Believing Catholics Pose No Threat to a Just Social Order

The high priests and priestesses of the anti-Incarnational, Christophobic world of Modernity in which we live proclaim themselves committed to a so-called “woke” program of “diversity, equity, and inclusion" even though what they really want is a program of conformity, inequity, and exclusion for all those who do not accept their ever-changing diktats of what they, who are nothing other than contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose mortal bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave, decide in all their sanctimonious infallibility to be the only acceptable standards for social acceptability.

These high priests and priestesses are masters of deceit, duplicity, hypocrisy, double-standards and sloganeering that call to mind Simone Weil’s description of modern propaganda ninety years ago:

"It is as though we had returned to the age of Protagoras and the Sophists, the age when the art of persuasion--whose modern equivalent is advertising slogans, publicity, propaganda meetings, the press, the cinema, and radio--took the place of thought and controlled the fate of cities and accomplished coups d'etat. So the ninth book of Plato's Republic looks like a description of contemporary events." (Simone Weil, quoted in Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order.)

A similar observation was made by then Soviet exile Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in his famous commencement address, “A World Split Apart,” to the graduating classes at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 6, 1978:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons - maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)

Yes, the very people who say they are “tolerant” are actually the most intolerant bigots on the face of the earth.

Those who say that they “open-minded” are narrow-minded ignoramuses who not only know nothing of First and Last Things but who are ignorant of the actual facts of history.

The preachers of diversity, equity, and inclusion believe in relegating all who disagree with them to the status of non-personhood who must be excoriated as “haters” and deemed unfit to enjoy even many basic “freedoms,” including that of speech, press, and religion, because of their refusal to conform their magisterial pronouncements and decrees.

Citizens of a country founded as a result of a revolt against the established order of British colonial rule are considered to be potential “insurrectionists” for opposing government policies, most of which are made by unelected bureaucrats who want to “transform” the West into the repressive state model of Red China and/or the former East Germany, and must be branded as “terrorists” for opposing moral evils that become enshrined in the civil law and celebrated as “civil rights” by what passes for “popular culture.”

We are but a short step or two away from becoming a northern North America version of Nicaragua (which is on the North American continent geographically even though it is considered part of Central America in geopolitical terms), where a putative bishop of the Catholic Church has been sentence to twenty-seven years, seven months in prison and stripped of his citizenship for daring to criticize the policies of the Communist thug Daniel Ortega, whose nefarious actions go without a word of criticism by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the South American fellow traveler of all things socialist and communist:

The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua sentenced on Friday, Feb. 10, Bishop Rolando Álvarez Lagos of Matagalpa to 26 years and four months in prison, charging him with being a “traitor to the homeland.”

The sentence against Bishop Álvarez comes just one day after the dictatorship deported 222 political prisoners to the United States.

Bishop Álvarez refused to get on the plane with the deportees, Ortega himself said yesterday afternoon in a speech.

The sentence read this afternoon by Judge Héctor Ernesto Ochoa Andino, president of Criminal Chamber 1 of the Managua Court of Appeals, states: “The defendant Rolando José Álvarez Lagos is held to be a traitor to the country.”

“Let it be declared that Rolando José Álvarez Lagos is guilty for being the author of the crimes of undermining national security and sovereignty, spreading fake news news through information technology, obstructing an official in the performance of his duties, aggravated disobedience or contempt of authority, all committed concurrently and to the detriment of society and the State of the Republic of Nicaragua,” the sentence states.

Detailing each of the charges and their respective penalties, the text adds: “The defendant Rolando José Álvarez Lagos is sentenced to 15 years in prison and perpetual disqualification from exercising public office on behalf of or at the service of the State of Nicaragua.” 

“The loss of the convicted person’s citizen rights is declared, which will be perpetual, all of this for being the author of the crime of undermining national security and sovereignty,” the ruling continues.

The sentence also decrees “the loss of Nicaraguan nationality to the sanctioned José Álvarez Lagos, in strict adherence to Law 1145.”

The aforementioned Law 1145, as well as a constitutional reform that allows the loss of nationality of those sentenced for “treason,” was passed by the National Assembly of Nicaragua Feb. 9.

Today’s ruling reads: “The defendant Rolando José Álvarez Lagos is sentenced to five years in prison and an 800-day monetary fine (based on a percentage of his daily salary) for being the author of propagating fake news through information and communication technologies.”

“The penalty in days-of-fine is equivalent to the amount of 56,461 córdobas and 15 centavos (about $1,550).”

Lastly, the judgment sentences the “defendant Rolando José Álvarez Lagos to five years and four months in prison for being the author of aggravated obstruction of the performance of duty of an official to the detriment of the State and the Republic of Nicaragua” and also “one year in prison for being the author of the crime of contempt of authority.”

“The prison sentences will be served successively, so the convicted Rolando José Álvarez Lagos must serve 26 years and four months in prison,” the sentence reads.

According to the sentence, Bishop Álvarez must be imprisoned until April 13, 2049.

The bishop refused to board the plane yesterday afternoon along with 222 other deportees, including four priests, who were flown to the U.S. in an agreement with the U.S. State Department. Bishop Álvarez decided to stay to accompany the Catholics who are suffering the repression of the dictatorship in Nicaragua.

In a statement issued Friday following the deportation of the 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, chair of the House Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives, said: “We must continue to work to combat the brutal Ortega regime and free the remaining prisoners — including courageous Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who refuses to abandon his flock.” 

He added: “He is truly a Christ-like figure with a servant’s heart, and we continue to urge Pope Francis to speak unequivocally on his behalf and seek his release.”  (BREAKING: Nicaragua’s Dictatorship Sentences Bishop Rolando Álvarez to 26 Years in Prison .)

Daniel Ortega’s treatment of “Bishop” Rolando Alvarez is, of course, quite similar to the treatment that Bishop Ignatius Kung and many other Catholic bishops and priests, both indigenous Chinese and foreign missionaries, suffered at the hands of Mao Tse-Tung and what Xi Jinping is imposing upon Joseph “Cardinal” Zen, the retired conciliar “archbishop” of Hong Kong¸ and it is identical to the Soviet show trial that resulted in  the imprisonment of Archbishop Jank Feliks Cieplak of Petrograd and sixteen priests in Soviet Russia one hundred years ago:

Moscow, April 10^th. BEFORE saying anything about the trial of Arch- bishop Cieplak and the Petrograd clergy, I shall first say a few words on the general aspects of the case :- 1. The Bolshevik Government is determined to destroy all religion. 2. All members of the court and all the witnesses were members of the Communist Party ; in fact, the judge asked each -witness if he belonged to the Communist Party, and they all replied in the affirmative. 3. There were no witnesses for the defence.

The prosecution confined itself to proving the existence of a certain state of mind in the prisoners—namely, a dislike for the Soviet Government. It was really on this charge that the prisoners were convicted. The charges of obstructing Soviet officials in the discharge of their duty, and of failing to comply promptly with the law of separation and with the edict regarding the Church valuables, were only made to prove the existence of this state of mind. At the very outset the defence tried to have the charges of obstruction, &c., taken separately; but Krylenko objected to this, and the judges upheld his objection. Under this system of “ justice,” ninety percent. Of the people in Russia, and certainly ninety-nine percent. Of the foreigners here, could be condemned to death to-morrow. There was a great deal of oratory; but, as there was no jury, and as it was clear from the beginning that the three judges had decided to condemn, this oratory was absolutely superfluous. The military display throughout the trial might also have been dispensed with, as there was not the slightest fear of the prisoners running away or of their being rescued. Four soldiers stood to attention with fixed bayonets at each of the four corners of the dock, and were relieved with great formality every hour. The relieving sentries filed in under the guidance of a captain, and, in accordance with the custom which prevailed in the old Tsarist Army, each soldier on guard whispered something into the ear of the man who relieved him. It was a routine instruction that he was not to let anyone approach the prisoners or hand anything to them, and that he must not permit any member of the audience to approach within three paces of him. Besides the soldiers thus standing to attention in a very strained attitude, half a dozen other soldiers were generally to be seen in the vicinity of the dock, and one or two officers were always at hand. One, the commandant, sat at a table below the dais on which the court sat. He had evidently charge of all the military arrangements, and he also carried documents to and fro between the lawyers and the witnesses. Halfway down the hall sat a sentry, whose duty it was to keep back the people who had not got tickets for the upper and more privileged part of the hall. This soldier was armed with a revolver, and, when he was relieved, he always handed his revolver to the man who relieved him. Besides, there were two armed sentries at the door, two other armed sentries at the foot of the stairs leading up to the courtroom, and a number of others still further down. In America or England two or three unarmed policemen would suffice, but in Soviet Russia, which is supposed to be anti-militarist and to detest all martial display, there is more sabre-clanking than one would see in any court of justice anywhere.

As for the audience, it was nearly all Communist. On one occasion, indeed, the officer giving out tickets downstairs declared that he would first admit those having cards of membership in Communist organizations, and would only admit non-Communists afterwards. Youths belonging to the League of Youth and to Polish Bolshevik organizations were apparently encouraged to attend the court. There were many Hebrew faces. While the Procureur was demanding six lives, a Jewish woman walked down the hall from one of the front seats, her face wreathed in smiles. She was a particularly repulsive- looking elderly woman in a low-necked dress, and, as she swept slowly past, she nodded and winked at friends on each side of her, who nodded pleasantly in return. About the same time two Polish women, overcome by the ferocious bellowing of Krylenko, left the court in tears. About a tenth of the audience was Polish; one could see that by the moisture in their eyes. The rest were in many cases smiling throughout the whole trial, and particularly when the Procureur’s roars for blood became most blood- curdling. Many ladies came with opera-glasses, through which they scrutinized the condemned men as coldly as they would have scrutinized actors on the stage. When the proceedings dragged, the audience became distinctly bored ; but they cheered up visibly when the yells for blood began again. It was a clear case of blood-lust, such as was exhibited by the Roman populace at the racti- torial combats in the Coliseum sixteen hundred years ago. There were three judges—Galkin, apparently a man of some education, and two others, a workman and a soldier. These judges showed themselves to be rather assistant prosecuting attorneys than impartial judges. They always decided against the counsel for the defence. They frequently cross-examined with the object of helping the Procureur. They invariably emphasized the points unfavourable for the defence, and frequently summed up for the prosecution the testimony which seemed incriminating. They did not always seem to be attending to what was going on. They sometimes smoked cigarettes, though there were large printed notices, “ Smoking Strictly Prohibited,” hung round the walls.

The first witness was Smirnov, a weedy, hollow-chested youth of twenty-four, who described himself as an official of the Petrograd Soviet. He had been entrusted with the delicate and important work of closing the Catholic churches in Petrograd, and his testimony was a resume of the petty incidents recounted in the Act of Accusation. At the evening session, Smimov, questioned by several of the priests, contradicted himself, but Krylenko came to his rescue by attacking the priest who had dared to cross-examine the witness. The following is a verbatim report of this attack, which was afterwards repeated in the case of every other priest in the dock-:- “Krylenko: Did you teach religion to persons under age ? Priest: Yes, whenever I was asked to do so.

Krylenko: Did you not know that the Soviet Law forbids the teaching of religion to persons under 18 ?

Priest: If the parents or other authorized persons ask me to teach religion to children, I always do so. .Krylenko : Even if you know it is forbidden Priest : Yes.

Krylenko: Did you know of the Soviet decree of 1918 nationalizing Church property, and of the decree ordering sacred vessels to be confiscated for famine relief purposes ?

Priest: I did, in a general way. But there are other laws, those of God and of the Catholic Church. . . . And the law to teach religion is divine.

Krylenko : We care not about any other law. There is no law here but Soviet law. When that law comes into conflict with any other law, you must choose which you will obey.

Priest: I will obey the law of God and of my conscience. Krylenko (angrily) Your conscience does not interest me in the least.

Priest : But it is of very great importance to me. The Judge (severely, to the Priest) : Your conscience has nothing to do with this trial. (The Judge then reads from the Bolshevik Code the law forbidding religious teaching to minors, and, shutting the book, says, in a decisive tone, ‘ That is the law.’) Kryktako : Are you aware that all sermons must be submitted to the censor ? Have you ever preached in church without first submitting your sermons to the Government censor?

Priest :

Krylenko: Did you continue saying Mass after the Petrograd churches had been closed ?

Priest : Yes.

Krylenko: Where? When? Before whom Priest: Quite frequently. In my private room. Sometimes I said Mass in a deserted orphanage underneath my lodgings. There were, on such occasions, 100 or 150 present.”

There was no evidence brought forward to prove the charges of political propaganda. The priest charged with “falling demonstratively on his knees “ said that, as he could not prevent the confiscation of the sacred vessels. He knelt down to pray. “That was a counterrevolutionary act I “cried Krylenko sternly.

Next day one of the priests admitted to preventing the officials opening the Tabernacle. He said that the Host was in it at the time, but the judges could not under- stand him, and he had to explain at some length. Then the workman-judge hinted that the priest’s reluctance to allow an examination of the ciborium was due to the fact that, besides the consecrated Host, it contained jewelery. Father Chodniewicz, as this priest was called, explained what a sin it would be for a priest to allow the Host to be profaned, but Judge Galkin interrupted him by saying impatiently, " We don’t care how you sin against religion. Our only concern is whether you break or not the law of the Soviet.”

During Thursday, the second day of the trial, Monsignor Butkevich was questioned closely and with much hostility. It was evident that the prosecution had a particular animus against him as one of the leaders of the clergy, but the Monsignor pointed out that much of the evidence adduced against him was in reality against Archbishop Ropp, who was not in Russia. The court replied that it made no difference; both he and Ropp had advocated open hoitility to the Soviet Government. One of the charges was that the Catholics had been ordered by Archbishop Ropp to change their attitude from “ active “ to “ passive “ resistance; but Mgr. B. pointed out that, as was explained further on in the Polish document from which the judge was reading, the phrase “ active resistance “ meant the presenting of petitions to the Soviet authorities, the protesting in legal form, &c. The Prosecutor had then to admit that he had mistranslated the Polish text. On this and the next two days attempts were made to show that Mgr. B. had shown Polish tendencies and supported the Polish Govern- ment. Thus, a telegram signed by Ropp, Butkevich and Zielinsky, expressing satisfaction at the opening of the Polish Mission in Moscow, after the War, was described by Krylenko as a ease of criminal communi- cation with a Foreign Power, though obviously the telegram had no political meaning whatsoever. Ir charge was that Mgr. B. had received money from Poland. Mgr. B. did not deny this; on the contrary, he admitted that he had received much money from Poland for the support of Russian orphans rescued from the streets of Petrograd and placed in orphanages. Mgr. B. pointed out that he had added to these funds much of his own private fortune.

The first examination of the Archbishop was begun by Krylenko at ten on Thursday night, this late hour being selected by the Procureur because the principal prisoner, an old man, of nearly seventy, was obviously tired out after a long day of nervous tension. A tele- gram sent by the Archbishop to a priest in Jarolava .was first taken up. This telegram read :—" Illegal demand. Don’t present an inventory of the Church goods.” Krylenko declared it was a counterrevolutionary act, and the Archbishop said that, according to Canon Law, the demand was illegal. A circular letter which he sent to the faithful was cited as political pro- paganda, though it contained nothing but the soundest Christian teaching on the need of religious teaching for the young in these dark and unsettled days.

The judges were in favour of an adjournment, but Krylenko, a strong, well-fed man of forty-three or forty- four years of age, was for continuing, all the more because he saw how exhausted the Archbishop was, and probably expected to extract some valuable admission from him while in that state of semi-collapse. On the first day of the trial Krylenko had even proposed, at eleven p.m., that they should have some food and begin again at midnight, continuing all the night through. He himself has one of the finest houses in Moscow. The Archbishop, on the contrary, had to come a long way every day from the Butyrka Prison and to return to the Butyrka after the session had finished.

On Friday-, March 23^rd, a copy of the last edition of the new code of Canon Law was brought into court, and Krylenko asked the Archbishop which law he would obey. The Archbishop said that he would obey the law of God. Then Krylenko tried to prove that the prisoner had had political dealings with the Polish Government. !.` Do you depend on Warsaw ? “ asked Krylenko sud denly. “No; on Rome alone ! “ replied the other, quick as a flash. “ What, then, do you mean by this ? “shouted Krylenko, with an air of great triumph, waving a letter which Bolshevik spies had intercepted. .There was excitement in court. The Communists in the front seats grinned at one another knowingly. The sentries also grinned, thereby showing that their Com- racti masters take more care to teach them Marxism than the Tsar did to teach them Christianity. Then the judge took the letter and began:—" Polski Nunciatura, Warsaw. . . . “ going on to read the contents of a letter, not of any particular importance in itself, from the Apostolic Nuncio, Warsaw.

“ Archbishop: Not Polish’ but Apostolic’ Nuncio. The Apostolic Nuncio in Warsaw is an Italian, the diplomatic representative of His Holiness in Poland, and has nothing to do with Polish politics. Krylenko: Oh, not Polish, is he ? How did you manage to correspond with him ? Archbishop : M. Chicherin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, has kindly placed some of the facilities of his Commissariat at our disposal, for litters.”

This day a communication signed “ Ganetsky “ for M. Chicherin was read. It stated that the Riga Treaty, or at least those paragraphs in that Treaty which guaranteed religious freedom to Poles in Russia, was no longer valid because certain Orthodox Russians were being persecuted in Poland. The ironical nature of this argument will be _readily appreciated when one reflects on the merciless per- ractic of Orthodox clergy, culminating, in the trial of the Patriarch, now being conducted by the Soviet Govern- ment in Russia. The Exarch of the Uniate or Russo- Roman Church was likewise subjected this day to severe questioning as to his religious beliefs and activities. He made a spirited defence of his faith, and declared that no persecution could force him to violate the clear dictates of conscience. . — Saturday, March 24^th, the attack was concentrated on -Mgr. Butkevich. This priest, the only one who eventually met death, was a plump, fresh-coloured man of less than medium height, and a very calm delivery. In speaking, he used no gestures, hardly moving even his lips, and he spoke in a low voice, inaudible at the other end of the hall. The evidence produced during the trial had proved him to be a good man of business, as he required to be, having all the administration of a diocese extending over Russia, but it did not prove him to be dishonest or self-seeking or an intriguer.

At 6.10 p.m. on Saturday evening the Procureur began his final speech of accusation. It was a violent attack on religion in general and on the Catholic Church in particular. “ The Catholic Church,” he declared “ has always exploited the working classes.” When he demanded the Archbishop’s death, he said, “ All the Jesuitical duplicity with which you have defended yourself will not save you from the death penalty. No Pope in the Vatican can save you now.” He pronounced these words in a tone of horrible glee, and, when he demanded Mgr. Butkevich’s death, he repeated ominously, “ No Pope in the Vatican can save you.” As the long oration proceeded, the Red Procureur worked himself into a fury of anti-religious hatred :- “’Your religion,’ he yelled, ‘ I spit on it, as I do on all religions, on Orthodox, Jewish, Mohammedan, and the rest.’

‘ There is no law but the Soviet law,’ he yelled, at another stage, and by that law you must die.’ “

Some of those present, who were familiar with the New Testament, were strangely reminded by this last declara- tion of St. John (chapter xix. 7) :—" We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he made himself the Son of God.” Krylenko demanded the death sentence not only for the Archbishop and the Mgr., but also for four of the priests. “ For the Exarch Fedorov,” he said, “ I ask ten years’ imprisonment. He is judged not only for what he has done, but for what he can do.” What the Procureur meant by this is not clear. Perhaps he meant the Union of the Eastern and Western Churches, to which great work the Exarch has devoted his life. Fedorov was, in many respects, the most picturesque figure in the court. Among the shaven Roman priests, with their close-fitting soutanes and close-cropped hair, he seemed out of place with his flowing robes, long hair and long beard. A Russian of the Russians, born in Petrograd, he studied first in Switzerland and then for seven years in the Papal College at Rome.

The Procureur's yells for blood were greeted with loud applause by the Communists who packed the hall. Then the two lawyers for the defence made a courageous defence of the priests. The leading lawyer, Mr. Pushkin, of Petrograd, began by charging the Pro- cureur with violating one of the Soviet’s own laws by the ferocity he had shown in a court of justice ; but this only brought a smile to the faces of the judges and a sneer from Krylenko. Krylenko’s sneers and smiles were a horrible feature of the whole case. When Mgr. Butkevich was saying his last words before sentence, Krylenko could not forbear from smiling and jeering at him. During these speeches the audience showed some impatience at the death sentences not being pronounced and the thing finished with. A large camera was mounted on a tripod before the prisoners while they were saying their last words, and the judge did not order the photographer out of the building, for he was the official photo grapher. The crowd in the hall having become very large towards the end, the doors were opened to let in some fresh air, and with the fresh air floated in sounds of music and laughter from an adjoining hall, where a Saturday night entertainment and cabaret was in progress. The session ended at 1.10 a.m. on Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday, March 25^th.—At noon on Palm Sunday the court was convened. The Bolshevik newspapers had been publishing—most unfair accounts of the trial, accounts in which only the charges were mentioned, but never a word of the answers. The Pravda stated that one of the priests, when being arrested, had burned some -letters to a girl, though there was not a word about this in the evidence. Finally the priests were called upon to say their last words. The Bishop first rose, and in a calm and dignified voice denied that he had organized any political society for counter-revolutionary purposes. He protested that he, in common with all Catholics, gave ready obedience to the civil power in all things not manifestly in opposition to the divine law.

“I have done no wrong,” he said, “ to the Soviet Government, but have ever taught and practiced the same truths which the Catholic Church has taught and practiced for nearly two thousand years. That Church has never taught evil, but always good. Today I stand before temporal judges : tomorrow, perhaps, I may stand before the Eternal Judge; and my only prayer is that the temporal judges will be just and the Eternal Judge will be merciful.”

Monsignor Maletsky followed. He said that he was the son of a rich gentleman—a bold confession to make to a court which holds that a gentleman must necessarily be an exploiter of the poor; and he spoke with pride and with warm praise of the piety and uprightness of his father. He had been forty years a priest, and had spent all his life, all his force and all his private fortune on rescuing children from the streets and placing them in the orphanages he had founded.

