” “Before judgment," says St. Augustine, ”the Judge can be appeased, but not in judgment." By a change of life we can now appease the anger of Jesus Christ, and recover his grace; but when he shall judge, and find us in sin, he must execute justice, and we shall be lost. (Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year by St Alphonsus Liguori: A sermon on the death of the sinner is appended at the end of this article.)

No one in public life today recognizes or accepts this as true. More accurately, of course, almost no one in public life today knows of the terror that awaits them by their use of amorality in every aspect of their lives. Not Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Not Merrick Garland. Not Jack Smith, Not Alvin Bragg. Not Juan Merchan. Not Andrew Weissman. Not Mattew Colangelo. Not Charles Schumers. And not even Donald John Trump. Not anyone, including many well-meaning Catholics who have been swept up in the falsehoods of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and its propagation of the heresy of universal salvation.

The use of Machiavellianism by the amoral denizens of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” has become so firmly embedded that some in the false opposite of the naturalist “right” are openly calling for the imprisonment of as many Democrats as possible in the belief that such revenge imprisonments would be the only way to stop the left’s use of lawfare as a ready feature of their electoral and governing repertoire:

The conviction of former President Donald Trump on manufactured charges in a Stalinist show trial this week marks a crossroads for the Republican Party. From now on, the civil war inside the GOP will be between those who understand they must do to Democrats what Democrats have done to Trump, and those who think they can trundle along with business as usual.

And make no mistake, that divide in the Republican Party is very real — and now, very obvious. In the wake of Trump’s conviction Thursday, for example, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was submissively silent for most of the day.

Not that his conspicuous silence was a surprise. Recall that a year ago McConnell was likewise silent for hours after Trump was indicted in the classified documents probe, as was minority Whip John Thune. Eventually, McConnell issued the weakest possible statement late on Thursday, as did Thune, who belatedly called the Manhattan trial “politically motivated” and bemoaned the “partisan nature of this prosecution.”

Other Republicans were not silent but should have been. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, whose last notable action before leaving office was to veto a bill that would have protected children from transgender genital mutilation, issued a craven statement that seemed to accept the legitimacy of the trial and conviction: “It is not easy to see a former President and the presumptive GOP nominee convicted of felony crimes; but the jury verdict should be respected. An appeal is in order but let’s not diminish the significance of this verdict.”

Hutchinson wasn’t alone in calling for the rigged, obviously corrupt trial and Soviet-style conviction to be “respected.” The former GOP governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who is now running for U.S. Senate, encouraged people “to respect the verdict and legal process” and invoked the “rule of law” — a curious thing to say given how the entire trial made a mockery of the rule of law.

Former National Security Advisor and neocon hack John Bolton said Trump’s conviction was a “fire-bell in the night,” and that Republicans should “change course” and “not nominate a convicted felon for President,” as if he were reading DNC talking points. (Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance had the perfect riposte to this: “John Bolton finally encounters a war he doesn’t want to fight.”)

Republicans like these should be purged from the party immediately — especially McConnell. As Rachel Bovard noted on X, “There is nothing stopping Senate Rs from calling the leadership election now.” Given what the stakes are now, and what we know Democrats are willing to do to cling to power, the only way forward is to do politics on the terms Democrats themselves have set.

That means if you’re a GOP candidate or elected official, and especially if you’re a Republican district attorney or attorney general, and your response to Trump’s conviction isn’t to begin making plans to indict President Biden and other leading Democrats on criminal charges, then you have no idea what time it is and need to be primaried, sidelined, or otherwise run out of the party. 

Take Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican who appears to live in a fantasy world. On Thursday in the wake of Trump’s conviction, Miyares said, “In America, we don’t seek to jail political opponents — we seek to defeat them at the ballot box.” Actually, Jason, in America only one major political party does that. The other one holds show trials and imprisons their political opponents on fake charges.

Put bluntly, Republicans have to make Democrats play by their own rules. They have to inflict pain ruthlessly on Democrats with endless show trials and lawfare, just as Democrats have done to Trump. The leftist radicals who run the Democrat Party only understand power, and they will only stop when they are force-fed their own medicine over and over. 

What does that messaging look like? It looks like Anthony Sabatini, a Florida Republican who said Thursday he’s running for Congress “to imprison as many Democrats as possible.”

As my Federalist colleague Sean Davis said Thursday, “If you’re a Republican running for office, you can just go ahead and throw away all of your elegant little policy proposals for this or that corporate exclusion or tax subsidy. Give me a list of which Democrat officials you’re going to put in prison, or get lost.”

What does that look like in practice? Here’s one idea. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should immediately indict President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland for the ongoing crisis at the border, which in every way is a criminal human-trafficking conspiracy that they have orchestrated and sustained by flouting federal immigration law.

Top Republicans like McConnell will never support anything like that, which means they’re worse than worthless — they’re actively on the side of Democrats. The only explanation for the weak, belated statement from McConnell is that he’s glad Trump was convicted and hopes he goes to prison.

If the Republican Party is going to be anything other than controlled opposition for the Democrats, fiddling while the republic burns, it needs to purge its ranks of snakes like McConnell and elevate those who aren’t afraid of playing by Democrats’ rules. A good way to separate the two groups would be to start asking Republican officeholders and candidates whether they’d be willing to bring criminal charges against high-ranking Democrats and, if they can, imprison them.

That’s the world Democrats have called into being with this show trial. They are the ones who have cried “no quarter” in this fight. The least Republicans can do at this point is accept their terms and enter the fight on equal footing.

Why is that so important? For two reasons. The first, mentioned above, is that Democrats will never stop unless they are made to suffer exactly what they would inflict on Republicans. If we’re going to start jailing political opponents in America, then it has to go both ways. The other reason is now that Democrats have done this, have made a mockery of our justice system, the only way to restore faith in the rule of law is to make those responsible pay for what they’ve done and bring them to justice. If Democrats get away with this, Americans will be justified in thinking the entire system is illegitimate.

So Republican officials have a choice to make. They can do what’s necessary to stop Democrats and restore faith in our justice system, or they can become Democrat slaves and let the republic burn. (Republicans Should Do To Democrats What They Did To Trump.)

The author of this essay, John Davidson, does not realize that our system of governance is illegitimate as it is based on the lie that the “people,” not Christ the King, is sovereign, and that we are only witnessing now the perfections of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles. Injustice under cover of the law and totalitarianism in practice if not in name are just the logical consequences of the false belief that men can govern themselves without regard to the Sacred Deposit of the Holy Faith and can pursue what the founders believed was “civic virtue” without belief in, access to, and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

No, to give the Democrats a taste of their own medicine will never stop their weaponization of the law, and to stoop to that level would be to demean their humanity just as much as the they, the Democrats, dehumanize men such as Donald John Trump and anyone else they believe is actually to their “divine right” to govern as they desire in perpetuity while crushing all dissenting voices in cooperation with Big Tech, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and a welter of globalist entities such as the World Health Organization composed of people desirous of using the nonexistent threats posed their diseases du jour as the pretext for eliminating the concept of national sovereignty once and for all.

No, the “solution” is not to imprison as many Democrats as possible. Such realpolitik may make good sense in a Machiavellian manner, but it is quite a terrible way to please God and thus to try to sanctify and save one’s immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. Such a “solution,” if implemented, would only result in the “left’s” calling for the summary execution of all Republicans and other dissenters, and an “eye for an eye” on that score would lead to open civil war and to whatever modern form of the guillotine that either one or both of the false opposites might employ for their mutual mass liquidation.

It is one thing for Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Michael Johnson (R-Louisiana) to promise use whatever political leverage that can be brought to bear against the Biden administration to block its programs, and several Republican Senators have said that they will block all Biden administration nominees. These are legitimate things that can be done within the rule of law. Granted.

However, to outdo the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist left is to play on the devil’s terms, and everyone loses in that sorry contest between competing groups of people who are divided by many things but are absolutely united in their rejection of referring all things that pertain to the good of souls to the authority of the Catholic Church while pursuing the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End.

Sure, there is a double standard in the American judicial process, and what is new about that?

Hypocrisy has reigned supreme almost from the beginning of the American founding, something that I have noted in many previous commentaries.

Hillary Diane Clinton and her cohorts escaped any legal consequences for her criminal wrongdoing concerning her arranging a home-brewed internet server installed in her home in Chappaqua, New York, on which she stored over 30,000 emails, many of which were marked confidential, from her four years as Secretary of State in full violation of Federal law. Comey also did not find Mrs. Clinton’s use of bleach bit to wipe clean a computer disk or her aides’ destructions of cellular phones and other records to be in the least bit legal problematic, and she was permitted to destroy other evidence under the very eyes of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. Moreover, the investigation of John Durham into the way the Clinton campaign concocted the Russian Collusion hoax got nowhere except for a plea bargain from a Ministry of Injustice official who altered a document to make it appear that low-level Trump campaign associate Carter Page was a Russian asset when the truth was that he had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Double-standards must prevail when men do not believe in nor care about where they will spend eternity. Secular systems of justice and administration must result in injustice after injustice as the institutionalized nor.

Writing in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, Pope Leo XIII, explained the dangers of the religious neutral civil state:

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

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

Almost no one today understands that the “growth of civilization” “grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as but the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue.”

No, men must convert to the Catholic Faith.

They must forgive as they are forgiven, and they must pursue justice without malice according to the words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself:

Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.  37 Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.  38 Give, and it shall be given to you: good measure and pressed down and shaken together and running over shall they give into your bosom. For with the same measure that you shall mete withal, it shall be measured to you again. (Luke 6: 38.)

