Victor Manuel Fernandez's Anthropocentric Decree on Human Dignity, part three

Dignitatis Infinita’s obsession with human dignity obscures the fact that we have not been created to “build up” “human dignity” but to know, to love, and to serve the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity with our hearts, minds, souls, bodies, and strength as members of His Catholic Church. We must give God the honor and glory that are His due with every breath that we take. While we are to treat all others with respect and dignity as befits redeemed creatures as we see in them in the Divine Impress and are careful to treat others as we would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the very Flesh, God is our First Cause and our Last End, and we are not to glorify nor deify mere creatures.

Yet it is that the counterfeit church of conciliarism has sought to glorify creatures and even the earth itself while doing so in the name of a distorted concept of “evangelization” that has nothing to do with the Gospel of Our Divine Redeemer. Part of this creaturely glorification involves the deification of poverty as something of a “special service” that comes before seeking the sanctification and salvation of the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem.

Material poverty is a feature of this mortal vale of tears, but no government institution has ever done nor can ever do as much as Holy Mother Church has done to minister to the temporal needs of the poor and, more importantly, to elevate them supernaturally by giving them an abundance of spiritual riches by which they sanctify and save their souls and thus enjoy riches that never can be taken away and that, quite indeed, will elude those who spent their lives either trying to acquire and/or retain wealth as an end in of itself without regard for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

On the contrary, though, Dignitatis Infinita’s discussion of what is called the “drama of poverty” is based on purely natural considerations that have nothing to do with the patrimony of Holy Mother Church’s constant, loving service to the poor through her history:

The Drama of Poverty

36. One of the phenomena that contributes significantly to denying the dignity of so many human beings is extreme poverty, linked as it is to the unequal distribution of wealth. As Pope St. John Paul II emphasized, “One of the greatest injustices in the contemporary world consists precisely in this: that the ones who possess much are relatively few and those who possess almost nothing are many. It is the injustice of the poor distribution of the goods and services originally intended for all.”[58] Moreover, it would be misleading to make a cursory distinction between “rich” and “poor” countries, for Benedict XVI recognized that “the world’s wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging. In poorer areas, some groups enjoy a sort of ‘super-development’ of a wasteful and consumerist kind, which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation.” The “‘scandal of glaring inequalities’ continues,”[59] where the dignity of the poor is doubly denied because of the lack of resources available to meet their basic needs and the indifference shown toward them by their neighbors.

37. With Pope Francis, therefore, one must conclude that “wealth has increased, but together with inequality, with the result that ‘new forms of poverty are emerging.’ The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities.”[60] As a result, poverty “can take a variety of forms, such as an obsession with reducing labor costs with no concern for its grave consequences, since the unemployment that it directly generates leads to the expansion of poverty.”[61] Among these “destructive effects of the empire of money,”[62] it must be recognized that “there is no poverty worse than that which takes away work and the dignity of work.”[63] Moreover, if some people are born into a country or family where they have fewer opportunities to develop, we should acknowledge that this is contrary to their dignity, which is the same dignity as that of those born into a wealthy family or country. We are all responsible for this stark inequality, albeit to varying degrees. (Dignitatis Infinita, April 2, 2024.)

Comments:

Poverty, whether considered as actual privation or relative deprivation, is not an offense against “human dignity.” It is, as noted just above, an enduring condition of the human being, and the Catholic Church was the first to make service to the poor one of her most important temporal missions as she established institutions for the relief of the poor, including hospitals and orphanages, and sanctioned the founding of numerous communities of consecrated religious to minister to their spiritual and temporal needs and, as far was possible according to the talents and inclinations of those so served, to provide them with useful skills to elevate them out of poverty.

Dignitatis Infinita, though, considers “extreme poverty,” which is not defined, as offense against “human dignity, and it does so to continue the “seamless garment” (“consistent ethic of life”) that was advanced first by Joseph “Cardinal” Bernardin in address he gave at Fordham University, Borough of the Bronx, City of New York, New York, on December 6, 1983:

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

We have no need to “hear” anyone’s “case” concerning the slicing and dicing, burning, or beheading of an innocent preborn child. God has decreed “Thou shalt not kill,” and that is the end of things as there is no “decision” to made, only love to be given.

“Cardinal” Bernardin was hit with a torrent of criticism after the Fordham address, forcing him to make some “clarifications” and “distinctions” in an address at Saint Louis University in March of 1984 that acknowledged that abortion and capital punishment were different issues but, he added, were “related” to each other in the “practical” realm of political “choices” that required “dialogue” to treat “seamlessly”:

Some of the responses I have received on the Fordham address correctly say that abortion and capital punishment are not identical issues. The principle which protects innocent life distinguishes the unborn child from the convicted murderer.

Other letters stress that while nuclear war is a threat to life, abortion involves the actual taking of life, here and now. I accept both of these distinctions, of course, but I also find compelling the need to relate the cases while keeping them in distinct categories.

Abortion is taking of life in ever growing numbers in our society. Those concerned about it, I believe, will find their case enhanced by taking note of the rapidly expanding use of public execution. In a similar way, those who are particularly concerned about these executions, even if the accused has taken another life, should recognize the elementary truth that a society which can be indifferent to the innocent life of an unborn child will not be easily stirred to concern for a convicted criminal. There is, I maintain, a political and psychological linkage among the life issues—from war to welfare concerns—which we ignore at our own peril: a systemic vision of life seeks to expand the moral imagination of a society, not partition it into airtight categories.

A third level of the question before us involves how we relate a commitment to principles to our public witness of life. As I have said, no one can do everything. There are limits to both competency and energy; both point to the wisdom of setting priorities and defining distinct functions. The Church, however, must be credible across a wide range of issues; the very scope of our moral vision requires a commitment to a multiplicity of questions. In this way the teaching of the Church will sustain a variety of individual commitments.

Neither the Fordham address nor this one is intended to constrain wise and vigorous efforts to protect and promote life through specific, precise forms of action. Both addresses do seek to cultivate a dialogue within the Church and in the wider society among individuals and groups which draw on common principles (e.g., the prohibition against killing the innocent) but seem convinced that they do not share common ground. The appeal here is not for anyone to do everything, but to recognize points of interdependence which should be stressed, not denied.

A fourth level, one where dialogue is sorely needed, is the relationship between moral principles and concrete political choices. The moral questions of abortion, the arms race, the fate of social programs for the poor, and the role of human rights in foreign policy are public moral issues. The arena in which they are ultimately decided is not the academy or the Church but the political process. A consistent ethic of life seeks to present a coherent linkage among a diverse set of issues. It can and should be used to test party platforms, public policies, and political candidates. The Church legitimately fulfills a public role by articulating a framework for political choices by relating that framework to specific issues and by calling for systematic moral analysis of all areas of public policy. (The Seamless Garment and a Consistent Pro-Life Ethic.)

This was just moral casuistry of the highest order that is continued by the entire structuring of Dignitatis Infinita’s discussion of offenses against “human dignity.” Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life, which was meant to support what turned out to be the never-realized presidency of the pro-abortion, pro-perversity then Governor of the State of New York, Mario Matthew Cuomo’s never-realized presidential candidacy against then President Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1984. Bernardin was, in essence, de-emphasizing the direct, intentional taking of innocent human life by equating its grievousness with poverty, war and peace, housing, and overall economic policies.  

With respect to the “drama of poverty,” therefore, Dignitatis Infinita has nothing to do with an understanding of poverty as an enduring condition of fallen human nature nor with understanding the remote and proximate causes of contemporary poverty, most of which is relative deprivation and not actual privation, in the so-called “developed world.” Furthermore, inequality exists in the nature of things as no one is endowed by God with an “equality” of gifts. We are not all equally intelligent, wise, healthy, or athletic nor is everyone endowed with aptitude for musical composition and performance the mathematics/sciences, applied and mechanical engineering, etc., and we are not meant to be endowed with an “equitable” distribution of the material things as this is the essence of Marxism itself.

Pope Leo XIII used his first encyclical letter, Quod Apostolicis Muneris, December 28, 1878, to condemn the growth of incipient socialism that would, in its Marxist-Leninist form, gain its first real foothold in Russia. His Holiness knew very clearly the dangers that socialism as the “remedy” for “inequalities” that are willed by God Himself:

6. Assuredly, the Church wisely inculcates the apostolic precept on the mass of men: “There is no power but from God; and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves damnation.” And again she admonishes those “subject by necessity” to be so “not only for wrath but also for conscience’ sake,” and to render “to all men their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.”[9] For, He who created and governs all things has, in His wise providence, appointed that the things which are lowest should attain their ends by those which are intermediate, and these again by the highest. Thus, as even in the kingdom of heaven He hath willed that the choirs of angels be distinct and some subject to others, and also in the Church has instituted various orders and a diversity of offices, so that all are not apostles or doctors or pastors,[10] so also has He appointed that there should be various orders in civil society, differing indignity, rights, and power, whereby the State, like the Church, should be one body, consisting of many members, some nobler than others, but all necessary to each other and solicitous for the common good.

9. But Catholic wisdom, sustained by the precepts of natural and divine law, provides with especial care for public and private tranquillity in its doctrines and teachings regarding the duty of government and the distribution of the goods which are necessary for life and use. For, while the socialists would destroy the “right” of property, alleging it to be a human invention altogether opposed to the inborn equality of man, and, claiming a community of goods, argue that poverty should not be peaceably endured, and that the property and privileges of the rich may be rightly invaded, the Church, with much greater wisdom and good sense, recognizes the inequality among men, who are born with different powers of body and mind, inequality in actual possession, also, and holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God, the Author and Defender of right, that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another, and that thieves and despoilers, no less than adulterers and idolaters, are shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven. But not the less on this account does our holy Mother not neglect the care of the poor or omit to provide for their necessities; but, rather, drawing them to her with a mother’s embrace, and knowing that they bear the person of Christ Himself, who regards the smallest gift to the poor as a benefit conferred on Himself, holds them in great honor. She does all she can to help them; she provides homes and hospitals where they may be received, nourished, and cared for all the world over and watches over these. She is constantly pressing on the rich that most grave precept to give what remains to the poor; and she holds over their heads the divine sentence that unless they succor the needy they will be repaid by eternal torments. In fine, she does all she can to relieve and comfort the poor, either by holding up to them the example of Christ, “who being rich became poor for our sake,[18] or by reminding them of his own words, wherein he pronounced the poor blessed and bade them hope for the reward of eternal bliss. But who does not see that this is the best method of arranging the old struggle between the rich and poor? For, as the very evidence of facts and events shows, if this method is rejected or disregarded, one of two things must occur: either the greater portion of the human race will fall back into the vile condition of slavery which so long prevailed among the pagan nations, or human society must continue to be disturbed by constant eruptions, to be disgraced by rapine and strife, as we have had sad witness even in recent times.

10. These things being so, then, venerable brethren, as at the beginning of Our pontificate We, on whom the guidance of the whole Church now lies, pointed out a place of refuge to the peoples and the princes tossed about by the fury of the tempest, so now, moved by the extreme peril that is on them, We again lift up Our voice, and beseech them again and again for their own safety’s sake as well as that of their people to welcome and give ear to the Church which has had such wonderful influence on the public prosperity of kingdoms, and to recognize that political and religious affairs are so closely united that what is taken from the spiritual weakens the loyalty of subjects and the majesty of the government. And since they know that the Church of Christ has such power to ward off the plague of socialism as cannot be found in human laws, in the mandates of magistrates, or in the force of armies, let them restore that Church to the condition and liberty in which she may exert her healing force for the benefit of all society.

11. But you, venerable brethren, who know the origin and the drift of these gathering evils, strive with all your force of soul to implant the Catholic teaching deep in the minds of all. Strive that all may have the habit of clinging to God with filial love and revering His divinity from their tenderest years; that they may respect the majesty of princes and of laws; that they may restrain their passions and stand fast by the order which God has established in civil and domestic society. Moreover, labor hard that the children of the Catholic Church neither join nor favor in any way whatsoever this abominable sect; let them show, on the contrary, by noble deeds and right dealing in all things, how well and happily human society would hold together were each member to shine as an example of right doing and of virtue. In fine, as the recruits of socialism are especially sought among artisans and workmen, who, tired, perhaps, of labor, are more easily allured by the hope of riches and the promise of wealth, it is well to encourage societies of artisans and workmen which, constituted under the guardianship of religion, may tend to make all associates contented with their lot and move them to a quiet and peaceful life. (Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolicis Muneris, December 28, 1878.)

One of the corollary proofs of the apostasies facing us at this time is the man who claims to be “Pope Francis” is entirely supportive of socialism and its goals. His kinship with world leaders who embrace socialist policies and with George Soros, the world’s leading financier of all things wicked (contraception, abortion, “palliative care,” sodomy and all its related perverse vices, “open borders,” violence against opponents of the “enlightened” Soros agenda, socialism, statism, globalism, feminism, environmentalism, evolutionism, etc.) and his words of praise for them speak loudly about the fact that he is a fellow traveler who has as much contempt for papal condemnations of socialism and communism as his predecessors on the conciliar seat of apostasy have had for the very immutable nature of dogmatic truth, noting that belief in biological evolutionism would lead to social and theological evolutionism. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is one of those hypocritical egalitarians who believe that they “enlightened” are more “equal” than all the rest. 

As the abuses caused by the Judeo-Calvinist capitalism grew in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and as the agitation caused by socialists against those abuses grew louder and louder and attracted many Catholics to their cause, Pope Leo XIII elaborated on the relationship between labor and capital in his landmark encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891, that once again stressed that inequality exists in the very nature of things and that pain and suffering will have no end in this life, discussing the desire of socialists to gain control of children by placing them on a level of equality with the authority of their parents

14. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them.

But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. “The child belongs to the father,” and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that “the child belongs to the father” it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.”[4] The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.

15. And in addition to injustice, it is only too evident what an upset and disturbance there would be in all classes, and to how intolerable and hateful a slavery citizens would be subjected. The door would be thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation.

Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. This being established, we proceed to show where the remedy sought for must be found.

16. We approach the subject with confidence, and in the exercise of the rights which manifestly appertain to Us, for no practical solution of this question will be found apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church. It is We who are the chief guardian of religion and the chief dispenser of what pertains to the Church; and by keeping silence we would seem to neglect the duty incumbent on us. Doubtless, this most serious question demands the attention and the efforts of others besides ourselves — to wit, of the rulers of States, of employers of labor, of the wealthy, aye, of the working classes themselves, for whom We are pleading. But We affirm without hesitation that all the striving of men will be vain if they leave out the Church. It is the Church that insists, on the authority of the Gospel, upon those teachings whereby the conflict can be brought to an end, or rendered, at least, far less bitter; the Church uses her efforts not only to enlighten the mind, but to direct by her precepts the life and conduct of each and all; the Church improves and betters the condition of the working man by means of numerous organizations; does her best to enlist the services of all classes in discussing and endeavoring to further in the most practical way, the interests of the working classes; and considers that for this purpose recourse should be had, in due measure and degree, to the intervention of the law and of State authority.

17. It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition. As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would not have remained wholly idle; but that which would then have been his free choice and his delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience. “Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life.”[5]

18. In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on earth; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must accompany man so long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let them strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there are who pretend differently — who hold out to a hard-pressed people the boon of freedom from pain and trouble, an undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment — they delude the people and impose upon them, and their lying promises will only one day bring forth evils worse than the present. Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek elsewhere, as We have said, for the solace to its troubles.

19. The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice. (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.)

