Reviewing the Electoral College on a Step by Step Basis in 2024

As I have been doing every four years since 2008, I am providing readers of this website with a review of how presidents and vice presidents of the United States of America are elected.

This in an exercise in pure political science. I offer some practical and supernatural considersations at the conclusion of this review.

Step-by-Step in 2024

The President and Vice President the United States of America are elected by means of the Electoral College (a term that does not appear in the text of the Constitution of the United States of America) according to the provisions found in Article II and the Twelfth, Twentieth and Twenty-Third Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America.

It works like this:

1. Each state is assigned a number of electors equivalent to that state's number of representatives in the House of Representatives and its two senators in the United States Senate.

2. The number of representatives each state is assigned depends upon a state's population in proportion to that of the rest of the states of the nation. The sole reason for which the United States Census is taken decennially is to determine where people live so that the apportionment of representation among the states in the United States House of Representatives may reflect shifts in population. The figures below reflect the final results of the 2020 United States Census. This is the first of two presidential elections this third decade of the Twenty-first Century that will be based upon those 2020 census figures.

3. There are currently 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Each state has two senators, meaning that there are 100 senators. As a result of the Twenty-third Amendment, which was ratified in 1961, the District of Columbia has the same number of electoral votes that it would have if it had the status of a state, three, although it is prohibited from having more than the least populous state. This means that there are 538 votes in what is called the "electoral college" (the term is never used in the Constitution, by the way).

4. Thus it is that the 538 electoral votes are apportioned among the states as follows:

California-----------------------54 electoral votes.
Texas---------------------------40 electoral votes.
Florida----------------------30 electoral votes.
New York--------------------------28 electoral votes.
Illinois---------------------------19 electoral votes.
Pennsylvania-------------------- 19 electoral votes.
Ohio-----------------------------17 electoral votes.
Georgia-------------------------16 electoral votes.
North Carolina-----------------16 votes
Michigan--------------------------15 electoral votes.
New Jersey----------------------14 electoral votes.
Virginia---------------------------13 electoral votes.
Washington-----------------------12 electoral votes.
Massachusetts--------------------11 electoral votes.
Indiana----------------------------11 electoral votes.
Arizona----------------------------11 electoral votes
Tennessee--------------------------11 electoral votes
Missouri---------------------------10 electoral votes.
Maryland--------------------------10 electoral votes.
Minnesota--------------------------10 electoral votes.
Wisconsin--------------------------10 electoral votes.
Colorado----------------------------10 electoral votes
Alabama----------------------------9 electoral votes.
Louisiana---------------------------8 electoral votes.
Kentucky---------------------------8 electoral votes.
Oregon------------------------------8 electoral votes.
South Carolina----------------------9 electoral votes.
Connecticut-------------------------7 electoral votes.
Oklahoma---------------------------7 electoral votes.
Arkansas-----------------------------6 electoral votes.
Kansas-------------------------------6 electoral votes.
Mississippi----------------------------6 electoral votes.
Nebraska-----------------------------5 electoral votes.
New Mexico-------------------------5 electoral votes.
Nevada-------------------------------5 electoral votes.
Utah----------------------------------6 electoral votes.
West Virginia-------------------------4 electoral votes.
Hawaii--------------------------------4 electoral votes.
Idaho---------------------------------4 electoral votes.
Maine---------------------------------4 electoral votes.
New Hampshire-----------------------4 electoral votes.
Rhode Island--------------------------4 electoral votes.
Alaska---------------------------------3 electoral votes.
Delaware------------------------------3 electoral votes.
Montana-------------------------------3 electoral votes.
North Dakota--------------------------3 electoral votes.
South Dakota--------------------------3 electoral votes.
Vermont-------------------------------3 electoral votes.
Wyoming------------------------------3 electoral votes.
District of Columbia--------------------3 electoral votes.

5. The individual electors may be any legal resident of voting age in a particular state, although they may not be Federal office holders or employees.

6. The Constitution leaves it to each state legislature to determine the method by which the electors will be appointed. It has been the practice for most of the past 180 years or so for the electors to be appointed by means of direct popular election in each state. However, it is still possible for a state legislature to appoint its electors. The last time this option was explored publicly was in the State of Florida twenty-four years ago and four years ago as then President Donald John Trump tried to get several state legislatures to send alernate slates of electors to Congress despite the fact that certified results in those states, no matter how debatable the integrity of popular votes results in those states, awarded electoral votes to Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

7. As a result of the rise of political parties, a development not foreseen by the Constitution's framers nor prohibited by the text of Constitution, each state legislature has enacted legislation to restrict ballot access for candidates for president and vice president to the nominees of established political parties who have nominated a slate of electors to represent them in that state. Those presidential candidates who do not belong to established political parties and who can gain ballot access (often a long and expensive process) in a particular state must nominate a certified slate of electors to represent them.

8. In forty-nine of the fifty-one jurisdictions in which the presidential election takes place every four years, voters go to the polls (or cast absentee/mail-in ballots) to vote for the slate of electors who are pledged to support a particular nominee for the presidency and vice presidency. In these forty-nine jurisdictions, that is, in every state except Maine and Nebraska, electors are elected on a "winner take all" basis, meaning that whichever slate of electors wins one more popular vote than its nearest competitor is elected en toto and then gets to cast that state's electoral votes on the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December in the state capital.

9. Thus, voters who cast ballots this year on or before November 5, 2024, will elect a slate (or team) of electors pledged to support a particular presidential-vice presidential team. If, for example, the fifty-five person slate of electors in California pledged to support the Democratic Party nominees of Kamala Harris Emhoff and Timothy James Walz wins one more popular vote than the fifty-four person slate of electors pledged to support the Republican Party nominees of Donald John Trump and James David Vance. then that Democratic Party slate of electors is elected en toto. The other slates of electors (Republican, American Independent, Libertarian, Reform, Green, etc.) lose.

10. This is the same principle by which voters select candidates for statewide office (Governor/Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, etc.) and their state's two United States Senators. Whichever candidate gets a plurality of votes in the state (a plurality is simply one more vote than received by one's nearest competitor) is elected. The losing candidates, no matter how close they get to winning, lose. They go home. They get no share in the governorship or lieutenant governorship or attorney general's office. I know. I did not get to share in 3.7% of the salary of the Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1986. The ticket of Denis Dillon and Thomas Droleskey lost, becoming but a footnote in the annals of meaningless political trivia. Losing slates of electors for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States, well, lose!

11. Thus it is the slate of electors that wins a simple plurality of popular votes in a state is elected as a team. Its electors will then cast that state's votes for President and Vice President of the United States of America. Each elector will cast one vote for President and one vote for Vice President. The Constitution specifies that one of the two people for whom an elector votes must not be a resident of the same state as the elector, meaning that Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates must be residents of different states by the time that the electors cast their ballots on the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December.

12. The actual election for President of the United States of America this year takes place on Tuesday, December 17 2024. The election on November 5, 2024, determines which slate of electors will be elected in each state.

13. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, award two electoral votes to the candidate who wins a plurality of that state's statewide vote. The other electoral votes (two in Maine, three in Nebraska) in these two states are awarded on the basis of which candidate wins a plurality of the popular vote in each of their Congressional districts (two in Maine, three in Nebraska). This is a variation of the Mundt-Lodge Electoral College, named after the late United States Senators Karl Mundt, R-South Dakota, and Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Massachusetts.

14. No one is legally the President-elect of the United States of America or the Vice President-elect of the United States of America until the electoral votes are cast in the state capitals on the first Monday after the second Wednesday are opened and counted by the President of the United States Senate (the Vice President of the United States of America) before a joint session of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. A ceremonial committee of Senators and Representatives is appointed by the President of the United States Senate to "inform" the President-elect and Vice President-elect of their official election. This will occur on Monday, January 6, 2025.

15. What does all this mean? All of this means that we do not elect the President and Vice President of the United States of America by direct popular election on a nationwide basis. In other words, the "raw" number of popular votes garnered by a particular presidential nominee's fifty-one different slates of electors on a state-by-state basis mean nothing insofar as electing the President and Vice President of the United States of America is concerned. Then Texas Governor George Walker Bush won the Presidency in the year 2000 by virtue of his having won more electoral votes than Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., even though he lost the national popular vote total by 543,895 votes. President Donald John Trump won the presidency in 2016 even though he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton 2,865,003 votes. This is the system we have, and it means that the national popular vote total is meaningless. It is the electoral votes won on a state-by-state basis that matters. It is that simple.

These are the procedures, drawn from the Constitution of the United States of America and from state laws that govern the election of the President and Vice President of the United States of America in the general election every four years.

Mind you, this exercise in pure political science on the natural level changes nothing of the analyses that I have brought to bear concerning the fact that there is no candidate of either major organized crime family in the United States of America, the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, who supports Catholic teaching and has the good of souls at heart. The best that can said is that the president is the “lesser of two evils,” but this is ignore that we have accepted such supposedly “lesser evils” so consistently as to come to “live with” the “lesser evil’s” support for vaccinations and for most of the agenda of homosexual collective.

My biggest complaint about the “lesser evil” argument, which, yes, is defensible in terms of moral theology on a theoretical basis but requires a considered, not mindless, judgment to be made in practical circumstances, is that those who support the “lesser evil” without following the details of governance come to delude themselves into silence as their naturalist “hero,” if not their veritable secular savior, does things inimical to the good of souls that they would never—not for one, solitary moment—tolerate in the administration of a supposedly “greater evil.” This is the same kind of behavior exhibited by many traditionally-minded Catholics who permitted themselves to bought off and silenced by the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007, as their “restorer of tradition” endorsed dogmatic evolutionism “papally” under the moniker of “the hermeneutic of continuity,” distorted and mispresented Sacred Scripture, the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of Holy Mother Church, gave endless harangues in favor of “religious liberty” and endless elegies of praise for one false religion after another and, perhaps worst of all, personally esteemed the symbols of numerous false religions with his own priestly hands.

This exercise in pure political science on the natural level has been offered to you to demonstrate to the screaming lunatics out there in "blue" states that places such as California, Washington, Oregon, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maryland, Illinois, Hawaii, Delaware and the District of Columbia are not going to be giving their electoral votes to any Republican candidate for the presidency ever again. Demographic changes, caused principally by illegal immigration, and the supremely successful brainwashing and ideological programming programs in state-controlled “schools” and almost college and university in the nations, are simple realities, which is why the Commonwealth of Virginia is likely never to vote for any Republican presidential candidate in the near future, if ever, as its demographic changes have revolved around an influx of “progressive” lobbyists and “think tanks” in northern Virginia that, effectively, disenfranchise the rest of the state ust as surely as “Chicagoland” has long disenfranchised the voters of “downstate”. The State of North Carolina may soon follow Virginia, perhaps as early as this year, and Georgia and, of all places, Texas may turn "purple" within a decade. Once again speaking on a purely natural level, there are not enough "votes" in the solidly “blue states” listed above for Trump to win those states, although, I will concede that the former president might significantly increase his percentage of the popular vote in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia and might even win the popular vote nationally as result if he outperforms expectations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,

Let me try to explain this in the simplest of terms:

Fictional bus driver Ralph Kramden, who thought that his wife Alice had stashed away lots of money over the years, asked his wife to gather up all of their "mad" money when he was laid off temporarily after making a suggestion to his bosses that his company, the Gotham Bus Company, had too many drivers on his Madiso Avenue route. This is a paraphrase of the dialogue:

Kramden: "All right, Alice. Gather up all of our mad money. That's right, everything you've been squirreling away over the years. Clean out the drawers. Empty your pocketbooks. Let's add it all up and see how much we have."

Alice Kramden said immediately without adding anything up: Twelve dollars and eighty-three cents."

Kramden: "Twelve dollars and eighty-three cents? What have you done with all of our money?”

Alice Kramden: "With the amount that you bring home every week, Ralph, you should be thanking me for saving the twelve dollars and eighty-three cents.” (Paraphrased from "Brother Ralph," The Honeymooners, November 26, 1955. See The Honeymooners S01, Episode 9, "Brother Ralph".)

Folks, you've got the equivalent of “twelve dollars and eighty-three cents” in the permanently "blue" states. You are delusional if you think that those states are not going to be guaranteed electoral votes for Kamala Harris Emhoff and Timothy Elmer Fudd/Knuclehead Walz's and Kamala Harris’s plans for the total government control of our daily lives under the pretext of "transforming" to "save democracy" by silencing and delegitimizing those who oppose them. And one of the reasons you've got only twelve dollars and eighty-three cents in those aforementiond "blue" states is because of the long term effects of Americanism on the psyches of Catholics in the United States of America and the counterfeit church of conciliarism's formal embrace of this insidious heresy from hell that leads nations into an abyss of chaos. (See Apostasy Has Consequences from sixteen years ago now.)

Obviously, people are going to believe what they want to believe. Very few people believed me in the year 2000 when I explained to them this exact electoral reality then (at a time I still believed in voting for minor party candidates of conscience). What I told them would be the case before the election turned out to be in the case in the election, prompting me to write the following thereafter:

The political analysis I have been providing over the course of the past few years in Christ or Chaos has proven to be right on the money. I expressed my doubt that George W. Bush could win the White House, in light of his intellectual shallowness and in light of the cultural factors facing our nation described earlier in this essay. As noted, Bush lost the popular vote, a loss that would have been exponentially greater had Nader not been in the race.