Human beings must judge others by being mindful of the fact that they themselves will be judged. This requires us not to condemn individuals even when discharging a Spiritual Work of Mercy to admonish the sinner and to pursue justice in the natural order of things with dispassion according to the nature of an act and the circumstances in which it was committed. All revenge, all amorality is thus excluded.

Permit me a slight digression as it is important to drive home the point that one cannot do whatever he wants without regard to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and expect to escape the fires of Hell for all eternity.

Even though Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem mankind, it is up to each person to avail himself of the merits of Our Lord’s Redemptive Act. Actually, of course, the number of those who are saved is very few:

Woe to you who command others! If so many are damned by your fault, what will happen to you? If few out of those who are first in the Church of God are saved, what will happen to you? Take all states, both sexes, every condition: husbands, wives, widows, young women, young men, soldiers, merchants, craftsmen, rich and poor, noble and plebian. What are we to say about all these people who are living so badly? The following narrative from Saint Vincent Ferrer will show you what you may think about it. He relates that an archdeacon in Lyons gave up his charge and retreated into a desert place to do penance, and that he died the same day and hour as Saint Bernard. After his death, he appeared to his bishop and said to him, "Know, Monsignor, that at the very hour I passed away, thirty-three thousand people also died. Out of this number, Bernard and myself went up to heaven without delay, three went to purgatory, and all the others fell into Hell."

Our chronicles relate an even more dreadful happening. One of our brothers, well-known for his doctrine and holiness, was preaching in Germany. He represented the ugliness of the sin of impurity so forcefully that a woman fell dead of sorrow in front of everyone. Then, coming back to life, she said, "When I was presented before the Tribunal of God, sixty thousand people arrived at the same time from all parts of the world; out of that number, three were saved by going to Purgatory, and all the rest were damned."

O abyss of the judgments of God! Out of thirty thousand, only five were saved! And out of sixty thousand, only three went to heaven! You sinners who are listening to me, in what category will you be numbered?... What do you say?... What do you think?...

I see almost all of you lowering your heads, filled with astonishment and horror. But let us lay our stupor aside, and instead of flattering ourselves, let us try to draw some profit from our fear.

Is it not true that there are two roads which lead to heaven: innocence and repentance? Now, if I show you that very few take either one of these two roads, as rational people you will conclude that very few are saved. And to mention proofs: in what age, employment or condition will you find that the number of the wicked is not a hundred times greater than that of the good, and about which one might say, "The good are so rare and the wicked are so great in number"? We could say of our times  what Salvianus said of his: it is easier to find a countless multitude of sinners immersed in all sorts of iniquities than a few innocent men. How many servants are totally honest and faithful in their duties? How many merchants are fair and equitable in their commerce; how many craftsmen exact and truthful; how many salesmen disinterested and sincere? How many men of law do not forsake equity? How many soldiers do not tread upon innocence; how many masters do not unjustly withhold the salary of those who serve them, or do not seek to dominate their inferiors? Everywhere, the good are rare and the wicked great in number. Who does not know that today there is so much libertinage among mature men, liberty among young girls, vanity among women, licentiousness in the nobility, corruption in the middle class, dissolution in the people, impudence among the poor, that one could say what David said of his times: "All alike have gone astray... there is not even one who does good, not even one." (Saint Leonard of Port Maurice, The Little Numbr of Those Who Are Saved.)

These are words that should terrify each one of us. The spiritually lax and outright moral reprobates do not enter the Kingdom of God. We must pray to Our Lady every day to help us to save our souls as it is far easier to go to Hell for all eternity than it is to go to Heaven. The conciliar revolutionaries preach the exact opposite.

The standard of one’s Particular Judgment becomes higher if he has authority over others. One duly invested with the authority to govern must do so justly as he seeks to foster the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End, namely, the possession of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven. Yes, woe to those who govern who do not make provision for the eternal well-being of those entrusted to their governance.

No, Catholicism is the answer to what ails men, namely, their fallen human nature and thus their proclivity to become divided by the errors that are multiplied for their own darkened intellects and weakened wills to believe in the illusion of secular salvation, whose pursuit justifies what means to accomplish this illusory belief. (Hmm, that’s a phrase that rings a bill or two.)

Good Character Matters

Although the lack of virtue in the world today is an accomplished fact of life, it is a deception to think that a just social order can be “restored” when men who have no regard for First and Last Things are at the helm of the ship of state.

Indeed, Pope Leo XIII pointed out in Mirae Caritatis, May 25, 1902, that it is much to be desired for those who serve the public in civic rule be men of virtue who permit themselves to be formed into the image of the Divine Redeemer by spending time in prayer before Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in His Real Presence:

Indeed it is greatly to be desired that those men would rightly esteem and would make due provision for life everlasting, whose industry or talents or rank have put it in their power to shape the course of human events. But alas! we see with sorrow that such men too often proudly flatter themselves that they have conferred upon this world as it were a fresh lease of life and prosperity, inasmuch as by their own energetic action they are urging it on to the race for wealth, to a struggle for the possession of commodities which minister to the love of comfort and display. And yet, whithersoever we turn, we see that human society, if it be estranged from God, instead of enjoying that peace in its possessions for which it had sought, is shaken and tossed like one who is in the agony and heat of fever; for while it anxiously strives for prosperity, and trusts to it alone, it is pursuing an object that ever escapes it, clinging to one that ever eludes the grasp. For as men and states alike necessarily have their being from God, so they can do nothing good except in God through Jesus Christ, through whom every best and choicest gift has ever proceeded and proceeds. But the source and chief of all these gifts is the venerable Eucharist, which not only nourishes and sustains that life the desire whereof demands our most strenuous efforts, but also enhances beyond measure that dignity of man of which in these days we hear so much. For what can be more honourable or a more worthy object of desire than to be made, as far as possible, sharers and partakers in the divine nature? Now this is precisely what Christ does for us in the Eucharist, wherein, after having raised man by the operation of His grace to a supernatural state, he yet more closely associates and unites him with Himself. For there is this difference between the food of the body and that of the soul, that whereas the former is changed into our substance, the latter changes us into its own; so that St. Augustine makes Christ Himself say: "You shall not change Me into yourself as you do the food of your body, but you shall be changed into Me" (confessions 1. vii., c. x.).

Moreover, in this most admirable Sacrament, which is the chief means whereby men are engrafted on the divine nature, men also find the most efficacious help towards progress in every kind of virtue. And first of all in faith. In all ages faith has been attacked; for although it elevates the human mind by bestowing on it the knowledge of the highest truths, yet because, while it makes known the existence of divine mysteries, it yet leaves in obscurity the mode of their being, it is therefore thought to degrade the intellect. But whereas in past times particular articles of faith have been made by turns the object of attack; the seat of war has since been enlarged and extended, until it has come to this, that men deny altogether that there is anything above and beyond nature. Now nothing can be better adapted to promote a renewal of the strength and fervour of faith in the human mind than the mystery of the Eucharist, the "mystery of faith," as it has been most appropriately called. For in this one mystery the entire supernatural order, with all its wealth and variety of wonders, is in a manner summed up and contained: "He hath made a remembrance of His wonderful works, a merciful and gracious Lord; He hath given food to them that fear Him" (Psalm cx, 4-5). For whereas God has subordinated the whole supernatural order to the Incarnation of His Word, in virtue whereof salvation has been restored to the human race, according to those words of the Apostle; "He hath purposed...to re-establish all things in Christ, that are in heaven and on earth, in Him" (Eph. i., 9-10), the Eucharist, according to the testimony of the holy Fathers, should be regarded as in a manner a continuation and extension of the Incarnation. For in and by it the substance of the incarnate Word is united with individual men, and the supreme Sacrifice offered on Calvary is in a wondrous manner renewed, as was signified beforehand by Malachy in the words: "In every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to My name a pure oblation" (Mal. i., 11). And this miracle, itself the very greatest of its kind, is accompanied by innumerable other miracles; for here all the laws of nature are suspended; the whole substance of the bread and wine are changed into the Body and the Blood; the species of bread and wine are sustained by the divine power without the support of any underlying substance; the Body of Christ is present in many places at the same time, that is to say, wherever the Sacrament is consecrated. And in order that human reason may the more willingly pay its homage to this great mystery, there have not been wanting, as an aid to faith, certain prodigies wrought in His honour, both in ancient times and in our own, of which in more than one place there exist public and notable records and memorials. It is plain that by this Sacrament faith is fed, in it the mind finds its nourishment, the objections of rationalists are brought to naught, and abundant light is thrown on the supernatural order.

But that decay of faith in divine things of which We have spoken is the effect not only of pride, but also of moral corruption. For if it is true that a strict morality improves the quickness of man's intellectual powers, and if on the other hand, as the maxims of pagan philosophy and the admonitions of divine wisdom combine to teach us, the keenness of the mind is blunted by bodily pleasures, how much more, in the region of revealed truths, do these same pleasures obscure the light of faith, or even, by the just judgment of God, entirely extinguish it. For these pleasures at the present day an insatiable appetite rages, infecting all classes as with an infectious disease, even from tender years. Yet even for so terrible an evil there is a remedy close at hand in the divine Eucharist. For in the first place it puts a check on lust by increasing charity, according to the words of St. Augustine, who says, speaking of charity, "As it grows, lust diminishes; when it reaches perfection, lust is no more" (De diversis quaestionibus, Ixxxiii., q. 36). Moreover the most chaste flesh of Jesus keeps down the rebellion of our flesh, as St. Cyril of Alexandria taught, "For Christ abiding in us lulls to sleep the law of the flesh which rages in our members" (Lib. iv., c. ii., in Joan., vi., 57). Then too the special and most pleasant fruit of the Eucharist is that which is signified in the words of the prophet: "What is the good thing of Him," that is, of Christ, "and what is His beautiful thing, but the corn of the elect and the wine that engendereth virgins" (Zach. ix., 17), producing, in other words, that flower and fruitage of a strong and constant purpose of virginity which, even in an age enervated by luxury, is daily multiplied and spread abroad in the Catholic Church, with those advantages to religion and to human society, wherever it is found, which are plain to see. (Pope Leo XIII, Mirae Caritatis, May 28, 1902.)

