Role Reversal

The imprisonment of Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis by United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky Judge David Bunning, who was appointed to the Federal bench by the pro-contraception, pro-abortion in the “hard cases” President George Walker Bush, on September 4, 2001, before taking office on February 19, 2002, over her steadfast refusal to issue “marriage” licenses to those of the same gender committed to lives of abject perversity in violation of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law has shown once again the madness of the world created by Father Martin Luther’s revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

In a reversal of roles that demonstrates the triumph of the law of man over the law of God that was made possible by Luther’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century, it was Judge David L. Bunning, a Catholic who is the son of former United States Senator James “Jim” Bunning (R-Kentucky, 1999-2011, and a 1953 graduate of Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio),  who dismissed the superiority of the Natural Law in American jurisprudence as he sentenced Kim Davis to jail on contempt of court charges for refusing to enforce the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, June 25, 2015 (see Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part one, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part two, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part three, and Arguing Who Decides That Which is Beyond Humans To Decide, part four):

“Personal opinions, including my own, are not relevant to today,” Bunning, a federal district judge, told Davis and the courtroom Thursday. “The idea of natural law superseding this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent indeed.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/09/04/he-has-guts-judge-david-bunning-the-same-sex-marriage-decisions-unlikely-enforcer.)

Judge David Bunning is ignorant of the teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the duties of public officials in the face of unjust laws, something that is unsurprising when one considers that he was born in 1966 and was thus immersed in the conciliar revolution from his earliest years.

Judge Bunning, the Catholic Church, which is not the same thing as its counterfeit ape headed by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, condemns those in public life who claim that their official duties require them to leave their religious beliefs, which are not “personal opinions,” aside in order to act solely on the basis of the dictates of the civil law and/or the desires of a majority of the “people.”

Bunning, however, is in very good company with fellow Catholic jurists such as Supreme Court of the United States of America Chief Justice John Glover Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony McLeod Kennedy, and Samuel Alito. Each of these jurists is a legal positivist, believing that “extraneous,” such as the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, to the words of the Constitution and/or to Federal or state laws can be used as foundation for their judicial decision-making.

Antonin Scalia, for example, has a brand of legal positivism that is founded in a "respect" for the "original meaning" (originalism) of the words contained in the Constitution. He has on many occasions, including one time in my own hearing in a question-and-answer session at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York, following a "communion breakfast" talk in May of 1987, said that, although he believes in the Natural Law, he could not use the Natural Law in the process of judicial decision-making.

Scalia went on to state that it was his belief that abortion is neither permitted or prohibited by the words of the United States Constitution, a contention that is arguable solely on the grounds of a proper reading of the text of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. According to Scalia, therefore, as abortion is a matter "reserved" for the states to decide for themselves as baby-killing is neither prohibited or permitted by the Constitution itself. He would be duty bound, he said, to uphold the constitutionality of a state law permitting abortion as long as it had been passed legally and did not violate that state's own constitutional provisions. "You write it," he told the crowd, "and I'll enforce it." This prompted me to write an extensive critique for The Wanderer of the fallacy of this exercise in positivism entitled, "You write it, I'll enforce it."

Each of the Catholics who serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America at the present time believe that the "people" have the final say as to what is considered legally acceptable, whether by means of the words of the United States Constitution, the provisions of state constitutions, the results of ballot initiatives at the state level designed to amend state constitutions or to overturn to revise state laws, or the language of state legislation. These Catholics (John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) do not understand or do not accept that human beings may not, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, permit grievous violations of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law or the Natural and/or seek to justify those violations of God's Law as matters that are "reserved" to "the people" to decide as they see fit.

Those who serve in institutions of civil governance have a grave obligation before God to uphold the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted to and explicated by Holy Mother Church, she who is the sole teacher and authentic governor of all men and all nations in all that pertains to the good of souls and thus the right ordering of men and their nations. This truth applies to all men in all circumstances at all times. Contrary to the contentions made publicly by Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, Catholics, in particular, do indeed have a grave obligation to use the Faith as the basis of each of their actions at all times.

Pope Leo XIII explained this very clearly in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

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

After all, did not a good deal of the English common law, which is still recognized at the Federal level as applicable in cases tried in Federal courts, have its origins as Catholic judges in Catholic England during the Middle Ages attempted to apply the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in concrete circumstances without "statutory guidance" from any kind of legislature, at least until the emergence of the Magna Carta in 1215?