In other words, Catholicism is the sole source of human sanctification and the legitimate teacher of men, and thus possesses the sole ability to provide the foundation for a social order that can be as just as possible in a world filled with fallen men, a point that Pope Pius XI reiterated in his encyclical letter commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the issuance of Rerum Novarum, Quadregesimo Anno, May 15, 1931:

127. Yet, if we look into the matter more carefully and more thoroughly, we shall clearly perceive that, preceding this ardently desired social restoration, there must be a renewal of the Christian spirit, from which so many immersed in economic life have, far and wide, unhappily fallen away, lest all our efforts be wasted and our house be builded not on a rock but on shifting sand.[62]

128. And so, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Sons, having surveyed the present economic system, We have found it laboring under the gravest of evils. We have also summoned Communism and Socialism again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified, to wander far from the precepts of the Gospel.

129. "Wherefore," to use the words of Our Predecessor, "if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it."[63] For this alone can provide effective remedy for that excessive care for passing things that is the origin of all vices; and this alone can draw away men's eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixed on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven. Who would deny that human society is in most urgent need of this cure now?

130. Minds of all, it is true, are affected almost solely by temporal upheavals, disasters, and calamities. But if we examine things critically with Christian eyes, as we should, what are all these compared with the loss of souls? Yet it is not rash by any means to say that the whole scheme of social and economic life is now such as to put in the way of vast numbers of mankind most serious obstacles which prevent them from caring for the one thing necessary; namely, their eternal salvation. (Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.)

Most men today are more concerned about the acquisition or possible loss of wealth once attained than they are about their immortal souls as they have “excessive care passing things that” are “the origin of all vices.” Only the true Faith can draw “men’s eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixated on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven.” Unfortunately, most men today, including many Catholics, do indeed deny that human society is in urgent need of the remedy that only Holy Mother Church can provide. Men who believe that they are descended from apes will come to act like them over the course of time. The ideology of biological evolutionism leads inexorably to the devolution of men and their societies into conditions of chaos, violence, and the worst kind of self-seeking that the world has ever seen.

Pope Pius XI also explained in the degree of degradation to which men must fall once they are fixed on temporal goals to the exclusion of all supernatural considerations.

131. We, made Shepherd and Protector by the Prince of Shepherds, Who Redeemed them by His Blood, of a truly innumerable flock, cannot hold back Our tears when contemplating this greatest of their dangers. Nay rather, fully mindful of Our pastoral office and with paternal solicitude, We are continually meditating on how We can help them; and We have summoned to Our aid the untiring zeal of others who are concerned on grounds of justice or charity. For what will it profit men to become expert in more wisely using their wealth, even to gaining the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their souls?[64] What will it profit to teach them sound principles of economic life if in unbridled and sordid greed they let themselves be swept away by their passion for property, so that "hearing the commandments of the Lord they do all things contrary."[65]

32. The root and font of this defection in economic and social life from the Christian law, and of the consequent apostasy of great numbers of workers from the Catholic faith, are the disordered passions of the soul, the sad result of original sin which has so destroyed the wonderful harmony of man's faculties that, easily led astray by his evil desires, he is strongly incited to prefer the passing goods of this world to the lasting goods of Heaven. Hence arises that unquenchable thirst for riches and temporal goods, which has at all times impelled men to break God's laws and trample upon the rights of their neighbors, but which, on account of the present system of economic life, is laying far more numerous snares for human frailty. Since the instability of economic life, and especially of its structure, exacts of those engaged in it most intense and unceasing effort, some have become so hardened to the stings of conscience as to hold that they are allowed, in any manner whatsoever, to increase their profits and use means, fair or foul, to protect their hard-won wealth against sudden changes of fortune. The easy gains that a market unrestricted by any law opens to everybody attracts large numbers to buying and selling goods, and they, their one aim being to make quick profits with the least expenditure of work, raise or lower prices by their uncontrolled business dealings so rapidly according to their own caprice and greed that they nullify the wisest forecasts of producers. The laws passed to promote corporate business, while dividing and limiting the risk of business, have given occasion to the most sordid license. For We observe that consciences are little affected by this reduced obligation of accountability; that furthermore, by hiding under the shelter of a joint name, the worst of injustices and frauds are penetrated; and that, too, directors of business companies, forgetful of their trust, betray the rights of those whose savings they have undertaken to administer. Lastly, We must not omit to mention those crafty men who, wholly unconcerned about any honest usefulness of their work, do not scruple to stimulate the baser human desires and, when they are aroused, use them for their own profit.  (Pope Pius XI, Quadregesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.)

The world us continues to fall deeper and deeper into the abyss because most men alive today are controlled by the forces of the world, the flesh and the devil, ignoring any thought of divinely-revealed truths and a single means by which their actions may be rendered meritorious in the sight of God and thus redound to their eternal salvation. Even most Catholics rush headlong to one side or the other of the false opposites of naturalism and refuse to consider the simple truth that to see the world as it truly as it is we must see it exclusively through the eyes of the Holy Faith. The only kind of “realism” is Catholic realism, Catholic truth. Everything else is but an illusion, a mirage. 

Dignitatis Infinita’s treatment of the “drama of poverty” ignores the fact that that there is no salvation in being poor nor any damnation for possessing and enjoying the material fruits of one’s own hard work. Some people have the desire to work hard and honestly for the greater honor and glory God while others work hard to possess things as ends in and of themselves as they live, perhaps unknowingly, in accord with the dictates of Judeo-Calvinist materialism and thus have no regard for how their own actions might exploit others or even worsen the living conditions of those so exploited.

It is beyond question the amorality extant in finance and commerce causes many contemporary problems as a cadre of elitists charge usurious interest rates to those with lower credit scores that are specifically designed to keep debtors in debt and thus slaves of whatever the ruling classes command them to do just for the sake of maintaining their monetary and social credit. Judeo-Calvinist capitalism has “evolved” into a global system of state fascism replete with central banks, worthless currency, state-sanctioned monopolies, and a massive array of government regulations designed to punish individual entrepreneurs and reward unelected apparatchiks and the lawyers who get to litigate the challenges that are brought, usually unsuccessfully, to this hegemony of unelected elites over those less favored.

All this having been noted, however, even those who are exploited never lose their “human dignity” as Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ never permits anyone to endure any suffering, whether just or unjust, that is beyond his capacity endure by means of cooperating with the graces He won for us by the shedding of every single drop of His own Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls by the working of God the Ghost and through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Dignitatis Infinita’s quasi-Marxist treatment of what it calls the “drama of poverty” is as shallow as it is ideological as it ignores the remote causes of contemporary poverty in the Western world that are to be found in the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the separation not only of Church and State but of even private action from any concept of Christian morality as well as ignoring the more proximate causes, rooted in the fascism that was described just above, that have given rise to a spirit of hopelessness among Catholics who do not see the world clearly through the eyes of the Holy Faith and among so many non-Catholics who have no understanding that they are suffering from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin and the effects of their own Actual Sins in a world where everyone seems to be seeking salvation in all the wrong places.

As the purpose of this website is to focus on root causes, it is important to emphasize yet again that the atavistic, dog-eat-dog capitalism, premised on amorality and profit-making as an end in and of itself, is so focused on temporal prosperity that the natural inequality that exists in the nature of things would be seen inevitably by other naturalists as somehow “unfair” and in need of a remedy. In other words, a world built on a forgetfulness of First and Last Things and with an utter contempt for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church will be defined by “what’s in it for me?”, a remedy for the kind of social chaos, disorder, class, sectional, and racial conflicts that will bring the Antichrist himself to the forefront.

As was the case with Karl Marx himself, today’s neo-socialists see the legitimate problems that exist because of multinational corporations headed by titans who exploit their own workers and sell their products, most of which are made in Red China, but they do not understand root problems. They are incapable of seeing that all problems in the world, bar none, are caused by Original Sin and the Actual Sins of men and can be ameliorated only by the reform of individual lives. Men must fall into an abyss of woe and corruption when they do not believe in the Sacred Divinity of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost and when they do not have belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. Economic systems based on the ability of “markets” to regulate themselves according to “invisible” market forces and the “self-interest” of those who have invested capital in various projects are based on the lie that there is an “invisible hand” to guide the markets. Such an “invisible hand” is truly invisible as it does not exist. It is but a figment of the imagination of Adam Smith and other apologists for the "self-regulatory" nature of the "free market.” There is no such thing as an "invisible hand,” and the “remedy” proposed by today’s neo-socialists is no remedy at all.

As the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn noted in his commencement address, “A World Split Apart,” on June 8, 1978, socialism of any kind leads to a leveling of mankind unto death:

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced -- Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France -- Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in the United States. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

Ideologues such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Victor Manuel Fernandez, of course, refuse to listen to the words of one who had suffered much under a communist regime.

What is indeed ironic is that Bergoglio and Fernandez are committed to the World Economic Forum “sustainable development goals” and to the Copenhagen agenda of “climate control” that are designed to depopulate the earth and enslave most of those who are permitted to survive to the whims of the double-dealing elitists who travel on private jets and dine on luscious steak dinners as they consign the peons to eating insects and owning nothing other than what they will be “allowed” to possess in the name of “saving the planet.”

As I have noted so many times in the past on this site, the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and “left,” despite their differences on the margins of the errors of Modernity, are united in their belief that men can order their lives without any reference to religion at all, no less the true religion, and that men can do anything they want by means of their own unaided powers. In others, the adherents of the “left” and the “right” believe that men do not need Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or His true Church and that it is not necessary for men to have belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to create a better and more just world. The adherents of the “left and the “right” believe that the “better world” is defined by economics and not by the state of the souls of men.

The late Dr. George O'Brien stressed the fact that there is only one institution that can reorder the world properly, and it is not a secular, naturalistic international organization or a secular, naturalistic political party:

There is one institution and one institution alone which is capable of supplying and enforcing the social ethic that is needed to revivify the world. It is an institution at once intra-national and international; an institution that can claim to pronounce infallibly on moral matters, and to enforce the observance of the its moral decrees by direct sanctions on the individual conscience of man; an institution which, while respecting and supporting the civil governments of nations, can claim to exist independently of them, and can insist that they shall not intrude upon the moral life or fetter the moral liberty of their citizens. Europe possessed such an institution in the Middle Ages; its dethronement was the unique achievement of the Reformation; and the injury inflicted by that dethronement has never since been repaired. (George O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation, first published in 1923, republished by IHS press in 2003, p. 132.) 

Neither Jorge Mario Bergoglio nor Victor Manuel Fernandez understand the truths summarized above, especially as concerns the following observation by Father Edward Leen in Why the Cross?:

Consider these words of Father Edward Leen as found in the introduction of Why the Cross? concerning those who want Holy Mother Church to be an instrument of social reform rather than what she is, the means of human sanctification and salvation:

For men, as a rule, have but shown themselves too eager to manage their own temporal affairs. They resent what they call the Church's interference. This resentment culminates in a deliberate exclusion of the Church from the councils of peoples. Even at the best of times, when States were not yet professedly secularist, what jealousy was always manifested with regard to the action of the Church in secular matters! How slow men were to take her advice! How her efforts for procuring the temporal welfare of men were hampered, thwarted and positively resisted!

The gradual silencing of the voice of Christianity in the councils of the nations is the evil cause of the chaotic conditions of modern civilized life. This issue was inevitable. For though the Church's wisdom is primarily in the domain of things of the world to come, yet she is wise, too, with regard to the things of the world that is. She is not for the world, and yet she is able and even ready to act as if she were equipped specially to procure the temporal good of men.  She is able and willing to give men directions in temporal matters, which, if followed, will result in temporal prosperity. She is too wise to promote unrealizable Utopias, from which all suffering and toil will be banished. She can give prudent directions how to devise measures for the mitigation of inevitable hardships and the elimination of unnecessary evils. If rulers and ruled alike listened to her voice, the authentic voice of Christianity, what a change would come over the world! It would not cease to be a vale of tears but would cease to be a vale of savage strife. It would not become an earthly Paradise but would become an earth where man's dreams of a satisfying order of things could be realized.

But when all this has been said, it remains true that the sphere of activity in which the Church's efficacy is to be tested is not the sphere of economics. That is not her proper province. There, nothing more than relative success can attend human efforts, whereas, in that work which is properly belongs to Christianity to accomplish no failure can attend on its efforts. The function of Christianity is not to reform or devise economic or social systems: her function is to reform and to transform the economists themselves. The Church, the organ of Christianity, is well aware that a change in social conditions, unaccompanied by a change in the disposition of people, will only result in the substitution of one set of wrongdoers for another. “And the last state of men is made worse than the first.” [Mt 12: 45.] The Church undertakes to change people, not systems. She knows that if individuals become what they ought, systems will become what they ought. The dictum of her Divine Founder remains her own and voices her wisdom as well as her experience. “Seek first the kingdom of God and His justice and all these things shall be added unto you.” [Mt. 6: 33, LK 12:31]

There is so much clamorous abuse of the Church for not remedying social evils, that both her friends and her enemies gradually have their minds dulled to the apprehension of what the Church's essential function is in the world. But it must be repeated that the creation of satisfactory social conditions is far from being the primary, much less the only, aim of Christianity. What that aim is – what promises Christianity holds out to people – what it guarantees to effect for them-- what means and processes it offers for the realization of these hopes – what is the reason that these means and processes take the form that they actually assume – and finally, what a wondrous life, satisfying every desire and aspiration, it infallibly provides for all, if people will only consent to make use of the resources it puts at their disposal. In short, to set forth the real message of Christianity, its promises, its methods and its guarantees, is the purport of the following pages. (Father Edward Leen, S.J., Why the Cross?, originally published by Sheed & Ward in 1938, and republished in 2001 by Scepter Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey,  pp. 9-17.)

Father Leen was a true Jesuit concerned about the salvation of souls.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a lay revolutionary Jesuit concerned about everything but the salvation of souls, and Victor Manuel Fernandez is his handpicked stooge to do his “theoretical” bidding for him.

Perhaps it is best to dispense with Dignitatis Infinita’s treatment of the “drama of poverty” by quoting the wisdom of Archbishop Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto as he was about to take canonical possession of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice as the Patriarch of that venerable see:

In August 1896 in Padua, the second Congress of the Catholic Union for Social Studies took place. We have already seen that this organization had been created seven years before by Professor Giuseppe Toniolo, in the presence of the Bishop of Mantua [Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto]. This time, eight bishops were present and several directors of the Opera del Congressi took part. All the eminent representatives of the Italian Catholic Movement were present (Medolago Pagnuzzi, Alessi and others). Cardinal Sarto's address attracted considerable notice. Faced with "ardent enemies" (unbelief and revolution) "...menacing and trying to destroy the social fabric," the Patriarch of Venice invited the participants to make Jesus Christ the foundation of their work: "the only peace treaty is the Gospel." He warned them against what is now called the "welfare state," the state which provides everything and provides all socialization: "substituting public almsgiving for private almsgiving involves the complete destruction of Christianity and it is a terrible attack on the principle of ownership. Christianity cannot exist without charity, and the difference between charity and justice is that justice may have recourse to laws and even to force, depending on the circumstances, whereas charity can only be imposed by the tribunal of God and of conscience." If public assistance and the redistribution of wealth are institutionalized, "poverty becomes a function, a way of life, a public trade..." (Yves Chiron, Saint Pius X: Restorer of the Church. Translated by Graham Harrison. Angelus Press, 2002, p. 100)

Poverty has indeed become a function, a way of life, a public trade that has further impoverished and enslaved the poor, enriched and empowered the ruling classes, and have given heretics who claim to be officials of the Catholic Church but who are actually agents of Antichrist the excuses to align themselves with the world’s globalists/socialists while disparaging both believing Catholics and anyone in public life who puts the unqualified protection of innocent human life above all other considerations. This institutionalization of poverty is left completely unaddressed by the text of Dignitatis Infinita. In truth, however, this institutionalization could not have been made possible without the anti-family program of Margaret Sanger and her utilitarian allies in the United Kingdom, at the Rockefeller Foundation, in the German Weimar Republic and the Third Reich itself.