To give just one example of a leader who exemplified virtue in public life we can turn to Our King’s great champion, Saint Louis IX, King of France.

Saint Louis IX was the personification of all of the virtues that flow from a life steeped in the pursuit of personal sanctity, a life that sought to seek the shelter of Our Lord in His Real Presence and was tenderly devoted to the Mother God, a life that set aside earthly pleasures and honors in order to seek the choicest riches of all: eternal life in the glory of the Beatific Vision in Heaven. Saint Louis IX knew that no one could exercise the powers of civil rule properly unless his mind was enlightened by the Deposit of Faith and his will strengthened by Sanctifying Grace in order to seek God's will first and to help advance the cause of the common good of all society in light of the common end of all men: to be citizens of Heaven for all eternity. Christ must reign first as the King of the hearts of individual men and then as the King of all nations.

Saint Louis IX was a just judge who would spend time under a tree hearing the cases of his subjects, knowing that he would be judged by the Judge of his immortal soul if he, in his own words, "swayed either to the right or the left," if he showed any favoritism in any way that would be a violation of the precepts of justice, both natural and Divine. Having learned from his mother's knee to love God and to grow in holiness, Louis IX is the model for all rulers at all times in all places. He outlined these principles in his letter to his son Philip:

9. Dear son, have a tender pitiful heart for the poor, and for all those whom you believe to be in misery of heart or body, and, according to your ability, comfort and aid them with some alms.

10. Maintain the good customs of your realm, and put down the bad ones. Do not oppress your people and do not burden them with tolls or tailles, except under very great necessity.

11. If you have any unrest of heart, of such a nature that it may be told, tell it to your confessor, or to some upright man who can keep your secret; you will be able to carry more easily the thought of your heart.

12. See to it that those of your household are upright and loyal, and remember the Scripture, which says: "Elige viros timentes Deum in quibus sit justicia et qui oderint avariciam"; that is to say, "Love those who serve God and who render strict justice and hate covetousness"; and you will profit, and will govern your kingdom well.

13. Dear son, see to it that all your associates are upright, whether clerics or laymen, and have frequent good converse with them; and flee the society of the bad. And listen willingly to the word of God, both in open and in secret; and purchase freely prayers and pardons.

14. Love all good, and hate all evil, in whomsoever it may be.

15. Let no one be so bold as to say, in your presence, words which attract and lead to sin, and do not permit words of detraction to be spoken of another behind his back.

16. Suffer it not that any ill be spoken of God or His saints in your presence, without taking prompt vengeance. But if the offender be a clerk or so great a person that you ought not to try him, report the matter to him who is entitled to judge it.

17. Dear son, give thanks to God often for all the good things He has done for you, so that you may be worthy to receive more, in such a manner that if it please the Lord that you come to the burden and honor of governing the kingdom, you may be worthy to receive the sacred unction wherewith the kings of France are consecrated.

18. Dear son, if you come to the throne, strive to have that which befits a king, that is to say, that in justice and rectitude you hold yourself steadfast and loyal toward your subjects and your vassals, without turning either to the right or to the left, but always straight, whatever may happen. And if a poor man have a quarrel with a rich man, sustain the poor rather than the rich, until the truth is made clear, and when you know the truth, do justice to them.

19. If any one have entered into a suit against you (for any injury or wrong which he may believe that you have done to him), be always for him and against yourself in the presence of your council, without showing that you think much of your case (until the truth be made known concerning it); for those of your council might be backward in speaking against you, and this you should not wish; and command your judges that you be not in any way upheld more than any others, for thus will your councillors judge more boldly according to right and truth.

20. If you have anything belonging to another, either of yourself or through your predecessors, if the matter is certain, give it up without delay, however great it may be, either in land or money or otherwise. If the matter is doubtful, have it inquired into by wise men, promptly and diligently. And if the affair is so obscure that you cannot know the truth, make such a settlement, by the counsels of of upright men, that your soul, and the souls of your predecessors, may be wholly freed from the affair. And even if you hear some one say that your predecessors made restitution, make diligent inquiry to learn if anything remains to be restored; and if you find that such is the case, cause it to be delivered over at once, for the liberation of your soul and the souls of your predecessors. 

21. You should seek earnestly how your vassals and your subjects may live in peace and rectitude beneath your sway; likewise, the good towns and the good cities of your kingdom. And preserve them in the estate and the liberty in which your predecessors kept them, redress it, and if there be anything to amend, amend and preserve their favor and their love. For it is by the strength and the riches of your good cities and your good towns that the native and the foreigner, especially your peers and your barons, are deterred from doing ill to you. I will remember that Paris and the good towns of my kingdom aided me against the barons, when I was newly crowned.

22. Honor and love all the people of Holy Church, and be careful that no violence be done to them, and that their gifts and alms, which your predecessors have bestowed upon them, be not taken away or diminished. And I wish here to tell you what is related concerning King Philip, my ancestor, as one of his council, who said he heard it, told it to me. The king, one day, was with his privy council, and he was there who told me these words. And one of the king's councillors said to him how much wrong and loss he suffered from those of Holy Church, in that they took away his rights and lessened the jurisdiction of his court; and they marveled greatly how he endured it. And the good king answered: "I am quite certain that they do me much wrong, but when I consider the goodnesses and kindnesses which God has done me, I had rather that my rights should go, than have a contention or awaken a quarrel with Holy Church." And this I tell to you that you may not lightly believe anything against the people of Holy Church; so love them and honor them and watch over them that they may in peace do the service of our Lord.

23. Moreover, I advise you to love dearly the clergy, and, so far as you are able, do good to them in their necessities, and likewise love those by whom God is most honored and served, and by whom the Faith is preached and exalted.

24. Dear son, I advise that you love and reverence your father and your mother, willingly remember and keep their commandments, and be inclined to believe their good counsels.

25. Love your brothers, and always wish their well-being and their good advancement, and also be to them in the place of a father, to instruct them in all good. But be watchful lest, for the love which you bear to one, you turn aside from right doing, and do to the others that which is not meet.

26. Dear son, I advise you to bestow the benefices of Holy Church which you have to give, upon good persons, of good and clean life, and that you bestow them with the high counsel of upright men. And I am of the opinion that it is preferable to give them to those who hold nothing of Holy Church, rather than to others. For, if you inquire diligently, you will find enough of those who have nothing who will use wisely that entrusted to them. (From Saint Louis' Advice to His Son, in Medieval Civilization, trans. and eds. Dana Munro and George Clarke Sellerym New York: The Century Company, 1910, pp. 366-375.)

Saint Louis IX, quite unlike the war-happy leaders of the past century who have considered war to be a first resort to the resolution of international conflicts and disputes rather than a regrettable last resort after all peaceful means to avoid armed military conflict have been exhausted, adhered to the principles of the Just War Theory that were mocked by Niccolo Machiavelli and jettisoned by the latter’s disciples.

27. Dear son, I advise you that you try with all your strength to avoid warring against any Christian man, unless he have done you too much ill. And if wrong be done you, try several ways to see if you can find how you can secure your rights, before you make war; and act thus in order to avoid the sins which are committed in warfare. 

28. And if it fall out that it is needful that you should make war (either because some one of your vassals has failed to plead his case in your court, or because he has done wrong to some church or to some poor person, or to any other person whatsoever, and is unwilling to make amends out of regard for you, or for any other reasonable cause), whatever the reason for which it is necessary for you to make war, give diligent command that the poor folk who have done no wrong or crime be protected from damage to their vines, either through fire or otherwise, for it were more fitting that you should constrain the wrongdoer by taking his own property (either towns or castles, by force of siege), than that you should devastate the property of poor people. And be careful not to start the war before you have good counsel that the cause is most reasonable, and before you have summoned the offender to make amends, and have waited as long as you should. And if he ask mercy, you ought to pardon him, and accept his amends, so that God may be pleased with you.

29. Dear son, I advise you to appease wars and contentions, whether they be yours or those of your subjects, just as quickly as may be, for it is a thing most pleasing to our Lord. And Monsignore Martin gave us a very great example of this. For, one time, when our Lord made it known to him that he was about to die, he set out to make peace between certain clerks of his archbishopric, and he was of the opinion that in so doing he was giving a good end to life. (From Saint Louis' Advice to His Son, in Medieval Civilization, trans. and eds. Dana Munro and George Clarke Sellerym New York: The Century Company, 1910, pp. 366-375.)

One can see that Saint Louis IX’s advice to his son was a cogent summary of the following principles of the Just War Theory that must, of course, be applied in the concrete circumstances by leaders, meaning that errors in judgment are bound to be made now and again given the nature of fallen creatures. It is nevertheless true that there must be a real consideration of these factors, something that Saint Louis IX, just man that he was, understood entirely.