Mgr. Butkevich gave, in his even tones, a complete refutation, one by one, of all the charges against him. Edward Yunevich, a young priest of twenty-five, made a very different kind of oration. He told of the promise of Bolshevism and of its failure. He described how glad he, a young Russian student—for he is a White Russian, not Polish—had been when he heard the shots which announced the downfall of the Tsar; but how soon and how completely he had been disillusioned. The Tsars had persecuted the Catholic Church, but the Bolsheviks were worse than the Tsars. He recounted the anti- religious activities of the Government and ended by saying, “ With joy I obeyed the summons to appear before the revolutionary tribunal and with joy I will go from hence. You cannot destroy the ideals and principles of my faith, for which I am ready to suffer imprisonment or to die.”

At exactly ten minutes past midnight the sentences were announced. The final scene will not soon be for- gotten by those who witnessed it. The few Polish women who had succeeded in gaining admission threw themselves on their knees with cries of horror and anguish that pierced the stillness of that cold night, and might well have pierced even the heart of Krylenko and the judges. The prisoners, who had, like everybody else, stood up to hear the sentence read, were quite un- moved  and hearing the shrieks of the women, the Archbishop turned towards them and raised his hand in a last episcopal benediction. Then the Red soldiers closed in around him and hurried him from the court while other Reds cleared the hall at the point of the bayonet. FRANCIS MCCULLAGH, New York Herald. (As found at: THE TRIAL OF ARCHBISHOP CIEPLAK AND THE PETROGRAD CLERGY.)

“There is no law but Soviet law, and by that law you shall die.”

Although intense international pressure spared the life of Archbishop Cieplak and spent much time lecturing in the United States of America before he died in Poland in 1926, Monsignor Butkevich was shot in the head by Bolshevik goons on March 31, 1923.

Don’t kid yourselves. This sort of treatment of supposed “traitors of the homeland” and “thought criminals” is coming here much, much sooner than later:

According to an explosive document newly uncovered by a Federal Bureau of Investigation whistleblower, the FBI’s Richmond office repeatedly cited the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center in an intelligence bulletin, violating longstanding FBI guidelines on the SPLC’s credibility.

“We got briefings that SPLC was not legitimate when I was at Quantico,” Kyle Seraphin, who served six years at the FBI as a special agent before getting indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Wednesday. Seraphin published the document on UncoverDC.com Wednesday.

The document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” bears markings reading “UNCLASSIFIED/FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY” and “FBI INTERNAL USE ONLY — DO NOT DISSEMINATE EXTERNALLY.”

“In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship,” the document states.

The document claims “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semtic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

The FBI Richmond document does not hide its sourcing for information about “radical-traditionalist Catholics.” In a “perspective” note, the document states, “As of 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified nine RTC hate groups operating in the United States.”

The document, dated Jan. 23, 2023, includes an appendix with a complete list of organizations the SPLC brands “radical traditional Catholic hate groups,” without any note that the SPLC’s “hate group” accusations have faced severe criticism and without any note about reaching out to the organizations for comment about the claim.

As I explain in my book Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents.

After the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former staffer claimed that the SPLC’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking northern liberals.” Critics across the political spectrum have voiced opposition and alarm at the organization’s “hate group” smears.

In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council’s headquarters in the nation’s capital, entering the lobby with a semiautomatic pistol and then shooting and wounding a guard. The man told the FBI that he found the conservative organization on the SPLC’s “hate map” and intended to kill everyone in the building.

The man later pleaded guilty to committing an act of terror and received a 25-year prison sentence. The SPLC condemned the attack, but has kept the Family Research Council on its “hate map” ever since.

Using the SPLC in this manner violates longstanding FBI practices, according to  target George Hill, whose 11 years at the bureau included a stint as a supervisory intelligence analyst. Among other things, he supervised the reports regarding the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013.

Hill told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Wednesday that one of his “primary roles” was “the editing and approval process of the various intelligence products. There are a very strict group of guildelines that come from the Directorate of Intelligence. The product in question here is an intelligence bulletin, which is primarily designed in this particular case for distribution to bureau only personnel.”

He said he would call the report “poorly sourced from sources who use unsubstantiated data to draw their own conclusions and not in compliance with FBI publication guidelines.”

Hill noted that the Directorate of Intelligence released guidelines barring analysts from relying on the SPLC. “They would have had to either change the guidelines since I left that you can now use the SPLC or the author and their supervisor who approved the final document knowingly violated the Directorate of Intelligence guidelines.”

He said the directorate excluded the SPLC from reports because “there was no analytical rigor or basis for the majority of their assertions that they would write about on their website.” He noted that the SPLC “publishes a lot of information about Asian hate crime,” but that it does not mention FBI statistics that most anti-Asian hate crimes are perpetrated by black Americans. Such a fact would be inconvenient for the SPLC’s narrative about white supremacy, he noted.

Steve Friend, a former SWAT team member who worked at the FBI for eight years before getting indefinitely suspended last September, also faulted the FBI for the document.

“It is clear that the FBI is failing to utilize counterbalancing sources of information it its efforts to generate intelligence products,” Friend told The Daily Signal. “Relying solely on sources such as SPLC, The Atlantic, and Salon demonstrates the FBI is beginning with a predetermined conclusion to target traditionally conservative Americans for undue scrutiny and persecution.”

“In this case, the FBI sought to target individuals holding pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and pro-border enforcement political opinions,” he noted. “Although many religious sects share these worldviews, the FBI placed the Catholic Church in the crosshairs in order to prop up a false political narrative about a rising threat of domestic terrorism.”

Seraphin, the whistleblower who published the document, told The Daily Signal that the “SPLC is not an appropriate source,” and that if a document were to cite Salon—as this document does—it would also need to cite another “source on the other side.”

When it comes to the SPLC, “a real intelligence product would quote that and say, ‘unsubstantiated.'”

Seraphin noted that there are 70 million Catholics in the U.S. and said, “this should get their blood boiling.”

“They’re literally opening the door to targeting any other Christian faith,” with this report, he warned.

The SPLC claims it does not brand Christian organizations “hate groups” merely because they oppose same-sex marriage, but many of its accusations boil down to a disagreement on LGBT issues. The SPLC branded the Ruth Institute an “anti-LGBT hate group” in part because its founder, Jennifer Roback Morse, called homosexual activity “intrinsically disordered,” pulling a direct quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Seraphin noted that such a bias “feels predictable at this point,” coming after “the FBI’s attacks on pro-life groups, the way that they were doing enforcement of the FACE Act in the latter half of 2022.” He cited the numerous unsolved cases of firebombings and vandalism atcrisis pregnancy centers since the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year.

The former FBI agent said that trend, along with this report “shows an ideological bent” that is “pervasive at this point.”

FBI Richmond directed The Daily Signal to the public affairs office for the national FBI. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (www.dailysignal.com/2023/02/08/whistleblower-docs-fbi-cites-southern-pov....)

Although the internal memorandum of the Richmond, Virginia, field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been “withdrawn,” it is plain the day is coming when Soviet/Red Chinese/Nicaraguan/Cuban show trials are coming for believing Catholics right here in the “free” United States of America no matter where they might fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical spectrum at this time of apostasy and betrayal, much to the utter delight of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and those of his “bishops” who share his contempt for authentic Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals. (For his wretched part, of course, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who never lacked for words when condemning the efforts of the Trump administration to enforce existing immigration laws, has simply called for “dialogue” in the cases of Joseph “Cardinal” Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong and “Bishop” Rolando Álvarez Lagos of Matagalpa, Nicaragua. See Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian, part one, Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian, part two, Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" With Diocletian, part three, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian, part four.)

We should be neither surprised nor shocked that Federal law enforcement agencies and even some branches of the United States armed forces use the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” list either as a means to “mitigate threats” or to warn others to have nothing to do with such “hate groups.” A world that rejects the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the authority of His true Church to exercise that Kingship in all that pertains to the good of souls is one that must perforce be a slave to the adversary, who has become so bold as to make use of the American concept of “religious liberty” to be worshiped and glorified openly in public events and by the placement of statues in his darkened honor.

Christophobic organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center believe that among the greatest "threats" to adherents of the blasphemous Talmud are what its leaders and writers refer to as "radical traditional Catholics," that it is, those of us who hold to the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church that Judaism is a dead, superseded religion that has the power to save no one and that has been used by the devil as a means of promoting incessant warfare against the Social Reign of Christ the King and thus against the very foundation of all social order. The only “safe” Catholics for such organizations are those who adhere to the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s “reconciliation” with the “principles inaugurated in 1789,” to call to mind Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger’s words in his misnamed Principles of Catholic Theology, and are thus at peace the “world” and its false currents. Alas, a Catholicism that is at peace with the world is no kind of Catholicism at all.

The Christophobic zealots of the Southern Poverty Law Center  have gone so far as to lump "radical traditional Catholics" as being fellow travelers with various "white nationalist," "white advocacy" and truly anti-Semitic organizations when the actual truth is that a believing Catholic rejects all forms of racialism and racial "advocacy" as he understands that every human being is made in the very image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and has an immortal soul that has been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Christ the King. We are to see His very image in every human being, no matter their skin color or ethnicity or nationality, and to treat them in the exact same manner as we would treat Our Lord Himself in the very Flesh:

[6] For which things the wrath of God cometh upon the children of unbelief, [7] In which you also walked some time, when you lived in them. [8] But now put you also all away: anger, indignation, malice, blasphemy, filthy speech out of your mouth. [9] Lie not one to another: stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds, [10] And putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him.

Supposing that anyone who has been included by the Southern Poverty Law Center as heading a "hate group" must be a "white superemacist," a man representing a conference on "white advocacy" wrote to me thirty-seven months ago now to speak at a conference in Indiana. This is what I wrote to him by way of response as I rejected the invitation out of hand:

I must reject without equivocation your invitation.

Please note that I am not interested in any further invitations.

Please note also these words of Pope Pius XI, contained in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, that I append below.

The Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, as It is lifted high by His Catholic Church unites men of all races as they strive for personal sanctity as the consecrated slaves of Our King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Sincerely yours in Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen,

Thomas A. Droleskey, Ph.D.
Publisher-Editor
www.christorchaos.com

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community -- however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things -- whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.

This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.

None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah xI, 15). (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)  

As Catholics, my friends, we know that God does not judge us on the basis of the race or ethnicity. Our immortal souls is made unto His own very image and likeness in that we have a rational soul with an intellect to know Him and a will to choose with which to love and to serve Him. Human beings do not love God as "blacks" or as "whites" or as "Latinos or Latinas" or as "Orientals" or as "Native Americans" or as "Italians" or as "Croatians" or as "French" or as "Americans" but as creatures whose immortal souls have been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Human beings are called upon to love God as He has revealed Himself to them through His true Church, the Catholic Church, and to love their own immortal souls as they have been redeemed at so great a cost. Our principal identity as human beings is as members of the Catholic Church. Everything else about us (race, ethnicity, nationality, gender), although occurring certainly within the Providence of God, is secondary.

As I tried to explain to students during my days as a college professor, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ embraced all of the legitimate joys and sorrows of this passing, mortal vale of tears as He underwent His fearful Passion and Death. We suffer or experience joy as human beings, as redeemed creatures, not as mere animals identifiable by external characteristics. There are no such things as "black" tears or "white" tears or "Indian" tears. There is no such thing as "white" joy or "black" joy" or "Latino" joy. The use of the "race" or "ethnicity" or "gender" card is the refuge of cowardly scoundrels who seek privilege and/or to indemnify slothful or corrupt behavior.

We are to see in each person the very impress of the Divine Redeemer and to treat Him accordingly, rendering unto each person that which is his due. We are to discriminate unjustly (we must discriminate justly in many circumstances of our lives as we choose which merchant to patronize, which person to employ, who to admit to a seat in a college or a professional school, to deny employment or privileges to those steeped in public scandal, etc.) against no one nor must we use the external characteristics of a human being to extend privileges that are undeserving and/or would result in an injustice to someone else.

Human beings are supposed to be bound together by the common bonds of the Catholic Faith, not to break into warring tribes along ethnic or racial or geographic lines, seething with hatred and resentment at those who have "more" (power, money, fame, prestige, accomplishment) than they do. We are to help each other get home to Heaven as members of the Catholic Church who aspire to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins, fulfilling these words of Saint Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians as we seek to build up each other as members of the Mystical Body of Christ on earth: 

We are to be bound together by the common bonds of the Catholic Faith. We advocate Christ the King and deep devotion to His Most Blessed Mother, nothing else.

Such advocacy, of course, has always been a threat to the forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil, which is why civil potentates from the time of Nero in 67 A.D, to Trajan, Domitian, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Georges Danton, Maximilian Robespierre, the scions of the Italian Risorgimento, Otto von Bismarck, Vladimir I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and Xi Jinping, among so many thousands of other forgettable minions of the adversary, including the current lords, both elected and unelected, of Modernity in the “civilized” West today have considered any expression of the Holy Faith by believing Catholics to be threats to their own political, cultural, legal, educational, and societal hegemony.

As Pope Leo XIII explained in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, believing Catholics have never posed any kind of threat to a just social order despite the gratuitous, self-serving claims of the pagan Romans of antiquity and the scions of the Enlightenment and Judeo-Masonry in the Eighteenth Century to the contrary:

The Catholic Church, that imperishable handiwork of our all-merciful God, has for her immediate and natural purpose the saving of souls and securing our happiness in heaven. Yet, in regard to things temporal, she is the source of benefits as manifold and great as if the chief end of her existence were to ensure the prospering of our earthly life. And, indeed, wherever the Church has set her foot she has straightway changed the face of things, and has attempered the moral tone of the people with a new civilization and with virtues before unknown. All nations which have yielded to her sway have become eminent by their gentleness, their sense of justice, and the glory of their high deeds.

2. And yet a hackneyed reproach of old date is leveled against her, that the Church is opposed to the rightful aims of the civil government, and is wholly unable to afford help in spreading that welfare and progress which justly and naturally are sought after by every well-regulated State. From the very beginning Christians were harassed by slanderous accusations of this nature, and on that account were held up to hatred and execration, for being (so they were called) enemies of the Empire. The Christian religion was moreover commonly charged with being the cause of the calamities that so frequently befell the State, whereas, in very truth, just punishment was being awarded to guilty nations by an avenging God. This odious calumny, with most valid reason, nerved the genius and sharpened the pen of St. Augustine, who, notably in his treatise, “The City of God,” set forth in so bright a light the worth of Christian wisdom in its relation to the public wealth that he seems not merely to have pleaded the cause of the Christians of his day, but to have refuted for all future times impeachments so grossly contrary to truth. The wicked proneness, however, to levy like charges and accusations has not been lulled to rest. Many, indeed, are they who have tried to work out a plan of civil society based on doctrines other than those approved by the Catholic Church. Nay, in these latter days a novel conception of law has begun here and there to gain increase and influence, the outcome, as it is maintained, of an age arrived at full stature, and the result of progressive liberty. But, though endeavors of various kinds have been ventured on, it is clear that no better mode has been devised for the building up and ruling the State than that which is the necessary growth of the teachings of the Gospel. We deem it, therefore, of the highest moment, and a strict duty of Our apostolic office, to contrast with the lessons taught by Christ the novel theories now advanced touching the State. By this means We cherish hope that the bright shining of the truth may scatter the mists of error and doubt, so that one and all may see clearly the imperious law of life which they are bound to follow and obey. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

This what is happening here and now in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world. The Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the subsequent rise and triumph, albeit temporary, of Judeo-Masonry cannot be stopped by means merely natural. We are being chastised for our sins, our lukewarmness, our lack of fidelity to our prayers, and our constant compromises with worldliness. It is thus necessary to be fortified by the armor of the Holy Faith by doing penance for our sins and praying for our own daily conversion as well as that of all others without fearing the powers of the civil state as our battle is not with them but with the principalities and powers of the lower world:

Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high place. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace:

In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God). By all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the spirit; and in the same watching with all instance and supplication for all the saints. (Ephesians 6: 11-18.)

We just have to be about the business each day of pleasing God as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church, seeking, wherever possible, to get to true offerings of Holy Mass by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism, spending time in prayer before Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, praying to our Guardian Angels, who behold the very Beatific Vision of the Most Blessed Trinity as they serve us here on earth, to help us keep aware of the Divine Presence at all times, praying to Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, to help us see the Providence of God in all of the events of our lives, recognizing that our lives could be demanded of us this night (cf. Luke 12: 20: " But God said to him: Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee: and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?").

The devil and his minions are spying on us every day to find ways to trap us into losing our souls.

A Grand American Tradition: Fear of Catholicism

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s stigmatizing of “radical traditional Catholics” and the Federal government’s blithe acceptance of such stigmatizing, is really nothing new.

As the purpose of this website is to focus on root causes, it is very important to remember the series of events that have brought us to this moment wherein the work of Catholics, many of whom disagree with each other on various points, is deemed to be a source of possible “domestic terror.”

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

Anti-Catholicism existed in the American colonies of the British Empire, and it was fear of Catholicism in the 1770s that some of the men who came the founders of the United States of America believed that the Quebec Act represented a mortal blow to “liberty.”

Robert Leckie described the flames of hatred that were fanned by anti-Catholic propagandists in the colonies in the immediate aftermath of the Quebec Act: 

This piece of legislation had not only confirmed the French in the free exercise of their religion and the practice of their native law, it had also granted the Quebec government those lands in the west which the English colonies claimed. Now, the colonists fancied themselves surrounded by French-speaking Catholics, the old enemy of former years, and their rage was so unbounded that on October 21, 1774, the [First] Continental Congress addressed a letter to the British people admonishing them for tolerating in America a religion which “has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.”  

One again, it was popular to quote Samuel Adams, who had said six years earlier [that is, in 1768]: “I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of popery in America, than from the Stamp Act or any other acts destructive of civil rights. . . .” Once again, the popular press picked up the old anti-Catholic cudgels, and one journal went so far as to predict: “We may live to see our churches converted into mass houses and our lands plundered by tythes for the support of the Popish clergy. The Inquisition may erect her standard in Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia may yet experience the carnage of St. Bartholomew’s Day.” Others, misrepresenting the truth of the Quebec Act, insisted that it actually established Romanism as an official religion, and warned: ‘If Gallic Papists have a right To worship their own way Then farewell to the liberties Of poor America.’  

Ministers, of course, were in full voice once more, but so also were John Adams, apparently recovered from his momentary lapse into tolerance, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, the inevitable Samuel Adams, and none other than Washington’s protégé and confidante, Alexander Hamilton, who thundered: “If [Parliament] had any regard to the freedom and happiness of mankind they would not have done it. If they had been friends to the Protestant cause, they would never have provided such a nursery for its greatest enemy . . . They may as well establish Popery in New York and the other colonies as they did in Canada!”  

More than the Stamp Act, perhaps more than any other act by Parliament or any British minister, the Quebec Act was a direct cause of the American Revolution. It so inflamed colonial hatred of the mother country that even that staunch and solid Protestant, King George III, was accused of being a Jesuit in disguise, and his statues, from which the rebels later were to melt so many serviceable bullets, were adored with mocking rosaries.

Meanwhile, patriots such as Paul Revere did a brisk business in scurrilous engravings which depicted His Majesty and his Ministers clothed in the livery of the Pope of Rome. To the Catholics of colonial America–who actually represented no more than 1 per cent of the total population of three million persons–it appeared that it was time to pull tight the shutters again, and it was this furor of anti-Catholic sentiment that rose about the ears of Father John Carroll when he returned to his native Maryland in 1774. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 45-47.)

Look at those names. John Adams. Samuel Adams. Alexander Hamilton. Paul Revere. These are not men to admire. They hated Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church, she who is the one and only means of personal salvation and social order.  

They had little to fear, however. Eager to be accepted by their fellow colonists, the leading Catholics of the colonies did not want to convert them to Catholicism. They simply desired the “freedom” to practice their Faith without persecution which is the only thing that the Quebec Act had guaranteed French Catholics in Quebec. Indeed, one could say that the Quebec Act was an incubator of the heresy of “religious liberty” just as much as had been the approach taken by the first Catholics who had arrived in Maryland in 1634 and the pragmatic tack taken by William Penn, who was no friend of Catholicism, in the Colony of Pennsylvania.  

Caught in the Devil’s Trap

To be sure, Catholics in the colonies, few in number though they were in the eighth decade of the Eighteenth Century, were in a very untenable situation. Indeed, they were in a trap that had been laid for them by the devil, finding themselves torn in a situation where they were not being killed, as had been the case for so long in England, but were still a hated minority in the land where some of their ancestors had lived for over one hundred forty years. A very small number of Catholics remained loyal to the British Crown as the first shots in the Revolutionary War were fired in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. Most Catholics, however, were to be found on the side of the self- styled “patriots,” that is, colonists who desired to break from the mother country, Great Britain.  

The “religious liberty” desired by Catholics came at quite a price: their fidelity to the Social Teaching of Holy Mother Church. There was never a time in the one hundred eighty-six years between the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the “Second” Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, that the American “bishops” sought to teach the necessity of converting their land to the true Faith. To do so, obviously, would be to jeopardize their own acceptance and to disturb civil peace, they believed. Rather than seek to convert their fellow countrymen to the true Faith, the American bishops presided over the conversion of their fellow Catholics to the “republican spirit” of “freedom” and “democracy” and “independent thinking” that would lead most Catholics in the United States of America to come to view Holy Mother Church over the course of time through the lens of republicanism, “freedom” and “democracy.”

Such a spirit of independence from Roman “interference” had developed amongst Catholics in the colonies that Father John Carroll defied Bishop Richard Challoner (after whom the Challoner Douay-Rheims Bible is named)after he had been assigned to oversee the dismantling of the Society of Jesus following its suppression by Pope Clement XIV on July 21, 1773:  

Although shocked by the enmity which passage of the Quebec Act had unleashed against his faith, Father Carroll nevertheless sided with the Patriots in their dispute with England. He proudly followed the career of his famous cousin, Charles, sympathizing with his republican convictions and becoming so independence-minded himself that he refused his obedience to Father John Lewis, acting as Bishop Challoner’s vicar-general. By this act, like so many of his fellow priests in America, he made it clear that he had no wish to submit to ecclesiastical authority based in England. Nevertheless, John Carroll was far from enthusiastic when his cousin Charles approached him with the astounding invitation to help win the Catholics of Canada to the Patriot cause (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, p. 48.)  