As has been noted on this site so many times, before, the popularization of contraception, which is a denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of Holy Matrimony, resulted in an epidemic of adultery and divorce. The poverty of love produced by divorce has left children without stable families as many are shifted from stepparent to stepparent with countless numbers of stepsiblings. We have seen the feminization of poverty in all too many instances caused by faithless husbands and fathers who refused to keep their marriage vows, forcing mothers who want to be home with their children into the workplace while their children are indoctrinated (and also vaccinated) by pre-school, after-school, and daycare problems that are the dream of every Marxist country that has ever existed.

Margaret Sanger personally targeted black communities with her population control propaganda as she wanted to eliminate black people and enslave the rest to become wards of the civil state by means of welfare programs that would entrap them in a never-ending cycle of poverty from which has sprung much of the crime that has been let loose in our cities in recent decades. Children without fathers and children with mothers who have been taught to look out only for themselves will join with other children in gangs to act criminally in the futile effort to find and “acceptance” that they never knew within their own families.

Other than the spiritual poverty of not knowing the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity, as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church, the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and  without which there can be no true social order, the poverty of love caused by contraception and the contraceptive mentality has entrapped people in a search for “meaning” in the thing in the ephemeral pleasures and possessions offered by world that is not our permanent dwelling. The fact that this form of poverty is left entirely unaddressed speaks volumes about the insidious nature of Victor Manuel Fernandez’s Dignitatis Infinita.

Relying as ever upon the August Queen of Heaven, Our Lady, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, and her Most Chaste Spouse, Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, we remain confident that a true pope will be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter by their intercession and that they will assist us in our daily warfare against the forcs of the world, the flesh, and the devil so that we can sanctify and thus save our souls as members of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

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.

Popes Saints Soter and Caius, pray for us.

Appendix A

The Conciliar “Popes” Have Ignored the History of an Economy Based on Principles of Justice and Catholic Truth

Starting with Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII and Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, the conciliar “popes” have consistently ignored the history of an economy based on authentic principles of justice and Catholic truth. The situation is so bad today that Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Victor Manuel Fernandez have little, if any, understanding of true history. Indeed, the little that they think they know about history is but a figment of their ideologically charged imaginations and of the ideologically infused programming they have received. 

It is important for believing Catholics to take the text of Dignitatis Infinita to examine the spirit that animated the Catholics of Christendom as the order and equity that existed in the world eight hundred years ago worked so well that the devil himself had to raise up his legions to destroy it and to replace it with a system of endless competition, envy and violence that characterizes the world in which we live today.

The Catholic spirit of the Middle Ages, that era in which men worked long and hard to build the great cathedrals and churches and shrines and in which men took great pains to provide us with beautiful works of art and composed music that lifted the human soul to Heaven, is far from the anti- Incarnational, naturalistic and semi-Pelagian spirit of Modernity that has been embraced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. For far from upholding the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church that has condemned the separation of the Church and State, the conciliar “popes” have endorsed this thesis, which was termed absolutely false by Pope Saint Pius X. Something that is absolutely false and a most pernicious error in 1906 does not become true and good a century later. Truth is immutable because God Himself is immutable. 

Social classes lived in harmony with each other. Men were unafraid to defend the cause of Christ the King and His true Church to fight in the Crusades to reclaim the Holy Land and to do battle with the Mohammedans. Chivalry was the hallmark of the Catholic gentleman. And perhaps most importantly, human beings saw in each other the Divine impress, attempting to treat each other as they would Our Lord in the very Flesh. 

Father Edward Cahill summarized the political spirit of Christendom very succinctly in The Framework of a Christian State: 

Social Life Permeated by the Christian Spirit.–The whole structure of mediaeval society was founded upon Christianity. All the people were Catholic; and ecclesiastical influence was very powerful. Christian principles were inculcated in the current literature, the pulpit, the schools, and the tribunal of Penance; and were taken for granted, even when not faithfully followed, by all classes of society. The laws and their administration, the economic policy of the State, the recognised relations between the different classes, even international politics, were judged by Christian standards. So strong and deep-rooted was public opinion in the mater that it was difficult for individuals to disregard these standards openly. 

Kenelm Digby mentions many interesting particulars illustrating the Catholic tone of public life. Thus: “A painting of the Crucifixion was usually to be seen in the great chambers of the parliaments... and over the seats of justice. The great, solemn thirteenth century paintings of sacred subjects on the walls of the great hall of Sienna, in which the grand council of the Republic assembled, are an evidence of the tone of the government.” 

In the choice of public functionaries, fidelity and probity were the great qualities insisted on. The injunction contained in one of the Capitularies of Charlemagne gives an idea of the spirit which continued during mediaeval times to dominate public administration. 

“Let no count hold his plaids [viz. placita generalia–a kind of local council] unless he be fasting and fed with sense.” 

Again, Digby quotes the following term from a mediaeval collection of municipal laws: 

“The town sheriff has to visit the round of the walls at night to see that the watch has sufficient clothing. He has to inspect the provisions destined for the poor.” 

Political Principles.–The fundamental principle of all mediaeval teaching upon public authority and civic rights was that authority comes from God and is given to the ruler solely for the people’s good; and that the people whose good was to be promoted included all classes equally, rich and poor, high and low, serf, burgher and feudal lord. Further, owing to the ingrained spirit of Christianity in favour of the poor and the weak, the principle was commonly admitted that the humbler classes had the first claim upon the consideration and the solicitude of the ruling powers. Thus John of Salisbury (d. 1180), a typical 12 century political philosopher, writes: 

“Then and only then will the health of the commonwealth be sound and flourishing when the higher members devote themselves to the lower; and when similarly the lower members cooperate with the higher so that each and all are as it were members of one another, and each believes his own interest best served by what he knows to be most usefully provided for others.” 

Again, the same author writes: 

“All things are to be referred to the public good; and whatever is useful to the humbler classes, that is, the multitude should be pursued in all things. . . . Christ will hear the poor when they cry out, and it will be in vain to multiply vows, and to endeavour, as it were, to bribe God by gifts.” 

Hence, Henry II of England describes himself (and was described) as the “Defender of the Poor and the Defenceless.” 

Vincent Beauvais of the Order of Saint Dominic (d. 1264), who was tutor to the children of St. Louis, writes in much the same strain as John of Salisbury on the duty of government: 

“There must be mutual safety for the king and the people; he errs who thinks that the king is safe when nothing is safe from the king.” 

Tyrannical Rule Reprobated.–Another fundamental principle strongly insisted upon in the political teaching of that age is that the absolute power is regulated by fundamental laws against which whatever is done is of its own nature null and void. This principle, at variance alike with the pagan principles of absolutism and the modern Liberalist view of the omnipotence of a majority, is frequently emphasized by St. Thomas (d. 1274). Thus he writes: 

“One is bound to obey civil rulers, in as far as the order of justice demands. Hence if the power is not held justly, but is rather a usurpation, or if the laws are unjust, the subjects are not bound to obey, unless perchance in order to avoid scandal or danger.”

Again the same writer has: 

“Those who defend the common good are not to be called seditious in resisting those who oppose it. . . . The tyrant himself it is that is seditious, who encourages disunion and sedition in the people he rules, in order that hey may more easily retain his control over them. For this is tyranny to aim, namely, at the personal advantage of the ruler to the detriment of the people.” 

We find in Dante (d. 1321), whose work contains so faithful a picture of the mediaeval spirit, many echoes of this attitude towards unjust rule. For instance a certain group in the infernal regions are thus referred to:

“Those are the souls of tyrants, who were given To blood and rapine. Here they wail aloud Their merciless wrongs.” 

Mediaeval Christian Democracy.–Such doctrines commonly acknowledged, and the structure of a society fashioned under their influence, effectually secured a high degree of genuine democratic rule. Despotism, understood in the sense of irresponsible rule exercised mainly in the interest of the rulers and practically regardless of the people’s rights–the system of government which obtained all over Europe before the rise of Christianity and was reintroduced as a result of the Protestant Revolt–did not generally prevail under the Christian regime of the Middle Ages. This fact, which is strongly asserted by the Catholic apologists, is acknowledged even by historians hostile to the Church. Thus Lecky writes: “The balance of power produced by the numerous corporations which she [viz., the Church] created or sanctioned, the reverence for tradition resulting from her teaching which created a network of unwritten customs with the force of public laws, by the dependence of the civil upon the ecclesiastical power, and the rights of excommunication and deposition [exercised by the ecclesiastical authorities] all combined to lighten the pressure of despotism”. . . . 

Hallam, while acknowledging the prevailing spirit of justice of justice and democratic independence in the mediaeval system, does not state that this was due to the influence of Christianity. 

Decentralisation of Political Power.–Another very important safeguard against tyranny was the decentralisation of political power. In this the mediaeval state contrasts strongly with the ancient pagan state as well as with the royal absolutism of the 17      and 18 centuries and the centralising tendencies of the modern bureaucracies. The extensive power conferred by royal charter on the city municipalities, which were organised on a democratic basis, and the fundamental laws and privileges of the provinces were all strong safeguards against centralised despotism. So was the guild organisation of the towns, to which Pius XI refers as: 

“The highly-developed social life which once flourished in a variety of institutions organically linked with each other.” 

On the other hand the very real power of the king, which depended largely upon popular support, acted as a check against the abuses of local barons. 

Conclusion.–Hence, although wicked and unprincipled rulers are to be met with even in the period of which we write, their power to injure and oppress was much more limited than that of a modern bureaucracy. Widespread injustice and continued tyranny were scarcely possible; and the oppression and tyranny which did exist here and there were partially counteracted by the resources which religion supplied. (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., The Framework of a Christian State, pp. 30-34.) 

Multiple volumes of books would be necessary to treat of each of the glories of Christendom in the Middle Ages as music, art, literature, and architecture flourished. Economic systems were in place that assured justice and the practice of usury, so common today, was unthinkable as immoral. There was also an adherence to the just price, distinguishing the era of Christendom from that which exists in our own Protestant-Judeo-Masonic world of unbridled capitalistic individualism and profiteering:

Application in Mediaeval Times.–The mediaeval law of Just Price is another example of the altruistic spirit which permeated the social and economic life of the middle ages. Individuals were not permitted to use freely the property they controlled in ways that might be detrimental to the common good. They were compelled, when the needs of others required it, to place the goods they had to dispose of at the service of the public under equitable conditions. Thus poor and weak were protected against unfair competition, so that all might be secured a fair access to the material goods of the community. 

The laws of Just Price had to be observed in wages, buying and selling and every contract of exchange; otherwise the contracted was accounted unjust and invalid in conscience, and the aggrieved party had a claim to restitution. “Whoever,” writes Trithemius, a well-known fifteenth century author, “buys up corn, meat and wine in order to drive up their prices, and amass money at the cost of others, is, according to the laws of the Church, no better than a common criminal. In a well-governed community all arbitrary raising of prices in the case of articles of food and clothing is peremptorily stopped. In times of scarcity merchants who have supplies of such commodities can be compelled to sell them at fair prices; for in every community care should be taken that all the members should be provided for, lest a small number be allowed to grow rich, and revel in luxury to the hurt and prejudice of the many.” 

Contract between Christian and Non-Christian Standpoint. In the old Roman law, just as in modern Liberal states, selfishness was assumed to be the dominating motive in every contract; and the fullest liberty was allowed to both parties to decide the price and even to over-reach each other, provided nothing was done that the law regarded as fraud. According to mediaeval teaching on the other hand, the price of a commodity was supposed to be determined by objective value alone; and could not be justly influenced by the special need or ignorance of buyer or seller. 

Doctrine of the Just Price.–This doctrine, which was universally accepted in mediaeval times, is thus summarised by St. Thomas: 

“It the price exceeds the value of the thing, or if the thing is worth more than the price paid, the equality which justice requires is done away with.” 

The seller cannot justly extract a higher price merely on account of the special need the buyer may have of the thing, or the accidental advantage that may accrue to him from it; for in such cases he would be selling what is not his. Hence the criterion of exchange value was something intrinsic to the commodity itself, not merely competition or the higgling of the market. Hence, too, the modern distinction between value in use and value in exchange was recognized to a very limited extent. (Father Edward Cahill, The Framework of a Christian State, pp. 42-44.) 

Also practiced during the Middle Ages was the principle of the living wage, that is, an amount that is paid to a worker that would permit him to meet the obligations of his state of life without forcing his wife to leave the home and the care of the children to support the family. While those paid a wage, even though they might have been few in number during Middle Ages as the contemporary “salaried” position became commonplace during the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, had a responsibility to live within their means and to, if possible, acquire a bit of savings from their earnings, employers were nevertheless expected to deal justly with their workers so that those who had the greater need (more children, poor health, critical circumstances) received the higher amount. This was such a universally respected principle during the Middle Ages that even Saint Thomas Aquinas and his own teacher, Saint Albert the Great, did not believe that it was necessary to elaborate upon it as it was simply part of the fabric of Christendom. 

Similarly, the practice of usury, that is, of lending money by the charging of interest, no less of exorbitant interest rates, was condemned by the Church and rejected universally by the Catholics of Christendom as offends justice, practiced more often than not by Talmudic moneylenders. Pope Leo XIII made advertence to the Church’s condemnation of all forms of rapacious usury in Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891. The 1917 Code of Canon Law, recognized that money itself had become a form of capital and that lenders could charge a rate of interest permitted by the civil law unless that rate is “clearly excessive.” There has been no change of Catholic teaching, only a change in what is considered to be capital. 

This is what Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerurm Novarum, May 15, 1891: 

In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustlyon the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.) 

This analysis is even more relevant to our times as it was in 1891. 

Holy Mother Church recognizes the changes that take place in economic systems even though she may not approve of those changes or believe that they are optimal for the realization of man’s Last End. And thus it is that money, as opposed to land or some other tangible good, has become capital, meaning that there can be a just interest charged on those who lend it. There is thus no contradiction between the Catholic Church’s consistent condemnation of usury and Canon 1543 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law:

“If a commodity which is consumed by its first use (such as money, bread, etc.), be lent on the stipulation that it becomes the property of the borrower, who is bound to return to the lender not the thing itself but its equivalent only, the lender may not receive any payment by reason of the loan itself. In the giving or lending of such a commodity, however, it is not in itself unlawful to make an arrangement for the recovery of interest at the rate allowed by the civil law (de luco legali pacisi) unless that rate is clearly excessive: One may even arrange for a still higher rate of interest, if there be a just title for doing so, in proportion to the amount of the excess.” (Canon 1543, 1917 Code of Canon Law.) 

What has changed is the nature of the commercial transaction itself, not the Church’s condemnation of usury, which has been made many times, including the Tenth Session of the Fifth Lateran Council, May 4, 1515, which was presided over by Pope Leo X. 

Father Cahill explained the effects of the Church’s prohibition of usury in the Middle Ages, a practice that has been widespread in our own day as our world is governed by principles that are based upon rank profiteering and the exploitation of the weak and impoverished: 

The Church’s legislation [on usury] did not, it is true, succeed in completely preventing the practice of usury, especially on the part of the Jews. These laws and principles were, however, an immense check upon the unjust activities of money-lenders and speculators, so that anything approaching the systematised extortion and stock-gambling of modern times was impossible.   

Conclusion.–It is commonly admitted that the undue concentration of wealth under the control of the few is one of the radical causes of the social misery and unrest that prevail at the present day. Individuals controlling great wealth have excessive power in almost every phase of social activity, and following the tendency of human nature, they too often use their power unjustly and tyrannically. Those huge fortunes are usually amassed by unjust profiteering, artificially created monopolies, usury, unjust reduction of wages, the sudden fluctuations of the markets which play into the hands of greedy speculators. The mediaeval economic doctrines and legislation and the public opinion they produced and fostered made impossible, or at least kept in check, such methods of accumulating wealth, and so were a potent safeguard against one of the worst types of social injustice. (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., The Framework of a Christian State, p. 51.) 