The final part of Saint Louis IX’s letter to his son Philip dealt with the care that a civil ruler must take to see to the good administration of his own government and that he is a good son of the Vicar of Christ:

32. Dear son, freely give power to persons of good character, who know how to use it well, and strive to have wickednesses expelled from your land, that is to say, nasty oaths, and everything said or done against God or our Lady or the saints. In a wise and proper manner put a stop, in your land, to bodily sins, dicing, taverns, and other sins. Put down heresy so far as you can, and hold in especial abhorrence Jews, and all sorts of people who are hostile to the Faith, so that your land may be well purged of them, in such manner as, by the sage counsel of good people, may appear to you advisable. Further the right with all your strength. Moreover I admonish you that you strive most earnestly to show your gratitude for the benefits which our Lord has bestowed upon you, and that you may know how to give Him thanks therefore.

33. Dear son, take care that the expenses of your household are reasonable and moderate, and that its moneys are justly obtained. And there is one opinion that I deeply wish you to entertain, that is to say, that you keep yourself free from foolish expenses and evil exactions, and that your money should be well expended and well acquired. And this opinion, together with other opinions which are suitable and profitable, I pray that our Lord may teach you.

34. Finally, most sweet son, I conjure and require you that, if it please our Lord that I should die before you, you have my soul succored with masses and orisons, and that you send through the congregations of the kingdom of France, and demand their prayers for my soul, and that you grant me a special and full part in all the good deeds which you perform.

35. In conclusion, dear son, I give you all the blessings which a good and tender father can give to a son, and I pray our Lord Jesus Christ, by His mercy, by the prayers and merits of His blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, and of angels and archangels and of all the saints, to guard and protect you from doing anything contrary to His will, and to give you grace to do it always, so that He may be honored and served by you. And this may He do to me as to you, by His great bounty, so that after this mortal life we may be able to be together with Him in the eternal life, and see Him, love Him, and praise Him without end. Amen. And glory, honor, and praise be to Him who is one God with the Father and the Holy Spirit; without beginning and without end. Amen. (From Saint Louis' Advice to His Son, in Medieval Civilization, trans. and eds. Dana Munro and George Clarke Sellerym New York: The Century Company, 1910, pp. 366-375.)

No, a confessional Catholic State is not a guarantor of social order, only the necessary precondition for it. Individual men must choose to cooperate with God's grace to build up the Kingship of Christ in their own souls and hence in every aspect of their nation's life. This is never an easy task given the frailties of fallen human nature, which is why the Church's shepherds must exhort the faithful to lives of holiness unspotted by the world and proclaim the immutable doctrine, contained in the Ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church, of the Social Reign of Christ the King that was exemplified so well by Saint Louis IX in the Thirteenth Century.

It is good to consider just the following passage, noting the great leader of France during most of the Thirteenth Century, Saint Louis IX, summarized the whole of the doctrine of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ when he wrote:

31. Dear son, I advise you always to be devoted to the Church of Rome, and to the sovereign pontiff, our father, and to bear him the reverence and honor which you owe to your spiritual father. (From Saint Louis' Advice to His Son, in Medieval Civilization, trans. and eds. Dana Munro and George Clarke Sellerym New York: The Century Company, 1910, pp. 366-375.)

There is no more cogent summary of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ. Saint Louis was telling his son that he, although destined to be a king, was subordinate to the Church founded by Our Lord upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. All States, no matter the construct of their civil governments, must be so subordinate. Remember this and remember well: Catholics do not care about "states' rights." They care about God's laws, which bind all men at all times, whether they are acting individually in their own lives or in the institutions of civil governance.

Importantly, as noted just above, Saint Louis admonished his son as follows:

Dear son, freely give power to persons of good character, who know how to use it well, and strive to have wickednesses expelled from your land, that is to say, nasty oaths, and everything said or done against God or our Lady or the saints. In a wise and proper manner put a stop, in your land, to bodily sins, dicing, taverns, and other sins. Put down heresy so far as you can, and hold in especial abhorrence Jews, and all sorts of people who are hostile to the Faith, so that your land may be well purged of them, in such manner as, by the sage counsel of good people, may appear to you advisable. (From Saint Louis' Advice to His Son, in Medieval Civilization, trans. and eds. Dana Munro and George Clarke Seller, New York: The Century Company, 1910, pp. 366-375.)

Yes, good character matters in statecraft. That there are so few men of good character today in either of the two major organized crime families of naturalism is the result of a world shaped by Protestantism's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the subsequent rise and institutionalization of Judeo-Masonry.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who sold his soul fifty-one years ago to curry favor with pro-abortion voters and who has been kept abreast of his son’s business dealings with Chicom “investors” while using the full power of the civil state against his political opponents and pro-life activists, lacks such character. This inveterate liar and fabulist, who has lurched to the Marxist “progressives” to keep his nominal job, is an indecent man, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to state that Donald John Trump, for his faults and for all his errors on policy matters (including the genocide he unleashed by means of the “vaccines” created under Operation Warp Speed), has more strength of character on natural level than Biden, the serial plagiarist, ever had:

There’s nothing decent about:

• Helping your family sell out the country to shady foreigners for tens of millions of dollars — and then pretending you know nothing about it.
• Inviting millions of illegal migrants into the country — and then lying that the border is secure.
• Inviting a transgender influencer to the White House who bares their breasts on the White House lawn.
• Sniffing and fondling children and women every chance you get.
• Allegedly sexually assaulting Tara Reade.
• Presiding over such a decline in decorum in Washington that cocaine is discovered at the White House and a Democratic staffer posts an X-rated video of his gay sex romp inside a Senate hearing room.
• Rewriting Title IX into a radical attack on girls and women.
• Allowing White House and campaign staff to refer routinely to Trump as “Hitler Pig.”
• Cursing out staff and calling a reporter a “stupid son of a bitch.”
• Refusing to acknowledge your out-of-wedlock grandchild until forced to issue a statement as part of a child support settlement Hunter Biden struck with the mother, and then failing to include the little girl in the annual family Christmas stocking lineup at the White House.
• Lying that the innocent truck driver involved in the fatal collision with your first wife was drunk.
• Refusing to provide Secret Service protection to Bobby Kennedy Jr., despite threats against him and the history of assassination in his family.
• Botching the withdrawal from Afghanistan so that 13 service members are killed by a suicide bomber and then ordering a revenge hit that takes out an innocent Afghan aid worker and his family.
• Continually looking at your watch in boredom as the bodies of the 13 heroes are repatriated to Dover Air Force Base, and then infuriating the families by making it about yourself and the fantasy that your son died in combat, too.
• Allowing your dogs to attack Secret Service agents.
• Role-playing as a devout Catholic while championing abortion on demand until the moment of birth.

If you want to vote for Joe Biden, that’s your choice, but don’t pretend it’s a vote for decency. (Joe Biden is far from 'decent' despite what the media and celebrities may claim.)

Author Miranda Devine, who has done very good investigative reporting, does not realize indecency must result when men do not understand or accept the fact that the civil state has the obligation to work to remove those conditions that breed sin in the midst of its cultural life.

Yes, sin there will always be.

True.

However, the State, which the Church teaches has the obligation to help foster those conditions in civil society in which citizens can better save their souls, must not tolerate grave evils (such as blasphemy or willful murder) under cover of law. Saint Thomas Aquinas understood that some evils may have to be tolerated in society. Graver evils, however, undermine the common good and put into jeopardy the pursuit of man’s last end.

Good character and men possessed of it and who persist in it only by a firm reliance upon and cooperation with the graces won for us by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. Nations must fall into ruin otherwise.

As Pope Saint Pius X explained in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

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. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Additionally, Pope Pius XI pointed out in Quas Primas that the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ must be proclaimed by men and their parliamentary assemblies:

If We ordain that the whole Catholic world shall revere Christ as King, We shall minister to the need of the present day, and at the same time provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of anti-clericalism, its errors and impious activities. This evil spirit, as you are well aware, Venerable Brethren, has not come into being in one day; it has long lurked beneath the surface. The empire of Christ over all nations was rejected. The right which the Church has from Christ himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation, that right was denied. Then gradually the religion of Christ came to be likened to false religions and to be placed ignominiously on the same level with them. It was then put under the power of the state and tolerated more or less at the whim of princes and rulers. Some men went even further, and wished to set up in the place of God's religion a natural religion consisting in some instinctive affection of the heart. There were even some nations who thought they could dispense with God, and that their religion should consist in impiety and the neglect of God. The rebellion of individuals and states against the authority of Christ has produced deplorable consequences. We lamented these in the Encyclical Ubi arcano; we lament them today: the seeds of discord sown far and wide; those bitter enmities and rivalries between nations, which still hinder so much the cause of peace; that insatiable greed which is so often hidden under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism, and gives rise to so many private quarrels; a blind and immoderate selfishness, making men seek nothing but their own comfort and advantage, and measure everything by these; no peace in the home, because men have forgotten or neglect their duty; the unity and stability of the family undermined; society in a word, shaken to its foundations and on the way to ruin. We firmly hope, however, that the feast of the Kingship of Christ, which in future will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of society to our loving Savior. It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. Many of these, however, have neither the station in society nor the authority which should belong to those who bear the torch of truth. This state of things may perhaps be attributed to a certain slowness and timidity in good people, who are reluctant to engage in conflict or oppose but a weak resistance; thus the enemies of the Church become bolder in their attacks. But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him, and would valiantly defend his rights.