Furthermore, I indicated in the most recent issue of Christ or Chaos that certain states — New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont — were bound to fall into the Gore camp. Although I believed a vote of conscience was always the right vote to cast as a matter of the principle, people in those states had a veritable “free throw” to cast for Buchanan or Phillips. We elect the president through the Electoral College; the national popular vote total is irrelevant. What matters is the popular vote total in the individual states. Anyone who knows anything about practical politics — and it’s amazing to me how unrealistic the so-called pragmatists actually are when they make their supposedly clever judgments about how to vote in particular elections — knows that the states listed above have tended toward the Democratic Party in national elections. The same people who used national polling data to browbeat supporters of Buchanan and Phillips into voting for Bush (because the polls said that Buchanan could not win) simply refused to believe the state-by-state polling data that showed Bush the sure loser in the ten states I’ve listed. (Justice Will Lose No Matter Who Wins, 2000.)

Such is the madness of pluralism, however, that many millions of people take leave of their senses in the diabolical trap that is the Judeo-Masonic electoral system and refuse even to believe the cold, hard facts of simple electoral arithmetic or, worse yet, to invest so heavily in the person of Donald John Trump as to think that he can remedy or even ameliorate problems that are caused by Original Sin and the Actual Sins of men, including each one of us, that are multiplied by the hundreds of millions daily, celebrated in culture, including by Trump, who has popularized vulgarity, venality and blasphemy in speech as no other public figure dared to do in the past even though they did so in private but had at least a Judeo-Masonic sense of decency not to do so publicly, and protected under the cover of the civil law.

To be sure, President Trump has been the victim of a massive conspiracy against him that was launched first by Madame Defarge as early as 2015 and became the basis of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro’s weaponizing the United States Department of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the United States Department of State to undermine Trump’s candidacy and then to provide enough smoke and mirrors that hampered him through his first term and brought about the Robert Mueller/Andrew Weissman coup and, when that failed, the Adam Schiff/Jerome Nadler impeachment effort. Joseph Robiintte Biden, Jr., further weaponized the legal system against him in an effort to keep him from being elected today, November 5, 2024 (Within the Octave of All Sains and, in some places, the Feast of the Holy Relics and, here in the United States of America, the Feast of Blssed Martin de Porres).

The American public, however, has been almost entirely uninterested in the arcane details of the coup and in the palace intrigues that undermined the president’s first term in many respects. Why should they? Those who are unjust in their own lives by being at warfare with the true God of the Most Blessed Trinity by means of their own unrepented sins are not going to be bothered by anything other than threats to their own economic well-being or health.

Those who are incapable of viewing the world through the supernatural eyes of the true Faith—and this means up to ninety percent of the electorate—want some kind of “pill” or a quick “fix” to problems that are, at least in part, the consequences of their own persistence in grave sins (contraception, impurity, indecency, profanity, abortion, sodomy, immodesty, an inordinate desire for material luxuries) and are eager to blame a president for natural disasters or viruses that originated in a foreign country that is an enemy of American national sovereignty and security. Those who are personally unjust in their own lives will made little heed to injustices such as those that have been visited upon a president, who, for his part, is incapable of pursuing justice without bitterness and is clueless about the fact that he, a sinner of epic proportions, must be chastised for his own sins as a means to effect his conversion and thus to be ready to offer up to Christ the King the travails of this passing, mortal vale of tears in reparation for his own sins as His consecrated slave through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

On the other hand, some dyed-in-the-wool supporters of all things Trump eagerly put on blinders to ignore the harm that he himself has done to his own credibility, especially by constantly endorsing a vaccination for the Wuhan/China/Chinese/Covid-19/Coronavirus that is simply part of the “global reset of humanity” that will alter the Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) structure of its recipients, and the fact that he is constitutionally incapable of accepting of even well-justified criticisms and is addicted to the adulation he receives at his rallies. As noted in recent commentaries, fhe former president has done incalculable harm to the cause of defending innocent human life by labeling those who oppose all exceptions to the surgical butchery of preborn children to be "extremists" and actually boasting of his support for the "right" of the "people" to decide that which belongs to God alone in his complete support for in vitro fertilization.

What part of “Sin maketh nations miserable” don’t we understand? (Proverbs 14: 4.)

What part of “Without Me you can do nothing” is hard to understand? (John 15: 5.)

To think that conflict will cease, and the bad guys will be “put in their place” if Trump wins election to a second, nonconsecutive term is delusional. An election stalemate tonight (which I do not think will happen as either the former president or his cackling Marxist-influenced opponent--see Her Father’s Daughter: Donald Harris’ Hidden Influence on Kamala--or Trump will win clear victories) that ends with an apparent Trump victory will result in cataclysmic riots, fueled by George Soros’s money in “community” organizations and by related insurrectionists, Marxists, anarchists, nihilists and all-around hoodlums, the likes of which we have not seen at any point in national history.

This is all tragic as people are needlessly divided over which set of naturalists are going to win an election rather than being united by the only common tie that should bind men together: a mutual love for Christ the King and His true Church, the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

To Criticize Trump Is Not to Support Harris

Some have accused me of that any opposition, even rhetorical opposition, to Donald John Trump's support of various moral evils is to overlook the real temporal danger and harm represented by Kamala Harris Emhoff and Timothy James Walz Joseph Robinette Biden and Kamala Harris or that I did not recognize the harm that would have been by a “President” Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton eight years ago and that has been done in the past four years by the demagogue named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

Please, are you serious?

Look, I wrote over two hundred articles, if not more, in The Wanderer between October 22, 1992, and January 20, 2001, on the horrors represented by William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Diane Clinton.

Indeed, the first article of mine that was published in The Wanderer was about then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's having referred to Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Jr., who had been diagnosed with a disease caused by behavior contrary to the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, as a "hero." My article was entitled, "Magic, You're No Hero." An article of mine was published in Sioux City Journal just before the presidential election on November 4, 1992, entitled, "Character Is A Real Issue." And my second article in The Wanderer, written on the night of November 4, 1992, was entitled, "What Kind of People Are We?", a prelude of over one hundred, if not more, articles that I wrote about the Clintons during their eight years in office.

One of those Wanderer articles, which was published also in the Arlington Catholic Herald, from whose pages I was banished in early-1994, dealt with the scandal represented by an invitation that a women's group associated with the University of Dayton, which is run by the Marianist Brothers, had extended to the then First Lady of the United States of America, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The article got some "traction," so to speak and was one of the factors, among others, that prompted Clinton's invitation to be withdrawn before she could respond one way or the other. Readers of this site know that I have been unsparing in my criticism of the former First Lady, former United States Senator from the State of New York and the current Secretary of State of the United States of America, Mrs. Clinton. (See, for example, Foggy Bottom's Bloody Tradition, Two Families in Alternate Worlds,Gradually Accepting Naturalism's False Premises, Fools' Gold, When Helen Keller Meets Ray Charles, Going to Confession in All the Wrong Places, Birds of a Naturalist Feather, An Illusion of a Victory, They Never Take Prisoners, Shifting Sands of Popular Sovereignty, A System Based on Lies Produces Liars, One Devil Goes, Another One Enters, Protected by the Forces of Darkness No More?,They Know Not The Way, Skating In July, One of the Greatest and Most Divisive Demagogues of Them All: Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.)