Although Judge David Bunning’s ignorance of Catholic teaching is completely understandable as he is but the product of the ethos of Americanism that made its diabolically-inspired “reconciliation” with “separation of Church and State” and “religious liberty,” both of which were traps to keep Catholics silent about the Faith in public life in order to have the “freedom” to worship as one pleases without the persecution, imprisonment, torture and execution that were visited upon Catholics during the Protestant Revolution in England Ireland. Americanism was one of the most important building blocks of the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s embrace of the very same errors that have shaped Catholics in the United States of America from 1776 to the present day. (See, for example, Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics.) The heresy of “religious liberty,” condemned by many of our true popes, including Popes Pius VI, Pius VII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, and Leo XIII, when it began to propagated at the end of the Eighteenth Century, has been a diabolical trap to keep Catholics “in line” in a Protestant-dominated country that has been suffused with the whiff of Judeo-Masonry throughout its existence.

While David Bunning’s ignorance of Catholic teaching is understandable, his ignorance of history, however, is a remarkable statement about the shallow nature of the education that he received. Bunning’s assertion that the “idea of a natural law superseding this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent” is a jaw-dropper. Bunning’s statement reveals a stunningly lack of knowledge of how the Natural Law, which is knowable, although not perfectly, by human reason alone unaided by Divine Revelation, is the very foundation of Western civilization.

It was to defend the binding precepts of the Natural Law that the Roman orator, Cicero, a pagan, who lived in the First Century B.C. was willing to shed his own blood in the wake of the coming tyranny of the caesars. Cicero defined the Natural Law as follows:

True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. And by so doing he will endure the severest penalties even if he avoid the other evils which are usually accounted punishments. (Cicero, The Republic.)

Cicero had it almost entirely correct. Almost. He was wrong in asserting that the natural law does not need any "other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience." He lived before the Incarnation and before the founding of the true Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Cicero thus did not know that man does need an interpreter and expositor of the natural law, namely, the Catholic Church. Apart from this, however, Cicero understood that God's law does not admit of abrogations by a vote of the people or of a "representative" body, such as the Roman Senate in his day or the United States Congress or state legislatures, et al. in our own day.

Pope Pius XI explained in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, the Natural Law is authoritatively explicated by Holy Mother Church even though it can be known by human reason and is thus not, unlike the Divine Positive Law, her exclusive possession:

The Church does not say that morality belongs purely, in the sense of exclusively, to her; but that it belongs wholly to her. She has never maintained that outside her fold and apart from her teaching, man cannot arrive at any moral truth; she has on the contrary more than once condemned this opinion because it has appeared under more forms than one. She does however say, has said, and will ever say, that because of her institution by Jesus Christ, because of the Holy Ghost sent her in His name by the Father, she alone possesses what she has had immediately from God and can never lose, the whole of moral truth, omnem veritatem, in which all individual moral truths are included, as well those which man may learn by the help of reason, as those which form part of revelation or which may be deduced from it  (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Like much else of the patrimony of the Holy Faith, most Catholics alive today are completely ignorant of such teaching, and even many of those who are aware do not want to admit that efforts to maintain respect for the Natural Law will fail absent the infallible guidance of the Catholic Church:

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.)

God's laws apply to everyone without regard to whether anyone accepts them. Civil law must be conformed to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in all that pertains to the good of souls, and Catholics have the positive moral obligation to work in behalf of such a conformity. Catholics are not permitted to privately hold one thing while publicly speaking and acting in a contradictory manner. Right order within civilization must fall apart absent the Catholic Faith and the exercise by Holy Mother Church of her Divinely-given power to intervene with the civil authorities when the eternal and temporal good of souls makes this necessary after all efforts to exhort those in civil power have failed to correct conditions and/or laws manifestly offensive to God and injurious to souls.

The overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and thus of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as the basis for personal morality and social order began with Martin Luther’s diabolically-inspired revolution, something that was noted Father Denis Fahey, C.SS.P, in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

The rending of the Mystical Body by the so-called Reformation movement has resulted in the pendulum swinging from the extreme error of Judaeo-Protestant Capitalism to the opposite extreme error of the Judaeo-Masonic-Communism of Karl Marx. 