Moreover, the annual and universal celebration of the feast of the Kingship of Christ will draw attention to the evils which anticlericalism has brought upon society in drawing men away from Christ, and will also do much to remedy them. While nations insult the beloved name of our Redeemer by suppressing all mention of it in their conferences and parliaments, we must all the more loudly proclaim his kingly dignity and power, all the more universally affirm his rights. (Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, December 11, 1925.)

As was pointed out in Not A Mention of Christ the King over fourteen ago, the presidents of the United States of America have gone out of their way to avoid making any reference to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in their inaugural address and in their addresses to special joint meetings of the United States Congress.

The errors of pluralism have divided people needlessly into warring camps as a permanently-established political class, composed of competing sets of naturalists, each of which believes that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation is, at best, a matter of complete indifference to personal and social order.

So many Americans live from election to election, always believing that "change," whether it be in the direction of "progress" for naturalists of the "left" or in the direction of "constitutionalism" or "liberty" or "limited government" for naturalists of the "right." Although divisions on some matters will always occur until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day at the Second Coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is also true that men today have been needlessly divided about matters pertaining to First and Last Things, oblivious to the fact that they have been given a spotless mother, Holy Mother Church, to serve as their mater and magister (mother and teacher) in this passing, mortal vale of tears. Most men today believe that they are automatons, either independent of any concept of God or "free" from the "dictates" of a hierarchical church.

Personal and social disaster cannot but be the result of such a brew of error. Men resort more and more to violence today because they do not know of the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. They do not know that they have a Blessed Mother who made possible their salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the father at the Annunciation. They do not realize that the supernatural helps they need to overcome all sin in their lives and to pray for the conversion of those who are promoting evil in society flow through the loving hands of that same Blessed Mother, who gave the Rosary with her own blessed hands to Saint Dominic de Guzman so that we could be more closely united to her Divine Son, Christ the King, through the mysteries contained in her psalter, the Rosary.

The late Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, France, put the matter as follows in the Nineteenth Century:

Neither in His Person," Card, Pie said in a celebrated pastoral instruction, "nor in the exercise of His rights, can Jesus Christ be divided, dissolved, split up; in Him the distinction of natures and operations can never be separated or opposed; the divine cannot be incompatible to the human, nor the human to the divine. On the contrary, it is the peace, the drawing together, the reconciliation; it is the very character of union which has made the two things one: 'He is our peace, Who hat made both one." (Eph. 2:14). This is why St. John told us: 'every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God. And this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh: and is now already in the world' (1 John 4:3; cf. also 1 John 2:18, 22; 2 John: 7). "So then, Card. Pie continues, "when I hear certain talk being spread around, certain pithy statements (i.e., 'Separation of Church and State,' for one, and the enigmatic axiom 'A free Church in a free State,' for another) prevailing from day to day, and which are being introduced into the heart of societies, the dissolvent by which the world must perish, I utter this cry of alarm: Beware the Antichrist." (Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, pp. 21-23.)

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

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

In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:

"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies." (Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers.)

There can be no middle ground about this at all. None. We are either for Our Lord as He revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church or we are against Him.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen put in this way in his “A Plea for Intolerance”:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broadminded. A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broadminded man is one who will accept anything for a reason—providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and, lastly, the love of novelty….

Religion is not an open question, like the League of Nations, while science is a closed question, like the addition table. Religion has its principles, natural and revealed, which are more exacting in their logic than mathematics. But the false notion of tolerance has obscured this fact from the eyes of many who are as intolerant about the smallest details of life as they are tolerant about their relations to God. In the ordinary affairs of life, these same people would never summon a Christian Science practitioner to fix a broken windowpane; they would never call in an optician because they had broken the eye of a needle; they would never call in a florist because they hurt the palm of their hand, nor go to a carpenter to take care of their nails. They would never call in a Collector of Internal Revenue to extract the nickel swallowed by the baby. They would refuse to listen to a Kiwanis booster discussing the authenticity of a painting, or to a tree‐surgeon settling a moot question of law. And yet for the all‐important subject of religion, on which our eternal destinies hinge, on the all‐important question of the relations of man to his environment and to his God, they are willing to listen to anyone who calls himself a prophet. And so our journals are filled with articles for these “broadminded” people, in which everyone from Jack Dempsey to the chief cook of the Ritz Carlton tells about his idea of God and his view of religion. These same individuals, who would become exasperated if their child played with a wrongly colored lollipop, would not become the least bit worried if the child grew up without ever having heard the name of God….

The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth maybe contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults. But for any one to say, ʺSome say this, some say that, therefore there is no truth,ʺ is about as logical as it would have been for Columbus, who heard some say, ʺThe earth is round,ʺ and other say, ʺThe earth is flat,ʺ to conclude: ʺTherefore there is no earth at allʺ…. 

The giggling giddiness of novelty, the sentimental restlessness of a mind unhinged, and the unnatural fear of a good dose of hard thinking, all conjoin to produce a group of sophomoric latitudinarians who think there is no difference between God as Cause and God as a ʺmental projectionʺ; who equate Christ and Buddha, St. Paul and John Dewey, and then enlarge their broad‐mindedness into a sweeping synthesis that says not only that one Christian sect is just as good as another, but even that one world‐religion is just as good as another. The great god ʺProgressʺ is then enthroned on the altars of fashion, and as the hectic worshipers are asked, ʺProgress towards what?ʺ The tolerant answer comes back, ʺMore progress.ʺ All the while sane men are wondering how there can be progress without direction and how there can be direction without a fixed point. And because they speak of a ʺfixed point,ʺ they are said to be behind the times, when really they are beyond the times mentally and spiritually.

In the face of this false broad‐mindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, ʺYou owe meʺ and ʺI owe you,ʺ but they seem to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. The best indication of this is the frequent misuse of the terms ʺtoleranceʺ and ʺintolerance.ʺ There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make ʺintoleranceʺ mean hate, narrow‐ mindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broad‐mindedness, American good nature.

What is tolerance? Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error….

Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability. The government must be intolerant about malicious propaganda, and during the World War it made an index of forbidden books to defend national stability, as the Church, who is in constant warfare with error, made her index of forbidden books to defend the permanency of Christʹs life in the souls of men. The government during the war was intolerant about the national heretics who refused to accept her principles concerning the necessity of democratic institutions, and took physical means to enforce such principles. The soldiers who went to war were intolerant about the principles they were fighting for, in the same way that a gardener must be intolerant about the weeds that grow in his garden. The Supreme Court of the United States is intolerant about any private interpretation of the first principle of the Constitution that every man is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the particular citizen who would interpret ʺlibertyʺ in even such a small way as meaning the privilege to ʺgoʺ on a red traffic‐light, would find himself very soon in a cell where there were no lights, not even the yellow — the color of the timid souls who know not whether to stop or go. Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in their laboratories, and as all of us are intolerant of a particularly broad‐minded, ʺtolerant,ʺ and good‐natured grocer who, in making our bills, adds seven and ten to make twenty.

Now, if it is right — and it is right — for governments to be intolerant about the principles of government, and the bridge builder to be intolerant about the laws of stress and strain, and the physicist to be intolerant about the principles of gravitation, why should it not be the right of Christ, the right of His Church, and the right of thinking men to be intolerant about the truths of Christ, the doctrines of the Church, and the principles of reason? Can the truths of God be less exacting than the truths of mathematics? Can the laws of the mind be less binding than the laws of science, which are known only through the laws of the mind? Shall man, gifted with natural truth, who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on the mathematician who says two and two make five and the one who says two and two make four, be called a wise man, and shall God, Who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on all religions, be denied the name of ʺWisdom,ʺ and be called an ʺintolerantʺ God?…

Why, then, sneer at dogmas as intolerant? On all sides we hear it said today, ʺThe modern world wants a religion without dogmas,ʺ which betrays how little thinking goes with that label, for he who says he wants a religion without dogmas is stating a dogma, and a dogma that is harder to justify than many dogmas of faith. A dogma is a true thought, and a religion without dogmas is a religion without thought, or a back without a backbone. All sciences have dogmas. ʺWashington is the capital of the United Statesʺ is a dogma of geography. ʺWater is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygenʺ is a dogma of chemistry. Should we be broad‐minded and say that Washington is a sea in Switzerland? Should we be broad‐minded and say that H2O is a symbol for sulfuric acid? …

But it is anything but progress to act like mice and eat the foundations of the very roof over our heads. Intolerance about principles is the foundation of growth, and the mathematician who would deride a square for always having four sides, and in the name of progress would encourage it to throw away even only one of its sides, would soon discover that he had lost all his squares. So too with the dogmas of the Church, of science, and of reason; they are like bricks, solid things with which a man can build, not like straw, which is ʺreligious experience,ʺ fit only for burning.