This recounting of my long and strong opposition to the merchants of baby-killing from Westchester County, New York, by way of Arkansas and the White House, the Clintons, as well as Biden and Harris has been offered so that readers will so that readers will realize that my criticism of the naturalists of the false opposite of the “right” is not to indemnify the naturalists of the false opposite of the “left.” I am merely pointing out that truth, not wishful thinking, must be our guide, and the simple truth is this: Catholicism is the one and only means of human salvation, and it is the only means of providing true order within nations. Efforts to bury Catholicism only empower the agents of Antichrist in both organized crime families of naturalism and all throughout the “popular culture” all the more.

Similarly, I wrote at least one hundred twenty-five articles, if not more, on this site opposing the election of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro twelve years ago and throughout the course of his truly destructive presidency that ended on January 20, 2017, as he was in the midst of making sure that a man he despised, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, would be caught in a perjury trap after his people decided to after him. I do not have the time to list those articles now. However, I hammered away against Obama/Soetoro and his vice president, a demagogue named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., repeatedly, and I have written close to fifty to sixty commentaries about the totalitarianism of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Kamala Harris Emhoff.

The difference between the false opposites of the naturalist "left" and the naturalist "right" are far less pronounced than professional politicians and fund raisers want us to believe. Indeed, both have this fatal flaw in common with the American founders themselves: that it is possible for men to govern themselves without a reliance upon and submission to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church, and that it is possible for men to be virtuous without belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. From that one fatal flaw flows all--and I mean each and every single one--of the evils associated with naturalism of the anti-Incarnational modern civil state. Once you understand that, ladies and gentlemen, then you understand that the devil wins no matter who—and I mean no matter who--wins an election in the United States of America. Those who proceed from false premises will always wind up worsening things rather than improving them.

The Protestant and Judeo-Masonic ethos that is at the heart of the American founding and has precipitated many errors and the conflicts between false opposites of naturalism ever since was described as follows by William Thomas Walsh in Characters of the Inquisition:

(1) The isolation of the human soul from God. The indifference and godlessness of our day are directly traceable to the triumph of Manicheanism under the guise of Sixteenth Century Protestantism. Many thoughtful Protestants are now beginning to see that the Revolt inflicted a ghastly wound upon Christianity without adding anything to it. Such positive Christian elements as the Reformers taught were already in Catholicism. As for the aberrations – Luther's doctrine of grace, Calvin's predestination – how many who call themselves Protestants today believe in the divinity of Christ; a Methodist will say he believes in the existence of some vague Life Force, not a personal God. With each generation the descendants of the men and women who were led from the Catholic fold by plausible reformers promising them primitive Christianity, become less and less concerned with any religion, and more the prey of Communism, Fascism or some other panacea with new false hopes of creating something permanently good on the frail structure of human nature alone. These will not even listen to the ancient wisdom of the Catholic Church; as Mr. Chesterton wrote somewhere, “They are tired of hearing what they have never heard.”

(2) Moral confusion and nihilism. There is and can be no objective and eternal standard of conduct, except that of Christ, as interpreted by His Church. All the old sins and follies that the Church began to drive into exterior darkness two thousand years ago, have come back to destroy the peace of individuals and the harmony of society. Divorce is destroying the family, murder the individual. The free love of the Beghards and the Alumbrados is corrupting the young. What is the prevalent craze for self-destruction but a manifestation of the old Manichean despair of life? And what is the fatal race-suicide known euphemistically as “birth control” but the old nastiness of the Manichees, born of cowardice, sensuality, distrust of life itself and the Author of life? Usury, which the medieval schoolmen called theft, and capitalism, which in its reprehensible form they identified as one of the seven deadly sins (greed), are defended by dull college professors in the name of economic law; while the enslaved masses everywhere pay tribute to the modern Mammon.

(3) Intellectual confusion. The Catholic Church speaks with authority in our world in defense of the human reason against a thousand sophistries having their origin in obscure feelings or prejudices. It has become the fashion in certain academic circles to speak disdainfully of logic itself, and of the law of cause and effect, as if these were relics of medieval barbarism. It was not merely a coincidence that a Manichean thought, or rather feeling has appeared extensively in our literature, and in some of the best of it, wherever the Protestant Revolt has prepared for the return of darkness and slavery. Consider the Manichean attitudes in some of Thomas Hardy's work – especially in Jude the Obscure, in The Return of the Native, and in that frightful sneer at the end of Tess; in Ibsen's Master Builder and Hedda Gabler; in Shelley's Defense of Poetry; in the Autobiography of Mark Twain; in such plays as the Piper of Josephine Preston Peabody, The Scarecrow of Percy Mackaye, and a great deal of O'Neill's work; even in that calm Victorian, Tennyson, who puts into the mouth of a Catholic King a sentiment that would have set Bernard Gui on the trail of any Albigensian:

“For why is all around us here,

As if some lesser god has made the world,

but had not force to make it as he would,

Until the High God enter from beyond . . .?”

Not to press the point too far – for some liberty must be allowed the facies of poets! – this and much more that could be mentioned is clearly symptomatic of the sickness which afflicts a world which will not turn to Christ.

(4) Totalitarianism. Is not the present evolution of government a retrogression toward heresies that the medieval Inquisitors combatted with all their might? Communism, first propagated by the Freemasons on the ruins of Protestantism, finally set up in Russia the absolute state which the Fraticelli had invoked (in so far as the state of science and communications would permit them to envisage it): it was a perversion also of their concept of primitive Christianity, without private property. The Nazi State, set up partly in imitation of Mussolini's Fascism, as a natural reaction to Communism, had also another parentage. The ideal of the omnipotent absolute state, for whose sake the individual exists, was expressed in very similar terms on behalf of Kaiserism by Bernhardi, in 1911; and Bernhadi's teacher was Treitchke, who in turn acknowledged his indebtedness to Martin Luther. (I have developed this idea further in an article published in The Sign, with quotations from Luther and others, in February, 1940.) Thus in two different directions we trace the origins of the Totalitarian State, toward which, by imitation or reaction, the governments of the whole world are tending, to breaches made by medieval heretics in the walls of the City of God, in despite of the watchdogs of the Inquisition.

The list could be extended. All the evils that the Inquisition sought to repress, and did in great measure repress, have returned to the modern world, grown great and ravening, to feed upon our children. What then of the evils incidental to the Inquisition itself – torture, loss of liberty and even life, occasional deceit and hypocracy? Are we better in those regards? Can anyone think of the torture cells maintained by the Reds in Spain in 1936-7 to drive their victims mad, (the cells constructed by the “Loyalist” Reds “were described as hollow cement blocks four feet height and containing a cement chair and bed, built in a slanting position so that it was impossible for a prisoner to sit or lie down for more than a minute at a time. Raised cement blocks were arranged in a crazy-quilt fashion on the floor to prevent prisoners from standing up. The prosecutor (in the Cik trial) charged that the Loyalists placed rings in the eyelids of prisoners to keep them open in the glare of powerful lights. Some of the witnesses testified that the prisoners were denied food and water and were flogged, sometimes while suspended head down from the ceiling or while cold water was showered upon them. Witnesses said the cells were pained with hundreds of yellow spots, broad black lines and scores of black and white cubes.” – Associated Press, dispatch from Barcelona, June 13, 1939, published in the New York Sun and other newspapers, Torquemada would have shrunk from the very idea of such diabolical ingenuity.) of the unspeakable butcheries of civilians and priests by both Germans and Russians in Poland in 1939, of the unrestrained villainy of modern warfare, of all our nightmare of hypocrisy, abortion, child-suicide, unpunished murder, and what is worse even that all these monstrosities, disdain for the Deity Himself, without wondering whether we have really progressed to a point where we can look patronizingly upon the memory of a Torquemada?