The uprise of individualism rapidly led to unbridled self-seeking. Law-makers who were arbiters of morality, as heads of the Churches, did not hesitate to favour their own enterprising spirit. The nobles and rich merchants in England, for example, who got possession of the monastery lands, which had maintained the poor, voted the poor laws in order to make the poor a charge on the nation at large. The enclosure of common lands in England and the development of the industrial system are a proof of what private judgment can do when transplanted into the realm of production and distribution. The Lutheran separation of Church from the Ruler and the Citizen shows the decay in the true idea of membership of our Lord's Mystical Body.

"Assuredly," said Luther, "a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The man is Christian, but his function does not concern his religion." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

Pope Leo XIII made a similar point in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The entire framework of the modern civil state is built upon the heresies and errors of Martin Luther that made possible the triumph of the naturalism that has been propagated and institutionalized since then by the interrelated, multifaceted forces of Judeo-Masonry.

The French Revolution itself, whose false ideas played just as much a part of the shaping of the conciliar worldview as Americanism as it made the “contribution” of the first avowedly egalitarian state, building upon the framework of the precedent established by the secular nature of the Constitution of the United States of America that admits of no authority higher than its own text as the foundation for civil law, and all of the modern totalitarianism that followed thereafter could not have come into existence had it not been for Martin Luther’s theological and revolution two hundred eighty-two years before.

Moreover, both the Protestant Revolution let loose a veritable bloodletting against Catholics who remained faithful to the true Faith in defiance of the dictates of the civil law. Fully seventy-two thousand Catholics, a little over 3.2% of the population of England at the time, were put to death upon orders by the lecherous, adulterous King Henry VIII between 1534 and the time of his death in 1547 for defying the “law of the land” that judges found themselves compelled to obey. Faithful Catholics preferred imprisonment and death rather than to obey unjust laws or to submit to the rulings of judges who believed that it was their “duty” to enforce them despite their own “personal opinions,” something that was true, of course, between 67 A.D. and 313 A.D. as over eleven million Catholics were put to the death for refusing to obey unjust laws and edicts issued by the Roman emperors and their regional administrators and minions.

Poor, ignorant Judge David Bunning does not realize that it is it was Natural Law jurisprudence, not the jurisdiction of champions of legal positivism such as the long-deceased Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (whose writings have been documented in several articles on this site, including, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part three), that was used by the at the Nuremberg Trials of the officials of the Third Reich, including judges, were found guilty of crimes against humanity even though each had obeyed orders and, in the cases of the judges, had carried out decrees that had been issued by Adolph Hitler under the terms of the emergency powers provisions of the 1919 Weimar Constitution.

Given the fact that Federal District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky David Bunning believes that it would set a “dangerous precedent” if he admitted the Natural Law for use in his courtroom, it must be presumed that he is ignorant of the simple fact that the judges in the Nuremberg Trials who sat in judgment on men who had broken no German laws, had been wrong to use the Natural Law as the basis for establishing their legal culpability for their actions. The late Morris Abram, who was an aide to Supreme Court of the United States Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, documented the use of the Naural Law in those trials:

In my opinion, there was preexisting applicable law for most of the acts declared criminal at Nuremberg. The law consisted of treaties against aggressive war, war crimes as defined in the Hague Conventions and the general principles of law recognized by all nations based in part on the natural law, for it is inconceivable that Hitler, Himler, Eichmann, or any subaltern did not know that it was an offense against civilization that children and other noncombatants be tortured and exterminated on ethnic grounds." (Morris Abram, Hearing before the Commission on Cooperation and Security in Europe, April 21, 1993.)

Although the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Trials has been noted in the past, suffice it to say for the moment that the Allies themselves were guilty of crimes against humanity in the deliberate targeting of civilian population centers and the mass incineration of human beings at various points during World War II, including firebombing of Dresden, Germany, on February 11-12, 1945, and the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hirsohima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Ah, no one judges the “victors,” do they? No one? Well, God does, and has done so.

Stipulating the hypocrisy, therefore, the point of citing the Nuremberg Trials is to illustrate that Natural Law jurisprudence is part of the fabric of Western civilization, and it is the specific rejection of this jurisprudence, albeit the inevitable result of Modernity itself, that has led to triumph of the false belief that civil law is above all other law. It is not.