A dogma, then, is the necessary consequence of the intolerance of first principles, and that science or that church which has the greatest amount of dogmas is the science or the church that has been doing the most thinking. The Catholic Church, the schoolmaster for twenty centuries, has been doing a tremendous amount of solid, hard thinking and hence has built up dogmas as a man might build a house of brick but grounded on a rock. She has seen the centuries with their passing enthusiasms and momentary loyalties pass before her, making the same mistakes, cultivating the same poses, falling into the same mental snares, so that she has become very patient and kind to the erring pupils, but very intolerant and severe concerning the false. She has been and she will always be intolerant so far as the rights of God are concerned, for heresy, error, untruth, affect not personal matters on which she may yield, but a Divine Right in which there is no yielding. Meek she is to the erring, but violent to the error. The truth is divine; the heretic is human. Due reparation made, she will admit the heretic back into the treasury of her souls, but never the heresy into the treasury of her wisdom. Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need, as Mr. [G. K.] Chesterton tells us, ʺnot a Church that is right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is wrong.ʺ

The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon [see 3 Kings 3:16-28]. Both of them claimed a child. The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth — it cannot be divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise. She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broad‐mindedness. (Monsignor Fulton Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels. New York, New York, The Century Company, 1931. Although I have the book itself, this excerpt was taken from Novus Ordo Watch Wire given the fact that it is already far later/earlier than is advisable for me right now. I just cannot transcribe anything more at this point.)

Behold a world awash in error, a world that accepts every "ism" (liberalism, socialism, communism, nihilism, conservativism, libertarianism, nationalism, militarism, globalism, statism, pantheism, paganism, satanism, occultism, Protestantism, Mormonism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, hedonism, barbarism, heathenism, environmentalism, evolutionism, pragmatism, Americanism, ecumenism, Modernism, relativism, positivism, utilitarianism, etc.) except Catholicism, the true religion.

 Living A World Devoid of a Superabundance of the Merits of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus:  Prophetic Words from Father Frederick Faber and Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.

We are looking at what happens in a world where most people, including most baptized Catholics, are devoid of contact with the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as Father Frederick Faber made this exact point in The Precious Blood:

It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are hindered by the Precious Blood; and this is not merely a hindering of so many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights. Falsehood would become so universal as to dissolve society; and the homes of domestic life would be turned into wards either of a prison or a madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But without the Precious Blood, such men would abound in the world. They might even become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we have in our souls. Civilization increases these possibilities. Education multiplies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Refinement adds a fresh malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad, until at last earth would be a hell on this side of the grave. There would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region of the unnatural. All highly-refined and luxurious developments of heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a highly-educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal.

The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose.

An earth, from off which all sense of justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes. The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way; and the same is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been just as it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this? All our struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no reason why we should not give ourselves up to that kind of enjoyment which our corruption does substantially find in sin. The gratification of our appetites is something; and that lies on one side, while on the other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser--is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness? Yet it would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world where there was no Precious Blood. Whatever relics of moral good we might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the most miserable; for they would be drawn away from the enjoyment of this world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and shame; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the allurements of sense are so vivid and strong.

What sort of love could there be, when we could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other, what a separation death would be! We should commit our dead to the ground without a hope. Husband and wife would part with the fearfullest certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation. Mothers would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to offend God with their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of our nature would become unnatural, and the most honorable ties be dishonored. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our hearts would have to learn to beat another way, in order to avoid the dismal consequences which our affections would bring upon ourselves and others. But it is needless to go further into these harrowing details. The world of the heart, without the Precious Blood, and with an intellectual knowledge of God, and his punishments of sin, is too fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity.

But how would it fare with the poor in such a world? They are God's chosen portion upon the earth. He chose poverty himself, when he came to us. He has left the poor in his place, and they are never to fail from the earth, but to be his representatives there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood, would any one love them? Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot? If the stream of almsgiving is so insufficient now, what would it be then? There would be no softening of the heart by grace; there would be no admission of of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our incomes; there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large;and yet even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with skilful concentration to different acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. Vocation is a blossom to be found only in the gardens of the Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God. Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining.

Even in countries professing to be Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel, the poor grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be supported by compulsory taxes; and they are in other ways a continual subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due to the Precious Blood that the principle of supporting them is acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history--even the history of nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation, and for literary and artistic refinement--it would not be extravagant for us to conclude that, if the circumstances of a country were such as to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves, so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition.

Such would be the condition of the world without the Precious Blood. As generations succeeded each other, original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to themselves. Every thing which makes life tolerable, which counteracts any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness, which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which consoles any sadness--is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in heathen as well as in Christian lands. It changes the whole position of an offending creation to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such a matter to speak of change, the aspect of God's immutable perfections toward his human children. It does not work merely in a spiritual sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We are all of us every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden, so imperceptible, so unsuspected? Perhaps because it is so universal and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents if it pressed sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of all his attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out?

Men would be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him; but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.

Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which made life unbearable to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)

Father Faber described the very world in which we live today,

Father Faber noted in his The Precious Blood is characterized by the Pelagian spirit of human self-redemption and the libertinage that flows forth as a result merely from the pull of the world, which is so strong and very difficult for so many to resist in these days of apostasy and betrayal:

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.)

Those words are even truer now than when Father Faber wrote them one hundred fifty-nine years ago.

A similarly prophetic reading of the signs of the times was made about eight years later by Father Henry James Coleridge in Father Faber’s beloved England. A careful reading of this essay, which was delivered as a series of sermons, will reveal that Father Coleridge understood perfectly the destructive trajectory of Modernity, a world moored on the rocky shoals of the rationalism of Protestantism and the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry:

But yet the Son of Man when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth.

(Words taken from the 8^th verse of the 13^th chapter of St. Luke's Gospel.)

We have this description chiefly in two great documents – in St. Paul's speech at Athens to the philosophers, (Acts xivv. 22-31.) and in his account of the miseries of the heathendom in the Epistle to the Romans. (Rom. I. 18-32) I shall speak presently of a third great passage which I mean to compare with these, in which, years after his Epistle to the Roman, he describes the men of the latter times. Let us first deal with the account given by the Apostle of the heathenism among which he lived and worked. In his speech, then, at the Areopagus, St. Paul describes in brief God's ways of dealing with the world. He tells the Athenians, as you know, of the “unknown God,” whom they worshipped in ignorance, Who, nevertheless, was the Creator and the Father of all. He had made of one blood, of one stock, of one nature, all nations on the face of earth. He had given them, as is implied in this, one moral law, one promise, one primeval tradition, one common hope of future salvation. Then He had, as it were, withdrawn, and left them themselves, though still His providence ruled them appointing the whole course of what is called the world's history, the rise, and fall, and character, and vicissitudes of nations and empires, and giving to all men, as St. Paul had said before at Iconium, abundance of good gifts, “Giving rains and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” (Acts xiv. 14-17) And the Apostle tells his hearers how the heathen had, as it were, to grope like blinded men, after God, although He was all the time so near to them, as to all of us – “for in Him we live and move and be.” (Acts xiv. 14-17) And he speaks in the same place, though gently and reservedly, of those terrible and lamentable errors into which the nations left to themselves had falling  touching upon the crown and consummation of them all, the idolatrous worship of false gods.

And now we must turn to the other great passage, which must be compared with this of which I have been speaking, where, at the beginning of his Epistle to the Romans, the same Apostle gives what we may call a companion picture to the former, describing the manner in which the heathen nations had in return treated God, and the consequence to themselves in which that treatment had issued. He speaks of the inexcusable ingratitude of the heathen to so good and wonderful a Creator, of their refusal to acknowledge Him, notwithstanding the strong evidences concerning Himself which He had imprinted on the face and on the course of nature; of the punishment which fell on them – that of being given over to idolatry: and then again of the further punishment of this judicial delusion, by which they became the slaves of lusts which in their abominable degradation went even beyond the extreme indulgence of all natural animal appetites. You may remember, my brethren, that fearful picture, on the details of which it is not necessary that we should linger for any space of time this afternoon. The character of heathendom, as he describes it, is based, of course, on intense selfishness, woking itself out in an eager grasping after all the object of concupiscence, and so in avarice, in the reckless pursuit of pleasure at whatever cost to others, in the passionate love of earthly honour and position; then rising, as was only natural after this, into intense pride and haughtiness, into unending stubbornness of will and judgment, and, further still, wreaking itself on all who came across its path, in envy, contentiousness, violence, contumely, in malignant craft, or insolent and reckless cruelty. By the side of these save features of debased humanity, we find placed, as is always the case in reality, a voluptuousness and licentiousness that knew no bound. And these two great passions of lust and pride combine in the character of the heathen world, as drawn by St. Paul, to smother and destroy all those instincts of natural piety and goodness which are implanted in man by his Creator, to which his conscience witnesses, and which animate and sustain all that social and domestic life which is the fundamental condition of our being and our happiness as men. Hence we find in St. Paul's description of heathenism a number of traits which point to the want of all natural affection. The tie which binds parents to children, and children to parents, was dissolved; so again, the law of faithfulness and truthfulness, which is essential in order that we may trust one another in the common intercourse of life, was set aside, as also the rule of gratitude and honest, the law of respect for the characters of others in men's language, the observance of obligations, the habit of peaceableness, the practice of kindness, even the instinct of mercy to the conquered, the weak, the helpless, the afflicted – mercy, the one provision of God for the numberless and otherwise inconsolable miseries to which the world is given up !