All the worst miseries which men everywhere endure today, while they begin “withering away for fear and expectations of what shall come? – famine and pestilence and civil wars whose shadows may already be discerned on the dim walls of the futre – all these have been foretold by the Popes of modern tomes, on after another pointing out the causes that must lead to such effects, and pleading with mankind to turn away from them to the only possible remedy, held forth by Christ in the Catholic Church. Against all the progressive steps in the disintegration of the European Order, from the Manichees to the Communists and other state worshippers, The Vicars of Christ have uttered solemn and deliberate warnings, based upon ample information. Very soon after the reorganization of the Freemasonry by the Grand Lodge of England, in Spain, the situation was clearly seen at Rome; and in 1738, Pope Clement XII uttered the first formal denunciation of this particular heresy, this oriental dissolvent in modern guise. “If they were not doing evil, they would not fear the light,” he said of all societies, without any exception, of the Masonic type or affiliation. He forbade Catholics to join them, favor, support, shelter, or defend them in any way, or even to receive the members into their homes. Any Catholic so doing was excommunicated by the very fact, and the ban could be removed only by the Pope himself, save in the danger of death. This, as we have seen, did not deter vain, ambitious or stupid Catholics, even among the clergy here and there, from being drawn into an organization which pretended to be social and philanthropic, and masked its real aims and nature from all its neophytes, from all except a few initiates. The Popes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries continued to raise their voices against the stealthy advances of this mystery of iniquity. Pius XII accused the Freemasons of being the chief causes of the revolutionary upheavals (antichristian in their direction) of Europe. Gregory XVI said they were guilty of sacrilege, infamy and blasphemy, and promoted heresy and revolution. Pius IX applied to them the words that Christ addressed to the scribes and pharisees who sought His destruction, “You are of your father the devil, and the works of your father you will do.” He called them the wolves in sheep's clothing against whom Our Lord and the Apostles had warned the first Christians. In another letter he referred to them as “the Synagogue of Satan . . . whose object is to blot out the Church of Christ, were it possible from the face of the Universe.” Renewing the condemnations of his predecessors, he explicitly included Freemasons in America “and in whatever part of the world they may be.”

Pope Leo XIII warned the world that Freemasonry was the real source and center of Communist and Atheist propaganda. “In this insane and wicked endeavor,” he wrote, “we may almost see the implacable hatred and spirit of revenge with which Satan himself is inflamed against Jesus Christ.” In that same magnificent encyclical he cried out to all Catholics, laymen as well as priests, to “tear the mask off the face? Of the hidden menace. If not, he said, “the ruin and overthrow of all things must necessarily follow.: (Encyclical, Humanum genus, 1884.)

This tremendous prophecy, deliberately uttered by the Vicar of Christ, and now being fulfilled with terrible literalness as the flimsy structure built of the sands of the great apostacy of the Sixteenth Century comes crashing down about us, has of course been generally disregarded by the world, as the prophecies of Christ were disregarded. Other profound observations from Leo and his successors have met the same characteristically Christian fate; nevertheless they remain as truth.

It was Pius XI who pointed out the close spiritual affinity of Liberalism and Socialism, even when they waged a sham battle across the arena of the world. “Let us bear in mind,” he wrote in Quadragesimo Anno, “that the parent of this cultural Socialism was Liberalism, and that its offspring will be Bolshevism.” He had no more regard for one of these antichristian aberrations than for the other. Liberalism, he said, had shown as early as 1891 “its utter impotence to find a right solution of the social question,” while Socialism “would have exposed human society to still graver dangers by offering a remedy much more disastrous than the evil it designed to cure.” (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931)

This great Pope remarked that since the time of Leo XIII the “capitalistic economic regime” had “penetrated everywhere”; and that:

“it is patent that in our days not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners, but only the trustees and directors of invested funds, who administer them at their good pleasure. This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercises by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will. This accumulation of power, the characteristic note of the modern economic order, is a natural result of limitless free competition which permits the survival of those only who are the strongest, which often means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience. This concentration of power has led to a threefold struggle for domination. First, there is the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself; then, the fierce battle to acquire control of the state, so that its resources and authority may be abused in the economic struggles. Finally, the clash between states themselves. . . The state, which should be the supreme arbiter, ruling in kingly fashion far above all party contention, intent only upon justice and the common good, has become instead a slave, bound over to the service of human passion and greed.” (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931)

Elsewhere, of course, Pius condemned the totalitarian theory which, reacting against the evil here described, rushed to the opposite extreme, and erroneously hald that the individual existed for the benefit of the state. None of these panaceas could reach the center of the disorder; they were all, inf fact, so many forms of Socialism, one fighting the other, but all tending toward a common end. With characteristic acuteness, Pius noticed that since the time of Leo XIII Socialism had broken up into various forms, of which he condemned even the most moderate.

“The question arises, or is unwarrantably proposed in certain quarters, whether the principles of Christian truth also could not be somewhat moderated and attenuated, so as to meet Socialism, as it were, halfway upon a common ground. Some are engaged by the empty hope of gaining Socialists in this way to our cause. But such hope are vain. Those who wish to be apostles among the Socialists should preach the Christian truth whole and entire, openly and sincerely, without any connivance with error. If they wish in truth to be heralds of the Gospel, let them convince Socialists that their demands, in so far as they are just, are defended much more cogently by the principles of Christian faith, and are promoted much more efficaciously by the power of Christian charity . . . Whether Socialism be considered as a doctrine or as an historical fact, or as a movement, if it really remain socialism, it cannot be brought into harmony with the dogmas of the Catholic Church, even after it has yielded to truth and justice in the points. We have mentioned; the reason being that it conceives human society in a way utterly alien to Christian truth.