The economics of the Middle Ages were also characterized in the Twelfth Century by the rise that made possible the training of masters in various fields of commerce (merchants and crafts) after first serving years of apprenticeships and then working as journeymen. The object of these guilds was to produce a cooperative spirit so that individual guild members could pursue their own interests without endangering the common interests of their mutual trades. It was the true spirit of Catholic charity that bound the guild members together to such an extent that they provided for each other what would be called “welfare” today, administering this assistance according to the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity that requires human problems to be remedied at the lowest levels of life, staring with the family. The guilds made it possible for those with needs that could not be meet by their families to receive assistance without the “strings” attached by the monster civil state of Modernity and without bankrupting the entire body politic: 

The greatest spirit of solidarity and mutual help animated the whole guild organisation. Thus money was advanced on easy terms to members who needed it. Those suffering from sickness, old age, accidents, etc., were liberally provided for. Even a guildman who might get into trouble with the municipal or state authorities had a right to the protection of the guild. If, after investigation by the council, his case was considered a deserving one he was defended in the courts at the common expense. Sick members were visited; and wine and food were sent from the public banquets to those whom illness or weakness prevent from attending. The dead, if the family was poor, was buried at the expense of their guild with all the honours befitting their position, and their daughters dowered for marriage or the convent. 

The Religious Character of the Guilds.–Another peculiarly Christian characteristic of—these guilds was their practical recognition of the intimate connection of religion with commercial relations and with all the activities of life. Although the primary object of the associations was economic, the guilds made every effort to secure good conduct and fidelity to religious duties on the part of the members. Individuals were punished or sometimes expelled from the guilds for immoral or irreligious conduct. 

Every guild was under the protection of a patron saint or was specially dedicated to the Holy Trinity or to the Blessed Mother of God under one of her titles. The portrait of the guild patron was painted on the banner of the guild which was borne in the public processions. Thus the guild of wood-workers was under the protection of St. Joseph. The shoemakers usually had on their banner paintings of SS. Crispin and Crispinian. Bakers were often under the patronage of St. Honorius, and so on. The association of the heavenly patron with the grade that belonged to the guild intensified the craftsmen’s pride in their work and the men’s esteem for the nobility of manual labour. The Church Feast of the patron was always the occasion of the great annual banquet of the guild. 

Many guilds had their own special chapels; and we commonly find provision made in the guild statutes for the support of a chaplain and sometimes of several chaplains. Some of the most beautiful mediaeval churches belonged to or were built by the guilds. Provision was also regularly made for the celebration of Masses for the intentions of the guild, and for the offering of candles at holy shrines. On the death of a member care was taken to have Masses offered and alms given for his eternal rest. Almsgiving, which was practiced even towards the poor outside the gild, was an important item of the ordinary guild expenditure. Oftentimes a guild gave feasts in its buildings to the poor of the whole town. (Father Edward Cahill, The Framework of a Christian State, pp. 79-80.) 

Christendom would continue beyond the Thirteenth Century. It was, however, at its height in the Thirteenth Century, which is why the devil used the weakness of men to embrace the world just a “little bit at a time” in the two centuries between its end and the beginning of the revolutions of Modernity that began with Father Martin Luther’s posting of his ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, and one of Martin Luther’s principal goals was to separate Church and State, a separation that has been nothing other than disastrous for the right ordering of men and their nations.

It should be noted, however, that Luther also conversed with the adversary himself, something that he related in his own writings and quoted by Protestant historian William Cobbett in his superb A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland:

. . . . Martin Luther, who says in his own works that it was by the arguments of the devil (who, he says, frequently ate, drank and slept with him) that he was induced to turn Protestant; three worthy followers of that Luther who is by his disciple Melancthon called "a brutal man, void of piety and humanity, one more a Jew than a Christian . . . . (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, written between 1824 and 1827 and published by Benziger Brothers, p. 209.)

Does anyone still want to deny that the world in which we live was inspired by the devil himself?

Protestantism Begets Capitalism with an Assist from Talmudic Principles

Although Martin Luther’s revolution, aided and abetted by Talmudic instigators, started the process that created the world of Modernity, it was the influence of John Calvin and his own brand of Judeo-Protestantism that has shaped the world of injustice and conflict today.

Among his many other false beliefs, John Calvin believed that those in the civil government could separate the "saved" from the "damned" was the degree of their material success here on earth. John Calvin believed that material success was a sign of "divine election." Thus it is that we have the Calvinist "work ethic" as those who subscribe to Calvin's warped, heretical views of God and man work hard not to give honor and glory to the Most Holy Trinity through the Immaculate Heart of Mary but to show to others that they are "saved" by virtue of their material "success" in this passing, mortal vale of tears. 

Calvin’s belief in material success as the sign of divine election or predestination that has provided the foundation for the modern economic system that has forced man off of the land and dehumanized him as he has been made a slave of "material success" by the captains of industry and banking. Calvinism, which is little more than Talmudic Judaism with a slight Christian gloss, has engendered all manner of economic abuses, not the least of which is the contemporary practice of usury, discussed earlier in this book, founded in the belief that men may ignore the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in order to be "successful" in this world. 

The injustices engendered by this amoral, naturalistic view of the world helped to encourage open atheists and anti-Theists, such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, to postulate a utopian system of naturalism based upon a materialistic view of man that denied his supernatural essence. The diabolical lie of Marxism-Leninism is but the logical consequence of John Calvin's materialistic view of man that denied that there could be an Omnipotent and Omniscient God Who created rational beings with free wills to choose for or against Him as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church.

Father Fahey elaborated on the effects of Protestantism, especially the warmed-over version of Talmudic Judaism that is Calvinism, in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World: 

It was, however, the Calvinistic doctrine on predestination and the signs by which a man's divine election could be recognized, which specially favored the advent of the unlimited competition, unscrupulous underselling and feverish advertising of the present day. In his able work, from which a passage has already been quoted, Professor O'Brien shows that it was in the peculiarly British variety of Calvinism, known as Puritanism, that all the Calvinist doctrines of succession life as a sign of man's predestination, of the respect and veneration due to wealth, had their fullest development. 

When all is said and done, Calvinism remains the real nursing-father of the civic industrial capitalism of the middle classes. . . . Since the aggressively active ethic inspired by the doctrine of predestination urges the elect to the full development of his God-given powers, and offers him this sign by which he may assure himself of his election, work becomes rational and systematic. In breaking down the motive of ease and enjoyment, asceticism lays the foundation of the tyranny of work over men . . . production for production's sake is declared to be a commandment of religion." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

This has great application in every aspect of contemporary life. Most people work not for the honor and glory of God, thus giving him the fruit of their labors as the consecrated slaves of His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, but for the sake of "success," to gain what is considered to be financial "wealth" and earthly "success" as ends that justify each and every method used to achieve such success. This has been the Calvinist "contribution" to the world, so enshrined in the ethos of the "American dream," which eschews the Holy Poverty of the Holy Family of Nazareth and of such great saints as Saint Francis of Assisi and his helper and fellow adorer of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Saint Clare of Assisi. Father Fahey quoted Gilbert Keith Chesterton's observation about the insidious influence of that wretched people known as the Puritans (or Pilgrims) in a footnote on page sixteen of The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World: 

"The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical City of Christ in the Modern World.)

The Protestants, however, were not alone in helping to usher in the world of amorality in commerce and politics and statecraft and popular culture, including what has become known as competitive sports. Father Fahey explained the “Talmudic connection,” if you will, from which the Calvinist world-view is derived:

The learned writer, Werner Sombart, in his great work, Die Juden and das Wirtschafsleben ("The Jews in Economic Life"), attributes the great, if not the deciding, role in the formation of the modern economic outlook or mentality to the Jewish race, for to them he attributes the introduction of the ideas of "free commerce" and "unchecked competition" into a society with quite different ideas. He points out the contrast between this Jewish mentality and the ordered outlook of the Middle Ages in phrases that are worthy of citation:--

"When we examine matters more closely . . . we shall immediately see that the struggle between Jewish and Christian merchants is a struggle between two views of the world, or, at least, between two economic mentalities imbued with principles that are different or even opposed. In order to understand this statement we must represent to ourselves the spirit which inspired that economic life into which, since the sixteenth century, Jewish elements have forced their way in ever increasing volume. To this spirit they openly showed themselves so rudely opposed that they were everywhere felt to be interfering with the livelihood and subsistence of the people. During the whole time which I have designated as the period of incipient capitalism . . . the same fundamental outlook on economic relations prevailed as had been accepted during the Middle Ages. . . The unrestrained, unbridled striving after gain was considered by most people during this whole period as unlawful, as unchristian, because the spirit of the old Thomistic economic philosophy as yet swayed men's minds, at least officially." The Jewish mentality was opposed to the outlook on life impressed on society by the Catholic Church, for (:) "the Jew stands out as the business man pure and simple, as the man who, in business, takes account only of business, and who in conformity with the spirit of true capitalist economy, proclaims, in the presence of all natural ends, the supremacy of gain and profit." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.) 

Has not the "supremacy of gain and profit" come to define almost every aspect of contemporary life, taking into account not at all the eternal good of our immortal souls?

This "supremacy of gain and profit" results in the corruption of daily living, contributing to the naturalistic belief, which itself is founded in pantheism, as Father Fahey notes, that is, that man is "divine" and is above all. The achievement of our earthly goals is what defines us as human beings, and no "external" authority, such as the Catholic Church, had better get in our way of this achievement. 

A final passage from Father Fahey will underscore this point: 

The Jew it was, according to Sombart, who broke down the mentality of the Middle Ages and commercialized the relations of men. 

Professor O'Brien dissents from Werner Sombart's thesis that the growth of the capitalistic spirit, the spirit of subordination of all other considerations to that of profit, was due to the Jews. He admits, however, that Sombart's contention would be quite correct, if for the "Jews" we substituted "Judaism," and he points out the importance of Calvin's justification of usury in preparing the way for modern developments. The Puritans adopted Old Testament ideas: the Old Testament idea of the reward of virtue in this world fitted in with the Puritan teaching about the fulfillment of one's vocation.

It is unnecessary for the purpose of this work to apportion responsibility for the triumph of what we may call the does it pay? mentality in the world, between Jews and Puritans. At any rate, if the Puritans subordinated men to production, the Jews completed the process, by subordinating production itself to money. The right order, of money as a means for production and production subservient to man, is now, as we know, reversed. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

Professor George O'Brien, cited in Father Fahey's The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, summarized his judgment about the effects of Protestantism upon the contemporary world in An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation (IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003): 

The thesis we have endeavoured to present in this essay is that the two great dominating schools of modern economic thought have a common origin. The capitalist school, which, basing its position on the unfettered right of the individual to do what he will with his own, demands the restriction of government interference in economic and social affairs within the narrowest possible limits, and the socialist school, which, basing its position on the complete subordination of the individual to society, demands the socialization of all the means of production, if not all of wealth, face each other today as the only two solutions of the social question; they are bitterly hostile towards each other, and mutually intolerant and each is at the same weakened and provoked by the other. In one respect, and in one respect only, are they identical--they can both be shown to be the result of the Protestant Reformation. 

We have seen the direct connection which exists between these modern schools of economic thought and their common ancestor. Capitalism found its roots in the intensely individualistic spirit of Protestantism, in the spread of anti-authoritative ideas from the realm of religion into the realm of political and social thought, and, above all, in the distinctive Calvinist doctrine of a successful and prosperous career being the outward and visible sign by which the regenerated might be known. Socialism, on the other hand, derived encouragement from the violations of established and prescriptive rights of which the Reformation afforded so many examples, from the growth of heretical sects tainted with Communism, and from the overthrow of the orthodox doctrine on original sin, which opened the way to the idea of the perfectibility of man through institutions. But, apart from these direct influences, there were others, indirect, but equally important. Both these great schools of economic thought are characterized by exaggerations and excesses; the one lays too great stress on the importance of the individual, and other on the importance of the community; they are both departures, in opposite directions, from the correct mean of reconciliation and of individual liberty with social solidarity. These excesses and exaggerations are the result of the free play of private judgment unguided by authority, and could not have occurred if Europe had continued to recognize an infallible central authority in ethical affairs. 

The science of economics is the science of men's relations with one another in the domain of acquiring and disposing of wealth, and is, therefore, like political science in another sphere, a branch of the science of ethics. In the Middle Ages, man's ethical conduct, like his religious conduct, was under the supervision and guidance of a single authority, which claimed at the same time the right to define and to enforce its teaching. The machinery for enforcing the observance of medieval ethical teaching was of a singularly effective kind; pressure was brought to bear upon the conscience of the individual through the medium of compulsory periodical consultations with a trained moral adviser, who was empowered to enforce obedience to his advice by the most potent spiritual sanctions. In this way, the whole conduct of man in relation to his neighbours was placed under the immediate guidance of the universally received ethical preceptor, and a common standard of action was ensured throughout the Christian world in the all the affairs of life. All economic transactions in particular were subject to the jealous scrutiny of the individual's spiritual director; and such matters as sales, loans, and so on, were considered reprehensible and punishable if not conducted in accordance with the Christian standards of commutative justice. 

The whole of this elaborate system for the preservation of justice in the affairs of everyday life was shattered by the Reformation. The right of private judgment, which had first been asserted  in matters of faith, rapidly spread into moral matters, and the attack on the dogmatic infallibility of the Church left Europe without an authority to which it could appeal on moral questions. The new Protestant churches were utterly unable to supply this want. The principle of private judgment on which they rested deprived them of any right to be listened to whenever they attempted to dictate moral precepts to their members, and henceforth the moral behaviour of the individual became a matter to be regulated by the promptings of his own conscience, or by such philosophical systems of ethics as he happened to approve. The secular state endeavoured to ensure that dishonesty amounting to actual theft or fraud should be kept in check, but this was a poor and ineffective substitute for the powerful weapon of the confessional. Authority having once broken down, it was but a single step from Protestantism to rationalism; and the way was opened to the development of all sorts of erroneous systems of morality.  Dr. George O’Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation, IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia, 2003.) 

Amintore Fanfani, who died in 1999 and had served as the Prime Minister of Italy on six different occasions of varying lengths between 1954 and 1987, noted in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, that it is only when men keep a view on their eternal destiny that they can be just stewards of the this of this world. The success of the above-named Protestant revolutionaries and naturalistic "philosophers" and "theorists" was made possible by the overthrow of he authority of the Catholic Church. Unrestrained self-seeking replaced the authority of the Catholic Church:

Those who have followed our argument cannot fail to conclude, as we do, that in the Middle Ages it was the international trade ventures that did most to favour the rise of the capitalist spirit. In light of these considerations, the conception of trade in St. Thomas, the champion of the Catholic social ideal, appears only logical, "For, "says St. Thomas, "the city that for its subsistence has need of much merchandise must necessarily submit to the presence of foreigners. Now relations with foreigners, as Aristotle says in his Politics, very often corrupt national customs: the foreigners who have been brought up under other laws and customs, in many cases act otherwise than is the use of the citizens, who, led by their example, imitate them and so bring disturbance into social life. Moreover, if the citizens themselves engage in commerce, they open the way to many vices. For since the aim of merchants is wholly one of gain, greed takes root in the heart of the citizens, by which everything, in the city, becomes venal, and, with the disappearance of good faith, the way is open to fraud; the general good is despised, and each man will seek his own particular advantage; the taste for virtue will be lost when the honour which is normally the reward of virtue is accorded to all. Hence, in such a city civil life cannot fail to grow corrupt."

When these words are understood, and we bear in mind the ideal of a Catholic society and the aspirations of capitalism, we can easily see why the friar noted a tendency to reason only in a "venal" manner and ("despising the general good") to seek only "particular advantage."