Such, in brief, is this great description of the heathenism of his own time given us by St. Paul. And now I come to the point of our argument concerning the latter days. This great Apostle as I have already said, has dwelt in more than one place on the characteristics of the men of those future times, as he has so often dwelt on the characteristics of the old heathen. We have already had occasion to examine what he has said in some of these passages; but one great description remains, written, moreover, as I have said, at the very end of St. Paul's life, on the eve of his martyrdom, in his last Epistle to his beloved child Timothy. (2 Tim. iii. I seq.) This is the longest and most particular description given us by the Apostle, and striking as it is in itself, it is perhaps still more striking when it is compared with the earlier passage in the Epistle to the Romans, to which I have referred. If you will take that passage, in which the vices and degradation of the unconverted heathen world are described with so much indignant severity, and yet with a certain discriminating tenderness and largesness of sympathy, and if you will put it side by side with the other account which, by way of prophecy, St. Paul gives, so many years afterwards, of the corruptions of the latter days, you will find that with one or two striking differences, which I shall point out, the two passages tally exactly. The differences that exist are important in themselves, as we shall see; and they are precious also on another ground, because they show us, if that be needed, that St. Paul has weighed his every word, that he has nowhere made one single charge, either against the ancient heathenism or against its modern revival, without the fullest knowledge and the calmest deliberation. Bear with me, then, if I dwell for a few moments on the points of agreement and of differences between the two,.

IV

In that old heathenism of the Roman world, into which it was the will of God that the Christian religion should be introduced by the Apostles, there were three diverse and often conflicting elements. There was a good element, which came from God; there was a thoroughly bad element, which came from Satan; and there was a corrupt element, which was the fruit of the workings of unregenerate human nature upon society, and upon the objects of sense and intelligence with which man is placed in relations. The good element we see embodied in great part of the laws and institutions of the ancient world, as also in much of the literature, the poetry, the philosophy of Greece and Rome, which literature consequently – after having been purified and as it were, baptized – has always been used by the Christian Church in the education of her children. This element, I say, was originally the gift of God, the Author of nature, to man, the offspring of reason and consicence, the tradition of a society of which God was Himself the founder. It enshrined whatever fragments of primeval truth as to God, the world, and man hiself, still lingered, in whatever shape among the far-wandering children of Adam. St. Paul alludes to this element in the first passage on which we dwelt to-day, and his words altogether seem to imply that God watched over it, supported it, and fostered it, as far as men were worthy of it, and that it might even have been expanded into a perfect system of natural religion and of reasonable virtue, had men been grateful enough to earn larger measure of grace from God, Who left not Himself without witness in His daily providence, and was “not far from” any one of His children.

But now we come to another element which just now I place the last of the three, the working of which we may distinguish in the heathen world. All flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth, and man had shut out the knowledge of God from his soul, and had let his passions lead him instead of his conscience. The unregenerate instincts of nature gradually overpowered the moral law in the heart of man, and their victory reflected itself in the rules of society, in the customs and maxims by which human life was guided. In proportion as man became more and more the master of the world, as wealth and power and knowledge and experience increased, as civilization (so to call it) and means of communication advanced, there grew up that great system of cruelty and immorality, of the godless pursuit of pleasure and worldly ends, which we call paganism. For paganism is not properly a religion, so much as a system of human life and human society, according to the impulses and unbridled lust of the natural man, checked only by what remained of strength in the law of right as written in men's hearts, in the voice of conscience, and in the old traditions of better days, and also by the law of necessity which made it imperative that society should in some way or other be kept alive and held together. St. Paul, in the passage to the Romans on which we have dwelt, has described to us, my brethren, what sort of men they were who were penetrated by this pagan spirit. And now, as I have already said, when the same Apostle comes to describe the men of the latter days, he paints them, as to all moral degradation, in the same colours as the pagans of his own time. The two passages correspond as to this word for word; the latter text is almost a repetition of the former. Thus far, the, we have St. Paul's authority for saying that the apostacy of the latter days will be a return to heathenism, understanding by the word that godless system of life and manners which is the fruit of the unrestrained development and reign of the lower instincts of human nature.

These thoughts bring us to the third element of paganism – that which I call the work of Satan, the enemy of God and man. As to this, also, we have St. Paul's authority, in that passage where in a few short words he tells us that the gods of the heathen were devils (I Cor. x. 20) We, my brethren, are often inclined to look upon the personages of which the heathen mythology is made up, as a number of poetic creations, as the powers of nature symbolized, or perhaps, at worst, as great men and famous heroes of fabulous times raised by a sort of natural canonization to the thrones of a higher world. This is the human part of the heathen religions, skillfully used by the authors of evil to disguise their own work for the delusion of men. But there was more behind the forms of apparent grace and beauty than the imagination of earthly poets. This might have been seen, we might truly say, by the base impurities in which they were steeped. No, my brethren, unless St. Paul is mistaken, unless thousands of Christian martyrs were mistaken who treated the heathen idols as the forms under which the apostate angels were adored, the gods of the heathen were Satan and his associates, permitted by the just judgment of God to draw to themselves the adoration which men had denied to Him; and taking care to deify in themselves every shape of human vice and passion, and to exact from their worshippers impure rites and filthy mysteries, that man made in the image God, might learn from them to degrade himself even beneath the level of the beasts of the field. Or, if we want a still more clear proof of the Satanic agencies which underlay the pagan religion we may find it in that other kind of worship which it exacted in the ancient world, and is still found to exact – in the ancient world, and is still found to exact – I mean the frightful tribute of human sacrifice, a custom widely spread and almost universal among pagan nations, some of whom have astonished even their Christian discoverers by their mildness and gentleness, their courtesy and simplicity, and yet have been found to be penetrated to the core by corruption, and to be in the habit of honouring their gods by the frightful homage of the tombs of human victims, a homage enough of itself to proclaim as its author the hater alike of man, and of God Who created him! (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 28-40. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Father Coleridge made the proper distinctions about the pagan world in which our spiritual ancestors lived and, all too frequently, shed their blood to plant the seeds for the rise of Holy Mother Church from the catacombs.

It is true, of course, that Holy Mother Church “baptized,” if you will, what was naturally good in pagan cultures. It is also true that human weakness, which is always at work in the lives of fallen men, undermined the naturally good and beautiful.

This having been noted, however, pagan cultures always do the bidding of satan and his legion of cohorts to seek both the temporal ruin of men and their nations, and it is this third aspect that is at work so fiercely in the world even more than it was in ancient times.

Father Colerdige continued:

Here, then my brethren, we have come to that part of the comparison as to which it need not be said that St. Paul's two descriptions are identical. We need not exaggerate the miseries of our own time, nor draw in darker colours than St. Paul the evil features of the last great apostacy. The Son of God, as another Apostle tells us, was “manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil,” (I St. John iii, S.) and I do not find, in any of the prophetic descriptions of the restored paganism of modern days, that the system of the worship of false gods is to revive, with its abominable rites of blood and its mysteries of licentiousness. Wherever the Cross has been once firmly planted, we may surely hope that the world has seen the last of the public worship of Satan. In St. Paul's description of the latter days, I find the blasphemy of the true God substituted for the worship of devils. But, my brethren, the Son of God was not manifested altogether to destroy the works of man. He came to raise man, change him, regenerate him, sanctify him, by uniting him to Himself. He did not come to take away man's free will, or to tear out of his nature those seeds of possible evil which produced all the human part of the paganism on which we have been reflecting. The empire of Satan has been overthrown, but alas!  Man is still his own great enemy, and though our Lord has armed him against himself, He has still left him the power to mar the work of God in his own soul, and this power, which each one of us possesses in his own case, is always fearfully active in the corruption of the Christian society, the character of which is the result and the reflection of that of the parts of which it is made up.

V.

And now, my brethren, what need have we of any subtlety of inquiry or refinement of speculation to tell us that this modern heathenism of which the prophecies speak is around us on every side? Mankind are in many sense far mightier, and the resources and enjoyments at their command are far ampler, than in the days of old. We are in possession of the glorious but intoxicating fruits of that advanced civilization and extended knowledge which has sprung up from the seeds which the Church of God has, as it were, dropped on her way through the world. Society has been elevated and refined, but on that very account it has become capable of a more penetrating degradation, of a more elegant and a more poisonous corruption. Knowledge has been increased, but on the increase of knowledge has followed the increase of pride. Science has unravelled the laws of nature and the hidden treasures of the material universe, and they place fresh combinations of power and new revelations of enjoyment in the hands of men who have not seen in the discovery increased reasons for self-restraint or for reverence for the Giver of all good gifts. The world, the home of the human race, has been opened to civilised man in all its distant recesses, and he has taken, or is taking, possession of his full inheritance; but his onward path is the path of avarice and greed, of lust and cruelty, and he seizes on each new land as he reaches it in the spirit of the merchant or the conqueror, not in that of the harbinger of peace, the bearer of the good tidings of God. At home, in Christendom itself, we hear, as our Lord said, of wars and rumours of wars, nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. In the Apostles' time, it was an unheard of thing that the majestic peace and unity of the Roman Empire should not absorb and keep in harmony a hundred rival nationalities. In our time it is not to be thought of that the supernatural bond of the christian church should be able to keep nations which are brethren in the faith from devouring one another.