“According to Christian doctrine, Man, endowed with a social nature, is place here on earth in order that he may spend his life in society, and under authority ordained by God, that he may develop and evolve to the full all his faculties to the praise and glory of his Creator; and that, by fulfilling faithfully the duties of his station, he may attain to temporal and eternal happiness. Socialism, on the contrary, entirely ignorant of or unconcerned about his sublime end both of individuals and of society, affirms that living in community was instituted merely for the sake of advantages which it brings to mankind. Goods are produced more efficiently by a suitable distribution of labor than by the scattered efforts of individuals. Hence the Socialist argue that economic production, of which they see only the material side, must necessarily be carried on collectively, and that because of this necessity men must surrender and submit themselves wholly to society with a view to the production of wealth. Indeed, the possession of the greatest possible amount of temporal goods is esteemed so highly, that man's higher goods, not excepting liberty must, they claim, be subordinated and even sacrificed to the exigencies of efficient production. They affirm that the loss of human dignity, which result from these socialized methods of production, will be easily compensated for by the abundance of good produced in common and accring to the individual who can turn them at his will to the comforts and culture of life. Society, therefore, as the Socialist conceives it, is, on the one hand, impossible and unthinkable without the use of compulsion of the most excessive kind: on the other it fosters a false liberty, since in such a scheme no place if found for true social authority, which is not based on temporal and material advantages, but descends from God alone, the Creator and Last End of all things. If, like all errors, Socialism, contains a certain element of truth (and this founded upon a doctrine of human society peculiarly its own, which is opposed to true Christianity . . . No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist." (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931)

Since Pius XI wrote those words in 1931, the nations of the world generally have taken long steps toward various forms of Socialism which, however different they appeared on first view, are more and more revealing themselves as essentially the same. Communism, the most radical and patently godless form was not too remote ideologically from its pretended rival Nazi-Socialism, to lie down beside it in the same foul nest, when it suited both to beget a second great war. Other nations, loving freedom, have been conquered and drawn into the two Socialist orbits. Still others have imitated Socialist regimes by reaction, or by military necessity. Few have been able to maintain fully the sacredness of human personality. The tiny nations of Portugal and Ireland, both thoroughly Catholic, are glorious exceptions. Of Spain, I have high hopes; may the Catholic spirit of General Franco prevail, and not certain others, very different and very crafty, which still exist in the country and even in high places, hungry for power. England, while fighting Hitler, has kept a friendly hand mysteriously outstretched toward his partner, Stalin; and whatever the outcome of the present war, is likely to emerge from it shackled to some form of Socialism.

Here in the United States Socialism has made more cautious but not the less evident gains. It is rather amusing, and at the same time depressing, to see that likable Socialist Mr. Norman Thomas denouncing both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilkie as champions of peace-time conscription, which he says (and I think rightly) must lead toward dictatorship, and to realize at the same time that both these gentlemen are fundamentally (that is to say spiritually) as Socialistic as he is. If we judge not by what a man says he is or even believes he is, but by the antithesis set up by Pope Pius XI as a test of spirits, this conclusion becomes inescapable. Mr. Roosevelt has tried to save the country by curtailing production. Mr. Wilkie proposes to do it by speeding up curtailing production, Yet both these Liberals, as they proudly call themselves, are interested primarily in production; in the material, in the things of this world. It is difficult, of course, to see how a politician could wholly free himself from such concerns, and I am not criticising either, or discussing any issues, political or economic, between them – whoever is elected will be entitled to our obedience, under the Constitution, and no doubt, will do his best according to his lights. I would only suggest that niether has the lights necessary to solve the social problem. (It is true that both have spoken reverently in public of Divine Providence; but so, for that matter has Hitler; so have the politicians of every country, except godless Russian..) Not too much must be expected from these well-meaning statesmen. They are children of a Liberalism evolving rapidly into Socialism. Both are high in the ranks of a secret society proscribed and abhorred by the Catholic Church, and denounced by Pope Leo XIII as the true source of Socialism and Communism, and the general corruption of European and world society. They are servants of the same invisible masters, to whose obedience they are bound by oaths – masters who may not even be in America, but in Europe or Asia; masters of whose exact identity they may themselves be ignorant. When they speak of “Democracy,” one must remember this background, and the fact that the elastic word has been used by many Liberals to include even the tyranny of Soviet Russia. Can Democracy be anything but a farce among men, when some of them, including the most influential, belong to a secret society whose real aims and principles have been repeatedly disclosed as political and anti-Christian? The French Catholics, in the sad clarifying light of catastrophe, have recently found the answer to this question. As Our Holy Father Pope Pius XII said in welcoming the French Ambassador after the tragedy of last summer, “Like lightening which flashes through heavy clouds, the devastating lights of war . . . have torn from the eyes of all careful and sincere observers that veil of prejudices which for half a century the voice of the Church, and especially the reiterated warnings of the last Popes, Our venerated predecessors, did not succeed in penetrating . . . May the lessons of this bitter period in acts which permit us to hope in the future for a revival of Christian spirit, particularly in the education of youth . . .” and “the creation of a new Christian order . . . When will this desired hour arrive? God preserves the secret of it; but We beseech Him to hasten its advent.”

All this is part of a universal conflict between the church of Christ and the Prince of This World. All other conflicts are either subsidiary to this or camouflages for it. Just now there seems to be a deadly strife between international capitalism, intrenched in the United States and gradually leading this country toward a State Socialism or (what amounts to the same thing) toward a State Capitalism, and on the other side, the seemingly more godless and godless forms of Socialism beyond the seas. Yet if Nazi-Socialism and Bolshevism, after so violent a sham battle, could so speedily come to terms, for a purpose convenient to both, what is to prevent this American Socialism, now in the making and already accepted and propagated by the dominant educational forces of this county, from arriving at mutually agreeable arrangements with both the Soviet and the Nazi forms of Socialism, whenever it may suit the real leaders on both sides to do so? Within a generation we have seen our Liberal politicians denounce the Soviet, cultivate friendly relations with it, and denounce it again – this time more coyly. As the world grows smaller in time, may not all the forms of Socialism be gathered together by skilful hands into a World Sate, such as many Masonic writers have advocated, and the League of Nations sought to achieve? It is not only conceivable, but probable; for all forms of Socialism (even if some still call themselves Democracies) will be animated by a single obscure but powerful principle: the worship of the material, which is and always must be the negation of Christianity. Here, then, by a masterly anithesis, Pius XI has cast a strong light upon the shapes of things to come. It is all the more revealing when it shows us only the recurrence upon a larger stage of a deathless drama that happened long ago. Christ still lives in His Mystical Body, the Church, as truly as in the human body he took from Our Lady; and when the time comes for Him to be crucified again in His Church, depend upon it, Pilate and Herod that day will find a way to patch up their differences, some Caiaphas will cry, “Crucify Him! We have no king but Caesar!” and there will always be found some Judas to give the kiss of death.

Admittedly (perhaps my wish is father to this thought) we may by some miracle escape that fate, here in America. Perhaps despite their affiliations, Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Wilkie, as political Catholic admirers of each will tell us, will be led in the right direction by a divine hand. Again, perhaps not. Only the future can reveal this. Meanwhile this much is certain: the United States, in a very few years, will be either a Catholic country (and therefore a free country) or a Socialist country, (and therefore a slave country). “He who is not with Me is against Me.” History demonstrates the unfailing truth of this dilemma.