The characteristics of capitalism are precisely the following: the adoption of an economic criterion as criterion of order; failure to consider third persons; a quest for purely individual profit. Nor did Aquinas exaggerate when he saw in the merchant the greatest danger in "civil life," as he understood it. It is not by chance that the first capitalistic figures presented to us are merchants--Godric, later St. Godric, presented by Pirenne; the Mariano by Heynen; the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Del Bene by Sapori; Datini by Bensa; the Fugger by Sreider. Nor is it by chance that though opinions differ as to whether capitalism sprang from land-owners or traders, all agree that even land-owners first showed themselves capitalistic in the quality of merchants. In mediaeval economic society the only individual who could easily and often find himself in a position to act otherwise than in conformity with pre-capitalistic ideals was the merchant. Having left his city, exposed to risks of every kind, free from such ties as the laws of country or the opinion of his acquaintances, surrounded by intriguing people who saw in him only someone to be cheated, he had to defend himself against the cheaters by cheating, against competitors by sharpening his wits to find new methods of competition, and against adverse circumstances by learning to overcome them. Although he may have been a God-fearing man, if it was urgent for him to take back to the warehouse at least the equivalent of what he had brought away, he was obligated to throw overboard something of his pre-capitalistic ideas, even if in paradaisal conditions they might have appealed to him.

In another part of the present work we have pointed out that in a pre-capitalistic society if a single individual breaks away from the norm, the others will be forced to follow his example if only in self-defence. Let the reader then consider the vast significance of encounters either with merchants of another religion, or with subtle, equivocal, and unscrupulous merchants, always ready to take advantage of any opportunity. Faced with these, men's faithfulness to their own ideals will have begun to waver; their consequent actions will have produced such remarkable results that we doubt whether their conviction of wrong-doing will have been reinforced. To reason in terms of utility means a tangible result; to reason in terms of Paradise means hope of a result of which the certainty vanishes if faith weakens. We must not forget how much the capitalistic ideal has the advantage in being concrete, and, remembering this, we can more easily understand how a profitable infraction of pre-capitalist normality would rather lead men to repeat such infractions than arouse in them such remorse as to lead them back to the old path. We hold it a very significant fact that among mediaeval merchants remorse led to notable conversion even when in no danger of death. It is enough to quote St. Godric, St. Francis, Blessed Colombini. It led also to death-bed restitutions, often complete, and which were the more wonderful the harder it had been for the dying man to scrape together his hoard, and the more reluctant he had been in his life to give a penny to anyone who had not earned it twice over. Such conversions, implying a return to pre-capitalistic modes of life, continue so long as there is faith, but when faith weakens there is no longer thought of reparation.

It is the waning of faith that explains the establishment of a capitalistic spirit in a Catholic world, but in a certain sense it is the establishment of the capitalistic spirit that brings about a waning of faith. The effect of the weakening of faith is that the material factors we have mentioned change from momentary circumstances to permanent ones. With the weakening of faith, remorse becomes rare; the "is" is no longer compared with the "should-be," and that which is accepted and exploited in accordance with its own standards; the world is judged by purely worldly criteria.

All the circumstances that, in the Middle Ages, led to a waning of faith explain the progressive establishment of the capitalistic spirit, for the pre-capitalistic spirit rests on facts that are not seen, but must be held by faith. Those faithful to it sacrifice a certain result for a result that is not guaranteed by faith; they eschew a certain mode of action in the certainty of losing riches, but believing that they will gain a future reward in heaven. Let man lose this belief, and nothing remains for him, rationally speaking, but to act in a capitalistic manner. If there are no longer religious ties uniting man to man, there will be a growing number of audacious men whose sole end, in the words of Villari, is to be ahead of their fellows. Such men existed before the modern era began, and of such men it has been said that they showed "a complete lack of scruples and contempt for every moral law."

Men were particularly encouraged to sharpen their wits to acquire wealth, and moral obstacles were removed by the fact that, by a subversion of ancient custom, the highest offices no longer fell to those summoned to them by law or custom, but to those who could win them either by their own or others' wit, by their own or others' material strength, or by their own ability and others' baseness. In each case the stair of ascent was provided by economic means, from the moment that economic difficulties made all feel the need of goods. The Emperor no longer sought homage but money, the Cities widened their domains more by gold than by arms. Bankers became masters of cities without striking a blow. Gold paved the way and opened the gates to the new tyrants. Even the man who, from lofty motives, had no need of money could not do without it, if he did not wish to cut a poor figure at banquets and ceremonies, or be behind hand in public largesse.

It is a vicious circle. A man seeks goods because he no longer believes in a faith that bounded his desires, and he no longer believes because he has experienced the pleasures of possession and influence. We need not enquire at what moment the former or the latter of these causes came into operation; we know that their working varied from country to country, from individual to individual, and that now a man might be tempted to discount morality by the attraction of goods, and now might be tempted to enrich himself because, he is no loner believed in divine penalties and rewards. And if in the case of an individual it would be hard to say which cause came first, it would be impossible in the case of society. We may take it for granted that in society as a whole both causes worked simultaneously, each stimulated by the other.

There were other phenomena that encouraged either acquisition action or incredulity. Leaving aside the less important and local ones, and confining ourselves to those of which the action was most general at the close of the pre-capitalistic period, we may say that the greatest contribution to the new economic spirit informing fifteenth-century men was brought by the humanist conception of life, of which the exponents, such as Alberti, took the most significant step towards the capitalist spirit by detaching their conception of wealth from its moral setting, and withdrawing the acquisition and use of goods from the influence of the rules and restrictions of religious morality. The advent of similar tendencies in the political field had the result that the State ceased to oppose the new mode of thought and life, and instead itself threw off the influence of Catholic ideals, often in order to exploit human vices, as we see in legislation on gambling. (Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, published originally by Sheed and Ward, 1935, republished in 2002 by IHS Press, pp. 135-138.)

Fanfani went on to note how Protestantism exploited this weakening of the Catholic Faith and built an entire economic system to suit its own heretical purposes:

Protestantism encouraged capitalism inasmuch as it denied the relation between earthly action and eternal recompense. From this point of view there is no real difference between the Lutheran and Calvinistic currents, for while it is true that Calvin linked salvation to arbitrary divine predestination, Luther made it depend on faith alone. Neither of the two connected it with works. Nevertheless, Calvin's statement was the more vigorous, and therefore better able to bear practical fruit in a capitalistic sense.

Such an assertion invalidates any supernatural morality, hence also the economic ethics of Catholicism, and opens the way to a thousand moral systems, all natural, all earthy, all based on principles inherent in human affairs. Protestantism by this principle did not act in a positive sense, as [Max] Weber believes, but in a negative sense, paving the way for the positive action of innumerable impulses, which--like the risks entailed by distant markets,  in the pre-Reformation period, the price revolution at the time of the Reformation, and the industrial revolution in the period following—led man to direct his action by purely economic criteria. Catholicism acts in opposition to capitalism by seeking to restrain these impulses and to bring various spheres of life into harmony on an ideal plane. Protestantism acted in favor of capitalism, for its religious teaching paved the way for it. (Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, published originally by Sheed and Ward, 1935, republished in 2002 by IHS Press, p. 151.)

The belief that social life is defined solely by economic criteria is what unites the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and right” even though they do not realize this. As I have noted so many times in the past on this site, the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and “left,” despite their differences on the margins of the errors of Modernity, are united in their belief that men can order their lives without any reference to religion at all, no less the true religion, and that men can do anything they want by means of their own unaided powers. In others, the adherents of the “left” and the “right” believe that men do not need Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or His true Church and that it is not necessary for men to have belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to create a better and more just world. The adherents of the “left and the “right” believe that the “better world” is defined by economics and not by the state of the souls of men.

The late Dr. George O'Brien stressed the fact that there is only one institution that can reorder the world properly, and it is not a secular, naturalistic international organization or a secular, naturalistic political party:

There is one institution and one institution alone which is capable of supplying and enforcing the social ethic that is needed to revivify the world. It is an institution at once intra-national and international; an institution that can claim to pronounce infallibly on moral matters, and to enforce the observance of the its moral decrees by direct sanctions on the individual conscience of man; an institution which, while respecting and supporting the civil governments of nations, can claim to exist independently of them, and can insist that they shall not intrude upon the moral life or fetter the moral liberty of their citizens. Europe possessed such an institution in the Middle Ages; its dethronement was the unique achievement of the Reformation; and the injury inflicted by that dethronement has never since been repaired. (George O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation, first published in 1923, republished by IHS press in 2003, p. 132.) 

Father Edward Cahill, S.J., writing in The Framework of a Christian State, wrote the following about Luther and his revolution against the Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope: 

The assertion that Protestantism has introduced into Europe, or promoted, democratic freedom or real liberty of conscience is still more patently untrue. It is a fact, indeed, that at the beginning of the revolt Luther's professions were radically democratic. He promised to benefit the people at large by curtailing the power of both Church and State. But he and his followers ended up by supporting an irresponsible despotism such as Europe had not known since the days of the pagan Emperors of Rome.

Inspired by Luther's democratic professions and his denunciations of the "tyranny and oppression" of the rulers, the knights and the lesser nobility of many of the German States, and later on, the peasants rose in open revolt against the princes. When the revolution was crushed in blood (1525) the victorious princes, now without a rival and no longer kept in check by the moderating influence of the Catholic Church, used their augmented power to establish a despotism which they exceeded for their own personal advantage, in opposition to the interests of the people; while Luther, with unscrupulous inconsistency, now proclaimed the doctrine of the unlimited power of rulers. 

Soon even the Church in the Protestant States fell completely under the control of the ruling princes, who were thus established as the absolute masters of both Church and State. The wealth of the Church, which hitherto had been the patrimony of the poor; its authority; all the ecclesiastical institutions, including hospitals, schools, homes of refuge, etc., passed into the hands of the kings, princes, and the town magistrates. At the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which ended the first phase of the revolution in Germany, the principle was formally adopted that the prince of each state was free to dictate the religion of each and all of his subjects." (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., The Framework of a Christian State, published in 1932 in Ireland and republished by Roman Catholic books, pp. 93-94. William Cobbett, a Protestant historian who never converted to the Holy Faith, wrote a remarkably full and honest account of the plunder of monasteries and convents under King Henry VIII in England, thus beginning the rise of all economic miseries since that time as this plunder threw off the poor from their lands and consigned them to pauperism and vagabondage. For a fuller account of this plunder, please see Appendix B. Even most Catholics have no idea how the entirety of the modern economic system was the result of the Protestant Revolution, up to and including the concept of a “national debt” that has enriched Talmudic bankers and merchants in the past and that has reached such a point in the United States of America as to make this country’s resources a vassal of the Red Chinese tyrants, who are plundering the goods of the underground Church at this time with Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s full blessing and support.)

Thus began the rise of the statism that is upon us at this time. There is no way to regard the growth of statism by making advertence to some kind of “generic” Christianity and/or by relying upon the Judeo-Masonic principles of naturalism and its religious indifferentism. Catholicism is but the one and only foundation of personal and social order, which is why the devil worked very hard to plant the seeds of corruption in the two centuries leading up to Martin Luther’ revolution against God and His true Church. And far from being “peaceful,” Luther’s revolution was born in blood as Catholic churches and convents were plundered and ransacked.

Appendix B

William Cobbett on the Plunder of the Catholic Church and the Rise of Pauperism in England under King Henry VIII

183. If I look at the county of Surrey, in which I myself was born, and behold the devastation of that county, I am filled with indignation against the ruffian devastators. Surrey has very little of natural wealth in it. A very considerable part of it is mere heath-land. Yet this county was, from one end of it to the other, ornamented and benefited by the establishments which grew out of the Catholic Church. At Bermondsey there was an abbey; at St. Mary Overy there was a priory, and this convent founded that very St. Thomas’s Hospital which now exists in Southwark. This hospital also was seized by the ruffians, but the building was afterwards given to the City of London. At Newington there was a hospital, and after its revenues were seized the master obtained a licence to beg! At Merton there was a priory. Then, going across to the Sussex side, there was another priory at Reigate. Coming again near the Thames, and more to the west, there was a priory at Shene. Still more to the west there was an abbey at Chertsey. At Tandridge there was a priory. Near Guildford, at Sende, there was a priory; and at the lower end of the county, at Waverley, in the parish of Farnham, was an abbey. To these belonged cells and chapels at a distance from the convents themselves; so that it would have been a work of some difficulty for a man so to place himself, even in this poor heathy county, at six miles distance from a place where the door of hospitality was always open to the poor, to the aged, the orphan, the widow and the stranger. Can any man now place himself, in that whole county, within any number of miles of any such door? No, nor in any other county. All is wholly changed, and all is changed for the worse. There is now no hospitality in England. Words have changed their meaning. We now give entertainment to those who entertain us in return. We entertain people because we like them personally, and very seldom because they stand in need of entertainment. A hospital, in those days, meant a place of free entertainment, and not a place merely for the lame, the sick, and the blind; and the very sound of the words "Old English Hospitality" ought to raise a blush on every Protestant cheek. But besides this hospitality exercised invariably in the monasteries, the weight of their example was great with all the opulent classes of the community, and thus to be generous and kind was the character of the nation at large; a niggardly, a base, a money-loving disposition could not be in fashion, when those institutions to which all men looked with reverence set an example which condemned such a disposition.

184. And if I am asked why the thirteen monks of Waverley, for instance, should have had And I may go on and ask why anybody should have any property at all? Aye, but they never worked; they did nothing to increase the nation's store. Let us see how this is. They possessed the lands of Waverley, — a few hundred acres of very poor land, with a mill, and perhaps about twenty acres of very indifferent meadow land, on one part of which, sheltered by a semicircle of sand-hills, their abbey stood, the river Wey (about twenty feet wide) running close by the outer wall of the convent.

Besides this they possessed the impropriated tithes of the parish of Farnham, and a pond or two on the commons adjoining. This estate in land belongs to a Mr. Thompson, who lives on the spot, and the estate in tithes to a Mr. Halsey, who lives at a distance from the parish. Now, without any disparagement to these gentlemen, did not the monks work as much as they do? Did not their revenue go to augment the nation's store as much as the rents of Mr. Thompson or the tithes of Mr. Halsey? Aye, and which is of vast importance, the poor of the parish of Farnham, having this monastery to apply to and having for their neighbour a bishop of Winchester who did not sell small beer out of his palace, stood in no need of poor rates, and had never heard the horrid word pauper pronounced. Come, my townsmen of Farnham; you who as well as 1 have, when we were boys, climbed the ivy-covered ruins of this venerable abbey (the first of its order in England; you who as well as I have, when looking at those walls which have outlived the memory of the devastators, bat not the malice of those who still taste the sweets of the devastation; you who, as well as I, have many times wondered what an abbey was, and how and why this one came to be devastated; you shall be the judge in this matter. You know what poor-rates are, and you know what church-rates are. Very well then, there were no poor-rates and no church-rates as long as Waverley Abbey existed and as long as bishops had no wives. This is a fact wholly undeniable. There was no need of either. The Church shared its property with the poor and the stranger, and left the people at large to possess their own earnings; and as to matters of faith and worship, look at that immense heap of earth round the church where your parents and my parents and where our progenitors for twelve hundred years lie buried; then bear in mind that for nine hundred years out of the twelve they were all of the faith and worship of the monks of Waverley, and with that thought in your mind find, if you can, the heart to say that the monks of Waverley, by whose hospitality your fathers and my fathers were for so many ages preserved from bearing the hateful name of pauper, taught an idolatrous and damnable religion.