Anti-Catholics though the leading colonists may have been, they were also as pragmatic as their British overlords. Some of those leading colonists believed that a way could be found to win over Catholics to the “patriot” cause, an invitation that suited the purposes of the Carrolls of Maryland in order to win acceptance and thus general “tolerance” for their co-religionists in each of the colonies when they became states in an independent United States of America.  

The late Mrs. Solange Hertz described the Masonic background of Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who had enlisted his cousin, Father John Carroll, to accompany the libertine Freemason Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase on a mission to Canada to win over the very people who had been the object of such hatred after the Quebec Act to the cause of American independence:

Charles Carroll, born in Annapolis in 1737, had become very active politically on completing his education abroad. He served 23 years in the Maryland legislature as well as in the U.S. Senate until it became illegal to hold both offices simultaneously. At the t i m e of the Revolution he was probably the richest man in America, owning some 80,000 acres in Maryland alone. Enjoying a reputation as a somewhat eccentric, but affable money-grubber, he was invaluable in managing the finances of the Continental Army. It has been pointed out that he stood most to lose should the Revolution fail: “There go a few millions!” exclaimed one onlooker who watched him sign the Declaration of Independence. But this was to lose sight of the fact that he also stood the most to gain if the Revolution succeeded and English taxes thereby abolished. His gamble paid off gloriously.  

He was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration, whose language a true son of the Church would have held under the deepest suspicion. Although he never denied the Faith and was sober and disciplined in his personal habits, he was not noted for any outbursts of piety. His birth may have been illegitimate, inasmuch as his parents’ marriage certificate bears a date some twenty years after he was born. His wife died young, a victim of opiates, and he never re-married. All his children died out of the Church, his only son Charles of Homewood renouncing the Faith, taking to drink and never holding any position worth mentioning.  

The Masonic builders of liberty had the utmost confidence in Charles Carroll. He not only helped win Maryland to the Articles of Confederation and later to the hotly resisted Constitution, but through his connections abroad, smoothed Franklin’s path in Paris to seal the French Alliance whereby France threw her weight against the English king. In February 1776 the Continental Congress resolved “that a committee of three–two of whom to be members of Congress–to be appointed to repair to Canada, there to pursue such instructions as shall be given them by that body.” Those named were the dean of American Masonry, Benjamin Franklin, together with the Maryland Protestant Samuel

Chase–and Charles Carroll. This despite the fact that he was only an observer at the

Congress, Catholics being barred from serving as delegates. (Solange Hertz, The Star Spangled Heresy: Americanism: How the Catholic Church in America Became the American Catholic Church, Veritas Press: Santa Monica, California, 1992, pp. 36-37.)  

The mission to Quebec that Father John Carroll undertook with his cousin, a Master Mason, and the chief of the Masons in the English colonies, Benjamin Franklin, began the official co-opting of leading Catholics by men who had no use for the Faith other than to use Its adherents for their purposes of promoting the “new science of politics” represented by their false ideas. This is not an exaggeration. Leading American “patriots” sought to do this very explicitly, something that Robert Leckie demonstrated (without understanding that he was doing so) in American and Catholic:  

After its first outburst against the Quebec Act, Congress [the First Continental Congress] had second thoughts about Canada. On the very same day that it had excoriated King George for tolerating in America a religion which “has deluged your land in blood,” they addressed a quite dissimilar letter to the people of Quebec, inviting them to join the fight against tyranny and declaring:  

We are too well acquainted with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation, to imagine, that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us. You know, that the transcendent nature of freedom elevates those, who unite in her cause, above all such-low minded infirmities.  

The Canadians, however, were also “too well-acquainted” with the true religious sentiments of the Protestants to the south, and they angrily spurned the overtures of what they called “the perfidious Congress.” Moreover, Bishop [Jean-Oliver] Briand of Quebec deeply distrusted the Americans, and forbade any of his flock to join them under penalty of excommunication. Thus, Canada remained loyal to the British crown, and in 1775 Congress, despairing of diplomacy, authorized a two-pronged military assault on Montreal and Quebec under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold. Although this expedition ultimately ended in failure, Congress flip- flopped back to diplomacy again. Already aware that the traditional American hatred of Catholicism was going to have to be muted during the war against England, it authorized a diplomatic mission to Canada charged with impressing upon the Canadians its new-found tolerance of Popery. Benjamin Franklin was the obvious choice to lead the embassy, along with Samuel Chase, known to have Catholic friends, and the Catholic Charles Carroll. A few weeks later the British-born

General Charles Lee wrote to his friend John Hancock: “I should think that if some Jesuit or Religieuse or any other Order (he must be a man of liberal sentiments, enlarged mind and a manifest friend of Civil Liberty) could be found out and sent to Canada, he would be worth battalions to us.” The same idea had occurred to John Adams, who wrote to a friend: “We have empowered the Committee to take with them, another gentleman of Maryland, a Mr. John Carroll, a Roman Catholic priest, and a Jesuit, a gentleman of learning and Abilities.” Obviously, John Adams, could he swallow his hatred of priests, and especially Jesuits, to the extent that he could praise one, Catholicism was once again in good odor in Philadelphia. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 48-49.)  

Only a corrupted version of Catholicism displays “liberal sentiments” with an “enlarged mind” and is a “manifest friend” of “Civil Liberty.” In other words, the Catholicism desired by Charles Lee and his fellow anti-Catholics was a “safe Catholicism.” Although it took much time and many struggles of one sort or another, the “safe,” “acceptable” brand of Catholicism that emerged after the Revolutionary War was a prophetic harbinger of the “safe Catholicism” that now exists in the entire world. It is called the counterfeit church of conciliarism that most people in the world believe is the Catholic Church but is in fact her counterfeit ape.  

It was on that mission to Quebec in 1774 that the colonial elite began to realize that they could neutralize “popery” by extending leading “papists” some baubles of recognition, thus convincing them that they could all live together in peace and brotherhood while they, the Catholics, surrendered any claim to seek the conversion of the country to the true Faith. Furthermore, the colonial elite believed that the Catholics could be convinced to “stand up” to any kind of “Roman interference” in their “internal affairs” in an independent American nation the way that they were standing up to King George III and the military might of the British Empire.  

It was a year after the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Revolutionary War and resulted in concessions by England to France and Spain that Father John Carroll was selected to be the de facto superior of the approximately 25,000 Catholics who lived in the new country, the United States of America. Benjamin Franklin personally recommended his old friend from the Quebec mission to Pope Pius VI’s papal nuncio to France for the position. Some of the American priests, having worked for so long without a superior, were resentful at the mere notion of the sudden appearance of a hierarchy, no less one established by “Rome.” Father Carroll himself was so concerned about the appearance of “foreign interference” that he wrote to Leonardo Cardinal Antonelli, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith from May 2, 1780, to June 25, 1784, to request him to phrase his appointment in such a way so that Protestants would not be frightened:  

In the official letter to Carroll, Cardinal Antontelli confirms that he was chosen because “it is known that your appointment will please and gratify many members of that republic, and especially Mr. Franklin, the eminent individual who represents that republic at the court of the Most Christian King [Louis XVI of France]. Accepting the appointment, Carroll urged the Cardinal to find some method whereby in future it would not appear that the American Church was receiving its authority from a foreign power! He had petitioned the Pope not to leave American Catholics under the jurisdiction of their prelate in England, alleging that this could not be done “without open offense at this supreme magistracy and political government.” (Solange Hertz, The Spar Spangled Heresy: Americanism: How the Catholic Church in America Became the American Catholic Church, Veritas Press: Santa Monica, California, 1992, p. 38.)

Father John Carroll was sincerely concerned about the growth of the Faith in the United States of America. He simply believed that a way could be found to do this without appearing to threaten the Protestants, many of whom are now themselves the victims of the “religious liberty” that their American forefathers championed even though such “liberty” was broad enough for atheism and even open worship of the adversary, something that we see so clearly today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is even truer today than it was one hundred years, three months ago.

From Overt Hostility to Upward Mobility Through the Democratic Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He ended on a pleading note:

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

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

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

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

The Author of our being has stamped in the human breast a love for one's country and therefore patriotism is a sentiment commended by Almighty God Himself. Let us glory in the title of American citizen. We owe our allegiance to one country, and that country is America. We must be in harmony with our political institutions. It matters not whether this is the land of our birth or our adoption. It is the land of our destiny. delivered a speech that he intended as a coup de grace to Germanizers. Ireland had won metropolitan status for his see city thanks to Denis O'Connell's effort in Rome. And the Americanist heresy was preparing to move to a wider stage at the Chicago World's Fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few, if any, heeded the Holy Father's warnings. They redoubled their efforts, with immediately dire consequences for Denis O'Connell and John Keane. O'Connell fell first when, in the summer of 1895, he was removed as rector of the North American College. His cohorts unsuccessfully defended him, although Gibbons did succeed in keeping him in Rome as rector of the Cardinal's titular church. From this vantage point O'Connell became "a kind of liason officer of the American hierarchy, and more particularly its left wing" until he returned to the United States in 1903.Catholic liberals claim that "the suppositious liberalism of the Catholic University" was responsible for the dismissal in 1896 of John J. Keane. In fact the liberalism of neither the CUA nor its rector was "suppositious." As the California Volksfreund noted, "It was clear enough from the beginning that Americanism was interwoven with the plan for the...University." This newspaper called instead for something that Keane could never provide: "a Catholic University with Catholic professors [where] the doctrine of the Catholic, and not of an American Church, is taught." (Heresy Blossoms Like a Rose.)

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

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

But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state. (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolical Letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold the "fruit" of this accommodation.

Behold the audacity of the likes of United States Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has branded parents as “domestic terrorists” for expression their opposition to the “woke” curricula being imposed upon children who are unfortunate enough to be enrolled in the American system of ideological indoctrination called “public schools” and who has persecuted—unsuccessfully, it should be noted—pro-life advocate Mark Houck for defending his child against the profane rants of a abortion mill “escort” (see Fear Not Those Who Can Destroy the Body, Fear Not the Likes of Merrick Garland), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in believing that those who dissent from their “infallible” programs represent “threats” to domestic order even though none of those “radical Catholics” listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s infamous “hate group” list hates anyone and has never advocated violence of any kind upon anyone for any reason.

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

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

However, Catholics cannot ignore false premises promoted by the founders, some of whom hated Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church with a fanatical intensity, or to believe that it might be possible, somehow, to produce the “better” society as men sin wantonly. (A review of the efforts by the administrations of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, George Walker Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetro tointimidate pro-life Americans can be found in Appendix E.)

A Return to Open Hostility Against Believing Catholics

The false, anti-Incarnational, naturalistic premises of the American founding have now boomeranged to produce a return to the open hostility against believing Catholics that existed within the English colonies along the Eastern seaboard of what is now the United States of America and that persisted in many regions of country well into the Twentieth Century is at the heart of the current attacks being waged by the Southern Poverty Law Center and its fawning admirers within the nooks and crannies of the Federal government and within academe, healthcare, finance, commerce, “entertainment” (from hell, that is), the administrators of professional sports leagues, “journalism,”  and the legal profession.

Although I am sure that those associated with the other “hate groups” named by the Southern Poverty Law Center will issue their own statements if they have not done so already (I do not scour the internet to review most other Catholic websites as my time is limited), permit me to explain the work of this website to those who may be viewing it for the first time in light of the recent spate of news stories.

First, why is this site entitled Christ or Chaos?

The title of this site, which was suggested to me in 1996 by a man, now a former friend of over two decades’ standing, who was instrumental in formatting the eponymous print journal that was in existence from September of 1996 to the time that this site was launched nineteen years ago on February 20, 2004.

The title comes from a phrase used by the then Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen in his old, Old Errors, New Labels, which was published in 1931 and whose words are more relevant today than they were ninety-two years ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability. . . .

Can the truths of God be less exacting than the truths of mathematics? Can the laws of the mind be less binding than the laws of science, which are known only through the laws of the mind? Shall man, gifted with natural truth, who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on the mathematician who says two and two make five and the one who says two and two make four, be called a wise man, and shall God, Who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on all religions, be denied the name of ʺWisdom,ʺ and be called an ʺintolerantʺ God?…

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

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

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

The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon [see 3 Kings 3:16-28]. Both of them claimed a child. The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth — it cannot be divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise. She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broad‐mindedness. (Monsignor Fulton Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels. New York, New York, The Century Company, 1931. Although I have the book itself, this excerpt was taken from www.novusordowatch.org/wire/year-of-condemnation-02.htm">http://www.novusordowatch.org/wire/year-of-condemnation-02.htm">Novus Ordo Watch Wire.)

Although the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was always very sanguine about the efforts of the government to curb alleged “misinformation” during wartime and did not realize the extent to which Americans were programmed by sophisticated psychological conditioning to believe the government’s rationale for entering the needless and immoral European war among peoples whose not-so-distant relatives constituted Christendom for over a millennium (see Randy Engel, https://akacatholic.com/covid-19-and-the-art-of-brainwashing-part-i/">Covid-19 and the Art of Brainwashing – Part I), he was, of course, entirely correct about the hypocrisy of the “broadminded” who are closed to the truth because they are must soothe any lingering feelings of guilt engendered by their embrace of evils that bring ruin on men and their societies.

Thus, my work on both the printed and online versions of Christ or Chaos since 1996 (and even before that in my college teaching career, which ran from January of 1974 to January of 2007 with a brief reprise in the Fall of 2014—see "The Students Expect to Get About a B") has sought to explain that Catholicism is the necessary precondition for both personal salvation and social order. While Catholicism can never be an absolute guarantor of social order as human nature remains wounded by the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin in the souls of the baptized and by the effects of Original Sin in the souls of the unbaptized, the true Faith is the necessary means by which men have a realistic possibility of ordering their lives, both personally and socially, in light of First and Last Things as they seek to live always in the shadow of the Holy Cross of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King.

Second, some may object that is presumptuous to claim that there is one true religion and that that true religion is Catholicism and nothing else.

To this objection, I reply with the following explanation provided by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, and that of Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi, June 29, 1943:

Now, it cannot be difficult to find out which is the true religion, if only it be sought with an earnest and unbiased mind; for proofs are abundant and striking. We have, for example, the fulfillment of prophecies, miracles in great numbers, the rapid spread of the faith in the midst of enemies and in face of overwhelming obstacles, the witness of the martyrs, and the like. From all these it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate.

8. For the only-begotten Son of God established on earth a society which is called the Church, and to it He handed over the exalted and divine office which He had received from His Father, to be continued through the ages to come. “As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you.” “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” Consequently, as Jesus Christ came into the world that men “might have life and have it more abundantly,” so also has the Church for its aim and end the eternal salvation of souls, and hence it is so constituted as to open wide its arms to all mankind, unhampered by any limit of either time or place. “Preach ye the Gospel to every creature.”^[8]

9. Over this mighty multitude God has Himself set rulers with power to govern, and He has willed that one should be the head of all, and the chief and unerring teacher of truth, to whom He has given “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”^[9] “Feed My lambs, feed My sheep.”^[10] “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not.”

10. This society is made up of men, just as civil society is, and yet is supernatural and spiritual, on account of the end for which it was founded, and of the means by which it aims at attaining that end. Hence, it is distinguished and differs from civil society, and, what is of highest moment, it is a society chartered as of right divine, perfect in its nature and in its title, to possess in itself and by itself, through the will and loving kindness of its Founder, all needful provision for its maintenance and action. And just as the end at which the Church aims is by far the noblest of ends, so is its authority the most exalted of all authority, nor can it be looked upon as inferior to the civil power, or in any manner dependent upon it. . . .

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.

32. So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from life, from laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

If we would define and describe this true Church of Jesus Christ — which is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church — we shall find nothing more noble, morre sublime, or more divine than the expression “the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ” – an expression which springs from and is, as it were, the fair flowering of the repeated teaching of the Sacred Scriptures and the holy Fathers.

14. That the Church is a body is frequently asserted in the Sacred Scriptures. “Christ,” says the Apostle, “is the Head of the Body of the Church.” If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity, according to those words of Paul: “Though many we are one body in Christ.”  But it is not enough that the body of the Church should be an unbroken unity; it must also be something definite and perceptible to the senses as Our predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Satis Cognitum asserts: “the Church is visible because she is a body.”  Hence they err in a matter of divine truth, who imagine the Church to be invisible, intangible, a something merely “pneumatological” as they say, by which many Christian communities, though they differ from each other in their profession of faith, are united by an invisible bond. . . .

22. Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. “For in one spirit” says the Apostle, “were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free.”  As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith. And therefore if a man refuse to hear the Church let him be considered — so the Lord commands — as a heathen and a publican. It follows that those are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit.

23. Nor must one imagine that the Body of the Church, just because it bears the name of Christ, is made up during the days of its earthly pilgrimage only of members conspicuous for their holiness, or that it consists only of those whom God has predestined to eternal happiness. it is owing to the Savior’s infinite mercy that place is allowed in His Mystical Body here below for those whom, of old, He did not exclude from the banquet. For not every sin, however grave it may be, is such as of its own nature to sever a man from the Body of the Church, as does schism or heresy or apostasy. Men may lose charity and divine grace through sin, thus becoming incapable of supernatural merit, and yet not be deprived of all life if they hold fast to faith and Christian hope, and if, illumined from above, they are spurred on by the interior promptings of the Holy Spirit to salutary fear and are moved to prayer and penance for their sins. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, June 29, 1943.)

It is out of both a love for the true God of Divine Revelation, the  Most Holy Trinity and the good of souls that this sinner, who despises his sins and prays to live long enough to make reparation as the consecrated slave of the Second of the Most Blessed Trinity, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour  Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother, for them, seeks to exhort his fellow sinners to love Holy Mother Church and to strive for holiness as befits redeemed creatures.

Third, why cannot the religiously neutral civil state be compatible with Catholicism?

Popes Pius IX, Leo III, and St, Pius X provided ready answers to this question, which is phrased sometimes as “what is wrong with keeping religion and the civil state separated”?

But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

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.)

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man’s supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. “Between them,” he says, “there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-“Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur.” He proceeds: “Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them…. As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error.” (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1905.)

The purpose of the civil state is to advance the common good in light of man’s last end, that is, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father,  God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, for all eternity in Heaven, and to this end the civil state must do foster those conditions in which men can better sanctify and thus save their souls.

Christ or Chaos has been and will ever continue to be uncompromising in its defense of these truths for as long as I mentally and physically able to state them.

Fourth, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group list of “radical traditional Catholics” that was lifted in its entirety by the Richmond, Virginia, field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation deems Christ or Chaos to be guilty of “hating” Jews. How do you reply?

I reply now as I replied eleven years ago when my little viewed and very inconsequential website that might as well not even exist in the eyes of most other traditional Catholics was first put on the Southern Poverty Law Center “hate group” list. These are two letters that I wrote to Fox News 19 in Cincinnati, Ohio, when its website accepted the “hate group” listing at face value without even bother to elicit a comment from me:

Dear Mr. Todd:

I have, by sheer happenstance, come upon a news story with your byline dated March 9, 2012.

As one who is a trained academic and has a great deal of experience in investigative journalism, I find it very interesting that you printed (and perhaps broadcast) a story carrying a gratuitous assertion about my writing made by the notoriously anti-Catholic Southern Poverty Law Center without even bothering to contact me. Are the assertions of the Southern Poverty Law Center infallible and beyond criticism? Are their supposed "haters" to be denied any opportunity to refute these baseless accusations?

First of all, my website is not a "group." It is the continuation of the work that began with a printed journal of the same name in 1996. Although there are about five hundred "unique" visitors to my site each day, only about three hundred people, at the very most, bother to read my articles.

Second, for the Southern Poverty Law Center to be correct, Mr. Todd, then Saint Peter himself would have been guilty of "hate" when he exhorted the Jews who heard his discourse on Pentecost Sunday to convert to the Catholic Faith. Three thousand did so. This is not "hate." This is the fulfillment of the mission that the Divine Redeemer had given the Eleven before He Ascended to the Father's right hand in glory on Ascension Thursday, forty days after His Easter victory over sin and death by means of His Resurrection.

Third, you seem to be misinformed about the Immemorial Mass of Tradition as it is in se a refutation of the  "Second" Vatican Council, which is why it had to be eradicated and why those groups that are "permitted" to offer a modernized version of it must remain silent about apostasies that many within the structures of the conciliar structure recognize are offensive to God and harmful to souls.

Permit me to send you a link to an article of mine written over five years ago now that referred to an earlier Christophobic effort on the part of the Southern Poverty Law Center to smear traditional Catholic groups that adhere to nothing other than the immutable teaching of the God-Man that formed the very foundation of civilization for over a thousand years as various barbaric tribes and pagan peoples were converted to Catholicism in Europe and elsewhere: Hating Without Distinction. It is a long article. You may not have the time or the inclination to read it. In the interest of the slogan "fair and balanced," Mr. Todd, I think that the least you can do is to include a link to this article as it is my definitive refutation of the attempts by the Southern Poverty Law Center to intimidate Catholics who adhere to the immutable Catholic Faith into silence about what they know to be true.

Sincerely yours,

Thomas A. Droleskey, Ph.D.
Publisher-Editor
www.Christorchaos.com

"According to the prejudices of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Saint Peter himself, the first pope, would be consider the leader of a 'hate' group and an anti-Semite for seeking the conversion of his own people to the Catholic Faith on Pentecost Sunday and thereafter. Saint Stephen the Protomartyr was stoned to death while seeking the conversion of his fellow Jews, a stoning presided over by Saul, who was converted by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself while on the road to Damascus. Is Christ the King Himself an anti-Semite for seeking the conversion of Saul to the Catholic Faith?