Here on the last edge and in the twilight of the world, the stage is set for the reenactment of an ancient tragedy – or can it this time be a comedy? Here are all the actors who have appeared over and over again in that tragedy in Europe. Here we have most of the Freemasons of the world, the Jews, most of the gold and its masters; Parthians and Medes and Elamites – men gathered together from all nations under the sun, speaking one language, leading a common life; and among them heirs of all the isms and heresies that the Catholic Church has denounced throughout the centuries, and some millions of good bewildered folk who have ceased to believe much in anything, and do not know what they believe, or whether anything be worth believing; and, scattered among these millions with their roots in such movements of the past, some twenty-five millions of Catholics.

Now, either the Catholic body will come into sharp conflict with those about them, or they will not.

If they do not, it will be the first time in history that the Mystical Body of Christ (and American Catholics, like all others, are “cells” of that Body) has not aroused violent and unreasoning antagonism. This has been so uniformly a characteristic of the life of Christ and the life of the Catholic Church, that when persons calling themselves Christian or Catholic do not meet with oppositions, and strong opposition, one may well begin to wonder whether they are profoundly Christian and truly Catholic. Perhaps then it is a reflection upon us American Catholics that we have inspired so little antagonism (comparatively) thus far. Perhaps we have not been telling our neighbors the truth, the strong truth, the hard saying they will not like: that the real test of our republican experiment here must ultimately be whether it accepts or opposes the Church of Christ; that it must become either a Catholic state, or a slave state.

A great many Catholics, influenced by the Protestant or Liberal environments in which they have lived, have sincerely and deliberately set out to propagate Christianity in such ways as to never arouse antagonism. They have compromised with Socialism, they have compromised with the economy theory of history, they have emphasized the importance of various material elements. It is a sad evidence of the lack of unity into which we have been betrayed when a Catholic Justice of the Supreme Court [Frank Murphy] can publicly proclaim that “Democracy” is more important than religion; when a Catholic priest, who has taught for some years at the Catholic University at Washington and has filled our country with his disciples, openly goes to address a Jewish Masonic lodge (though Catholics are still forbidden by Canon 2335 to cooperate with or condone Masonry in any way)—and this, according to the press, not to remind his hearers of their true home in the Church Catholic, but to confirm them in their sense of injured innocence; or when a Catholic journalist burns a little incense on the altar of the economic theory of history, or a Catholic college professor condones usury, or defends the Communist cause in Spain.

Now all these gentlemen, these liberal broad-minded Catholics, many of whom are teaching the next generation of American Catholics no doubt think that they are doing a service to God in smoothing out our differences with others, and neglecting to utter the challenge which Christianity has uttered everywhere else in the world, until the opposed gnashed its teeth, and took up stones to cast. Perhaps they hope in this way to avert persecution, and gradually to bring about the conversion of the country they love to the true Faith. I do not impugn their motives or their sincerity; indeed, they are often animated by a great, if misguided charity. But if the history of Christianity teaches anything, it fairly cries out from the stones of desecrated and stolen churches that if they have their way, they will do just the opposite to what they intend, and even worse. They will lead us, if we are foolish enough, to follow them, to that abyss over which English Catholics fell, one by one and family by family, in the Sixteenth Century. The English Catholics, a huge majority, were kept comparatively silent and inactive in the face of an intolerable but gradual oppression by a small rich crafty minority, in the hope that if they ever compromised on this point and that point, they would ultimately prevail, since they were more numerous, and had truth on their side. The result was the almost complete extinction of Catholicism in England for centuries—perhaps forever. (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 281-294.)

That last paragraph summarized the theme that I have tried to hammer home in hundreds upon hundreds of lengthy commentaries on this site—and in countless hours of lectures around the country and online. William Thomas Walsh’s prophetic vision of what would happen to Catholicism in the United States of America has been accomplished by conciliar revolutionaries, many of whose American predecessors before the “Second” Vatican Council sought to pave the way for the triumph of Americanist “ideals.”

Yes, the United States of America has become a slave state controlled by the same set of forces that the Inquisition sought to eliminate from within Holy Mother Church. This is because the United States of America was founded on false principles, including those of “religious liberty” and “religious indifferentism” that contributed to the rise of counterfeit church of conciliarism, whose very false spirit was being pioneered by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America Frank Murphy and the others, including that nameless priest who taught at the Catholic University of America, described by Mr. Walsh above.

Rest Secure In Our Lady's Loving Embrace

The true victims of the past two millennia have been those Catholics who have been martyred, frequently by the brute power of the civil state, for their steadfast witness to the truths of the Catholic Faith and to the Social Reign of Christ the King. Saint Alphonsus de Liguori wrote that over thirteen million Catholics were put to death by the authorities of the Roman Empire between the time of Nero in 67 A.D. and the Edict of Milan in the year 313 A.D. Millions upon millions of others have been put to death in the centuries since. These true victims who offered themselves to the Chief Priest and Victim of Calvary, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, did not feel sorry for themselves. They did not castigate their torturers or their executioners, although some exhorted their torturers and executioners to convert to the true Faith.

This is the time for martyrdom. Yes, for heroic martyrdom, certainly white martyrdom and possibly even actual red martyrdom itself.

Consider this example from the life of Blessed Edmund Campion, S.J.:

What must the prisoners of the sixteenth century have thought when the doors of the Tower closed upon them? Few men--or women--ever came out of the Tower in those days to tell what it was like inside. Most who emerged came out to go to their death at Tyburn. When Father Campion knelt in his cell, praying for strength to be brave and loyal to Christ to the end, he knew enough about the treatment that was most likely in store for him to have every reason in the world to be filled with fear.

He had heard of the The Pit, in which a prisoner might be confined for weeks and months. It was a cave running down for twenty feet and in absolute darkness. He knew of Little Ease, a cell so constructed that a prisoner could not stand upright nor lie down at full length.

Another form of torture was The Scavenger's Daughter. This was a broad hoop of iron which ran between the legs and over the head and forced the prisoner to remain in a crouched-over, cramped position. When this was maintained for days or more, it frequently was impossible for the poor prisoner ever to stand upright again. Before Father Campion's vision rose, too, images of the iron gauntlets that fitted over the wrists and could be tightened with screws, and of the awful rack.

This last instrument of torture was a wooden frame with rollers at each end Ropes ran around the rollers and the ends of the ropes were fastened to the prisoner's wrists and ankles. Then, when the rollers were revolved, arms and legs were stretched, often so far that all the limbs become disjointed.

One of the cruelest of the rack-masters, as they were called, was a man named Topcliffe. He performed his horrible work some years after Father Campion had met his Lord at Tyburn. He once boasted, referring to another Jesuit he was going to torture on the rack, that he would "make him a foot taller than he was before."

Is it any wonder, then, that for Father Campion, and for hundreds of others like him in those terrible days, the Tower of London was not a pleasant or quaint place, but an abode of horrors? Is there any wonder that he, known for his bravery and his gallantry, now knelt in his dismal cell and repeated the prayer that our Lord had uttered to His Father during His agony in the garden" Not My will but Thine be done"?