185. That which took place in Surrey took place in every other county, only to a greater extent in proportion to the greater wealth and resources of the spot. Defacing followed closely upon the heels of confiscation and plunder. If buildings could have been murdered, the tyrant and his plunderers would have made short work of it. As it was they did all they could; they knocked down, they blew up, they annihilated as far as they could. Nothing, indeed, short of diabolical malice was to be expected from such men; but there were two abbeys in England which one might have hoped that even these monsters would have spared, — that which contained the tomb of St. Austin, and that which had been founded by and contained the remains of Alfred. We have seen how they rifled the tomb of St. Austin at Canterbury. They tore down the church and the abbey, and with the materials built a menagerie for wild beasts and a palace for the tyrant himself. The tomb of Alfred was in an abbey at Winchester, founded by that king himself. The abbey and its estates were given by the tyrant to Wriothesley, who was afterwards made Earl of Southampton, and who got a pretty good share of the confiscations in Hampshire. One almost sickens at the thought of a man capable of a deed like the destruction of this abbey. Where is there one amongst us who has read any thing at all who has not read of the fame of Alfred? What book can we open, even for our boyish days, that does not sound his praise? Poets, moralists, divines, historians, philosophers, lawyers, legislators, not only of our own country but of all Europe, have cited him, and still cite him, as a model of virtue, piety, wisdom, valour and patriotism, as possessing every excellence without a single fault. He, in spite of difficulties such as no other human being on record ever encountered, cleared his harassed and half-barbarized country of horde after horde of cruel invaders, who at one time had wholly subdued it and compelled him, in order to escape destruction, to resort to the habit and the life of a herdsman. From this state of depression he, during a not long life, raised himself and his people to the highest point of happiness and of fame. He fought, with his armies and fleets, more than fifty battles against the enemies of England. He taught his people by his example as well as by his precepts, to be sober, industrious, brave and just. He promoted learning in all the sciences; he planted the University of Oxford; to him, and not to a late Scotch lawyer, belongs " Trial by Jury." Blackstone calls him the founder of the Common Law; the counties, the hundreds, the tithings, the courts of justice, were the work of Alfred. He, in fact, was the founder of all those rights, liberties and laws which made England to be what England has been, which gave her a character above that of other nations, which made her rich and great and happy beyond all her neighbours, and which still give her whatever she possesses of that pre-eminence. If there be a name under heaven to which Englishmen ought to bow with reverence approaching towards adoration it is the name of Alfred. And we are not unjust and ungrateful in this respect at any rate, for, whether Catholics or Protestants, where is there an Englishman to be found who would not gladly make a pilgrimage of a thousand miles to take off his hat at the tomb of this maker of the English name ? Alas! that tomb is nowhere to be found. The barbarians spared not even that. It was in the abbey before mentioned, called Hyde Abbey, which had been founded by Alfred himself and intended as the place of his burial. Besides the remains of Alfred this abbey contained those of St. Grimbald, the Benedictine monk, whom Alfred brought into England to begin the teaching at Oxford. But what cared the plunderers for remains of public benefactors? The abbey was knocked down or blown up, the tombs were demolished, the very lead of the coffins was sold," and, which fills one with more indignation than all the rest, the estates were so disposed of as to make the loan-makers, the Barings, at this day the successors of Alfred the Great!

186. Wriothesley got the manors of Micheldever and Stratton, which by marriage came into the hands of the family of Russell ; and from that family, about thirty years ago, they were bought by the Barings, and are now in possession of Sir Thomas Baring. It is curious to observe how this Protestant "Reformation" has worked. If it had not been there would have been no paupers at Micheldever and Stratton, but then the Russells would not have had the estates, and they could not have sold them to the Barings: aye, but then there would have been, too, no national debt as well as no paupers, and there would have been no loan-makers to buy the estates of the Russells. Besides this there would have been no bridewell erected upon the precise spot where the abbey church stood; no tread-mill, perhaps over the very place where the ashes of Alfred lay; and, what is more, there would have been no need of bridewell or tread-mill. It is related of Alfred that he made his people so honest that he could hang bracelets up by the way side without danger of their being touched. Alas! that the descendants of that same people should need a tread-mill! Aye, but in the days of Alfred there were no paupers, no miserable creatures compelled to labour from month's end to month's end without seeing meat, no thousands upon thousands made thieves by that hunger which acknowledges no law, human or divine.

187. Thus then was the country devastated, sacked and defaced; and I should now proceed to give an account of the commencement of that poverty and degradation which were, as I have pledged myself to show, the consequences of this devastation, and which I shall show, not by bare assertion, nor from what are called " Histories of England," but from Acts of Parliament, and from other sources which every one can refer to, and the correctness of which is beyond all dispute. But before we come to this important matter we must see the end of the ruffian "Vice-gerent," and also the end of the tyrant himself, who was, during the events that we have been speaking of, going on marrying and divorcing or killing his wives, but whose career was, after all, not very long.

188. After the death of Jane. Seymour, who was the mother of Edward VI., and who was the only one of all the tyrant's wives who had the good luck to die a queen and to die in her bed ; — after her death, which took place in 1537, he was nearly two years hunting up another wife. None certainly but some very gross and unfeeling woman could be expected to have voluntarily anything to do with a man whose hands were continually steeped in blood. In 1539 he found, however, a mate in Anne, the sister of the Duke of Cleves. When she arrived in England he expressed his dislike of her person ; but he found it prudent to marry her. In 1540, about six or seven months after the marriage, he was divorced from her, not daring in this case to set his myrmidons to work to bring her to the block. There was no lawful pretence for the divorce. The husband did not like his wife; that was all, and this was alleged, too, as the ground of the divorce." Cranmer, who had divorced him from two wives before, put his irons into the fire again for this occasion, and produced in a little time as neat a piece of work as ever had come from the shop of the famous "Reformation." Thus the King and Queen were single people again; but the former had another young and handsome wife in his eye. This lady's name was Catherine Howard, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk. This Duke, as well as most of the old nobility, hated Cromwell, and now was an opportunity of inflicting vengeance on him. Cromwell had been the chief cause of the King's marriage with Anne of Cleves; but the fact is his plundering talent was no longer wanted, and it was convenient to the tyrant to get rid of him.

189. Cromwell had obtained enormous wealth from his several offices, as well as from the plunder of the Church and the poor. He had got about thirty of the estates belonging to the monasteries ; his house, or rather palace, was gorged with the fruits of the sacking; he had been made Earl of Essex; he had precedence over every one but the King; and lie, in fact, represented the King in the Parliament, where he introduced and defended all his confiscating and murdering laws. He had been barbarous beyond all description towards the unfortunate and unoffending monks and nuns ; without such an instrument the plunder never could have been effecte : but he was no longer wanted; the ruffian had already lived too long; the very walls of the devastated convents seemed to call for public vengeance on his head. On the morning of the 10th of June, 1540, he was all-powerful; in the evening of the same day he was in prison as a traitor. He lay in prison only a few days before he had to experience the benefit of his own way of administering justice. He had, as we have seen in the last chapter, invented a way of bringing people to the block or the gallows without giving them any form of trial, without giving them even a hearing, but merely by passing a law to put them to death. This was what he had brought about in the case of the Countess of Salisbury; and this was what was now to fall on his own head. He lived only about forty-eight days after his arrest; not half long enough to enable him to expiate, barely to enumerate, the robberies and murders committed under his orders. His time seems, however, to have been spent, not in praying God to forgive him for these robberies and murders, but in praying to the tyrant to spare his life. Perhaps of all the mean and dastardly wretches that ever died, this was the most mean and dastardly. He who had been the most insolent and cruel of ruffians when he had power, was now the most disgustingly slavish and base. He had, in fact, committed no crime against the King ; though charged with heresy and treason, he was no more a heretic than the King was, and as to the charge of treason there was not a shadow of foundation for it. But he was just as guilty of treason as the abbots of Reading, Colchester and Glastonbury, all of whom and many more he had been the chief instrument in putting to death. He put them to death in order to get possession of their property; and I dare say to get at his property, to get the plunder back from him, was one of the motives for bringing him to the block. This very ruffian had superintended the digging up of the ashes of Thomas a Becket and scattering them in the air; and now the people who had witnessed that had to witness the letting of the blood out of his dirty body, to run upon the pavement to be licked up by hogs or dogs. The cowardly creature seems to have had, from the moment of his arrest, no thought about anything but saving his life. He wrote repeatedly to the King in the hope of getting pardoned, but all to no purpose: he had done what was wanted of him, the work of plunder was nearly over, he had, too, got a large share of the plunder which it was not convenient to leave in his hands; and therefore, upon true "Reformation" principles, it was time to take away his life. He in his letters to the King most vehemently protested his innocence. Aye, no doubt of that; but he was not more innocent than were the butchered abbots and monks, he was not more innocent than any one out of those thousands upon thousands whom he had quartered, hanged, burned, or plundered; and amongst all those thousands upon thousands there never was seen one, female or male, so complete a dastard as himself. In these letters to the tyrant he fawned on him in the most disgusting manner; compared his smiles and frowns to those of God; besought him to suffer him to kiss his balmy hand once more that the fragrance thereof might make him fit for heaven! "The base creature deserved his death, if it had only been for writing these letters. Fox, the "martyr" man, calls this Cromwell the “valiant soldier of the Reformation." Yes, there have been few soldiers to understand sacking better; he was full of valour on foraging parties, and when he had to rifle monks and nuns and to rob altars; a brave fellow when he had to stretch monks and nuns on the rack to make them confess treasonable words or thought ; but when death began to stare him in the face he was, assuredly, the most cowardly caitiff that ever died. It is hardly necessary to say that this man is a great favourite of Hume, who deeply laments Cromwell's fate, though he has not a word of compassion to bestow upon all the thousands that had been murdered or ruined by him. He, as well as other historians, quotes from the conclusion of one of Cromwell's letters to the King these abject expressions: " I, a most woful prisoner, am ready to submit to death when it shall please God and your Majesty; and yet the frail flesh incites me to call to your grace for mercy and pardon of mine offences. — Written at the Tower with the heavy heart and trembling hand of your Highness's most miserable prisoner and poor slave, Thomas Cromwell. Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy" That is the language of Fox's "valiant soldier." Fox meant valiant, not in the field or on the scaffold, but in the convent, pulling the rings from women's fingers and tearing the gold clasps from books: that was the Protestant valour of the “Reformation." Hume says that Cromwell " deserved a better fate." Never was fate more just or more appropriate. He had been the willing, the officious, the zealous, the eager agent in the execution of all the tyrannical, sacrilegious, and bloody deeds of his master, and had amongst other things been the very man who first suggested the condemning of people to death without trial. What could be more just than that he should die in the same way? Not a tear was shed at his death, which produced on the spectators an effect such as is produced when the foulest of murderers expiate their crimes on the gallows.

190. During the seven years that the tyrant himself survived this his cruel and dastardly vice-gerent, he was beset with disappointments, vexations, and torments of all sorts. He discovered at the end of a few months that his new queen had been, and still was, much such another as Anne Boleyn. He with very little ceremony sent her to the block, together with a whole posse of her relations, lovers, and cronies. He raged and foamed like a wild beast, passed laws most bloody to protect himself against lewdness and infidelity in his future wives, and got for his pains the ridicule of the nation and of all Europe. He for the last time took another wife; but this time none would face his laws but a widow, and she very narrowly escaped the fate of the rest. He for some years before he died became, from his gluttony and debaucheries, an unwieldy and disgusting mass of flesh, moved about by means of mechanical inventions. But still he retained all the ferocity and bloody-mindedness of his former days. The principal business of his life was the ordering of accusations, executions, and confiscations. When on his death-bed every one was afraid to intimate his danger to him, lest death to the intimator should be the consequence; and he died before he was well aware of his condition, leaving more than one death-warrant unsigned for want of time.

191. Thus expired, in the year 1547, in the fifty-sixth year of his age and the thirty-eighth year of his reign, the most unjust, hard-hearted, meanest "and most sanguinary tyrant that the world had ever beheld, whether Christian or heathen. That England which he found in peace, unity, plenty and happiness, he left torn by factions and schisms, her people wandering about in beggary and misery. He laid the foundations of immorality, dishonesty and pauperism, all which produced an abundant harvest in the reigns of his unhappy, barren, mischievous and miserable children, with whom, at the end of a few years, his house and his name were extinguished for ever. How he disposed of the plunder of the Church and the poor; how his successors completed that work of confiscation which he had carried on so long ; how the nation sunk in point of character and of wealth ; how pauperism first arose in England ; and how were sown the seeds of that system of which we now behold the effects in the impoverishment and degradation of the main body of the people of England and Ireland ; all these will be shown in the next chapter, and shown, I trust, in a manner which will leave in the mind of every man of sense no doubt that, of all the scourges that ever afflicted this country, none is to be put in comparison with the Protestant Reformation.

CHAPTER VII.

192. Having shown that the thing impudently called the “Reformation” was begun in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood, I intended to show in the present chapter how the main body of the people were by these doings impoverished and degraded up to this time; that is to say, I intended to trace the impoverishment and degradation down to the end of the reign of the tyrant, Henry VIII. But upon reviewing my matter I think it best first to go through the whole of my account of the plunderings, persecutings and murderings of the "Reformation" peopl ; and when we have seen all the robberies and barbarities that they committed under the hypocritical pretence of religious zeal, or rather, when we have seen such of those robberies and barbarities as we can find room for, then I shall conclude with showing how enormously the nation lost by the change, and how that change made the main part of the people poor and wretched and degraded. By pursuing this plan I shall in one concluding chapter give, or at least endeavour to give, a clear and satisfactory history of this impoverishment. I shall take the present Protestant labourer and show him how his Catholic forefathers lived  and if cold potatoes and water, if this poorer than pig-diet, have not quite taken away all the natural qualities of English blood, I shall make him execrate the plunderers and hypocrites by whom was produced that change which has finally led to his present misery and to nine-tenths of that mass of corruption and crime, public and private, which now threatens to uproot society itself.

193. In pursuance of this plan, and in conformity with my promise to conclude my little work in ten chapters, I shall distribute my matter thus: — in chapter VII. (the present) the deeds and events of the reign of Edward VI. In chapter VIII., those of the reign of Queen Mary. In chapter IX., those of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and in chapter X., the facts and arguments to establish my main point, namely, that the thing impudently called the “Reformation” impoverished and degraded the main body of the people. In the course of the first three of these chapters I shall not touch, except incidentally, upon the impoverishing and degrading effects of the change, but shall reserve these for the last chapters, when, having witnessed the horrid means, we will take an undivided view of the consequences, tracing those consequences down to the present day.

194. One of Henry's last acts was a will by which he made his infant son his immediate successor, with remainder, in case he died without issue, to his daughter Mary first, and then in default of issue again, to his daughter Elizabeth, though, observe, both the daughters had been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament, and though the latter was born of Anne Boleyn while the king's first wife, the mother of Mary, was alive. Parliament had given the king the right to determine the succession by will.

195. To carry this will into execution, and to govern the kingdom until Edward, who was then ten years of age, should be eighteen years of age, there were sixteen executors appointed, amongst whom was Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and the "honest Cranmer." These sixteen worthies began by taking, in the most solemn manner, an oath to stand to and maintain the last will of their master. Their second act was to break that oath by making Hertford, who was a brother of Jane Seymour, the King's mother, "protector," though the will gave equal powers to all the executors. Their next step was to give new peerages to some of themselves. The fourth, to award to the new peers grants of the public money. The fifth was to lay aside at the coronation the ancient English custom of asking the people if they were willing to have and obey the King. The sixth was "to attend at a solemn high mass.” And the seventh was to begin a series of acts for the total subversion of all that remained of the Catholic religion in England, and for the effecting of all that Old Harry had left uneffected in the way of plunder.