"The contention made by the Southern Poverty Law Center is, therefore, gratuitous, slanderous and without any foundation in fact. It is to 'hate' no one to seek with urgency his unconditional conversion to the Catholic Faith. Furthermore, I am the leader of no 'group.' I have a website that seeks to defend the traditional Catholic teaching that has been under assault by alleged Catholics who have proved themselves to be unfaithful to the mission given by Christ the King to the Apostles before He Ascended into Heaven to convert all men and all nations.

"The Southern Poverty Law Center is incompetent to judge theological disputes among Catholics. There are some rabbis I know who take issue with the Southern Poverty Law Center's support for abortion and other social evils. Are they anti-Semitic as well?

"Fox 19 News would do well to check with those accused before printing such baseless assertions as those made by the Southern Poverty Law Center against me."

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Thomas A. Droleskey, Ph.D.
www.Christorchaos.com

Catholicism superseded Judaism as the true religion when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday as the earth quaked and the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, signifying the end of the Mosaic Covenant and the ratification of the New and Eternal Testament that Our Lord inaugurated at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday and was consumed when He gave up His spirit to His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal God the Father on the gibbet of the Holy Cross.

Pope Pius XII explained this truth as follows in the aforementioned Mystici Corporis Christi, June 29, 1943:

28.That He completed His work on the gibbet of the Cross is the unanimous teaching of the holy Fathers who assert that the Church was born from the side of our Savior on the Cross like a new Eve, mother of all the living. "And it is now," says the great St. Ambrose, speaking of the pierced side of Christ, "that it is built, it is now that it is formed, it is now that is .... molded, it is now that it is created . . . Now it is that arises a spiritual house, a holy priesthood."  One who reverently examines this venerable teaching will easily discover the reasons on which it is based.

29. And first of all, by the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished; then the Law of Christ together with its mysteries, enactments, institutions, and sacred rites was ratified for the whole world in the blood of Jesus Christ. For, while our Divine Savior was preaching in a restricted area -- He was not sent but to the sheep that were lost of the house of Israel  -the Law and the Gospel were together in force;  but on the gibbet of his death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees,  fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross,  establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race.  "To such an extent, then," says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, "was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom."

30. On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death,  in order to give way to the New Testament of which Christ had chosen the Apostles as qualified ministers;  and although He had been constituted the Head of the whole human family in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, it is by the power of the Cross that our Savior exercises fully the office itself of Head in His Church. "For it was through His triumph on the Cross," according to the teaching of the Angelic and Common Doctor, "that He won power and dominion over the gentiles"; by that same victory He increased the immense treasure of graces, which, as He reigns in glory in heaven, He lavishes continually on His mortal members it was by His blood shed on the Cross that God's anger was averted and that all the heavenly gifts, especially the spiritual graces of the New and Eternal Testament, could then flow from the fountains of our Savior for the salvation of men, of the faithful above all; it was on the tree of the Cross, finally, that He entered into possession of His Church, that is, of all the members of His Mystical Body; for they would not have been united to this Mystical Body. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)

Catholics must bear themselves kindly toward all persons, Catholics or non-Catholics alike, and Catholics never want any harm to come upon those who reject either the Catholic Church as the one and only true Christian church nor upon those who rejected the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is with kindness towards all others whom God’s Providence puts in our path each day that might plant the seeds for the conversion of others to the true Faith.

It is an incontestable fact that the most anti-Semitic people on the face of the earth are those, such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his cohorts in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who do not pray for the conversion of the Jews to Catholicism and who even go so far as to say that seeking such conversion is prohibited. Bergoglio’s rejection of the missionary work of Saint Peter and the other Apostles is what tickles the ears of the leadership of the Southern Poverty Law Center and why they must seek to smear Catholics who adhere to the immutable teaching of Holy Mother Church about the necessity of seeking, perhaps at least with our prayers, the conversion of all non-Catholics to the true Faith with the explosive and damaging charge of anti-Semitism.

Finally, it is demagogic to lay the charge of anti-Semitism at the feet of anyone who criticizes the policies of the government of the State of Israel as even anti-Zionist Jews do so rather regularly. Although a believing Catholics holds entirely to the exhortation that Pope Saint Pius X gave to Zionism’s founder, Theodore Herzl, on January 25, 1904, the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle, he also recognizes that the State of Israel is an accomplished fact by virtue of its displacement of the people who had lived there for centuries and centuries and that its citizens are entitled to protection against aggressors. (See Appendices, A, B, C, and D for further elaboration the these points.)

It is nevertheless not anti-Semitic to point out and to oppose acts of Israeli aggression against Christians within its borders, which belong by right in the objective order of things to Christ the King and His true Church, and its historic misreatment of Arabs, both Christian and Mohammedan, as sub-humans, which is how the late Ariel Sharon viewed them. The national security interests of the United States of America and Israel are not synonymous, and it is not any kind of anti-Semitic statement to make this distinction.

Fifth, what do you have to say to Protestants?

Well, I do not really think that the Southern Poverty Law Center cares all that much about the matter as their goal is indemnify, believing Catholics distinguish themselves from the conciliar revolutionaries by praying for the conversion of all non-Catholic Christians, meaning the Protestants and the Orthodox, as they make their own the following statements of Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XI:

It is for this reason that so many who do not share 'the communion and the truth of the Catholic Church' must make use of the occasion of the Council, by the means of the Catholic Church, which received in Her bosom their ancestors, proposes [further] demonstration of profound unity and of firm vital force; hear the requirements [demands] of her heart, they must engage themselves to leave this state that does not guarantee for them the security of salvation. She does not hesitate to raise to the Lord of mercy most fervent prayers to tear down of the walls of division, to dissipate the haze of errors, and lead them back within holy Mother Church, where their Ancestors found salutary pastures of life; where, in an exclusive way, is conserved and transmitted whole the doctrine of Jesus Christ and wherein is dispensed the mysteries of heavenly grace.

It is therefore by force of the right of Our supreme Apostolic ministry, entrusted to us by the same Christ the Lord, which, having to carry out with [supreme] participation all the duties of the good Shepherd and to follow and embrace with paternal love all the men of the world, we send this Letter of Ours to all the Christians from whom We are separated, with which we exhort them warmly and beseech them with insistence to hasten to return to the one fold of Christ; we desire in fact from the depths of the heart their salvation in Christ Jesus, and we fear having to render an account one day to Him, Our Judge, if, through some possibility, we have not pointed out and prepared the way for them to attain eternal salvation. In all Our prayers and supplications, with thankfulness, day and night we never omit to ask for them, with humble insistence, from the eternal Shepherd of souls the abundance of goods and heavenly graces. And since, if also, we fulfill in the earth the office of vicar, with all our heart we await with open arms the return of the wayward sons to the Catholic Church, in order to receive them with infinite fondness into the house of the Heavenly Father and to enrich them with its inexhaustible treasures. By our greatest wish for the return to the truth and the communion with the Catholic Church, upon which depends not only the salvation of all of them, but above all also of the whole Christian society: the entire world in fact cannot enjoy true peace if it is not of one fold and one shepherd. (Pope Pius IX, Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868.) 

Weigh carefully in your minds and before God the nature of Our request.  It is not for any human motive, but impelled by Divine Charity and a desire for the salvation of all, that We advise the reconciliation and union with the Church of Rome; and We mean a perfect and complete union, such as could not subsist in any way if nothing else was brought about but a certain kind of agreement in the Tenets of Belief and an intercourse of Fraternal love.  The True Union between Christians is that which Jesus Christ, the Author of the Church, instituted and desired, and which consists in a Unity of Faith and Unity of Government. (Pope Leo XIII, referring to the Orthodox in Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae, June 20, 1894.)

So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. . . .  Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See, set up in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, consecrated by their blood; to that See, We repeat, which is 'the root and womb whence the Church of God springs,' not with the intention and the hope that 'the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth' will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government. Would that it were Our happy lot to do that which so many of Our predecessors could not, to embrace with fatherly affection those children, whose unhappy separation from Us We now bewail. Would that God our Savior, "Who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth," would hear us when We humbly beg that He would deign to recall all who stray to the unity of the Church! In this most important undertaking We ask and wish that others should ask the prayers of Blessed Mary the Virgin, Mother of divine grace, victorious over all heresies and Help of Christians, that She may implore for Us the speedy coming of the much hoped-for day, when all men shall hear the voice of Her divine Son, and shall be 'careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.'" (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)

Any Catholic who rejects these immutable truths is a heretic.

As noted earlier in this commentary, one religion is not as good as another. Religious indifferentism leads to the public celebration of the adversary, something is happening with greater frequency now in the United States of America as, according to reports, the enemy of God and man was honored at the 2022 Grammy Awards and a statue in honor of a satanic figure that is designed to celebrate the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn was placed about a courthouse in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York (see How the ‘Satanic’ New York City Courthouse Statue Is All About Abortion).

Sixth, those within the  Southern Poverty Law Center and the field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Richmond, Virginia, by extension believe that those who are opposed to abortion are committing violence against women. How do you respond.

I reply by noting that it is no violence against a woman to be opposed to the violent assault upon an innocent preborn human being. The conception of a child is the natural end of the conjugal gift that God has given to human beings to be used exclusively between a man and a woman united in a bond of mutual self-surrender to Him and to each other in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

All innocent human life is inviolable from the moment of conception until death.

All actions that directly intend to kill an innocent human being are forbidden by the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”). The killing, whether by chemical or surgical means, of an innocent human being in the womb is act of atrocious butchery that opens the way to the killing off of “burdensome” or “troublesome” human beings after birth, something that we see so clearly on our world of random attacks and wanton murders, our land of vivisecting the ”brain dead” for their vital bodily organs, our land of starving and dehydrating innocent brain damaged human beings, our land of using hospice and “palliative care” as a means to directly expedite the deaths of human beings to “ease” their “suffering,” which is the very path that Our Lord has chosen for them to make expiation for their sins before they die.

The courageous Bishop of Munster, Germany, Bishop Clemens von Galen, opposed the Nazi eugenics program in three sermons in 1941 by forcefully repeating his parishioners that the Fifth Commandment applied to the Nazis, and his words should remind us that the Fifth Commandment applies to all men in the so-called civilized “West,” including here in the United States of America:

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm! If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients ” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!

I will give you an example of what is happening. One of the patients in Marienthal was a man of 55, a farmer from a country parish in the Munster region I could give you his name who has suffered for some years from mental disturbance and was therefore admitted to Marienthal hospital. He was not mentally ill in the full sense: he could receive visits and was always happy, when his relatives came to see him. Only a fortnight ago he was visited by his wife and one of his sons, a soldier on home leave from the front. The son is much attached to his father, and the parting was a sad one: no one can tell, whether the soldier will return and see his father again, since he may fall in battle for his country. The son, the soldier, will certainly never again see his father on earth, for he has since then been put on the list of the “unproductive”. A relative, who wanted to visit the father this week in Marienthal, was turned away with the information that the patient had been transferred elsewhere on the instructions of the Council of State for National Defence. No information could be given about where he had been sent, but the relatives would be informed within a few days. What information will they be given? The same as in other cases of the kind? That the man has died, that his body has been cremated, that the ashes will be handed over on payment of a fee? Then the soldier, risking his life in the field for his fellow-countrymen, will not see his father again on earth, because fellow-countrymen at home have killed him.

The facts I have stated are firmly established. I can give the names of the patient, his wife and his son the soldier, and the place where they live.

“Thou shalt not kill!” God wrote this commandment in the conscience of man long before any penal code laid down the penalty for murder, long before there was any prosecutor or any court to investigate and avenge a murder. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was a murderer long before there were any states or any courts of law. And he confessed his deed, driven by his accusing conscience: “My punishment is greater than I can bear . . . and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me the murderer shall slay me” (Genesis 4,13-14).

“Thou shalt not kill!” This commandment from God, who alone has power to decide on life or death, was written in the hearts of men from the beginning, long before God gave the children of Israel on Mount Sinai his moral code in those lapidary sentences inscribed on stone which are recorded for us in Holy Scripture and which as children we learned by heart in the catechism.

“I am the Lord thy God!” Thus begins this immutable law. “Thou shalt have not other gods before me.” God ” the only God, transcendent, almighty, omniscient, infinitely holy and just, our Creator and future Judge ” has given us these commandments. Out of love for us he wrote these commandments in our heart and proclaimed them to us. For they meet the need of our God-created nature; they are the indispensable norms for all rational, godly, redeeming and holy individual and community life. With these commandments God, our Father, seeks to gather us, His children, as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. If we follow these commands, these invitations, this call from God, then we shall be guarded and protected and preserved from harm, defended against threatening death and destruction like the chickens under the hen's wings.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Is this to come about again in our country of Germany, in our province of Westphalia, in our city of Munster? How far are the divine commandments now obeyed in Germany, how far are they obeyed here in our community?

The eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not lie.” How often is it shamelessly and publicly broken!

The seventh commandment: “Thou shalt not steal”. Whose possessions are now secure since the arbitrary and ruthless confiscation of the property of our brothers and sisters, members of Catholic orders? Whose property is protected, if this illegally confiscated property is not returned?

The sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Think of the instructions and assurances on free sexual intercourse and unmarried motherhood in the notorious Open Letter by Rudolf Hess, who has disappeared since, which was published in all the newspapers. And how much shameless and disreputable conduct of this kind do we read about and observe and experience in our city of Munster! To what shamelessness in dress have our young people been forced to get accustomed to” the preparation for future adultery! For modesty, the bulwark of chastity, is about to be destroyed.

And now the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”, is set aside and broken under the eyes of the authorities whose function it should be to protect the rule of law and human life, when men presume to kill innocent fellow-men with intent merely because they are “unproductive”, because they can no longer produce any goods.

And how do matters stand with the observance of the fourth commandment, which enjoins us to honour and obey our parents and those in authority over us? The status and authority of parents is already much undermined and is increasingly shaken by all the obligations imposed on children against the will of their parents. Can anyone believe that sincere respect and conscientious obedience to the state authorities can be maintained when men continue to violate the commandments of the supreme authority, the Commandments of God, when they even combat and seek to stamp out faith in the only true transcendent God, the Lord of heaven and earth?

The observance of the first three commandments has in reality for many years been largely suspended among the public in Germany and in Munster. By how many people are Sundays and feast days profaned and withheld from the service of God! How the name of God is abused, dishonoured and blasphemed!

And the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In place of the only true eternal God men set up their own idols at will and worship them: Nature, or the state, or the people, or the race. And how many are there whose God, in Paul's word, “is their belly” (Philippians 3:19)” their own well being, to which they sacrifice all else, even honour and conscience ” the pleasures of the senses, the lust for money, the lust for power! In accordance with all this men may indeed seek to arrogate to themselves divine attributes, to make themselves lords over the life and death of their fellow-men.

When Jesus came near to Jerusalem and beheld the city he wept over it, saying: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the day shall come upon thee, that thine enemies . . . shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” Looking with his bodily eyes, Jesus saw only the walls and towers of the city of Jerusalem, but the divine omniscience looked deeper and saw how matters stood within the city and its inhabitants: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings ” and ye would not!" That is the great sorrow that oppresses Jesus's heart, that brings tears to his eyes.   I wanted to act for your good, but ye would not!

Jesus saw how sinful, how terrible, how criminal, how disastrous this unwillingness is. Little man, that frail creature, sets his created will against the will of God! Jerusalem and its inhabitants, His chosen and favoured people, set their will against God's will! Foolishly and criminally, they defy the will of God! And so Jesus weeps over the heinous sin and the inevitable punishment. God is not mocked!

Christians of Munster! Did the Son of God in his omniscience in that day see only Jerusalem and its people? Did he weep only over Jerusalem? Is the people of Israel the only people whom God has encompassed and protected with a father's care and mother's love, has drawn to Himself? Is it the only people that wou1d not ? The only one that rejected God's truth, that threw off God's law and so condemned itself to ruin?

Did Jesus, the omniscient God, also see in that day our German people, our land of Westphalia, our region of Munster, the Lower Rhineland? Did he also weep over us? Over Munster?

For a thousand years he has instructed our forefathers and us in his truth, guided us with his law, nourished us with his grace, gathered us together as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. Did the omniscient Son of God see in that day that in our time he must also pronounce this judgment on us: “Ye would not: see, your house will be laid waste!” How terrible that would be!

My Christians! I hope there is still time; but then indeed it is high time: That we may realise, in this our day, the things that belong unto our peace! That we may realise what alone can save us, can preserve us from the divine judgment: that we should take, without reservation, the divine commandments as the guiding rule of our lives and act in sober earnest according to the words: “Rather die than sin”.

That in prayer and sincere penitence we should beg that God's forgiveness and mercy may descend upon us, upon our city, our country and our beloved German people.

But with those who continue to provoke God's judgment, who blaspheme our faith, who scorn God's commandments, who make common cause with those who alienate our young people from Christianity, who rob and banish our religious, who bring about the death of innocent men and women, our brothers and sisters with all those we will avoid any confidential relationship, we will keep ourselves and our families out of reach of their influence, lest we become infected with their godless ways of thinking and acting, lest we become partakers in their guilt and thus liable to the judgment which a just God must and will inflict on all those who, like the ungrateful city of Jerusalem, do not will what God wills.

O God, make us all know, in this our day, before it is too late, the things which belong to our peace!

O most Sacred Heart of Jesus, grieved to tears at the blindness and iniquities of men, help us through Thy grace, that we may always strive after that which is pleasing to Thee and renounce that which displeases Thee, that we may remain in Thy love and find peace for our souls!

Amen. (Three Sermons in Defiance of the Nazis by Bishop von Galen.)

Anyone who does not think that the situation in Nazi Germany that was described so clearly and condemned so forcefully by the late Bishop Clemens von Galens in 1941 obtains in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world at the present time is spiritually blind. We are living through the precise situation now as that described and condemned by Bishop Clemens von Galens.

Please do yourself a favor and re-read the late bishop's remarks again.

Bishop von Galens's remarks resonate with Catholic truth and serve as prophetic warnings to us not to trust in the diagnoses and judgments of doctors who have accustomed themselves to lying and killing, something that is especially the case as a result of everyone in the medical industry having to undergo “training” in the ethos of “palliative care.” Patients are evaluated now on a cost-benefit basis that dehumanizes them and permits medical “professionals” to start the processes, tailored to the “needs” of each person and carried out by conditioning patients and their families to accept the “inevitable,” of expediting their deaths in the name of “mercy” and “compassion.”

Bishop von Galens's sermon from the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost in 1941 also discussed the cogent point that it is easier for men to break the Fourth through Tenth Commandments under cover of law when they have violated the First through Third Commandments. Consider this passage once again:

And the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In place of the only true eternal God men set up their own idols at will and worship them: Nature, or the state, or the people, or the race. And how many are there whose God, in Paul's word, “is their belly” (Philippians 3:19)” their own well being, to which they sacrifice all else, even honour and conscience” the pleasures of the senses, the lust for money, the lust for power! In accordance with all this men may indeed seek to arrogate to themselves divine attributes, to make themselves lords over the life and death of their fellow-men.

Although admitting, as noted above, that the proximate causes for the astounding advances in evil that we have seen before our very eyes in the past fifty years is the result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century and the contempt that this has bred for His Deposit of Faith and the authority of His true Church, it is nevertheless also true that the astounding advances in evil that we have seen before our very eyes in the past fifty years have resulted at least in part as the result of a chastisement that God is permitting us to endure as a punishment for our failure to seek to restore all things in Him. How can we stop the advance of evil on the devil's own terms of naturalism, no less think and speak naturalistically about the state of disabled, dependent human beings?

We have the obligation to peacefully and prayerfully oppose unjust laws that sanction crimes against God and men. Pope Leo XIII summarized these duties very succinctly in the following passages of Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

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

Governments that are “religiously neutral,” however, must end up awash in a sewer of evil as men, especially today given the paucity of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Grace caused by the sacramentally barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, govern themselves and their nations by means of sentimentality or raw majoritarian impulses. Such governmental systems must place jurists who might know better into making one legal argument after another, no matter how constitutionally or statutorily sound, on a purely naturalistic basis, thus placing into straitjackets from which it is impossible to extricate themselves. One cannot fight naturalism/secularism/humanism with naturalism/secularism/humanism. One can only fight naturalism/secularism/humanism with Catholicism, Nothing.

While we pray for the conversion of all those who solicit, perform, cooperate in or support the chemical and/or surgical execution of the innocent preborn, we also have a duty to remind those in public life who enable these executions of the very direct words written by Pope Pius XI about their fate when they stand before the Avenger of innocent blood when they die:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

It is no act of “violence” upon anyone to call abortion by its proper name: homicide in the particular and genocide in the universal sense.

Seventh, aren’t you trying to “impose” your “opinions” upon the rest of society?

The moral order is no more “imposed” upon anyone than is the law of gravity. One can defy either and suffer the deleterious consequences or one can respect their existence and realize the benefits from doing so. Men must be plunged in the outer darkness of madness and rage when the immutable laws given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai and then entrusted His Divine Son’s Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication are broken with impunity, no less protected under the cover of the civil law and celebrated in every nook and cranny of what passes for “popular culture.”

no mere contingent being, man or woman, has any “autonomy” over the life of an innocent human being.

Each human being, man, or woman, is duty bound to observe the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, which itself was defined very succinctly by the Roman orator Cicero:

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.)

Eighth, why are you are opposed to the women receiving “health care.”

The killing of an innocent human being is not health care. It is murder.

Ninth, why can’t a woman “choose to do what she wants with her own body?

No one has the moral right to “choose” to kill another human being.

A mother can never dispose of the fruit of her womb as she desires. She has an obligation before God to provide the love that is the child’s due. True justice is, after all, giving to each that which his is due.

There are no “decisions” to be made about a child, only selfless, unconditional love to be offered.

There are no “difficult choices” to be made, only a firm reliance upon Our Lady’s graces to provide all the supernatural and natural helps necessary to fulfill one’s maternal duties with the distinction of a saint and imitation of the Queen of All Saints, Our Lady herself.