Even the late plagiarist and serial adulterer named Martin Luther King, Jr., cited none other than Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law as justification for his acts of civil disobedience to protest the invidious de jure segregation of human beings on the basis of their skin color existed under the cover of the civil law in the former states of the Confederate States of America following the end of the vindictive policies of the “Union” victors that had been imposed between the end of the War between the States and the end of the so-called “Reconstruction” in 1877:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

Mind you, this is not to endorse Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Federal holiday named after him, only to point out that he cited the Natural Law to oppose de jure racial segregation, which was unjust. That is all. King supported the diabolical work of Margaret Sanger and he came under the influenced and was used by a number of Communists during the last years of his life prior to his murder on April 4, 1968. One an oppose de jure racial segregation while being opposed to the social engineering of forced integration of schools by means of busing and the forced integration of neighborhoods by means of  Federal census standards, which is what the so-called “American Community Survey” that I was forced to complete last month is designed to do.

No one, including Judge David Bunning, is above the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. If Bunning does indeed disagree with decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, June 25, 2015, as his mother indicated (“David is an honest person,” she said. “He doesn’t agree with the Supreme Court but has to obey the law.”-- Cincinnati Enquirer), then he should have either recused himself from the case of Kim Davis or have resigned from the Federal bench altogether as Catholics have a duty to oppose unjust laws:

Pope Leo XIII had also explained that Catholics have the necessity of opposing evil at all times, especially when it is promoted and protected under the civil law:

10. But, if the laws of the State are manifestly at variance with the divine law, containing enactments hurtful to the Church, or conveying injunctions adverse to the duties imposed by religion, or if they violate in the person of the supreme Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then, truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime; a crime, moreover, combined with misdemeanor against the State itself, inasmuch as every offense leveled against religion is also a sin against the State. Here anew it becomes evident how unjust is the reproach of sedition; for the obedience due to rulers and legislators is not refused, but there is a deviation from their will in those precepts only which they have no power to enjoin. Commands that are issued adversely to the honor due to God, and hence are beyond the scope of justice, must be looked upon as anything rather than laws. You are fully aware, venerable brothers, that this is the very contention of the Apostle St. Paul, who, in writing to Titus, after reminding Christians that they are "to be subject to princes and powers, and to obey at a word," at once adds: "And to be ready to every good work."Thereby he openly declares that, if laws of men contain injunctions contrary to the eternal law of God, it is right not to obey them. In like manner, the Prince of the Apostles gave this courageous and sublime answer to those who would have deprived him of the liberty of preaching the Gospel: "If it be just in the sight of God to hear you rather than God, judge ye, for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard." (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

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

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

Pope Leo XIII’s clear, bold reiteration of Catholic teaching is unknown by the likes of David Bunning because they have been rejected by the figures of Antichrist in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are the e architects of a false religion that is designed precisely to lead the “human family” into a “bond of brotherhood” that the Antichrist will use rule over the earth. Bergoglio himself has uttered not a word in opposition to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, June 25, 2015, as he is concerned about the "rights" of those who break a nation's just laws by crossing its borders illegally and about the necessity of "saving the planet."

Meanwhile, of course, there has been quite a role reversal as a Protestant woman, the now-imprisoned Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis, seeks to defend moral truth as a Catholic judge sentences her to jail for contempt of court for doing so. The lords of Modernity have been so very successful in convincing believing Catholics in public life to do their bidding for them as the lords of Modernism say not one word in defense of a courageous woman who is simply trying to do her own duty before God. This is all the handiwork of Martin Luther, who will have a piazza named for him in Rome, Italy in ten days' time, a subject to be discussed in an article that has been in the development stage for the past week, and of those, such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has such admiration for his wretched work.