Or, again, my brethren, let us turn from public to private life. Look at social life, look at domestic manners; consider the men and women of the present day in their amusements, their costumes, the amount of restraint they put upon the impulses of nature; compare them at their theatres and their recreations, compare them as to their treatment of the poor and the afflicted classes; compare them, again, as to the style of art which they affect, or the literature in which they delight, with the old heathen of the days of St. Paul. I do not say, God forbid! That there is not a wide and impassable gulf between the two, for that would be to say that so many centuries of Christendom had been utterly wasted, and that the Gospel law has not penetrated to the foundations of society, so that it is not true that our Lord rules as the Psalmist says, “in the  midst of His enemies,” (Psalm cix, 2)  even over the world, which would fain emancipate itself from His sway. But I do say, that if a Christian of the first ages were to rise from the dead, and examine our society, point by point, on the heads which I have intimated, and compare it, on the one hand, with the polished refined heathen whom he may have known at the courts of Nero or Domitian, and, on the other, with the pure strict holiness of his own brethren in the faith, who worshipped with him in the catacombs, he might find it difficult indeed to say that what he would see around him in London or Paris was derived by legitimate inheritance rather from the traditions of the martyr Church than from the customs of the persecuting heathen. He would miss the violence, the cruelty, the riotous and ruffianly lust, the extraordinary disrespect for humanity and human life which distinguished the later Roman civilization; but he would find much of its corruption, much of its licentiousness, much of its hardness of heart. The unregenerate instincts of human nature are surging up like a great sea all around us, society is fast losing all respect for those checks upon the innate heathenism of man which have been thrown over the surface of the world by the Church. It is becoming an acknowledged law that whatever is natural is right, and by nature is meant nature corrupted by sin, nature unilluminated by faith and unassisted by grace – that is, the lower appetites of man in revolt against conscience, looking for no home but earth and no satisfaction but in the present “having no hope of the promise, and without God in this world.” . . . .  (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 28-40. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Time has proven Father Coleridge wrong on one point as a Christian from the first ages who would rise from the dead would indeed find “the violence, the cruelty, the riotous and ruffianly lust, the extraordinary disrespect for humanity and human life which distinguished the later Roman civilization.”

Over three thousand babies are killed surgically every day under cover of law in the United States of America alone, thousands more are killed “silently” by means of chemical abortifacients. Thousands of innocent human beings are dispatched every week in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and even in the comfort of their homes by those who want to give them a “compassionate death” rather than to accept the death that God has willed for them from all eternity to endure, replete with all of its pains sufferings with which they can make final satisfaction for their sins.

Blasphemy is rampantly uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable.

All that is holy and just is mocked and reviled.

Believing Catholics are persecuted and denied employment and/or promotions because they are said to be “haters” who deny the “rights” of women to kill their babies or of those immersed in the sin of Sodom and its related vices to celebrate their iniquity publicly.

The world is awash with the blood of the innocent.

Yes, a visitor from Holy Mother Church’s first three centuries would recognize this world as being worse than that of Roman antiquity, which was so near and dear to the darkened mind of Niccolo Machiavelli and other Renaissance figures, because men, having heard the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer, have rejected the Holy Faith and prefer to live as brutes.

Father Coleridge’s remarkable essay concludes:

So then, in these our days, can we too often remind ourselves of the points of attack chosen by the enemies of faith and of society? Can we forget with what a wearisome sameness of policy the war is waged year after year, first in one place and then in another; how certain it is that as soon as we hear that some nation hitherto guided by Catholic instincts has become a convert to the enlightened ideas of our times, the next day will bring the further tidings that in that nation marriage is no longer to be treated as a sacrament and that education is to be withdrawn from the care of the church and her ministers? And, indeed, my brethren, we know not how soon we ourselves may be engaged in a deadly conflict, on one at least, of these points. Up to this time we, at least in England, have been able to train our children for ourselves. And, to give honour where honour is due, we have owed our liberty in great measure to the high value which certain communities outside the Church set upon distinctively Christian and doctrinal instruction. But we know not how soon the tide of war may come to our homes. We hear cry in the air – it says that the child belongs to the State, and that it is the duty of the State to take his education to itself. The cry is false; the child belongs to the parent, belongs to the Church, belongs to God. In that cry speaks the reviving paganism of our day. Surely it should teach us, if nothing else can, the paramount importance of Christian education. If we give in to that cry we are lost. Train up your children, my brethren, in the holy discipline and pure doctrine of the Church, and they are formed thereby to be soldiers of Jesus Christ in the coming conflict against the powers of evil. Train them up in indifference to religion and Christian doctrine, and if they are not at once renegades from their faith, at least they are far too weak and faint-hearted in their devotion to the Church, to range themselves courageously among her champions in her terrible battle against the last apostacy. (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 28-40. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Anyone who does not see we are living at a time when the consequences of the dreadful errors set upon the world by Niccolo Machiavelli, Martin Luther, et al. is a fool. The conditions described by Father Coleridge describe our conditions today. Sadly, there are still Catholics today who permit themselves to become agitated over the events of the world without realizing that there is no getting the “toothpaste back into the tube” by natural means. Men revel in their sins and they are evangelistic in behalf of their errors. Worse yet, obviously, is the fact that the false “pope” and his equally false “bishops” reaffirm them in their sins and are even more evangelistic than they in the spread of errors and heresies that fulfill the very prophecy of Saint Paul to Saint Timothy:

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

Men prefer to have others tickle their itching ears rather than to consider the sweet entreaties of Christ the King and to respond to the motherly intercession of Our Blessed Mother in their behalves.

Men prefer to believe in naturalism of one sort or another, not Catholicism.

Men prefer to pursue material pleasure and well-being to the exclusion of all considerations of futurity, of where they will spend eternity, Heaven or Hell.

Men prefer to submit to the statists of Modernity rather than to the sweet yoke of Christ the King and to His true Church.

Men prefer to walk in the darkness rather than in the light of Christ the King.

The world of realpolitik advanced by Niccolo Machiavelli and made possible by the Protestant Revolution can end only in disaster as God leaves men who will not submit to Him to their own feckless devices, something that Pope Pius XI noted in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1923:

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

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

Paragraph number twenty-eight above says it all:

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

Similarly, they waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to justify Niccolo Machiavelli’s realpolitik as the foundation of political praxis and social order. Such people will never be able to save what little remains of the existing ruins of the world founded upon the deceptions of Machiavelli and the lies of Martin Luther and those who followed him.

To Flee from the Deceptions and Snares of a World Gone Mad

Catholics must reject the deceptions of a world gone mad, a world that has no more place for Christ the King than it did when He was born in a stable in a cave in Bethlehem as He was warmed by the breath of stable animals.

We must, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, offer up the sacrifices of the moment, recognizing that this is the time that God has appointed for us from all eternity in which to live and to sanctify our souls.

We have been given the weapon of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and the shield of her Brown Scapular.

Conscious of our need to make reparation for our own many sins and to live in the world but without being of the world, we take seriously this instruction that Our Lady gave to the Venerable Mary of Agreda about the public manifestation of her Divine Son to Saint John the Baptist, His cousin, herald and precursor, at the Jordan River prior to embarking upon His Public Ministry to accept the sufferings of this time as redeemed creatures eager to make satisfaction in this life for how our sins have offended Divine Justice and thus worsened the state of the Church Militant and of the world-at-large:

272. My daughter, since in relating to thee the works of my most holy Son I so often remind thee how gratefully I appreciated them, thou must understand how pleasing to the Most High is the most faithful care and correspondence on thy part, and the hidden and great blessings enclosed within it. Thou art poor in the house of the Lord, a sinner, insignificant and useless as dust; yet I ask thee to assume the duty of rendering ceaseless gratitude for all the incarnate Word has done for the sons of Adam, and for establishing the holy and immaculate, the powerful and perfect law for their salvation. Especially must thou be grateful for the institution of Baptism by which He frees men from the tyranny of the devil, regenerates them as his children (Jn. 3:5), fills them with grace, clothes them with justice, and assists them to sin no more. This is indeed a duty incumbent upon all men in common, but since creatures neglect it almost entirely I enjoin thee to give thanks for all of them as if thou alone wert responsible for them. Thou art bound to special gratitude to the Lord for other things as well because He has shown Himself so generous to no one among other nations as He has with thee. In the foundation of his holy law and of his Sacraments thou wert present in his memory; He called and chose thee as a daughter of his Church, proposing to nourish thee by his own blood with infinite love.

 273. And if the Author of grace, my most holy Son, as a prudent and wise Artificer, in order to found his evangelical Church and lay its first foundations in the sacrament of Baptism, humiliated Himself, prayed, and fulfilled all justice, acknowledging the inferiority of his human nature, and if, though at the same time God and man, He hesitated not to lower Himself to the nothingness of which his purest soul was created and his human being formed, how much must thou humiliate thyself, who hast committed sins and art less than the dust and despicable ashes? Confess that in justice thou dost merit only punishment, the persecution and wrath of all the creatures, and that none of the mortals who has offended his Creator and Redeemer can say in truth that any injustice or offense is done to them if all the tribulations and afflictions of the world from its beginning to its end were to fall upon them. Since all sinned in Adam (I Cor. 15:22), how deeply should they humiliate themselves when the hand of the Lord visits them (Job 19:21)? If thou dost suffer all the afflictions of men with the utmost resignation, and at the same time fulfill all that I enjoin upon thee by my teachings and exhortations with the greatest fidelity, thou nevertheless must esteem thyself as a useless and unprofitable servant (Lk. 17:10). How much then must thou humiliate thyself when thou dost fail in thy duty and in the return due to all the blessings received from God? Since I desire thee to make a proper return both for thyself and for others, think well how much thou art obliged to annihilate thyself to the very dust, not offering any resistance, nor ever being satisfied until the Most High receives thee as his daughter and accepts thee as such in his own presence and in the celestial vision of the triumphant Jerusalem. (New English Edition of The Mystical City of God: Book Five, The Transfixion, Chapter XXIV)

The Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph in the end, and it will be upon this triumph that the words Our Lord spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque will be fulfilled:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

The only verdict that matters belongs to Christ the King, and no matter what others believe, we must work to be on the right side of His just verdict with every beat of our heatts, consecrated as they must be to His own Most Sacred Heart throught he Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Viva Cristo Rey!

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.