Our first pope, Saint Peter, explained that we are not to use our liberty as a cloak for malice, and the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being is act of malice:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, to refrain yourselves from carnal desires which war against the soul, [12] Having your conversation good among the Gentiles: that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by the good works, which they shall behold in you, glorify God in the day of visitation. [13] Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God's sake: whether it be to the king as excelling; [14] Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good: [15] For so is the will of God, that by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

[16] As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God. [17] Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. [18] Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. [19] For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God, a man endure sorrows, suffering wrongfully. [20] For what glory is it, if committing sin, and being buffeted for it, you endure? But if doing well you suffer patiently; this is thankworthy before God.

[21] For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps. [22] Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. [23] Who, when he was reviled, did not revile: when he suffered, he threatened not: but delivered himself to him that judged him unjustly. [24] Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed. [25] For you were as sheep going astray; but you are now converted to the shepherd and bishop of your souls. (1 Peter 2: 11-25.)

There is nothing complex about “Thou shalt not kill.”

Tenth, you don’t shut up, do you? All right, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have us believe that you are “homophobic.” How do you respond.

Once again, it is not to “hate” anyone to call him to correction when he is doing that which is opposed to the binding precepts of the Divine and Natural Laws.

The sin of Sodom is one of the four sins (willful murder, defrauding the widow, withholding the day laborer’s wages are the other three) that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. It is thus our duty to oppose the advance of perversity, which has become mainstreams in culture and law because of sentimentality and emotionalism.

The following words of Sacred Scripture, which was, by the way, written under the infallible inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, condemns sodomy in no uncertain terms, and no amount of public opinion, court decisions, legislation, or executive decrees can ever change truths that exist in the nature of things and do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force or validity:

And he said to him: Behold also in this, I have heard thy prayers, not to destroy the city for which thou hast spoken. Make haste and be saved there, because I cannot do any thing till thou go in thither. Therefore the name of that city was called Segor. The sun was risen upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor. And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about, all the inhabitants of the cities, and all things that spring from the earth.

And his wife looking behind her, was turned into a statue of salt. And Abraham got up early in the morning and in the place where he had stood before with the Lord, He looked towards Sodom and Gomorrha, and the whole land of that country: and he saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace. Now when God destroyed the cities of that country, remembering Abraham, he delivered Lot out of the destruction of the cities wherein he had dwelt. (Genesis 19: 21-29.)

[13] If any one lie with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination, let them be put to death: their blood be upon them. [14] If any man after marrying the daughter, marry her mother, he hath done a heinous crime: he shall be burnt alive with them: neither shall so great an abomination remain in the midst of you. [15] He that shall copulate with any beast or cattle, dying let him die, the beast also ye shall kill. (Leviticus 20: 13-15.) 

And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till you go thence. And when you come into the house, salute it, saying: Peace be to this house. And if that house be worthy, your peace shall come upon it; but if it be not worthy, your peace shall return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust from your feet. Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. (Matthew 10: 11-15.) 

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1: 18-32.)

It is thus necessary to reprise a list that I wrote up around twenty years ago and keep repeating as repetition is the mother of learning and as many good Catholics find themselves stumped when confronted with the claims of “loving” sodomite relationships:

1) God's love for us is an act of His divine will, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of our immortal souls.

2) Our love for others must be premised on willing for them what God wills for us: their salvation.

3) We love no one authentically if we do or say anything, either by omission or commission, which reaffirms him in a life of unrepentant sin.

4) God hates sin. He wills the sinner to repent of his sins by cooperating with the graces He won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross.

5) Sin is what caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer unspeakable horrors on the wood of the Holy Cross and caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be thrust through with Seven Swords of Sorrow.

6) No one can say that he loves Our Lord or Our Lady if he persist in sin unrepentantly and/or celebrates the commission of sin in public acts of defiance against the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the Natural Law.

7) Each sin darkens the intellect and weakens the will, inclining us all the more to sin and sin again. We must, therefore, resolve never to sin again and to do penance for our sins as Our Lady herself implored us to do when she appeared in th Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, ninety years ago.

8) It is therefore forbidden for anyone of this parish or diocese to participate or support, whether morally or financially, any event whatsoever that celebrates any sin, whether natural or unnatural, and/or encourages people to persist in sin as a legitimate "lifestyle."

9) One of the Spiritual Works of Mercy is to admonish the sinner. We have an obligation to admonish those who are in lives on unrepentant sin to turn away from their lives of sin and to strive to pursue the heights of sanctity.

10) God has compassion on all erring sinners, meaning each one of us. He understands our weakness. He exhorts us, as He exhorted the woman caught in adultery, to "Go, and commit this sin no more."

11) It is not an act of "love" for people to persist in unrepentant sins with others.

12) It is not an act of "judgmentalness" or "intolerance" to exhort people who are living lives of unrepentant sin to reform their lives lest their souls wind up in Hell for eternity.

13) Mortal Sins cast out Sanctifying Grace from the soul. Those steeped in unrepentant mortal sin are the captives of the devil until they make a good and sincere Confession.

14) Certain sins cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Sodomy is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

15) Those engaged in natural or unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments do not "love" the individuals with whom they are sinning. Authentic love cannot exist in a soul committed to a life against the Commandments of God and the eternal welfare of one's own soul, no less the souls of others.

16) Those engaged in natural or unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are not fit to adopt children.

17) Those engaged in natural or unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are not fit to adopt children because their very sinful lives put into jeopardy the eternal of the souls of the children they seek to adopt. It is not possible for people who are sinning unrepentantly to teach children to hate sin as God hates sin. They are immersed in sin. Pope Pius XI put it this way in Casti Connubii, December 31,1930:

But Christian parents must also understand that they are destined not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshippers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God's household, that the worshippers of God and Our Savior may daily increase. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31,1930.)

18) Those engaged in unnatural, perverse acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are further unfit to adopt children because they have no right in the Divine positive law or the natural law to live together as a "couple."  Once again, Pope Pius XI's Casti Connubii:

Nor must We omit to remark, in fine, that since the duty entrusted to parents for the good of their children is of such high dignity and of such great importance, every use of the faculty given by God for the procreation of new life is the right and the privilege of the married state alone, by the law of God and of nature, and must be confined absolutely within the sacred limits of that state. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31,1930.)

19) Those engaged in unnatural, perverse acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandment have no right in the Divine positive law or the natural law to present a "model" of parenthood that is from the devil himself. The words that Saint Paul wrote about perversity in Rome in his own day are quite apropos of our own:

Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use against which is their nature.

And in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.

And as they liked not to  have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.

Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.  (Romans 1: 24-32)

20) Matrimony was elevated to a Sacrament by Our Lord at the wedding feast in Cana. The Holy Sacrament of Matrimony is entered into by one man and by one woman to achieve these ends: the procreation and education of children, the mutual good of the spouses, a remedy for concupiscence. Pope Pius XI noted this in Casti Connubii:

This conjugal faith, however, which is most aptly called by St. Augustine the "faith of chastity" blooms more freely, more beautifully and more nobly, when it is rooted in that more excellent soil, the love of husband and wife which pervades all the duties of married life and holds pride of place in Christian marriage. For matrimonial faith demands that husband and wife be joined in an especially holy and pure love, not as adulterers love each other, but as Christ loved the Church. This precept the Apostle laid down when he said: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church,"[24] that Church which of a truth He embraced with a boundless love not for the sake of His own advantage, but seeking only the good of His Spouse.[25] The love, then, of which We are speaking is not that based on the passing lust of the moment nor does it consist in pleasing words only, but in the deep attachment of the heart which is expressed in action, since love is proved by deeds. This outward expression of love in the home demands not only mutual help but must go further; must have as its primary purpose that man and wife help each other day by day in forming and perfecting themselves in the interior life, so that through their partnership in life they may advance ever more and more in virtue, and above all that they may grow in true love toward God and their neighbor, on which indeed "dependeth the whole Law and the Prophets." For all men of every condition, in whatever honorable walk of life they may be, can and ought to imitate that most perfect example of holiness placed before man by God, namely Christ Our Lord, and by God's grace to arrive at the summit of perfection, as is proved by the example set us of many saints.

This mutual molding of husband and wife, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

21) It is never permissible to put even one child into spiritual, if not physical, jeopardy by claiming that so many others would be helped if the Church did not cooperate with an unjust law. Our Lord said that it would be better for one to have a millstone thrown around his neck and thrown into a lake than to lead one of his little ones astray. He was not joking.

22) Sinners must repent of the evil they have done in order to live lives of penance and mortification worthy of Saint Francis of Assisi.

A physician does not "judge" anyone if he warns him what might happen if he does not stop engaging in a certain course of behavior that is deleterious to his bodily health.

Similarly, one who warns another about the state of his soul as he persists in a life of unrepentant sin is simply performing a fundamental Spiritual Work of Mercy, and those who are inclined to and/or steeped in perverse sins against nature are not to be left without being remonstrated as this is a duty of a Catholic before God and to the eternal and temporal good of the sinner.

It is one thing to sin and to be sorry and then to seek out the mercy of the Divine Redeemer in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. It is quite another to persist in sin, no less perverse sins against nature, unrepentantly and to expect others to reaffirm him in those sins, whether explicitly by words of approval or implicitly by silence, which betokens consent. Catholics must judge the states of their own souls every night in their Examen of Conscience, and they have a duty to help others to recognize the serious states of sin into which they have plunged themselves, praying beforehand to God the Holy Ghost to fill them with wisdom and prudence so as to provide a warning in such a way that could plant a seed to get an unrepentant sinner to a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance.

Eleventh, why do you believe that the Throne of Saint Peter has been vacant since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958:

How do you answer?

The short answer is that the Catholic Church is the inerrant, infallible, spotless and virginal mystical spouse of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head, and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Pope Gregory XVI explained that Holy Mother Church cannot be tainted with even a slight varnish of error:

8. As for the rest, We greatly deplore the fact that, where the ravings of human reason extend, there is somebody who studies new things and strives to know more than is necessary, against the advice of the apostle. There you will find someone who is overconfident in seeking the truth outside the Catholic Church, in which it can be found without even a light tarnish of error. Therefore, the Church is called, and is indeed, a pillar and foundation of truth. You correctly understand, venerable brothers, that We speak here also of that erroneous philosophical system which was recently brought in and is clearly to be condemned. This system, which comes from the contemptible and unrestrained desire for innovation, does not seek truth where it stands in the received and holy apostolic inheritance. Rather, other empty doctrines, futile and uncertain doctrines not approved by the Church, are adopted. Only the most conceited men wrongly think that these teachings can sustain and support that truth. (Pope Gregory XVI, Singulari Nos, June 25, 1834.)

The papacy is the guarantor of the preservation of the Holy Faith in its entirety. Although individual popes might have been poor administrators, poor judges of character, too weak to discipline the wayward or too blind to recognize nascent or immediate threats to Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals, a true pope is the Vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ on earth and is to be venerated, not scoffed at as a heretical buffoon and a veritable forerunner of Antichrist.

Once again, it is worth noting Pope Saint Pius X’s admonition to Italian priests about how the pope is to be loved:

And how must the Pope be loved? Non verbo neque lingua, sed opere et veritate. [Not in word, nor in tongue, but in deed, and in truth - 1 Jn iii, 18] When one loves a person, one tries to adhere in everything to his thoughts, to fulfill his will, to perform his wishes. And if Our Lord Jesus Christ said of Himself, “si quis diligit me, sermonem meum servabit,” [if any one love me, he will keep my word - Jn xiv, 23] therefore, in order to demonstrate our love for the Pope, it is necessary to obey him.

Therefore, when we love the Pope, there are no discussions regarding what he orders or demands, or up to what point obedience must go, and in what things he is to be obeyed; when we love the Pope, we do not say that he has not spoken clearly enough, almost as if he were forced to repeat to the ear of each one the will clearly expressed so many times not only in person, but with letters and other public documents; we do not place his orders in doubt, adding the facile pretext of those unwilling to obey – that it is not the Pope who commands, but those who surround him; we do not limit the field in which he might and must exercise his authority; we do not set above the authority of the Pope that of other persons, however learned, who dissent from the Pope, who, even though learned, are not holy, because whoever is holy cannot dissent from the Pope.

This is the cry of a heart filled with pain, that with deep sadness I express, not for your sake, dear brothers, but to deplore, with you, the conduct of so many priests, who not only allow themselves to debate and criticize the wishes of the Pope, but are not embarrassed to reach shameless and blatant disobedience, with so much scandal for the good and with so great damage to souls. (Pope Saint Pius X, Allocution Vi ringrazio to priests on the 50th anniversary of the Apostolic Union, November 18, 1912, as found at: “Love the Pope!” – no ifs, and no buts: For Bishops, priests, and faithful, Saint Pius X explains what loving the Pope really entails.)

Whoever is holy cannot dissent from the pope.

This means that those who has dissent from the conciliar “popes” in the belief that they have been true and legitimate Successors of Saint Peter are not holy or that the conciliar “popes” have been no “popes” at all as it would never have been necessary to oppose them and to dissent from their false teachings if they had been such.

For anyone—and I do mean anyone—to think that the Catholic Church can be identified publicly as having anything to do with the welter of heresies and errors that have emanated from her counterfeit ape is to make a total and unabashed mockery of Dom Prosper Gueranger's beautiful summary of the teaching of Saint Augustine of Hippo that is nothing other than a statement of clear and irrefutable Catholic truth:

The magnificent theory of St. Augustine comes most appropriately here. According to his teaching--which, after all, is but the explanation of the texts just cited--the Holy Ghost is the principle of the Church's life; and He, being the Spirit of truth, preserves and directs her in the truth, so that both her teaching and her practice cannot be other than expressions of the truth. He makes Himself responsible for her words, just as our spirit is responsible for what our tongue utters. Hence it is that the Church, by her union with the Holy Ghost, is so identified with truth, that the apostle did not hesitate to call her 'the pillar and ground of the truth'. The Christian, therefore, may well rest on the Church in all that regards faith. He knows that the Church is never alone; that she is always with the holy Spirit who lives within her; that her word is not her own, but the word of the Spirit, which is the word of Jesus. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Paschal Time Book III: Volume 9, pp. 393-399.)  

In other words, the counterfeit church of conciliarism is not and can never be the Catholic Church. The counterfeit church of conciliarism is Antichrist’s church of lies and sin.

A heretical pope is an ontological impossibility as, to call to mind the words of Saint Robert Bellarmine, S.J., wrote defense of popes said to have erred in faith, either the Faith is had entirely, or it is not had at all:

There are some persons, dear listeners, who hold almost everything with a firm faith that Catholics hold: but there is one thing or another, which they have not yet been able to accept completely, such as that purgatory exists, that sacred images are to be venerated, that the sovereign Pontiff is the vicar of Christ and the head of the whole Church. And since there are many things that they believe, and only one or two things that they do not believe and consider it is not important if taken together with the other articles, they think they are situated very well on the foundation of Christ. What is the difference, they say, even if I err in that one thing, which I still cannot believe, and at the judgment will the Lord be concerned about that? And will he not be mindful of the many difficult things I believe? Indeed, this is the way in which they flatter themselves; I serious rebuke them and say that they have fallen from grace and have laid their foundation on sand, and will have no part with Christ. Either the faith is had completely, or it is not had at all. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. I ask you (to clarify the matter with a crass example), when you order a pair of shoes from a shoemaker, if when they are finally made you find they are an inch shorter than your feet, do you not put them on and wear them? Your will say “I cannot wear them” But they are only an inch too short, so why can't you wear them, since they are just a little bit short of the right measurement? As, therefore, your shoes are either the right size for your feet or they have no value at all, so also the faith is either integral, or it is not the faith. Therefore no one should deceive himself. If we want to build a house which cannot be moved by wind or rain, we must lay the foundation of both rocks, that is, on Christ and Peter. (Sermons of St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J., Part II: Sermons 30-55, Including the Four Last Things and the Annunciation., translated from the Latin by Father Kenneth Baker, S.J., and published in 2017 by Keep the Faith, Inc., Ramsey, New Jersey, pp. 152-154.)

Saint Francis de Sales and Popes Leo XIII and Benedict XVI put the matter this way:

With reference to its object, faith cannot be greater for some truths than for others. Nor can it be less with regard to the number of truths to be believed. For we must all believe the very same thing, both as to the object of faith as well as to the number of truths. All are equal in this because everyone must believe all the truths of faith--both those which God Himself has directly revealed, as well as those he has revealed through His Church. Thus, I must believe as much as you and you as much as I, and all other Christians similarly. He who does not believe all these mysteries is not Catholic and therefore will never enter Paradise. (Saint Francis de Sales, The Sermons of Saint Francis de Sales for Lent Given in 1622, republished by TAN Books and Publishers for the Visitation Monastery of Frederick, Maryland, in 1987, pp. 34-37.)

We are mindful only of what is witnessed to by Holy Writ and what is otherwise well known. Christ proves His own divinity and the divine origin of His mission by miracles; He teaches the multitudes heavenly doctrine by word of mouth; and He absolutely commands that the assent of faith should be given to His teaching, promising eternal rewards to those who believe and eternal punishment to those who do not. “If I do not the works of my Father, believe Me not” John x., 37). “If I had not done among them the works than no other man had done, they would not have sin” (Ibid. xv., 24). “But if I do (the works) though you will not believe Me, believe the works” (Ibid. x., 38). Whatsoever He commands, He commands by the same authority. He requires the assent of the mind to all truths without exception. It was thus the duty of all who heard Jesus Christ, if they wished for eternal salvation, not merely to accept His doctrine as a whole, but to assent with their entire mind to all and every point of it, since it is unlawful to withhold faith from God even in regard to one single point. (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine:they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: ‘This is the Catholic Faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved’ (Athanasian Creed). There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim ‘Christian is my name and Catholic my surname,’ only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself.

Besides, the Church demands from those who have devoted themselves to furthering her interests, something very different from the dwelling upon profitless questions; she demands that they should devote the whole of their energy to preserve the faith intact and unsullied by any breath of error, and follow most closely him whom Christ has appointed to be the guardian and interpreter of the truth. There are to be found today, and in no small numbers, men, of whom the Apostle says that: "having itching ears, they will not endure sound doctrine: but according to their own desires they will heap up to themselves teachers, and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables" (II Tim. iv. 34). Infatuated and carried away by a lofty idea of the human intellect, by which God's good gift has certainly made incredible progress in the study of nature, confident in their own judgment, and contemptuous of the authority of the Church, they have reached such a degree of rashness as not to hesitate to measure by the standard of their own mind even the hidden things of God and all that God has revealed to men. Hence arose the monstrous errors of "Modernism," which Our Predecessor rightly declared to be "the synthesis of all heresies," and solemnly condemned. We hereby renew that condemnation in all its fulness, Venerable Brethren, and as the plague is not yet entirely stamped out, but lurks here and there in hidden places, We exhort all to be carefully here and there in hidden places, We exhort all to be carefully on their guard against any contagion of the evil, to which we may apply the words Job used in other circumstances: "It is a fire that devoureth even to destruction, and rooteth up all things that spring" (Job xxxi. 12). Nor do We merely desire that Catholics should shrink from the errors of Modernism, but also from the tendencies or what is called the spirit of Modernism. Those who are infected by that spirit develop a keen dislike for all that savours of antiquity and become eager searchers after novelties in everything: in the way in which they carry out religious functions, in the ruling of Catholic institutions, and even in private exercises of piety. Therefore it is Our will that the law of our forefathers should still be held sacred: "Let there be no innovation; keep to what has been handed down." In matters of faith that must be inviolably adhered to as the law; it may however also serve as a guide even in matters subject to change, but even in such cases the rule would hold: "Old things, but in a new way."  (Pope Benedict XV, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, November 1, 1914.)

There is no such thing as “almost Catholic,” and there is certainly nothing called an “irreducible minimum” of beliefs which one must hold to remain a member of the Catholic Church and thus to save his immortal soul. It is all or nothing. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church from which no one may dissent legitimately. No one who is intellectually honest can claim that the six conciliar claimants to the papacy have held the doctrine of the Catholic Church wholly and inviolably. It is these false claimants to the papacy who have not held to the truth of salvation. Indeed, these men have led Catholics and non-Catholics alike away from the salvation.

Those who recognize there has been no true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, adhere entirely to the irreformable teaching that the salvation of men depends upon their submitting to the Vicar of Christ on earth. The conciliar revolutionaries themselves do not believe this teaching. Indeed, they have reaffirmed Protestants, the Orthodox, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Buddhists and even atheists that they have their own paths to salvation.

Twelfth, why are you committed to what you call the Immemorial Mass of Tradition? What is wrong with the Novus Ordo?

You just asked two questions.

As to the second question, please read Appendix F and G.I.R.M. Warfare: The Conciliar Church's Unremitting Warfare Against Catholic Faith and Worship.

As to the first question, a believing Catholic is committed to the defense of the purity and integrity of the Holy Faith. The Immemorial Mass of Tradition is the most perfect liturgical expression of the Holy Faith and a bulwark against a belief that Holy Mother Church must conform to the ages rather than the ages to the teaching that she has received from her Divine Founder and transmits infallibly under the Divine protection of the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost.

Concluding Reflections

Obviously, this whole exercise could be dismissed by mean as a waste of my good Catholic time. Others might claim that I am casting my pearls before swine.

However, I am always aware that there might be at least one seeker of truth who is open to studying matters in depth and who might be inclined to take the time and effort that is needed to realize that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s castigation of “radical traditional Catholics” is a transparently shallow and demagogic effort to repeat the words uttered by the leaders of the Sanhedrin to the Apostles as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles:

Saying: What shall we do to these men? for indeed a known miracle hath been done by them, to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem: it is manifest, and we cannot deny it. But that it may be no farther spread among the people, let us threaten them that they speak no more in this name to any man. And calling them, they charged them not to speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answering, said to them: 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. (Acts 4: 16-20.)

Nothing I write here is going to change the minds of anyone at the Southern Poverty Law Center nor convince the thought police within the Federal Bureau of Investigation to stop monitoring what is written here as I, for one, do not believe that the symbolic “retraction” of the internal memorandum circulated within the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office represents an honest statement of fact. Other federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service of the United States Department of the Treasury, have been weaponized to accomplish monetarily what the United States Ministry of Injustice under Merrick Garland is trying accomplish by means of criminal trials such as the one that Mark Houck was forced to endure recently after having FBI agents with weapons drawn storm his home and frighten his children.