King Henry VIII had Parliament enact an unjust law naming him as the “supreme head of the church in England,” requiring every Englishman to take an oath in support of it. Saint Thomas More, though he kept his peace about the oath until his trial, resigned his position as the Chancellor of the Realm as he knew that he could not take an oath to support a declaration that was false and had no binding force upon God or man. It was only after the perjured testimony of Richard Rich that Saint Thomas More discharged his mind concerning the injustice of the supremacy law and of his own trial:

In good faith, Master Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than for mine own peril, and you shall understand that neither I nor any man else to my knowledge ever took you to be a man of such credit in any matter of importance I or any other would at any time vouchsafe to communicate with you. And I, as you know, of no small while have been acquainted with you and your conversation, who have known you from your youth hitherto, for we long dwelled together in one parish. Whereas yourself can tell (I am sorry you compel me to say) you were esteemed very light of tongue, a great dicer, and of no commendable fame. And so in your house at the Temple, where hath been your chief bringing up, were you likewise accounted. Can it therefore seem likely to your honorable lordships, that I would, in so weighty a cause, so unadvisedly overshoot myself as to trust Master Rich, a man of me always reputed for one of little truth, as your lordships have heard, so far above my sovereign lord the king, or any of his noble counselors, that I would unto him utter the secrets of my conscience touching the king's supremacy, the special point and only mark at my hands so long sought for?

A thing which I never did, nor ever would, after the statute thereof made, reveal unto the King's Highness himself or to any of his honorable counselors, as it is not unknown to your honors, at sundry and several times, sent from His Grace's own person unto the Tower unto me for none other purpose. Can this in your judgment, my lords, seem likely to be true? And if I had so done, indeed, my lords, as Master Rich hath sworn, seeing it was spoken but in familiar, secret talk, nothing affirming, and only in putting of cases, without other displeasant circumstances, it cannot justly be taken to be spoken maliciously; and where there is no malice there can be no offense. And over this I can never think, my lords, that so many worthy bishops, so many noble personages, and many other worshipful, virtuous, wise, and well-learned men as at the making of the law were in Parliament assembled, ever meant to have any man punished by death in whom there could be found no malice, taking malitia pro malevolentia: for if malitia be generally taken for sin, no man is there that can excuse himself. Quia si dixerimus quod peccatum non habemus, nosmetipsos seducimus, et veritas in nobis non est. [If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.] And only this word, "maliciously" is in the statute material, as this term "forcibly" is in the statute of forcible entries, by which statute if a man enter peaceably, and put not his adversary out "forcibly," it is no offense, but if he put him out "forcibly," then by that statute it is an offense, and so shall be punished by this term, "forcibly."  

Besides this, the manifold goodness of the King's Highness himself, that hath been so many ways my singular good lord and gracious sovereign, and that hath so dearly loved and trusted me, even at my first coming into his noble service, with the dignity of his honorable privy council, vouchsafing to admit me; and finally with the weighty room of His Grace's higher chancellor, the like whereof he never did to temporal man before, next to his own royal person the highest office in this whole realm, so far above my qualities or merits and meet therefor of his own incomparable benignity honored and exalted me, by the space of twenty years or more, showing his continual favors towards me, and (until, at mine own poor suit it pleased His Highness, giving me license with His Majesty's favor to bestow the residue of my life wholly for the provision of my soul in the service of God, and of his special goodness thereof to discharge and unburden me) most benignly heaped honors continually more and more upon me; all this His Highness's goodness, I say, so long thus bountifully extended towards me, were in my mind, my lords, matter sufficient to convince this slanderous surmise by this man so wrongfully imagined against me....  

Forasmuch, my lord, as this indictment is grounded upon an act of Parliament directly oppugnant to the laws of God and his holy church, the supreme government of which, or of any part thereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual preeminence by the mouth of our Savior himself, personally present upon the earth, to Saint Peter and his successors, bishops of the same see, by special prerogative granted; it is therefore in law amongst Christian men, insufficient to charge any Christian man....  

More have I not to say, my lords, but that like as the blessed apostle Saint Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of Saint Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends forever: so I verily trust and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation. (See Saint Thomas More's Speech in Defense of Himself, at his Trial.)

As Our Lady told Jacinta and Francisco Marto in the Cova da Iria, near Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, 1917, that “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph”:

"To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world." (Our Lady's words at Fatima.)

We must continue to pray, fast and to make many sacrifices for the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter who will proceed to fulfill Our Lady’s Fatima Message no matter how many people believe that is either unnecessary or that it would not do any good. Our Lady told us what would happen, namely, that her Immaculate Heart will triumph.” Why do we doubt that this is so?

Praying our Rosaries as we beseech Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, to protect us in these times of great peril, may we fly unto his Most Chaste Spouse, to surrender to everything, including our liberty if this is to be taken away from us, to serve Christ the King as soldiers in His holy army in our battle with the forces of the adversary in our lives and in the world-at-large.

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.