196. The monasteries were gone; the cream had been taken off; but there remained the skimmed milk of church altars, chantries and guilds. Old Harry would doubtless, if he had lived much longer, have plundered these; but he had not done it, and he could not do it without openly becoming Protestant, which, for the reasons stated in paragraph 101, he would not do. But Hertford and his fifteen brother worthies had in their way no such obstacle as the ruffian king had had. The church altars, the chantries and the guilds contained something valuable, and they longed to be at it. The power of the Pope was gotten rid of, the country had been sacked, the poor had been despoiled; but still there were some pickings left. The piety of ages had made every church, however small, contain some gold and silver appertaining to the altar. The altars in the parish churches, and generally in the cathedrals, had been left as yet untouched; for though the wife-killer had abjured the Pope, whose power he had taken to himself, he still professed to be of the Catholic faith, and he maintained the mass and the sacraments and creeds with fire and faggot. Therefore he had left the church altars unplundered. But they contained gold, silver, and other valuables, and the worthies saw these with longing eyes and itching fingers.

197. To seize them, however, there required a pretext, and what pretext could there be short of declaring at once that the Catholic religion was false and wicked, and, of course, that there ought to be no altars, and, of course, no gold and silver things appertaining to them! The sixteen worthies, with Hertford at their head and with Cranmer amongst them, had had the King crowned as a Catholic, he as well as they had taken the oaths as Catholics, they had sworn to uphold that religion, they had taken him to a high mass after his coronation:' but the altars had good things about them  there was plunder remaining, and to get at this remaining plunder the Catholic religion must be wholly put down. There were doubtless some fanatics, some who imagined that the religion of nine hundred years' standing ought not to be changed, some who had not plunder and plunder only in view; but it is impossible for any man of common sense, of unperverted mind, to look at the history of this transaction, at this open avowal of Protestantism, at this change from the religion of England to that of a part of Germany, without being convinced that the principal authors of it had plunder and plunder only in view.

198. The old tyrant died in 1547, and by the end of 1549 Cranmer, who had tied so many Protestants to the stake for not being Catholics, had pretty nearly completed a system of Protestant worship. He first prepared a book of homilies and a catechism, in order to pave the way. Next came a law to allow the clergy to have wives, and then, when all things had been prepared, came the Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments .Gardiner, who was Bishop of Winchester, reproached Cranmer with his duplicity, reminded him of the zeal with which he had upheld the Catholic worship under the late king, and would have made him hang himself or cut his throat if he had had the slightest remains of shame in him.

199. This new system did not, however, go far enough for the fanatics, and there instantly appeared arrayed against it whole tribes of new lights on the Continent; so that Cranmer, cunning as he was, soon found that he had undertaken no easy matter. The proclamations put forth upon this occasion were disgustingly ridiculous, coming as they did in the name of a king only ten years of age, and expressed in words so solemnly pompous and full of arrogance. However, the chief object was the plunder, and to get at this nothing was spared. There were other things to attract the grasp, but it will be unnecessary to dwell very particularly on anything but the altars and the churches. This was the real " reformation reign," for it was a reign of robbery and hypocrisy without anything to be compared with them, — anything in any country or in any age. Religion, conscience, was always the pretext; but in one way or another robbery, plunder, was always the end. The people, once so united and so happy, became divided into innumerable sects, no man knowing hardly what to believe, and, indeed, no one knowing what it was lawful for him to say, for it soon became impossible for the common people to know what was heresy and what was not heresy.

200. That prince of hypocrites, Cranmer, who, during the reign of Henry had condemned people to the flames for not believing in transubstantiation, was now ready to condemn them for believing in it. We have seen that Luther was the beginner of the work of "reformation," but he was soon followed by further reformers on the Continent. These had made many attempts to propagate their doctrines in England, but old Henry had kept them down. Now, however, when the churches were to be robbed of what remained in them, and when, to have pretext for that robbery, it was necessary to make a complete change in the form of worship, these sectarians all flocked to England, which became one great scene of religious disputation. Some were for the Common Prayer-Book, others proposed alterations in it, others were for abolishing it altogether; and there now began that division, that multiplicity of hostile opinions, which has continued to the present day. Cranmer employed a part of the resources of the country to feed and fatten those of these religious, or rather impious, adventurers who sided with him and who chose the best market for their doctrines. England was overrun by these foreign traders in religion, and this nation, so jealous of foreign influence, was now compelled to bend its haughty neck, not only to foreigners but to foreigners of the most base and infamous character and description. Cranmer could not find Englishmen sufficiently supple to be his tools in executing the work that he had in hand. The Protector, Hertford, whom we must now call Somerset (the child-king having made him Duke of Somerset), was the greatest of all “reformers” that had yet appeared in the world, and, as we shall soon see, the greatest and most audacious of all the plunderers that this infamous reformation has produced, save and except Henry himself. The total abolition of the Catholic worship was necessary to his projects of plunder, and therefore he was a great encourager of these greedy and villainous foreigners.

201. The consequences to the morals of the people were such as were naturally to be expected. All historians agree that vice of all sorts and crimes of every kind were never so great and so numerous before. This was confessed by the teachers themselves, and yet the Protestants have extolled this reign as the reign of conscience and religion! It was so manifest that the change was a bad one, that men could not have proceeded in it from error. Its mischiefs were all manifest before the death of the tyrant; that death afforded an opportunity for returning into the right path, but there was plunder remaining, and the plunderers went on. The  “Reformation” was not the work of virtue, of fanaticism, of error, of ambition, but of a love of plunder. This was its great animating principle; in this it began, and in this it proceeded till there was nothing left for it to work on.

202. Henry had, in certain cases, enabled his minions to rob the bishoprics, but now there was a grand sweep at them. The Protector took the lead, and his example was followed by others. They took so much from one, so much from another, and some they wholly suppressed, as that of Westminster, and took their estates to themselves. There were many chantries (private property to all intents and purposes), free chapels (also private property), almshouses, hospitals, guilds or fraternities, the property of which was as much private property as the funds of any plunder. And yet there are men who pretend that what is now possessed by the Established Church is of so sacred

a nature as not to be touched by Act of Parliament! This was the reign in which this our present Established Church was founded, for though the fabric was overset by Mary it was raised again by Elizabeth. Now it was that it was made. It was made, and the new worship along with it, by Acts of Parliament. It had its very birth in division, disunion, discord, and its life has been worthy of its birth. The property it possesses was taken nominally from the Catholic Church, but in reality from that Church, and also from the widow, the orphan, the indigent and the stranger. The pretext for making it was that it would cause a union of sentiment amongst the people, that it would compose all dissensions. The truth, the obvious truth, that there could be but one true religion, was acknowledged and loudly proclaimed, and it was not to be denied that there were already twenty, the teachers of every one of which declared that all the others were false, and, of course, that they were, at the very least, no better than no religion at all. Indeed, this is the language of common sense, though it is now so fashionable to disclaim the doctrine of exclusive salvation.

I ask the Unitarian parson or prater, for instance, why he takes upon him that office; why he does not go and follow some trade, or why he does not work in the fields. His answer is that he is more usefully employed in teaching. If I ask of what use his teaching is, he tells me, he must tell me, that his teaching is necessary to the salvation of souls. Well, say I, but why not leave that business to the Established Church, to which the people all pay tithes? Oh no, says he, I cannot do that, because the Church does not teach the true religion. Well, say I, but true or false, if it serve for salvation, what signifies it? Here I have him penned up in a corner. He is compelled to confess that he is a fellow wanting to lead an easy life by pandering to the passions or whims of conceited persons, or to insist that his sort of belief and teaching are absolutely necessary to salvation; as he will not confess the former he is obliged to insist on the latter, and here, after all his railing against the intolerance of the Catholics, he maintains the doctrine of exclusive salvation.

203. Two true religions, two true creeds, differing from each other, contradicting each other, present us with an impossibility; what then are we to think of twenty or forty creeds, each differing from all the rest? If deism or atheism be something not only wicked in itself, but so mischievous in its effects as to call — in case of the public profession of it — for imprisonment for years and years, if this be the case, what are we to think of laws, the same laws too which inflict that cruel punishment, tolerating and encouraging a multiplicity of creeds, all but one of which must be false? A code of laws acknowledging and tolerating but one religion is consistent in punishing the deist and the atheist, but if it acknowledge or tolerate more than one it acknowledges or tolerates one false one, and let divines say whether a false religion is not as bad as deism or atheism? Besides, is it just to punish the deist or the atheist for not believing in the Christian religion at all, when he sees the law tolerate so many religions, all but one of which must be false? What is the natural effect of men seeing constantly before their eyes a score or two of different sects, all calling themselves Christians, all tolerated by the law, and each openly declaring that all the rest are false? The natural, the necessary effect is, that many men will believe that none of them have truth on their side, and of course that the thing is false altogether, and invented solely for the benefit of those who teach it and who dispute about it.

204. The law should acknowledge and tolerate but one religion, or it should know nothing at all about the matter. The Catholic code was consistent. It said that there was but one true religion, and it punished as offenders those who dared openly to profess any opinion contrary to that religion. Whether that were the true religion or not we have not now to inquire; but while its long continuance —and in so many nations too — was a strong presumptive proof of its good moral effects upon the people, the disagreement amongst the Protestants was and is a presumptive proof not less strong of its truth. If, as I observed upon a former occasion, there be forty persons who — and whose fathers for countless generations — have up to this day entertained a certain belief, and if thirty-nine of these say at last that this belief is erroneous, we may naturally enough suppose, or at least we may think it possible, that the truth so long hidden is, though late, come to light. But if the thirty-nine begin, aye, and instantly begin, to entertain, instead of the one old belief, thirty-nine new beliefs, each differing from all the other thirty-eight, must we not in common justice decide that the old belief must have been the true one? What! shall we hear these thirty-nine protestors against the ancient faith each protesting against all the other thirty-eight, and still believe that their joint protest was just? Thirty-eight of them must now be in error; this must be: and are we still to believe in the correctness of their former decision, and that, too, relating to the same identical matter? If in a trial relating to the dimensions of a piece of land, which had been proved to have always been, time without mind, taken for twenty acres, there were one surveyor to swear that it contained twenty acres, and each of thirty-nine other surveyors to swear each of the other number of acres between one and forty, what judge and jury would hesitate a moment in crediting him who swore to the twenty, and in wholly rejecting the testimony of all the rest?

205. Thus the argument would stand on the supposition that thirty-nine parts out of forty of all Christendom had protest; but there were not, and there are not even unto this day, two parts out of fifty. So that here we have thirty-nine persons breaking off from about two thousand, protesting against the faith which the whole, and their fathers, have held; we have each of these thirty-nine instantly protesting that all the other thirty-eight have protested upon false grounds; and yet we are to believe that their joint protest against the faith of the two thousand, who are backed by all antiquity, was wise and just ! Is this the way in which we decide in other cases? Did honest men, and men not blinded by passion or by some base motive, ever decide thus before? Besides, if the Catholic faith were so false as it is by some pretended to be, how comes it not to have been extirpated before now? When, indeed, the Pope had very great power, when even kings were compelled to bend to him, it might be said, and pretty fairly said, that no one dared use the weapons of reason against the Catholic faith. But we have seen the Pope is prisoner in a foreign land; we have seen him without scarcely food and raiment; and we have seen the press of more than half the world at liberty to treat him and his faith as it pleased to treat them. But have we not seen the Protestant sects at work for three hundred years to destroy the Catholic faith? Do we not see, at the end of those three hundred years, that that faith is still the reigning faith of Christendom? Nay, do we not see that it is gaining ground at this very moment, even in this kingdom itself, where a Protestant hierarchy receives eight millions sterling a year, and where Catholics were rigidly excluded from all honour and power and, in some cases, from all political and civil rights under a constitution founded by their Catholic ancestors? Can it be then that this faith is false? Can it be that this worship is idolatrous? Can it be that it was necessary to abolish them in England as far as law could do it? Can it be that it was for our good, our honour, to sack our country, to violate all the rights of property, to deluge the country with blood, in order to change our religion?

206. But in returning now to the works of the plunderers, we ought to remark that, in discussions of this sort, it is a common but a very great error to keep our eyes so exclusively fixed on mere matters of religion. The Catholic Church included in it a great deal more than the business of teaching religion and of practising worship and administering sacraments. It had a great deal to do with the temporal concerns of the people. It provided, and amply provided, for all the wants of the poor and distressed. It received back, in many instances, what the miser and extortioner had taken unfairly, and applied it to works of beneficence. It contained a great body of land proprietors whose revenues were distributed in various ways amongst the people at large, upon terms always singularly advantageous to the latter. It was a great and powerful estate, independent both of the aristocracy and the crown, and naturally siding with the people. But above all things, it was a provider for the poor and a keeper of hospitality. By its charity and by its benevolence towards its tenants and dependents, it mitigated the rigour of proprietorship, and held society together by the ties of religion rather than by the trammels and terrors of the law. It was the great cause of that description of tenants called life-holders, who formed a most important link in the chain of society, coming after the proprietors in fee and before the tenant at will, participating, in some degree, of the proprietorship of the estate, and yet, not wholly without dependence on the proprietor." This race of persons, formerly so numerous in England, has by degrees become almost wholly extinct, their place having been supplied by a comparatively few rack-renters and by swarms of miserable paupers. The Catholic Church held the lending of money for interest, or gain, to be directly in the face of the Gospel. It considered all such gain as usurious and, of course, criminal. It taught the making of loans without interest; and thus it prevented the greedy-minded from amassing wealth in that way in which wealth is most easily amassed. Usury amongst Christians was wholly unknown, until the wife-killing tyrant had laid his hands on the property of the Church and the poor. The principles of the Catholic Church all partook of generosity; it was their great characteristic, as selfishness is the characteristic of that Church which was established in its stead.

207. The plunder which remained after the seizure of the monasteries was comparatively small; but still, the very leavings of the old tyranny, the mere gleanings of the harvest of plunder, were something; and these were not suffered to remain. The plunder of the churches, parochial as well as collegiate, was preceded by all sorts of antics played in those churches. Calvin had got an influence opposed to that of Cranmer; so that there was almost open war amongst these Protestants, which party should have the teaching of the people. After due preparation in this way, the robbery was set about in due form. Every church altar had, as I have before observed, more or less of gold and silver. A part consisted of images, a part of censers, candlesticks, and other things used in the celebration of the mass. The mass was, therefore, abolished, and there was no longer to be an altar, but a table in its stead. The fanatical part of the reformers amused themselves with quarrelling about the part of the church where the table was to stand, about the shape of it, and whether the head of it was to be placed to the north, the east, the west, or the south, and whether the people were to stand, kneel, or sit at it! The plunderers, however, thought about other things: they thought about the value of the images, censers, and the like.

208. To reconcile the people to these innovations the plunderers had a Bible contrived for the purpose, which Bible was a perversion of the original text wherever it was found to be necessary. Of all the acts of this hypocritical and plundering reign this was, perhaps, the basest. In it we see the true character of the heroes of the " Protestant Reformation"; and the poor and miserable labourers of England, who now live upon potatoes and water, feel the consequences of the deeds of the infamous times of which I am speaking. Every preparation being made the robbery began, and a general plunder of churches took place by royal and parliamentary authority! The robbers took away everything valuable, even down to the vestments of the priests. Such mean rapacity never was heard of before, and for the honour of human nature let us hope that it will never be heard of again. It seems that England was really become a den of thieves, and of thieves, too, of the lowest and most despicable character.