As Catholics, of course, we must recognize the prophetic moment in which we are living and take to heart these words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as recorded in Chapter Ten of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew:

Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. [17] But beware of men. For they will deliver you up in councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. [18] And you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles: [19] But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. [20] For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.

[21] The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. [22] And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. [23] And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come. [24] The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. [25] It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?

[26] Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. [27] That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. [28] And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. [29] Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. [30] But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

[31] Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. [32] Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. [33] But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. [34] Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. [35] For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

[36] And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. [37] He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. [38] And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. [39] He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. [40] He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me. (Matthew 10: 16-40.)

The day is coming when it will not only be the so-called “radical traditional Catholics” who are the ones to be stigmatized, smeared, and perhaps subject to various acts of government intimidation. The day is coming when all it will take to get in trouble with the authorities is to profess believe in the Apostles’ Creed. That is all it is going to take. Nothing more.

We must face the reality of the situation in which we live with confidence as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother. This is the time that God has appointed for us from all eternity to live, which means that the graces His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal Divine Son won for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem us and that He sends to us through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces and the Treasurer of the mercies of His Most Sacred Heart, are sufficient for us to endure whatever crosses are sent our way.

Indeed, the best chance that many of us stinkers might have to save our immortal souls is to be castigated and persecuted for the sake of the Holy Faith. Deo gratias! We should never shrink out of fear of what might happen to us temporally as the worst thing that can happen to us is to lose our immortal souls for all eternity by dying in a state of final impetinence.

In this, all in everything in our lives, we must rely upon the maternal intercession and loving protection of the Mother of God, who exhorted the seers at Fatima to pray her Most Holy Rosary and to be devoted to her Immaculate Heart.

An article written by the late Father Aloysius Ellacuria, CMF, in the February 1971 edition of Soul magazine noted that Saint Anthony Mary Claret, the only canonized father of the [First] Vatican Council, was a forerunner of Our Lady’s Fatima message by stressing devotion to her Most Holy Rosary and to her Immaculate Heart:

St. Anthony Mary Claret, archbishop of Cuba, royal confessor of Queen Elizabeth II of Spain, father of Vatican Council I, and so far the only canonized saint of that Council, is the greatest apostle of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of the 19th century and the forerunner of the Message of Fatima.

St. Anthony Mary Claret was a special devotee of the Immaculate Heart of Our Blessed Mother all his life, from 1807 to 1870. His ideal was St. John the Evangelist in his filial love, his perfect surrender and thorough consecration of the Blessed Mother. Even more the ideal of St. Anthony Mary Claret was Jesus Christ Himself, to love with the Divine Heart of Jesus the Immaculate Heart of His most loving Mother and our Mother, given to us by Him as His last and best present while dying on the Cross in the person of St. John with those most beautiful words: “Behold thy son,” “Behold Thy Mother.”

Forerunner of Fatima.

St. Anthony Mary Claret was the forerunner of the Fatima message for the following twelve reasons:

First: Because of his devotion to the Most Holy Trinity. St. Anthony Mary Claret recited the Angelic Trisagion each day. His devotion to the Most Holy Trinity was supreme, particularly at the end of his life.

Second: St. Anthony Mary Claret was one of the greatest adorers of the Most Blessed Sacrament from the beginnings of his childhood. St. Anthony Mary Claret preserved within his virginal body (incorrupt from one Holy Communion to the next) the Sacramental Species, from August 26th of 1861 until the day of his death, October 24, 1870. This is a most extraordinary grace granted by the Blessed Mother to him. Let us quote St. Anthony Mary Claret to this purpose:

Why This Rarest of Gifts?

 “The Most Holy Virgin obtained for me from her Divine Son the grace of preserving within my breast the Sacramental Species from one Communion to the next.” This extraordinary favor was granted to St. Anthony Mary Claret not only for his personal holiness but as Our Lord and the Blessed Mother told him — to be a tower of spiritual strength to counteract the moral evils of his day, particularly atheism.

Third: The Blessed Mother one Christmas night after the midnight Mass placed the Child Jesus in his arms, in the convent of the Adorers of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Madrid.

Fourth: St. Anthony Mary Claret, Apostle of the Immaculate Heart, deserves the place he occupies in the Basilica at Fatima on the right hand of the Blessed Mother on the main altar. He spread the devotion to the Immaculate Heart by word of mouth in his 25,000 sermons all over Spain, the Canary Islands, Cube, Italy and France, and, by his most active life. St. Anthony Mary Claret used to consecrate to the Immaculate Heart of Mary every apostolic enterprise that he originated, and they were so many, every holy association where he presided, and every place he visited. These places were numerous because his apostolic zeal took him all over, faithful to his motto: “The love of Christ presses us.”

The Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was spread far and wide personally by him and through his congregation of Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart, called also the Claretian Fathers.

St. Anthony Mary Claret as Archbishop of Cuba consecrated that island to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in her national sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity del Cobre.

Fifth: One reason why St. Anthony Mary Claret is the forerunner of Fatima is because Our Divine Lord and His Blessed Mother chose him time and again to be the St. Dominic Guzman of the 19th century and of the present day to spread the devotion to the Holy Rosary.

St.Anthony Mary Claret preached in season, out of season, on the Holy Rosary as the best means to enter into the inner sanctuary of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

Valued the Scapular

Sixth: St. Anthony Mary Claret is the forerunner of Fatima by the fact of his position in regard to the Scapular of Mt. Carmel. This is confirmed by the Carmelite Order. In their centennial book of the scapular there are ample proofs and documents of St. Anthony Mary Claret’s writings pertaining to the Mt. Carmel scapular. No wonder, for he was a Tertiary Carmelite. He began also his congregation of Missionaries of the feast of Mt. Carmel, July 16th, 1849.

Seventh: Our Lady of Sorrows. St. Anthony Mary Claret was a terrific client of the Sorrowful Mother and likewise belonged to the Confraternity of Our Lady of Sorrows. (In those days they could be tertiaries in more than one order.) When he was in Cuba the enemies of the Church attempted to kill him. He was wounded but was miraculously cured by the Blessed Mother and the wound he received in his wrist was transformed into a beautiful image of Our Lady of Sorrows, visible to all.

Eighth: St. Anthony Mary Claret was visibly assisted by the angels, and protected by them against the enemies of the Church. Fourteen times the Masons in their lodges cast lots to kill him, from whom he was protected, particularly by St. Michael the Archangel. He was likewise transported from place to place by the angels. On one occasion an old priest to whom he owed much in his youth was dying. St. Anthony Mary Claret was able in a few moments to be present with him to give him spiritual comfort, through a heavy snow fall without any trace on the ground. He wrote a beautiful prayer book on the nine choirs of angels which was very popular. I remember in my youth, as a minor seminarian we were divided into nine choirs and used to pray from this book.

Our Lord revealed to him that He made him the seventh angel of the Apocalypse, and I quote from the writings of St. Anthony Mary Claret of his interior life written in obedience to his spiritual director.

Startling Revelation

“And I saw another angel, a strong one, coming down from heaven, clothed in a cloud, and the rainbow was over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his feet like pillars of fire,” (Chapter X, Verse 1). – And the rainbow of peace and salvation was the Immaculate Heart (the same Immaculate Heart which afterwards would appear in Fatima) – The way his body is described means that he was the living sanctuary of Our Lord sacramentally present in Him.

“And he had in his hand a little scroll set open; and he set his right foot upon the sea but his left upon the earth,” – The little scroll means the Holy Bible that he carried iwth hi all the time. – St. Anthony Claret saw one of his feet was on Cuba inn the sea and the other was on the mainland of Europe.

“And he cried with a loud voice as when a lion roars,” (Verse 3). – In his evangelical life by means of his apostolic preaching he was a lion roaring, in spite of all the calumnies, attacks of the devils, and all the enemies of the Church, the plots against his life and the persecutions. He was a lion of superhuman fortitude withstanding all the evil directed against him.

Would be More

“And when he had cried, the seven thunders spoke out their voices,” (Verse 4) – This means the great apostles to follow in the footsteps of St. Anthony Mary Claret, animated by their intense love for the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Holy Eucharist.

“And when the seven thunders had spoken, I was about to write; and I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Seal up the things that the seven thunders spoke, and do not write them.’

“And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the earth, lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him who lies forever and ever, who created heaven and the things that are therein, and the earth and the things that are therein, that there shall be delay no longer; but that int he days of the seventh angel, when he begins to sound the trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, as he declared by his servants the prophets.” (Verses 5-7)

“And they said to me, ‘Thou must prophesy again to many nations and peoples and tongues and kings,’ (Verse 11). – St. Anthony Mary Claret was the great prophet who announced one century ahead the evils of today, particularly Communism. He spoke before the kings as the royal confessor of Queen Elizabeth of Spain and before the highest authorities of the Church, as a prominent Father of the Vatican Council I, before Pius IX and all the council Fathers. Among them was the Cardinal Joachim Pecci, later on the wonderful Pope Leo XIII, and Cardinal Gibbons of [Balimore].

 Ninth: St. Joseph. St. Anthony Mary Claret as Father of Vatican Council I signed a petition with 150 others attending the Council asking the Holy Father to declare St. Joseph patron of the Universal Church. It was two months after the death of St. Anthony Mary Claret that His Holiness Pius IX answered this petition by proclaiming St. Joseph Patron of the Universal Church, on December 8, 1870.

Once when St. Anthony Mary Claret was supposed to be assassinated, on the feast of St. Teresa on October 15, 1859, one of those on whom the lot fell to perform the deed, passed by the church of St. Joseph. To mock at the holy place he entered and saw at the altar a young priest saying the Holy Mass with great devotion. When Mass was over he went to talk to this young priest to pervert him, but found him very virtuous and learned. The grace of God touched him, then the assassin-to-be continued his trip to meet St. Anthony Mary Claret. He told him from where he had come and the plot against his life. Our Lord made St. Anthony Mary Claret understand that the intercession of St. Joseph protected him from assassination that day.

Secret of Counteraction

 Tenth: St. Anthony Mary Claret as a great prophet foretold Communism and its evils one century ago. Our Lord told him to counteract all these evils by his perfect oneness with the Holy Eucharist, day and night present in him, and the fervent recitation of the Trisagion and that of the Holy Rosary.

Eleventh: His compassion for sinners and his untiring, intense zeal for their salvation. He pleaded with God Almighty to let him remain by the gates of hell until the end of time, to tell everyone: “Stop, Stop! Do not trespass these horrible gates of hell! Do not dare to walk through these gates! Turn back, turn back! Do not go through these gates – Stop! Turn back! Make your confession! Save your immortal soul.” All of his prayers had these three intentions:

What He Prayed For

       1) The deliverance of the souls from Purgatory.

       2) The perseverance of the just.

       3) The conversion of sinners throughout the entire world.

 Twelfth: St. Anthony Mary Claret’s love for the Holy Father was ever outstanding. As a Father of Vatican Council I he defended so convincingly the infallibility of the Holy Father that on May 31, 1870, before all the Fathers of the Council he said: “I carry the stigmata of Christ in my body and I wish I could shed all my blood to seal this great truth – I believe that the Roman Supreme Pontiff is infallible when speaking ex cathedra in the Name of Christ and in the name of Sts. Peter and Paul and in his own name on matters of faith and morals.” His sermon was so eloquent and the impression produced on the Council so enormous that the balloting on Infallibility was favorable despite the debate and the opposition that took place, particularly with the French bishops. The Secretary of the Council said: “Truly Archbishop Claret is a Confessor of the Faith.”

These twelve reasons make St. Anthony Mary Claret the perfect forerunner of the message of Our Blessed Mother in Fatima. His statue at the right hand of the Blessed Mother in her Basilica at Fatima is in its right place! And it is fitting that the Blue Army of Our Lady, in the centenary year of his death, should adopt him as its special Patron. (Published in January – February 1971 edition of Soul Magazine and found at: https://fatimaprotocol.wordpress.com/seventh-angel-of-the-apocalypse/">Seventh Angel)

And why, precisely, are we afraid to be like Saint Anthony Mary Claret today in our small efforts to oppose Communism, to oppose the Modernism that has made its reconciliation with Communism, to defend the infallibility of a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter and of the universal ordinary magisterium of Holy Mother Church?

Let the Southern Poverty Law Center have at us. Let ‘em.

Let the full might of the government of the United States of America come down upon us, and when it does may we call to mind the stirring words of Archbishop Jan Feliks Cieplak at his Soviet show trial one hundred years ago this year:

“I have done no wrong,” he said, “ to the Soviet Government, but have ever taught and practiced the same truths which the Catholic Church has taught and practiced for nearly two thousand years. That Church has never taught evil, but always good. Today I stand before temporal judges : tomorrow, perhaps, I may stand before the Eternal Judge; and my only prayer is that the temporal judges will be just and the Eternal Judge will be merciful.”

We have nothing to fear from the petty potentates of Modernity nor their Modernist enablers and fellow travelers in the counterfeit church of conciliarism as long as we stay as close as possible—perhaps even by means of making Spiritual Communions—to Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and to Our Lady by means of a fervent devotion to her Immaculate Heart and by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

With Saint Joseph as the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faith and with Saint Philomena, our powerful Wonder Worker, ever ready to help us as we face the persecutions of the moment that pale into insignificance with those she suffered at the hands of Diocletian, may we joyfully embrace the challenges of these times by not ruing the lot that is ours but by thanking our dear Lord for choosing us, as unworthy as we are, to serve Him by being brought low before men and ground into a reputational dust at the hands of the wild forces of hatred that our sins have let loose in the world.

With contrite hearts ever ready to seek out the ineffable mercy of the Divine Redeemer in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and ever mindful of the fact that He might call us unto Himself for the terrible moment of the Particular Judgment, may we be ever reliant upon and confident in—without in the least being presumptuous of—the intercession of Holy Mother, Mother of God, who prays us sinners now, and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

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.

Saint Valentine, pray for us.

Appendix A

Pope Saint Pius X’s Meeting with Theodore Herzl, January 25, 1904

HERZL: Yesterday I was with the Pope [Pius X]. . . . I arrived ten minutes ahead of time, and without having to wait I was conducted through a number of small reception rooms to the Pope. He received me standing and held out his hand, which I did not kiss. Lippay had told me I had to do it, but I didn’t. I believe this spoiled my chances with him, for everyone who visits him kneels and at least kisses his hand. This hand kiss had worried me a great deal and I was glad when it was out of the way.

He seated himself in an armchair, a throne for minor affairs, and invited me to sit by his side. He smiled in kindly anticipation. I began:

HERZL: I thank Your Holiness for the favor of granting me this audience. [I begged him to excuse my miserable Italian, but he said:

POPE: No, Signor Commander, you speak very well.

HERZL: [He is an honest, rough-hewn village priest, to whom Christianity has remained a living thing even in the Vatican. I briefly laid my request before him. But annoyed perhaps by my refusal to kiss his hand, he answered in a stern categorical manner.

POPE: We are unable to favor this movement [of Zionism]. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.

HERZL: [The conflict between Rome and Jerusalem, represented by the one and the other of us, was once again under way. At the outset I tried to be conciliatory. I said my little piece. . . . It didn’t greatly impress him. Jerusalem was not to be placed in Jewish hands.] And its present status, Holy Father?

POPE: I know, it is disagreeable to see the Turks in possession of our Holy Places. We simply have to put up with it. But to sanction the Jewish wish to occupy these sites, that we cannot do.

HERZL: [I said that we based our movement solely on the sufferings of the Jews, and wished to put aside all religious issues].

POPE: Yes, but we, but I as the head of the Catholic Church, cannot do this. One of two things will likely happen. Either the Jews will retain their ancient faith and continue to await the Messiah whom we believe has already appeared—in which case they are denying the divinity of Jesus and we cannot assist them. Or else they will go there with no religion whatever, and then we can have nothing at all to do with them. The Jewish faith was the foundation of our own, but it has been superceded by the teachings of Christ, and we cannot admit that it still enjoys any validity. The Jews who should have been the first to acknowledge Jesus Christ have not done so to this day.

HERZL: [It was on the tip of my tongue to remark, “It happens in every family: no one believes in his own relative.” But, instead, I said:] Terror and persecution were not precisely the best means for converting the Jews. [His reply had an element of grandeur in its simplicity:]

POPE: Our Lord came without power. He came in peace. He persecuted no one. He was abandoned even by his apostles. It was only later that he attained stature. It took three centuries for the Church to evolve. The Jews therefore had plenty of time in which to accept his divinity without duress or pressure. But they chose not to do so, and they have not done it yet.

HERZL: But, Holy Father, the Jews are in a terrible plight. I do not know if Your Holiness is aware of the full extent of their tragedy. We need a land for these harried people.

POPE: Must it be Jerusalem?

HERZL: We are not asking for Jerusalem, but for Palestine—for only the secular land.

POPE: We cannot be in favor of it.

[Editor Lowenthal interjects here] Here unrelenting replacement theology is plainly upheld as the norm of the Roman Catholic Church. Further, this confession, along with the whole tone of the Pope in his meeting with Herzl, indicates the perpetuation of a doctrinal emphasis that has resulted in centuries of degrading behavior toward the Jews. However, this response has the “grandeur” of total avoidance of that which Herzl had intimated, namely that the abusive reputation of Roman Catholicism toward the Jews was unlikely to foster conversion. Further, if, “It took three centuries for the Church to evolve,” it was that very same period of time that it took for the Church to consolidate and launch its thrust of anti-Semitism through the following centuries.
HERZL: Does Your Holiness know the situation of the Jews?

POPE: Yes, from my days in Mantua, where there are Jews. I have always been in friendly relations with Jews. Only the other evening two Jews were here to see me. There are other bonds than those of religion: social intercourse, for example, and philanthropy. Such bonds we do not refuse to maintain with the Jews. Indeed we also pray for them, that their spirit see the light. This very day the Church is celebrating the feast of an unbeliever who became converted in a miraculous manner—on the road to Damascus. And so if you come to Palestine and settle your people there, we will be ready with churches and priests to baptize all of you.

HERZL: [At this point Conte Lippay had himself announced. The Pope bade him be admitted. The Conte kneeled, kissed his hand, and joined in the conversation by telling of our “miraculous” meeting in the Bauer beerhall at Venice. The miracle was that he had originally intended to stay overnight in Padua, and instead, it turned out that he was given to hear me express the wish to kiss the Holy Father’s foot. At this the Pope made no movement, for I hadn’t even kissed his hand. Lippay proceeded to tell how I had expiated on the noble qualities of Jesus Christ. The Pope listened, and now and then took a pinch of snuff and sneezed into a big red cotton handkerchief. It is these peasant touches which I like about him best and which most of all compel my respect. Lippay, it would appear, wanted to account for his introducing me, and perhaps ward off a word of reproach. But the Pope said:

POPE: On the contrary, I am glad you brought me the Signor Commendatore.

HERZL: [As to the real business, he repeated what he had told me, until he dismissed us:]

POPE: Not possible!

HERZL: [Lippay stayed on his knees for an unconscionable time and never seemed to tire of kissing his hand. It was apparent that this was what the Pope liked. But on taking leave, I contented myself with shaking his hand warmly and bowing deeply. The audience lasted about twenty-five minutes. While spending the last hour in the Raphael gallery, I saw a picture of an Emperor kneeling before a seated Pope and receiving the crown from his hands. That’s how Rome wants it.]   (Marvin Lowenthal, Diaries of Theodore Herzl, pp. 427- 430.)

Judaism has been superseded by Catholicism, and the establishment of the Zionist State of Israel, which was founded as its racialist, militarist Zionist “founding fathers” drove off and seized the property of Palestinians whose families had lived there for over sixteen hundred years, and it is now officially the basis of Israel’s very existence. Pope Saint Pius X recognized that this would be the only result of Herzl’s project, which did not then and has not since enjoyed the favor of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Appendix B

How Herzl Convinced Protestants to become “Christian Zionists”

Since the time of the Apostles, the Holy Catholic Church has preached the Gospel by the authority granted it by Jesus Christ. The Church was preaching the Gospel years before the Four Gospels were written down, and has continued to this day to fulfill Our Lord’s command to “preach the gospel to every creature” (Mk.16:15). 

The Church collected the Scriptures that make up the Bible. But the heretic, Martin Luther (1483-1546), weeded out some of the books of the Bible he didn’t like, and the Protestant version of the Bible was born. The Bible itself was then touted as the sole authority subject to the “private interpretation” of the believer, thus denying the Church’s authority to preach the Gospel and interpret the Scriptures. However, it seems “the believers” are willing to believe much that is not to be found in the Bible.

No doubt many of us are puzzled by the strange phenomenon of Christian Zionism. Many Evangelical Christians, like the Baptists, the Pentecostals and the Charismatics, are enthusiastic supporters of Jewish Zionism, although not all Jews are Zionists, and many of them dispute the Zionist claims.

The Jewish Zionist Movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Its chief aim was the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the “Land of Israel” in the Bible. The Temple would eventually be rebuilt, and the ancient religious rites resumed. Since they believe they have a right to the lands promised to Abraham by God, the Zionists have little sympathy for the Palestinians, who were squeezed into the West Bank and the Gaza strip after the creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948. Misusing Old Testament Scriptures, the Jewish Zionists believe they are destined to rule the world.

So what could have turned famous Protestant preachers like Billy Graham, Hal Lindsay, John Hagee and Pat Robertson, into Christian Zionists, enthusiastic supporters of the aims of Jewish Zionism? Could it have been – the Scofield Bible?

The Scofield Reference Bible is widely used in Protestant seminaries, especially among Evangelicals, such as Baptists, Pentecostals and Charismatics. Recently someone sent me an article by a Mr. C.E. Carlson about the Scofield Bible, which seems to get to the root of the problem. Much of what follows is from Mr. Carlson.