Christ's hero did not have long to wait before his worst anticipation began to come true. The warden of the Tower was Sir Owen Hopton, who was seeking advancement in the Queen's service. As soon as he heard that the famous Campion, the biggest prize yet to be caught, would be committed to his charge in the Tower, he thought, "I'll show the Queen and Lord Leicester how zealous I can be in the performance of my duty. From the very start I'll be as severe as I can with the traitor, and when Her Majesty hears of it, she will certainly give me a promotion.

At the very moment when Father Campion was praying in his cell, Sir Owen was giving orders to have Little Ease mad ready for him. On the afternoon of July 22, the door of Father Campion's cell groaned open, and a jailer's voice growled. "Come along, seditious Jesuit, we have a little surprise for you."

Father Campion blessed himself, rose and followed down the gloomy corridors. Another door swung open and he saw before him the small room, absolutely bare and almost pitch-dark, even with the door open, which he knew to be Little Ease. Sir Owen stood to one side, elegant and disdainful, watching the weary, disheveled man gaze in fascinated horror at the dreadful room.

"Well, then, Mr. Campion," he said mockingly, "where is all the bravery you protest in your lying Brag? If the sight of our Little Ease affrights you so much, how pale do you think your face will become when you see some of the other means we have here to break the spirit of rebellious citizens like you and your fellow-priests?"

"Fear is not the same as cowardice, Sir Owen," responded Father Campion with a calm dignity, and a trace of his famous smile began to show on his haggard face. "I never said, nor could I, for I am a man, and not an angel, that I would not feel fear at what lies in store for me. But I did say, and with the grace of Our Lord, I will prove it, that I would not be broken in spirit and betray either my Lord Christ or those Catholic friends who have sheltered me and to whom I have brought the Holy Mass and the word of God."

"Humph! Well, we shall soon see. In with the man, and let him think over his deeds and his boasts for a while."

"By what right am I subjected to this torture? cried Father Campion in a commanding voice. "I am an Englishman, I have not been tried, I have not yet been found guilty of any crime. Torture is for criminals--if indeed it is for anyone who is a human being. I demand to see the writ of the Privy Council which gives you the authority so to treat me."

"You can demand until you are blue in the face, my good Papist," snarled Sir Owen. "I am the master of this Tower, and who's to know that I have given you a little taste of discipline? He nodded his head to one of the jailers. The man stepped behind Father Campion, grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him, not too gently, into Little Ease. The door was slammed shut; the darkness closed in on the figure of Edmund Campion huddled in a cramped, bent-over, standing position.

For three full days and part of a fourth, Father Campion got to know the "little taste of discipline" Little Ease could administer. When his legs and back began to tremble and twitch from the strain of trying to stand, he would slump to a crowded sitting position, and when he could bear that no loner, he would struggle to stand again. Would the hours never pass? How many hours had to pass before he would either be released or lose consciousness? And yet, he prayed not to lose consciousness. He prayed that he might remain in control of his mind and will so that he could consciously offer his suffering in reparation for his own sins and for the conversion of his beloved England. [Father Harold C. Gardiner, S.J.,Edmund Campion, Hero of God's Underground, Vision Books: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957 pp. 138-142.]

This stirring letter written by a Claretian priest Spain during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939) just before he (and others with him) were martyred demonstrates the difference between hiding the Faith in public life, whether as a matter of supposedly "clever" calculation or as a matter of habitual reluctance to speak the truth clearly no matter the cost, and being a victim for Christ the King at all times without any exception or equivocation:

We all die praying to God that the blood from our wounds may not be a vengeful blood, but that it run red and full of life in your veins, to stimulate your growth and development all over the world. Good-bye, dear Congregation! Your sons, the martyrs of Barbastro, salute you from prison and offer you our sorrow and anguish as a holocaust to expiate our faults, our weaknesses, and as a testimony of our faithful, generous and eternal love. The martyrs of tomorrow, the 14th, are mindful of the fact that they die on the eve of the Assumption. What a remembrance that will be! We die for the right to wear the cassock and we die on the very anniversary of the day on which we were clothed in it. (Quoted in Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade, Christendom Press, 1996, p. 110.)

Dr. Carroll went on to quote a member of the civil guard's testimony to the constancy of the Faith of the Claretian martyrs of Barbastro:

These [blasphemous expletive deleted] fools! No one could shut them up! All the way they sang and praised Christ the King. One of them fell dead when he hit him with the butt of a gun, and this is no lie. But the more we hit them, the more they sang and shouted: "Viva Cristo Rey!("Quoted in Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade, Christendom Press, 1996, p. 110.)

We must strive to be victims for Christ the King and for Mary our Immaculate Queen as we make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our own sins and those of the whole world. No Catholic, including this one, is proud of his sins. Indeed, we abhor them. We do not blame others for our sins. We do not seek to destroy those who may have firsthand knowledge of our sins of thoughts, words, and deeds. We take full and complete responsibility for our sins, recognizing that we are absolutely no better than anyone else. We must give thanks to God that it is by His own gratuitous gift of the Holy Faith and of the graces that He won for us by the shedding of His own Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, that we have even a little bit of a chance of undoing the damage that our sins have done to our souls--and for the bad example, if not outright scandal--we might have given to the souls of others--by living penitentially, especially as we fulfill Our Lady's Fatima Message in our own lives on a daily basis.

Yes, we must strive to be victims for Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen as we pray as many Rosaries as our states-in-life permit.

The petty tyrants of today will fade from view soon enough. God is more powerful than any of the fools who think that their grand ideas and schemes can "save" society and make our own lives "easier" and "more comfortable" (sort of like they want to create a huge "national hospice" for us). A country that has killed over sixty million innocent preborn human beings by surgical abortion alone, no less the truly countless number of souls its wars have taken out of the Catholic Church and placed into Protestant "churches" and Masonic lodges, owes God a tremendous debt that might be repaid only by the extinction of its national existence

We must, therefore, embrace the Cross as never before, hoping that our lives of prayer and penance and fasting and mortification and almsgiving and total consecration to Jesus through Mary will help, especially by means of Eucharistic piety and our devotion to Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, to plant just a few seeds for the day when all men will hail the Chief Victim and Priest, the One Who become Man for us to die on the wood of the Cross so that we might know an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.

We must be champions of Christ the King and Our Lady, she who is our Immaculate Queen, champions of the Catholic Church in this time of apostasy and betrayal, champions of the truth that Catholicism is the and only foundation of personal and social order. Those who disagree do so at the peril to the nation they say they love but for which they have a false sense of nationalistic pride that impedes her conversion to the true Faith, which is what Our Lord Himself mandates for each nation on the face of this earth.

We must not be distracted by the side shows of naturalism or conciliarism. We must serve as champions of Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, refusing to march along in the parade of the ignorant midget naturalists.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

All the Saints, pray for us.

The Holy Relics, pray for us.

Blessed Martin de Porres, T.O.P, pray for us.

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