One of the schemes of the Jewish Zionists was to alter the Christian view of Zionism by creating and promoting a pro-Zionist subculture within Christianity. One Cyrus I. Scofield (1843-1921) was funded by Zionist agents to re-write the King James Version of the Bible by inserting Zionist-friendly notes in the margins, between verses and chapters, and on the bottoms of the pages. It was first published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, which still holds the copyright. 

Scofield produced a revolutionary book that radically changed the context of the King James Version. Oxford's promoters made the Scofield Bible, with its Christian Zionist footnotes, a standard for interpreting scripture in Christian churches, seminaries, and Bible study groups. And they all followed like sheep – even Hagee, Lindsay, Robertson, Van Impe, and the revered Billy Graham. So much for private interpretation!

After Scofield’s death, the Oxford University Press turned the Scofield Bible into a manual for the Christian worship of the State of Israel. Scofield’s un-Christian anti-Arab theology has permitted the theft of Palestine and 54 years of death and destruction against the Palestinians, with hardly a complaint from the Judeo-Christian mass media evangelists or most other American church leaders, including the so-called U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In his Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul contradicts the claims of the Scofield Bible:

“The promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. He does not say, ‘And to his offsprings,’ as of many; but as of one, ‘And to his offspring,’ who is Christ… For you are all the children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all who have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are the offspring of Abraham, heirs according to promise” (Gal.3:15b,16;26-29).

This makes it clear that to be a blood relative descended from Abraham is of no advantage to those who do not have faith in Jesus Christ. And Scofield and the Oxford University Press are liars when they try to prove that those who are known today as “Jews” are the heirs to the promises of Abraham. We read this whopper on page 1136 of the 1967 edition: “All Jews are natural descendants of Abraham…”  

This is absolutely false and absurd. The great majority of the so-called Jews who control Israel today are not descendants of Abraham at all. They are the Ashkenazi Jews, descendants of the Khazars of Eastern Europe. They are imposters, with no right to the lands of the Bible! Although known as “Jews” they are such neither by blood nor by religion, because the Jewish religion their ancestors adopted in the eighth century is not the true religion of the ancient Jews of the time of Christ, but the false Talmudic Judaism which blasphemes Jesus Christ and deifies the Jewish race.

And on page 19 we find this blatant lie: “God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed… to the Nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever.

What a deception! The televangelists and their huge following have accepted this abominable lie, and have led the whole country into vassalage to the Godless modern State of Israel. Jesus Christ is Abraham’s heir, not the State of Israel. The promises God made to Abraham are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The Jewish Zionists have no true understanding of the Scriptures. And who would have thought that the “Bible believing Christians” would have stumbled after them into the darkness? 

“Did you never read in the Scriptures,” said Our Lord to the Pharisees: “‘The stone which the builders rejected, has become the corner stone; by the Lord this has been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes’? Therefore I say to you, that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and will be given to a people yielding its fruits” (Mt.21:42,43).

St. Paul understood it well:

“You are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief corner stone. In him the whole structure is closely fitted together and grows into a temple holy in the Lord, in him you too are being built together into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit” (Eph.2:20-22).  (Father Louis J. Campbell, Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.)

The notion that the people who threw out the Palestinians from their homes and dispossessed them of their belongings as many of them were herded into the Zionist equivalent of concentration camps, termed euphemistically as "relocation camps," in 1948 and thereafter represent the Abrahamic Jews of the Old Testaments is false. Most of those Jews who settled in Palestine between the two world wars and after World War II are not descendents of Abraham nor are they Jews by blood. Most of these modern day Talmudists are descendants of the Asiatic Khazars who converted to Talmudism:

Jesus Christ is the Great Prophet foretold by Moses, Whom all nations and peoples must hear and obey, lest they be "destroyed from among the people." Jesus was not a mere prophet, like Moses, Jeremiah, or Isaiah. In Jesus there resided the prophetic gift in all its fullness. When God speaks, we must listen in fear and trembling (cf. Isaias 66:5).

Though they have rejected the Great Prophet, the Jews still think that the promises made to Abraham are theirs, and that all the lands promised to the ancient Israelites are theirs by right, and will be theirs in fact. This means that no one else who occupies these lands, be they Palestinians, Lebanese, or whatever, have any rights, and that they can be dispossessed of the lands they have occupied for millennia. The ancient Israelites, whose heirs they imagine themselves to be, were commanded by God to exterminate the Philistines, were they not? And who are the descendants of the Philistines? Why, the Palestinians and the Lebanese, of course! Their rights can be ignored with impunity.

Then there are those of the Christian Fundamentalist Right in the Unites States, the Christian Zionists, who support Israeli claims, egged on by such false prophets as Jerry Falwell, Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, and John Hagee. Thousands of evangelical Christians recently arrived from all 50 states in Washington, where they have enormous political influence, for the first annual summit of Christians United for Israel, Hagee being the main organizer. 

For the first time in the history of Christianity in America," Hagee said, "Christians will go to the Hill to support Israel as Christians." They will urge the US government "not to restrain Israel in any way in the pursuit of Hamas and Hezbollah… We want our Congress to make sure that not one dime of American money goes to support Hamas and Hezbollah or the enemies of Israel."

Then Hagee declares: "When they see what's going on in the Middle East, a whole range of enemies arrayed against God's people, they see God's word being played out on their television sets. They see Israel triumphing over its enemies as proof that God's promises remain" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5193092.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5193092.stm).

It is as if Jesus Christ never came and established a New Covenant in His Blood, and founded the Holy Catholic Church. God's promises were fulfilled in Jesus Christ and in those who follow Him. Hagee, and those like him, have an Old Testament theological viewpoint, and have betrayed Jesus Christ, in Whom the Scriptures are fulfilled. Who are God's people but those who have believed in His word and obey His commands, whether Jews or not? According to St. Paul, "There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are the offspring of Abraham, heirs according to promise" (Galatians 3:28,29).

The Jews are children of Abraham according to the flesh only, natural descendants. Some of them, that is. Are those whom we call Jews today the descendants of the Jews who were dispersed among the nations after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D., or even of the ten tribes that were carried off into captivity by the ancient Assyrians in 721 B.C.? On the contrary, most Jews today are the so-called Ashkenazi Jews, descended from the ancient Khazars of Eastern Europe. Despite their prominence in the Jewish community they do not have Jewish blood, but were converted to Judaism in the ninth century. They do not have Jewish blood, and they follow the modern Jewish Talmudic religion. How does that make them "God's people," and the "inheritors of the promises"?

On May 14, 1948, on the day in which the British Mandate over Palestine expired, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum and declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The new state was recognized that night by the United States, and three days later by the USSR. The Vatican, out of concern for the safety of the Holy Places and the rights of the Palestinians, many of whom are Catholic, did not recognize the modern state of Israel until John Paul II, fervently pro-Jewish, gave it official Vatican recognition on April 20, 1984.

Contrary to what the Jewish Zionists expect, they will not reign as masters of the world from Jerusalem. The servile nations will not come to Mount Zion bearing gifts. Pray for the Jews! They will be all but exterminated except for the remnant who will turn to Jesus Christ and be saved.

And contrary to what the Christian Zionists expect, the Temple will not be rebuilt, and 144,000 Jews will not be converted to reign with Jesus Christ from the Temple in Jerusalem for a thousand years. (Father Louis Campbell, "And I Saw No Temple Therein". For a listing of John Hagee’s anti-Catholic statements over the years, see Hagee in His Own Words.)

Yes, the notion of the current "Talmudists" as the Jews of the Old Testament is entirely invented. 

The Zionist State of Israel is entirely invented out of the fantasies of Theodore Herzl, the founder of International Zionism, to relocate the Talmudists in the very land from which the actual descendants of Abraham were expelled by the Romans in 70 A.D. as God used the pagan Romans as the instrument to chastise the Jews for their obstinate refusal to accept the preaching of the Gospel in their midst after He had mercifully permitted them a thirty-seven year period of reprieve following their role in calling down the Most Precious Blood of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, upon them and their children. God expelled the Jews from the Holy Land in 70 A.D., and they were not meant to return, certainly not to found a nation based in a false, blasphemous religion, less yet to do so by violent means and the constant use of raw terror and the murder of countless thousands of innocent Palestinian Arabs, both Christians and Mohammedans, thus engendering an endless cycle of hatred and violence.

Appendix C

Ariel Sharon’s Epic Hatred of Arabs

AS ARIEL SHARON'S career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as "a man of courage and peace" who had generated "hopes for a far-reaching accord" with an electoral campaign promising "to end conflict with the Palestinians."

But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that miracles don't happen, and only rarely have words and realities been separated by such a yawning abyss.

From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.

As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.

Sharon's approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn't very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as "a man of courage and peace."

Some may take comfort in the myth that Sharon was transformed into a peacemaker, but in fact he never deviated from his own 1998 call to "run and grab as many hilltops" in the occupied territories as possible. His plan for peace with the Palestinians involved grabbing large portions of the West Bank, ultimately annexing them to Israel, and turning over the shattered, encircled, isolated, disconnected and barren fragments of territory left behind to what only a fool would call a Palestinian state.

SHARON'S "painful sacrifices" for peace may have involved Israel keeping less, rather than more, of the territory that it captured violently and has clung to illegally for four decades, but few seem to have noticed that it's not really a sacrifice to return something that wasn't yours to begin with.

His much-ballyhooed withdrawal from Gaza left 1.4 million Palestinians in what is essentially the world's largest prison, cut off from the rest of the world and as subject to Israeli power as before. It also terminated the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict by condemning Palestinians to whiling away their lives in a series of disconnected Bantustans, ghettos, reservations and strategic hamlets, entirely at the mercy of Israel.

That's not peace. As Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull would have recognized at a glance, it's an attempt to pacify an entire people by bludgeoning them into a subhuman irrelevance. Nothing short of actual genocide — for which Sharon's formula was merely a kind of substitute — would persuade the Palestinian people to quietly accept such an arrangement, or negate themselves in some other way. And no matter which Israeli politician now assumes Sharon's bloody mantle, such an approach to peace will always fail. (The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon; see also Remembering Israel's Brutal massacre of Palestinian Civilians in Kafr Qasem, and Israeli Massacres on Palestinians, which contains some graphic photographs of injuries to Palestinians caused by the Israeli military, for an assessment of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.)

Appendix D

How the Western Wall is Not a Remnant of Herod’s Temple

No man that hath read the history of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Princes Vespasian and Titus, can be ignorant that it was of that destruction that the Lord spoke when He wept over the ruin of the city. It is these Princes that are pointed at where it is said "For the days shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee." The truth of what followeth: "They shall not leave in thee one stone upon another" is even now fulfilled in the change of site of the city, which hath been re-built round about that place without the gates, where the Lord was crucified, while the ancient city hath been, as I am told, rooted up from the very foundations.

What the sin of Jerusalem was which brought upon her the punishment of this destruction, we find written after: "Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation." The Maker of men, through the mystery of His Incarnation, was pleased to visit her, but she remembered not to fear and to love Him. Hence also the Prophet Jeremiah, rebuking the hardness of man's heart, calleth the birds of the air to testify against it, saying "The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed time and the turtle, and the swallow, and the crane, observe the time of their coming but my people know not the judgment of the Lord." viii. 7.

The Saviour wept over the ruin of the unfaithful city, while she herself as yet knew not that it was coming. If thou hadst known, said He, even thou and we may understand Him to have meant thou wouldest thyself have wept, in place of making merry as thou now dost, knowing not what hangeth over thee. And hence He saith farther: "at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace." While she was giving herself up to fleshly pleasures, and casting no look ahead upon coming sorrows, she had still for a day in her power the things which might have brought unto her peace. (Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Matins, Divine Office.)

And Jesus being come out of the temple, went away. And his disciples came to shew him the buildings of the temple. [2] And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen I say to you there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed. (Matthew 24: 1-2.)

Our Lord prophesied that there “shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed,” which should teach us that the so-called Western Wall is not part of Solomon’s Temple as modern Jews contend (it is a retaining wall for the courtyard on the Temple mount, not for the Temple itself, which was destroyed, stone upon stone) but another false representation made by those who believe that they remain the Chosen People, which they do not.

Father George Leo Haydock’s commentary on verse two of the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew explains the falsity of the Jewish contention that the Western (Wailing) Wall has anything to do with Solomon’s Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans.  in its entirety. It was, to use a favorite phrase of a friend of ours, leveled. Ironically, it was the Jews themselves who destroyed a few remnants of the Temple’s wall in the Fourth Century as they did the bidding of Julian the Apostate to try to produce false archeological evidence to debunk Our Lord’s prophecy:

Ver. 2. Do you see all these things? Examine again and again all this magnificence, that the sentence of heaven may appear more striking. --- A stone upon a stone. We need not look on this as an hyperbole. The temple burnt by the Romans, and afterwards even ploughed up. See Gregory of Nazianzus, orat. ii. cont. Julianum; Theodoret, lib. iii. Histor. chap. xx. &c. (Witham) --- Julian the apostate, wishing to falsify the predictions of Daniel and of Jesus Christ, attempted to rebuild the temple. For this purpose, he assembled the chief among the Jews, and asking them why they neglected the prescribed sacrifices, was answered, that they could not offer any where else but in the temple of Jerusalem. Upon this he ordered them to repair to Jerusalem, to rebuild their temple, and restore their ancient worship, promising them his concurrence in carrying on the work. This filled the Jews with inexpressible joy. Hence flocking to Jerusalem, they began with scorn and triumph to insult over the Christians. Contributions came in from all parts. The Jewish women stripped themselves of their most costly ornaments. The emperor opened his treasures to furnish every thing necessary for the building. The most able workmen were convened from all parts; persons of the greatest distinction were appointed to direct the work; and the emperor's friend, Alipius, was set over the whole, with orders to carry on the work without ceasing, and to spare no expense. All materials were laid in to an immense quantity. The Jews of both sexes bore a share in the labour; the women helping to dig the ground, and carry away the rubbish in their aprons and gowns. It is even said that the Jews appointed some pick-axes, spades, and baskets, to be made of silver, for the honour of the work. Till this time the foundations and some ruins of the walls had remained, as appears from St. Cyril, in his catechism xv. n. 15, and Eusebius, Dem. Evang. lib. viii. p. 406. These ruins the Jews first demolished with their own hands, thus concurring to the accomplishment of our Saviour's prediction. They next began to dig a new foundation, in which many thousands were employed. But what they had thrown up in the day, was, by repeated earthquakes, the night following cast back again into the trench. When Alipius the next day was earnestly pressing on the work, with the assistance of the governor of the province, there issued, says Ammianus Marcellinus, such horrible balls of fire out of the earth near the foundations, as to render the place inaccessible from time to time to the scorched workmen. And the victorious element continuing in this manner obstinately bent, as it were, to drive them to a distance, Alipius, thought proper to abandon, though reluctantly, the enterprise. This great event happened in the beginning of the year 363, and with many very astonishing circumstances is recorded both by Jews and Christians. See the proofs and a much fuller account of this astonishing event, which all the ancient fathers describe as indubitable, in Alban Butler's life of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, March 18th. Thus they so completely destroyed whatever remained of the ancient temple, that there was not left one stone upon another; nor were they permitted by heaven even to begin the new one. (Maldonatus) (http://haydock1859.tripod.com/id42.html">Haydock Commntary.)

So much for the “fake news” and absolute hoax that is the “Western Wall” as being anything other than yet another means for the contemporary practitioners of a dead, superseded religion to lay claim to that which belongs to Christ the King and His true Church that He Himself founded upon the Rock of Saint Peter, the Pope, and to force the conciliar “popes” and dupes such as Trump and Vice President Michael Richard Pence to do their obeisance in front of this hoax.

Appendix E

Efforts by the Clinton, George Walker Bush, and Obama Administrations to Intimidate Pro-Life Americans

Although the current [Biden] administration’s crackdowns on its political opponents has taken its pro-baby-killing rhetoric into the realm of rank Soviet-style paramilitary intimidation, I am here to remind the very limited readership that the path to Merrick Garland’s use  of naked aggression against a man with no criminal record for an action to protect his own son that not even the “woke” District Attorney of Philadelphia County believed was prosecutable began on January 20, 1993, when William Jefferson Blythe Clinton was inaugurated as the forty-second president of the United States of America. It was at his behest that Congress, then firmly in the control of his band of leftists, passed the so-called Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) on May 12, 1994, by a roll-call vote of 69 to 30 (one senator did not vote). Seventeen Republican senators voted in favor of this monstrous act, including a supposedly “pro-life” senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Addison Mitchell McConnell. Ever hear of him? Well, I think that this is one of many reasons that the country club Republican who did, to his credit, keep Merrick Garland off of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in 2016 and who did get former President Donald John Trump’s Supreme Court nominees confirmed (not that this has meant very much insofar as stopping Biden’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers who are employed by facilities receiving Federal funding—see Supreme Court Declines to Review Vaccine Mandate Case for Health-Care Workers). The Old Crow from Kentucky will never speak out in defense of Mark Houck of Chet Gallagher. Neither will the flip-flopping, flimflam, preeningly self-righteous Willard Mitt Romney (R-Utah by way of Michigan and Massachusetts) or Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-South Dakota).

FACE was designed to shut down Operation Rescue and to give the United States Department of Justice, then headed by Attorney General Janet Reno, a pro-abortion, pro-perversity Catholic, of course, a wedge by which its Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) could use to intimidate to shut down pro-life activities outside of America’s killing centers.  Reno organized the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy (VAAPCON) Task Force under the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  to intimidate pro-life Americans, including a woman in Toledo, Ohio, who was visited by FBI agents after she had written to a baby-killer to tell her that she was praying for her conversion, an act that was deemed by the agents to have constituted a "violent threat" against the baby-killer (see FBI's VAAPCON Spies on Pro-Lifers for more information about the Clinton-Reno war against pro-lifers).

It was also during the administration of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton that the Chairman of the Federal Election Commission, a woman by the name of Lois Lerner, sought to intimidate former Illinois State Representative Al Salvi by seeking to bring charges against him that were found by a federal judge to be without merit whatsoever.

Here is a report that was published in 2013:

CHICAGO - The IRS scandal may have its roots in Illinois politics. Specifically, the 1996 U.S. Senate race between Democrat Congressman Dick Durbin and conservative Republican State Rep. Al Salvi.

More than a decade before his 2010 letter to IRS officials urging the agency to target conservative organizations, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin's political career crossed paths with Ms. Lerner when she was head of the Enforcement Division of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and directly involved in the 1996 Illinois U.S. Senate race.

Soon after the IRS story broke, Al Salvi told Illinois Review that it was IRS official Lois Lerner who represented the FEC in the 1996 Democrat complaint against him. According to Salvi, Lerner was, without question, politically motivated, and went so far as to make him an offer: "Promise me you will never run for office again, and we'll drop this case."

Salvi declined her offer. In fact he ran for Illinois Secretary of State in 1998.

But when he saw Lerner plead the Fifth Amendment before Congress last week, he recognized her. "That's the woman," Salvi said. "And I didn't plead the Fifth like she did."

In 2000, a federal judge dismissed the FEC case against him, clearing Salvi's name and reputation.

Now with the revelations about Lerner, the IRS, and the intriguing connection to Durbin, Salvi shared with Illinois Review his experience with Lois Lerner.

The 1996 FEC Complaint against Salvi

During the last several weeks of the 1996 Illinois U.S. Senate campaign, two FEC complaints were filed against Salvi - one by Illinois Democrats about the way he reported a loan he made to himself, and another by the Democratic Senatorial Committee about a reported business donation.

Salvi made a personal loan to his campaign for $1.1 million to fund the last campaign ads in the expensive Chicago television ad market. News of that loan and the filed FEC complaint dominated Chicago media headlines towards the end of the campaign, suffocating the life out of Salvi's threatening momentum.

"We couldn't get our message out because day after day, the media carried story after story about the FEC complaint," Salvi told Illinois Review in an exclusive interview. 

After Salvi lost to Durbin, he was left to face the FEC complaints. The Commission alleged that the Salvi committee:

• Reported bank loans to Mr. Salvi as personal loans from the candidate, never identifying the source of the funds;
• Failed to report debts to the candidate;
• Failed to file 48-hour notices for personal advances from the candidate; and
• Failed to disclose campaign-related payments by the candidate to vendors and a bank.

A federal district court dismissed the case against Salvi in 1999, and the FEC appealed it to the 7th U.S. District Court of Appeals.

The FBI was called in at one point to gather evidence on the case. According to Salvi, two FBI agents unexpectedly visited the Salvis' home, and interrogated his elderly mother about her $2,000 check to her son's campaign and where she got "that kind of money." 

Salvi says he saw the visits as nothing but intimidation, making it clear the FEC intended to use his case as a example to others.

At the same time, Salvi said, other conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition were besieged by the FEC demands. One time, representatives from several investigated conservative groups even convened on a conference call to compare notes on how the Clinton Administration was scouring their organizations' financial and activity records.

In fact, Salvi's case (and name) was highlighted as an example several times in the FEC's monthly publication until the case was finally dismissed in 2000.

It was while dealing with the FEC complaint that Salvi says he first met Lois Lerner, then the head of the FEC Enforcement Division.

During one conversation with Lerner, she offered a deal Salvi says he'll never forget, and neither will his brother and attorney, Mike Salvi.

"She said, 'If you promise to never run for office again, we'll drop this case,'" Salvi recalled.

At the time, Salvi said, he figured it was probably just Dick Durbin's way of getting him out of politics. 

Salvi said he refused Lerner's offer because he knew he had done nothing wrong and wanted to leave the door open for future campaigns. In 1998, Salvi ran for Illinois Secretary of State while the 1996 FEC case against him continued.

Nearly four years and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees later, federal judge George Lindbergh dismissed the FEC case against him, leaving the FEC attorney Lois Lerner -- who was present and actively arguing before the judge -- shocked. 

"The judge said to Lerner, 'Let me get this straight - Mr. Salvi loaning himself money is legal, and you have no complaint against that, is that right?'" Salvi said. "Ms. Lerner agreed. Then the judge said, 'You just don't like the way his attorneys filled out the report?' Lerner agreed."

Case dismissed, the judge said shaking his head and pounding his gavel, as Lerner objected.

"We never lose!" Lerner said to Salvi afterwards.

Despite all the Democrats' efforts, Salvi never paid the FEC a dollar in fines or penalties.

Congressional Hearings On IRS Scandal 

Salvi, now 53, said when he saw Lerner on television last week, those FEC hearings all came back to his memory -- 13 years later. "I didn't plead the Fifth," Salvi said.

And the taxpayers had no choice but to pay for Lerner's legal trail that lasted for over four years.

Durbin Asks IRS For Help in 2010

After the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case, many incumbent politicians became concerned about the activities of organizations like Crossroads GPS, which had announced it would be running issue ads against Illinois' Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate Alexi Giannoulias, who was campaigning to succeed Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate.

In October 2010, Durbin wrote IRS Commissioner Shulman about the tax exemption status of Crossroads - a job that would find its way to IRS official Lois Lerner.

I write to urge the Internal Revenue Service to examine the purpose and primary activities of several 501(c)(4) organizations that appear to be in violation of the law.

One organization whose activities appear to be inconsistent with its tax status is Crossroads GPS, organized as a (c)(4) entity in June. The group has spent nearly $20 million on television advertising specific to Senate campaigns this year. If this political activity is indeed the primary activity of the organization, it raises serious questions about the organization's compliance with the Internal Revenue Code.

Other 2010 letters to the IRS with similar requests from elected officials may be included in four Congressional investigations now scheduled to take place in the next few weeks.

Salvi says it will be interesting to see how Lois Lerner, Dick Durbin, the FEC, IRS, and Illinois politics intersect as these investigations continue. (Lerner intrigue goes back to '96 Durbin/ Salvi.)

Unfortunately for Mr. Salvi, however, he did knuckle under to the then Chairman of the Republican National Senatorial Campaign Committee after he had told him to quit talking about abortion or lose the committee's financial support. Oh, yes, you want the name of that individual? I will happily give it to you as it is none other than the now-former United States Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-New York), against whom I ran, unsuccessfully, of course, for the senatorial nomination of the Right to Life Party of the State of New York in 1998. (See Blood Money Talks Loud And Clear, part two, for details.)

As longtime readers of this site might call, former United States Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson had submitted an amicus curiae brief for the United States Department of Justice in 2002 to argue that the aforementioned Joseph Scheidler, the founder of the Pro-Life Action League who has saved thousands of babies by means of sidewalk counseling, was a “bandit” under the Hobbs Act of 1946 as his activities interfered with the ability of a business, a baby-killing mill, to make money, thereby “robbing” the proprietor:

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

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

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

Yes, the "pro-life" George Walker Bush administration authorized its Solicitor General to argue before the Supreme Court of the United States of America that abortuaries are legitimate businesses whose economic well-being was "threatened" by the sidewalk counseling activities of Joe Scheidler. Do you see how the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic system of government is a farce from beginning to end? And even though the Supreme Court of the United States of America rendered the correct decision in the case of Joseph Scheidler v. National Organization for Women on February 26, 2003 (see Justice for a True Pro-Life Hero), the ever-mercurial nature of American jurisprudence guarantees nothing about the future as such jurisprudence, both for "strict constructionists" and "liberal judicial activists" is founded in an interpretation of the words of men in written documents without making any reference at all to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted exclusively to the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

Not to be outdone, the contemptible Eric Himpton Holder also made war upon pro-life Americans during his time as Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro’s own Minister of Injustice:

Holder's own Department of Justice sought to persecute a woman, Mary Susan Pine, who did sidewalk counseling in the State of Florida, an act of rank administration tyranny and a gross miscarriage of justice and abuse of civil power that was denounced as such by Judge Kenneth Ryskamp, the senior judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida:

The Department of Justice has given up its bid to prosecute a pro-life counselor and agreed to pay her $120,000 in a case a judge said never should have been brought:

Mary Susan Pine, who stands outside abortion clinics and advises women not to have the procedure, was accused of blocking a car from entering a Florida abortion clinic in 2009. In December, a judge threw out the case, in which the government sought $10,000 in fines and a permanent injunction barring Pine from counseling women outside the Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. The government had been appealing the ruling until it was announced Monday it would no longer pursue the case.

Pine's lawyer said she was a victim of a politically-driven prosecution.

"It is irresponsible for the U.S. Department of Justice to place politics above principle when deciding to prosecute, and thus attempt to silence, a pro-life sidewalk counselor without any evidence of wrongdoing," Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said in a statement. "When the nation’s highest law enforcement officer files suit against any citizen, the suit must be based on the law coupled with compelling evidence. Anything less is an abuse of the high office."

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice defended prosecution decision as "based on the facts presented during our investigations and the applicable federal laws." In Pine's case, "the department made a decision to settle with the defendant rather than continue with costly litigation."

Florida District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp said in December the case appeared to be part of a "concerted effort" between the government and the Presidential Women's Center.

"The Court is at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this particular case in the first place,” Ryskamp wrote in a summary judgment order against the feds. “The court can only wonder whether this action was the product of a concerted effort between the government and PWC, which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities rather than to vindicate the rights of those allegedly aggrieved by Ms. Pine’s conduct."

Under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) federal law, DOJ officials alleged that Pine obstructed a car from entering the Florida abortion clinic on Nov. 19, 2009.

Pine, who could not be reached for comment, had denied obstructing any vehicle from entering the clinic. (DOJ officials drops appeal, pays Florida pro-life sidewalk counselor.)

Janet Reno, Eric Himpton Holder, Loretta Lynch, and Merrick Garland have all played the same pro-baby-killing tunes. All that Merrick Garland is doing is turning up the volume, something that he is able to because most Catholics today, living in a milieu of religious indifferentism (“one religion is a good as another or no religion at all;” “it does not matter what one believes, if anything, as long as he is a ‘good person’) and of a secularized version of Calvinist materialism, do not care what happens to pro-life activists because do not care about the daily slaughter of innocent unborn children by chemical and/or surgical means.

Appendix F

Reviewing the Problems with the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo Liturgical Abomination

If you will permit me yet a brief moment of your time, I want to rework some of the things that I have written in the past to provide a summary of some of the principal defects found in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service to demonstrate that the Novus Ordo is in se hideous in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity and can never be "reformed."

First, the Novus Ordo service is the synthetic product of an unprecedented exercise in liturgical manufacturing that was designed to enshrine false ecumenism. The Immemorial Mass of Tradition was not invented by a committee headed by the aforementioned Bugnini, that was advised by six liberal Protestant observers (who made their "observations" in coffee breaks so that those comments could be read into the record by Consilium's bishop-members). The Immemorial Mass of Tradition was taught in all of its essential elements by Our Lord to the Apostles before He Ascended to the Father's right hand in glory on Ascension Thursday. 

Father Adrian Fortescue explained in the early part of the Twentieth Century that the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, which was not "written" by the Council of Trent as some conciliar apologists continued to assert falsely, is the oldest of the liturgical rites in the Roman Catholic Church:

Essentially, the Missal of Pius V is the Gregorian Sacramentary; that again is formed from the Gelasian book, which depends upon the Leonine collection. We find prayers of our Canon in the treatise de Sacramentis and allusions to it in the [Fourth] Century. So the Mass goes back, without essential change, to the age when it first developed out of the oldest Liturgy of all. It is still redolent of that Liturgy, of the days when Caesar ruled the world, and thought he could stamp out the Faith of Christ, when our fathers met together before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as God. The final result of our enquiry is that, in spite of some unresolved problems, in spite of later changes there is not in Christendom another rite so venerable as ours. (Michael Davies, ed., The Wisdom of Adrian Fortescue)

Second, as the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is indeed the unbloody re-presentation of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross and is at the same time a foretaste of Heavenly glories, its rubrics are meant to reflect the immutability of God and not the passing currents of any individual age. A true and valid offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, although it takes place at a particular time in a particular place, is meant to reflect the timelessness of eternity and the unchanging nature of God as it reflects the differences between the hierarchical priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the lay faithful by means of their baptism in various ways, including the separation of the sanctuary from the nave of a Catholic Church by an altar rail.

Third, abject lies were told by Bugnini and company about where the various constituent elements of the Novus Ordo originated. Far from being the "recapturing" of some allegedly simpler liturgy in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, a claim that was itself an exercise in the antiquarianism condemned by Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947, the Novus Ordo service borrowed heavily from the now defunct Gallican Rite, from various Oriental Rites, from various strains of Protestantism, and even from the "table prayers" of Talmudic Judaism, which were inserted at the personal behest of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI and replaced the traditional Offertory of the Mass that clearly denotes the sacrificial nature of Mass, something that is not reflected clearly in the Novus Ordo service. (Please see Appendix A for a further documentation of the misrepresentations made by Annibale Bugnini to the bishop members of the Consilium.)

Fourth, while ignoring all of the mistranslations of the Latin editio typica of the Novus Ordo service into vernacular languages, the editio typica itself contains a less full expression of the Catholic Faith than is found in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. References to the miracles of various saints have been changed, if not eliminated altogether. Various parts of the Ordinary of the Mass, including the Confiteor, have been watered down. All references to a God Who judges, to the possibility of the loss of one's immortal soul for all eternity, and to the need of doing penance for one's sins have been changed or eradicated (see Paragraph 15 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal and my analysis of same as found in G.I.R.M. Warfare that I have repeated on this site numerous times, including in Blind to Truth, Blind to the Horror of Personal Sin.

Fifth, the "Eucharistic Prayers" that have been added since 1969--and the changes made to the Roman Canon itself--do not make clear the sacrificial nature of the Mass. Others have provided solid evidence concerning the invalidity of these "Eucharistic Prayers." (See Invalidity of the Novus Ordo Missae, Matter and Form of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, Article on the Eucharistic Form of Consecration.)

Sixth, the General Instruction to the Roman Missal requires the novelty of laity in the sanctuary during what purports to be a valid offering of Holy Mass. Young boys and adult males are permitted by the special permission of the Church to enter the sanctuary as altar servers in the Mass, serving as the extension of the hands of the priest, who is a male. No other personage, male or female, is permitted in the sanctuary. This is not so in the Novus Ordo service, where the priest sits at almost every Mass as a proliferation of laity "participates" in reading and singing. This blurs the distinction between the sacerdotal, hierarchical priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the lay faithful. This is yet another fact about the Novus Ordo service that obliterates the sacrosanct nature of the sanctuary during Mass, thereby eliminating the sense of the timelessness of the unbloody re-presentation of the Son's one Sacrifice to the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Seventh, the hands of the non-ordained are permitted to distribute what purports, albeit falsely, to be Holy Communion at a putative offering of Holy Mass. This has taught Catholics that they can touch what they believe to be the Sacred Species by with their own hands and that they can have arrogated unto themselves certain of the functions reserved solely to validly ordained priests.

Eighth, the distribution of what purports to be Holy Communion in the hand, which has been sanctioned officially since 1977 (after years of this sacrilege being permitted at the parish and diocesan levels without Roman approbation), has made sacrilege an accepted part of almost every staging of the Novus Ordo service in the world. The hands of the non-ordained must never touch, no less distribute, the Sacred Species. The number of allegedly consecrated Hosts dropped (or placed into pockets or purses or books, some of which have been used in purported black Masses) and the amount of what is said to be Most Precious Blood of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that has been spilled is known only to God, Who is deeply offended by the callous manner in which Catholics have been taught to receive what they believe is His Real Presence in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. (See Michael Davies on Communion in the hand and my own Missing the Real Culprit Once Again, which was written about three hundred seventy-nine days before the first article on this site was published that explore the possibility of the truth of the canonical doctrine of sedevacantism and that it may apply in our own days).

Ninth, the General Instruction to the Roman Missal's penchant for endless options in the offering of the Novus Ordo service make any discussion of a a fixed rite laughable and absurd. A liturgical rite must convey the permanence and immutability of God and the permanence and immutability of man's need for Him as He has revealed Himself solely through His true Church, the Catholic Church. A liturgical rite that admits of ceaseless changes and endless options, some undertaken in the name of the ideology of "inculturation" of the Gospel, produces instability in the souls of the faithful, leading them to believe that God and His truths are mutable. As discussed earlier, Paragraph 395 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal makes it almost impossible to distinguish "approved" liturgical experimentations from "unapproved" improvisations.

Tenth, the 1997 edition of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal's support for the "free-standing" altar and for Mass facing the people continues to undermine the Christocentricity of the Mass and the fact a priest's personality and celebratory "style" are utterly unimportant in the context of offering Holy Mass. A priest is an alter Christus who acts in persona Christi. Our focus is on a priest's actions as Christ, the Chief Priest and Victim of every Mass, not on his own personality. No liturgical rite of the Catholic Church featured this harmful Protestant novelty prior to the 1960s.

Eleventh, the calendar of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo service, completing the revolution that began in 1951, offends God by eliminating the feasts of a great number of saints, some of whose sacrifices in defense of the Faith have been disparaged as never having taken place! The number of Octaves, which served to extend the celebrations of important feasts, were reduced from fifteen to three in 1956, and from three to two in the Novus Ordo calendar. The nomenclature used to describe the Sundays of the year was changed after nearly two millennia of usage. The words of Pope Saint Pius V, which warned against any changes to the Missal he propagated in 1570, have been ignored with impunity, resulting in a loss of the sense of the sacred, a loss of belief in the Real Presence, and a loss of devotion to the great saints of the first centuries of the Church. (See Pre-Vatican II Liturgical Changes: Road to the New Mass, The Pius X and John XXIII Missals Compared, Liturgical Revolution.)

In short, as can be seen from this brief and far from exhaustive list of problems with the Novus Ordo service, this liturgical fabrication, which is itself an abuse against God and the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood, generates one abuse after another as the Faith is undermined at every turn. And this the "liturgy" to which Francis the Liturgist is committed with every fiber of his Modernist being.

It is very offensive for a man considered by almost everyone in the world to be a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter to do what the conciliar "popes," including Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis, have done and continue do by using their "papal" office to destroy all notion of the sacred in the liturgy. This is particularly offensive as it is the very sacrality of Christ the King Who most be embodied in the person of the Vicar of Christ, especially as he offers the unbloody perpetuation or re-presentation of Our King's bloody sacrifice of Himself to His Co-Eternal and Co-Eternal Father in Spirit and in Truth that is the Holy Mass

If the Church, in accordance with the teaching of St. Paul, is the Mystical Body of Christ, then she must have a head and a heart like any other body. Jesus is her Head and Heart. The Head works mainly in Rome, the Heart in the tabernacle. The Head reveals itself especially in the Holy Father, the Heart in the Eucharist. Both are vital necessities. If the head and the heart no longer work, the body dies. If Catholicism were no longer papal and Eucharistic, it would cease to exist.

Whoever says, “pope” and “tabernacle,” says Jesus Christ, because the papacy and the sacrament of the altar are the two great channels through which Jesus Christ rules the world. And whoever says the word Jesus Christ , the Word before Whom everything must bow in heaven, on earth and under the earth, has said everything. The name of Jesus is the answer to all problems, all secrets, all difficulties.

If we have the pope and the Eucharist, the Head and the Heart, why is the Body so ill?  Although we receive Holy Communion, why are we not better, purer, more willing to sacrifice, more patient, more humble? This question is very apt in a time of frequent Communions. What’s wrong?

What is Communion? What should it be? Communion is union. What is union? Union presupposes two who desire to be one. Where there is only one, there can be no talk of communion. Where there are two, but two who pass by one another without speaking, there can also be no talk of communion. Communion is two that equal one.

Who are the two? Jesus and you. That is Communion; Jesus and you. It must be said in that order, Jesus and you, not you and Jesus. In Communion everything depends upon who is first and who is second, who stands in the foreground and who is in the background, who is the star and who is the extra. In the communion of the lukewarm souls, the ego is in the foreground and Jesus in the background; in the Communions of the devoted souls, Jesus is in the foreground and the ego is in the background. Jesus reigns.

In other words, preparation and disposition are of vital importance for Communion. It is true that the sacrament is effective of itself, but only insofar as no hurdles are placed in its way. It is the same with light; light shines in the darkness, but if something is hung before the rays of light or if we close our eyes, the light’s effect is blocked.

It is also like nutrition. It is not just a matter of eating healthy and strengthening food. Our digestive system must also possess the capacity of digesting the food we eat. Otherwise eating is useless. Therefore, the effectiveness of the sacrament depends upon the ability of the recipient to take it in, i.e. according to the disposition. And here we have the reason why the results of Holy Communion are so lacking in some people. There have a lack of good disposition.

Why cannot Jesus develop His work in the soul? Perhaps because there is no room? The question of room plays just as fatal a role in Communion as it did in Bethlehem. The minds and hearts are often full of alien things, superfluous matters, miscellaneous, vain, worldly, dangerous, even sinful or evil thoughts. There are full of the world and of the self, whether in the category of “worldly” the problem is materialism, addiction to amusement or sensuality, and whether that of “self” applies to arrogance, vanity or self-righteousness. Such people apparently want Jesus to come to them, but not that He should reign in them.

The fact is that modern man lives from Sunday to Saturday, from the first to the last year of his life in a world which is alien to the tabernacle. And now, take this modern person, who breaths the air of a completely foreign atmosphere, and set his into the atmosphere of the supernatural that surrounds the altar. What happens? He’s there with his body. He communicates with his tongue. But that is no real union. It is not soul-to-soul, spirit-to-spirit, and heart-to-heart. Jesus comes, as it were, into the front yard of the soul. Figuratively speaking, one only says hello at the front door.

This person says a few pious words, which he call Communion prayers, but he doesn’t let Jesus into the most intimate shrine of his soul. He does not talk personally about his most intimate secrets. He has not led Jesus to the throne, but instead dealt with Him quickly like a beggar or an unwelcome guest. The he turn his back and goes to the window to chat with Mrs. World, as though he actually were not at home, and every couple of minutes he looks at his wristwatch to see whether the official 15-minute reception hour is soon over. That is how people often do it. That is how we often treat the King. We have no room and no time for Jesus. We communicate without communicating. That is why we don’t come back from the Communion rail as saints, but instead like the same people were before.

What ought Communion to be? The opposite of that which we just described. It should be Jesus at the center of the soul and the ego at His feet. In other words, Jesus as Lord of the House, and the “old man” outside the door. Fr. Ravignan once quoted someone; “You ask me what I did during my novitiate? I answer: We were two. I threw one of us out the window, and now I am alone.”  Communion should be an enthronement!

What is the precondition for such a Communion? First of all, strong faith. If one should not begin to pray at all without first evoking a living act of faith in the presence of god, with whom one wants to converse, then how much more does this apply to the first-quarter hours after the Holy Communion! I must be saturated with the thought that Jesus is there, Jesus, the Son of the Living God, Jesus, Son of Man, Jesus, my King. I must say that to myself again and again, because I am forgetful and superficial. Forgetful and superficial people need always to be reminded of the same thing.

Let us imagine that the Blessed Virgin Mary would honor us with a visit every day and talk with us for a quarter of an hour. A Communion is more that such a vision. It is more important that the visit of al the angels and saint. But I must be filled with this faith to my deepest depth. I must believe it: Jesus is there! Otherwise our whole communion devotion, our whole thanksgiving, remains cold and dry.

The thought of Jesus must work in us like sunrise, like the beginning of a new day. The physical world disappears and the one which now appears in the world of grace, the world of the Divine Heart, much more rich and beautiful than all that human eyes see and human ears hear.

How can I attempt to paint and describe this world of grace? I have not the colors, I have not the words. You cannot paint Jesus, you cannot describe Him. Jesus is too beautiful. A saintly soul has said: “If the world could behold Jesus, as I have seen Him, then all souls would be absorbed in such a sight, leave their businesses, the pleasures, their politics, and ravished by the sight of the King of Glory and Love, see nothing more than Him and worship Him alone.”

You do not see this Jesus. But once more I say: the important thing is not that you see Him, but rather that He is there and that you believe. Jesus is there, in me, in the midst of my heart, as King. Then you can pray. Then you can wonder. Then you can love. Then you can cry and mourn. And all that even without the prayer book! And 15 minutes will seem too short to you, the most beautiful minutes of your day and your week. When you come home, you will be purer, calmer, friendlier to your fellow men, more compassionate and more humble.

Let us not make the precious time after Holy Communion so complicated, so difficult , so unnatural. Let us think of only one thing: Jesus is there. Everything else comes of its own accord. And if afterward someone should ask you what you did then say: A great deal, but actually only one thing. For 15 minutes I have believed, hoped and loved! That is Communion! Jesus and you! Jesus in the center of you soul! Jesus as King. Come and see how sweet the Lord is. But come alone. Leave the world outside the doors. If you finally understand the right way to go to receive Holy Communion, you will also soon understand the right way to live. (Father Robert Mader, Cross and the Crown, edited and translated by Dr. Eileen Kunze, Sarto House, 1999, pp. 99-101.)

It is precisely because  the spiritual robber barons who have presented themselves as "popes" since October 28, 1958, have not been members of the Catholic Church (something that they have shown by fomenting doctrinal, liturgical, moral and pastoral revolutions that could never come from Holy Mother Church) that Catholicism has ceased to exist in the souls of so many hundreds of millions of Catholics worldwide.

Anyone who thinks, therefore, that he is "consoling" Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or is in a true communion with Him while he remains "neutral" about or supportive of any the apostasies, blasphemies and sacrileges of the conciliar authorities is deceiving himself quite possibly to the point of his own eternal perdition, Such a person is in need of our prayers, to be sure. Sloganeering and sentimentality and wishful thinking do not secure one's salvation. Indeed, they are instruments of the devil to lead sloganeers and sentimentalists such as the conciliar revolutionaries into Hell as they take many others with them.

The twin, inter-related revolutions of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism are irreversible by means merely human. God will reverse and overthrow them, however, when He chooses to manifest forth the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she who has already crushed all heresies as each proceeds from the adversary himself.

As the late William Charles Koneazny said shortly before his death on June 16, 2004, “Our Lady will come and throw the bums out” (see A True Catholic Rendezvous: A Personal Reminiscence of the late +William C. Koneany, R.I.P. ).

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