209. The Protector, Somerset, did not forget himself. Having plundered four or five of the bishoprics he needed a palace in London. For the purpose of building this palace, which was erected in the Strand, London, and which was called Somerset House," as the place is called to this day, he took from three bishops their town houses. He pulled these down, together with a parish church, in order to get a suitable spot for the erection. The materials of these demolished buildings being insufficient for his purpose, he pulled down a part of the buildings appertaining to the then cathedral of Saint Paul; the church of Saint John, near Smithfield; Barking chapel, near the Tower; the college church of Saint Martin-le-Grand; St. Ewen's church, Newgate; and the parish church of Saint Nicholas. He, besides these, ordered the pulling down of the parish church of Saint Margaret, Westminster; but, says Dr. Heylyn, “the workmen had no sooner advanced their scaffolds when the parishioners gathered together in great multitudes with bows and arrows and staves and clubs, which so terrified the workmen that they ran away in great amazement, and never could be brought again upon that employment." Thus arose Somerset House, the present grand seat of the power of fiscal grasping. It was first erected literally with the ruins of churches, and it now serves, under its old name, as the place from which issue the mandates to us to give up the fruit of our earnings to pay the interest of a debt which is one of the evident and great consequences of the " Protestant Reformation," without which that debt never could have existed.

210. I am, in the last chapter, to give an account of the impoverishment and degradation that these and former Protestant proceedings produced amongst the people at large; but I must here notice that the people heartily detested these Protestant tyrants and their acts. General discontent prevailed, and this, in some cases, broke out into open insurrection. It is curious enough to observe the excuses that Hume, in giving an account of these times, attempts to make for the plunderers and their "reformation." It was his constant aim to blacken the Catholic institutions, and particularly the character and conduct of the Catholic clergy. Yet he could not pass over these discontents and risings of the people; and, as there must have been a cause for these, he is under the necessity of ascribing them to the badness of the change, or to find out some other cause. He therefore goes to work in a very elaborate manner to make his readers believe that the people were in error as to the tendency of the change. He says that " scarce any institution can be imagined less favourable, in the main, to the interests of mankind," than that of the Catholic; yet, says he, "as it was followed by many good effects, which had ceased with the suppression of the monasteries, that suppression was very much regretted  by the people." He then proceeds to describe the many benefits of the monastic institutions; says that the monks, always residing on their estates, caused a diffusion of good constantly around them; that, "not having equal motives to avarice with other men, they were the best and most indulgent landlords"; that, when the church lands became private property, the rents were raised, the money spent at a distance from the estates, and the tenants exposed to the rapacity of stewards; that whole estates were laid waste; that the tenants were expelled, and that even the cottagers were deprived of the commons on which they formerly fed their cattle; that a great decay of the people, as well as a diminution of former plenty, was remarked in the kingdom; that at the same time the coin had been debased by Henry, and was now further debased; that the good coin was hoarded or exported; that the common people were thus robbed of part of their wages; that "complaints were heard in every part of the kingdom." (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, written between 1824 and 1827 and published by Benziger Brothers, pp. 137-167.)

Appendix C

William Cobbett On the Just Punishment of Heretics by Queen Mary

247. As a preliminary to the punishment of heretics, there was an Act of Parliament passed in December, 1554 (a year and a half after the Queen came to the throne), to restore the ancient statutes relative to heresy. These statutes were first passed against the Lollards in the reigns of Richard II. and Henry IV., and they provided that heretics who were obstinate should be burnt. These statutes were altered in the reign of Henry VIII. in order that he might get the property of heretics, and in that of Edward they were repealed; not out of mercy, however, but because heresy was, according to those statutes, to promulgate opinions contrary to the Catholic faith, and this did, of course, not suit the state of things under the new Church "as by law established." Therefore it was then held that heresy was punishable by common law, and that, in case of obstinacy, heretics might be burnt; and accordingly many were punished and some burnt in that reign by process at common law; and these were, too, Protestants dissenting from Cranmer’s Church, who himself condemned them to the flames. Now, however, the Catholic religion being again the religion of the country, it was thought necessary to return to ancient statutes, which accordingly were re-enacted. That which had been the law during seven reigns, comprising nearly two centuries, and some of which reigns had been amongst the most glorious and most happy that England had ever known, one of the kings having won the title of King of France, and another of them having actually been crowned at Paris; that which had been the law for so long a period was now the law again, so that here was nothing new at any rate. And observe, though these statutes were again repealed when Elizabeth's policy induced her to be a Protestant, she enacted others to supply their place, and that both she and her successor, Tames I., burnt heretics; though they had, as we shall see, a much more expeditious and less noisy way of putting out of the world those who still had the constancy to adhere to the religion of their fathers.

248. The laws being passed were not likely to remain a dead letter. They were put in execution chiefly in consequence of condemnations in the spiritual court by Bonner, Bishop of London. The punishment was inflicted in the usual manner, dragging to the place of execution and then burning to death, the sufferer being tied to a stake in the midst of a pile of faggots, which, when set on fire, consumed him. Bishop Gardiner, the Chancellor, has been by Protestant writers charged with being the adviser of this measure. I can find no ground for this charge, while all agree that Pole, who was now become Archbishop of Canterbury in the place of Cranmer, disapproved of it. It is also undeniable that a Spanish friar, the confessor of Philip, preaching before the Queen, expressed his disapprobation of it. Now, as the Queen was much more likely to be influenced, if at all, by Pole, and especially by Philip, than by Gardiner, the fair presumption is that it was her own measure. And as to Bonner, on whom so much blame has been thrown on this account, he had indeed been most cruelly used by Cranmer and his Protestants, but there was the council continually accusing all the bishops (and he more than any of the rest) of being too slow in the performance of this part of their duty.  Indeed, it is manifest that in this respect the council spoke the almost then universal sentiment; for though the French ceased not to hatch rebellions against the Queen, none of the grounds of the rebels ever were that she punished heretics. Their complaints related almost solely to the connection with Spain, and never to the "flames of Smithfield," though we of later times have been made to believe that nothing else was thought of; but the fact is, the persons put to death were chiefly of very infamous character, many of them foreigners, almost the whole of them residing in London and called in derision by the people at large the "London Gospellers." Doubtless, out of two hundred and seventy-seven persons (the number stated by Hume on authority of Fox) who were thus punished, some may have been real martyrs to their opinions, and have been sincere and virtuous persons, but in this number of two hundred and seventy-seven many were convicted felons, some clearly traitors, as Ridley and Cranmer. These must be taken from the number ; and we may surely take such as were alive when Fox first published his book, and who expressly begged to decline the honour of being enrolled amongst its " Martyrs." As a proof of Fox's total disregard of truth, there was in the next reign a Protestant parson, as Anthony Wood (a Protestant) tells us, who in a sermon related, on authority of Fox, that a Catholic of the name of Grimwood had been, as Fox said, a great enemy of the Gospellers, had been " punished by a judgment of God," and that "his bowels fell out of his body." Grimwood was not only alive at the time when the sermon was preached, but happened to be present in the church to hear it, and he brought an action of defamation against the preacher! Another instance of Fox's falseness relates to the death of Bishop Gardiner. Fox and Burnet, and other vile calumniators of the acts and actors in Queen Mary's reign, say that Gardiner, on the day of the execution of Latimer and Ridley, kept dinner waiting till the news of their suffering should arrive, and that the Duke of Norfolk, who was to dine with him, expressed great chagrin at the delay; that when the news came, "transported with joy" they sat down to table, where Gardiner was suddenly seized with the disury, and died in horrible torments in a fortnight afterwards. Now Latimer and Ridley were put to death on the 16th of October, and Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History, p. 386, states that Gardiner opened the Parliament on the 21st of October, that he attended in Parliament twice afterwards, that he died on the 12th of November of the gout, and not of disury, and that as to the Duke of Norfolk, he had been dead a year when this event took place! What a hypocrite, then, must that man be who pretends to believe in this Fox! Yet this infamous book has, by the arts of the plunderers and their descendants, been circulated to a boundless extent amongst the people of England, who have been taught to look upon all the thieves, felons and traitors whom Fox calls " Martyrs," as sufferers resembling St. Stephen, St. Peter and St. Paul!

249. The real truth about these  Martyrs" is that they were generally a set of most wicked wretches, who sought to destroy the Queen and her government, and, under the pretence of conscience and superior piety, to obtain the means of again preying upon the people. No mild means could reclaim them; those means had been tried: the Queen had to employ vigorous means, or to suffer her people to continue to be torn by the religious factions, created not by her but by her two immediate predecessors, who had been aided and abetted by many of those who now were punished, and who were worthy of ten thousand deaths each if ten thousand deaths could have been endured. They were, without a single exception, apostates, perjurers, or plunderers ; and the greater part of them had also been guilty of flagrant high treason against Mary herself, who had spared their lives, but whose lenity they had requited by every effort within their power to overset her authority and her government. To make particular mention of all the ruffians that perished upon this occasion would be a task as irksome as it would be useless; but there were amongst them three of Cramer's bishops and himself! For now justice at last overtook this most mischievous of all villains, who had justly to go to the same stake that he had unjustly caused so many others to be tied to; the three others were Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, each of whom was, indeed, inferior in villainy to Cranmer, but to few other men that have ever existed.

250. Hooper was a monk; he broke his vow of celibacy and married a Flandrican; he, being the ready tool of the Protector Somerset, whom he greatly aided in his plunder of the churches, got two bishoprics, though he himself had written against pluralities. He was a co-operator in all the monstrous cruelties inflicted on the people during the reign of Edward, and was particularly active in recommending the use of German troops to bend the necks of the English to the Protestant yoke. Latimer began his career, not only as a Catholic priest, but as a most furious assailant of the Reformation religion. By this he obtained from Henry VIII. the bishopric of Worcester. He next changed his opinions, but he did not give up his Catholic bishopric! Being suspected, he made abjuration of Protestantism; he thus kept his bishopric for twenty years while he inwardly reprobated the principles of the Church, and which bishopric he held in virtue of an oath to oppose to the utmost of his power all dissenters from the Catholic Church. In the reigns of Henry and Edward he sent to the stake Catholics and Protestants for holding opinions which he himself had before held openly, or that he held secretly at the time of his so sending them. Lastly, he was a chief tool in the hands of the tyrannical Protector Somerset in that black and unnatural act of bringing his brother, Lord Thomas Somerset, to the block. Ridley had been a Catholic bishop in the reign of Henry VIII., when he sent to the stake Catholics who denied the king's supremacy and Protestants who denied transubstantiation. In Edward's reign he was a Protestant bishop, and denied transubstantiation himself. He in Edward's reign got the bishopric of London by a most roguish agreement to transfer the greater part of its possessions to the rapacious ministers and courtiers of that day. Lastly, he was guilty of high treason against the Queen, in openly (as we have seen in paragraph 220) and from the pulpit exhorting the people to stand by the usurper, Lady Jane, and thus endeavouring to produce civil war and the death of his sovereign, in order that he might by treason be enabled to keep that bishopric which he had obtained by simony including perjury.

251. A pretty trio of Protestant "saints;" quite worthy, however, of Martin Luther, who says in his own works that it was by the arguments of the devil (who, he says, frequently ate, drank and slept with him) that he was induced to turn Protestant; three worthy followers of that Luther who is by his disciple Melancthon called "a brutal man, void of piety and humanity, one more a Jew than a Christian; “three followers altogether worthy of this great founder of that Protestantism which has split the world into contending sects: but black as these are, they bleach the moment Cranmer appears in his true colours. But alas where is the pen or tongue to give us those colours? Of the sixty-five years that he lived, and of the thirty-five years of his manhood, twenty-nine years were spent in the commission of a series of acts which, for wickedness in their nature and for mischief in their consequences, are absolutely without anything approaching to a parallel in the annals of human infamy. Being a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and having, of course, made an engagement (as the fellows do to this day) not to marry while he was a fellow, he married secretly and still enjoyed his fellowship. While a married man he became a priest and took the oath of celibacy, and going to Germany he married another wife, the daughter of a Protestant "saint," though his oath bound him to have no wife at all. He, as archbishop, enforced the law of celibacy, while he himself secretly kept his German wife in the palace at Canterbury having, as we have seen in paragraph 104, imported her in a chest. He, as ecclesiastical judge, divorced Henry VIII. from three wives, the grounds of his decision in two of the cases being directly the contrary of those which he himself had laid down when he declared the marriages to be valid; and in the case of Anne Boleyn he, as ecclesiastical judge, pronounced that Anne had never been the king's wife; while as a member of the House of Peers he voted for her death, as having been an adulteress and thereby guilty of treason to her husband. As archbishop under Henry (which office he entered upon with a premeditated false oath on his lips) he sent men and women to the stake because they were not Catholics, and he sent Catholics to the stake because they would not acknowledge the king's supremacy and thereby perjure themselves as he had so often done. Become openly a Protestant in Edward's reign, and openly professing those very principles for the professing of which he had burnt others, he now punished his fellow Protestants because their grounds for protesting were different from his. As executor of the will of his old master, Henry, which gave the crown (after Edward) to his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he conspired with others to rob those two daughters of their right, and to give the crown to Lady Jane, that queen of nine days, whom he with others ordered to be proclaimed. Confined, notwithstanding his many monstrous crimes, merely to the palace at Lambeth, he, in requital of the Queen's lenity, plotted with traitors in the pay of France to overset her government. Brought at last to trial and to condemnation as a heretic, he professed himself ready to recant. He was respited for six weeks, during which time he signed six different forms of recantation, each more ample than the former. He declared that the Protestant religion was false ; that the Catholic religion was the only true one; that he now believed in all the doctrines of the Catholic Church; that he had been a horrid blasphemer against the Sacrament; that he was unworthy of forgiveness; that he prayed the people, the Queen and the Pope to have pity on and to pray for his wretched soul; and that he had made and signed this declaration without fear and without hope of favour, and for the discharge of his conscience, and as a warning to others. It was a question in the Queen's Council whether he should be pardoned, as other recanters had been; but it was resolved that his crimes were so enormous that it would be unjust to let him escape. Brought, therefore, to the public reading of his recantation on his way to the stake, seeing the pile ready, now finding that he must die, and carrying in his breast all his malignity undiminished, he recanted his recantation, thrust into the fire the hand that had signed it, and thus expired, protesting against that very religion in which, only nine hours before, he had called God to witness that he firmly believed."

252. And Mary is to be called the "Bloody" because she put to death monsters of iniquity like this! It is surely time to do justice to the memory of this calumniated queen; and not to do it by halves, I must, contrary to my intention, employ part of the next chapter in giving the remainder of her history. (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, written between 1824 and 1827 and published by Benziger Brothers, pp. 203-211.)

Appendix D

William Thomas Walsh on the Rise of Socialism and the Catholic Acquiescence to it During the New Deal

Here in the United States Socialism has made more cautious but not the less evident gains. It is rather amusing, and at the same time depressing, to see that likable Socialist Mr. Norman Thomas denouncing both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilkie as champions of peace-time conscription, which he says (and I think rightly) must lead toward dictatorship, and to realize at the same time that both these gentlemen are fundamentally (that is to say spiritually) as Socialistic as he is. If we judge not by what a man says he is or even believes he is, but by the antithesis set up by Pope Pius XI as a test of spirits, this conclusion becomes inescapable. Mr. Roosevelt has tried to save the country by curtailing production. Mr. Wilkie proposes to do it by speeding up curtailing production. Yet both these Liberals, as they proudly call themselves, are interested primarily in production; in the material, in the things of this world. It is difficult, of course, to see how a politician could wholly free himself from such concerns, and I am not criticising either, or discussing any issues, political or economic, between them – whoever is elected will be entitled to our obedience, under the Constitution, and no doubt, will do his best according to his lights. I would only suggest that neither has the lights necessary to solve the social problem. (It is true that both have spoken reverently in public of Divine Providence; but so, for that matter has Hitler; so have the politicians of every country, except godless Russia.) Not too much must be expected from these well-meaning statesmen. They are children of a Liberalism evolving rapidly into Socialism. Both are high in the ranks of a secret society proscribed and abhorred by the Catholic Church, and denounced by Pope Leo XIII as the true source of Socialism and Communism, and the general corruption of European and world society. They are servants of the same invisible masters, to whose obedience they are bound by oaths – masters who may not even be in America, but in Europe or Asia; masters of whose exact identity they may themselves be ignorant. When they speak of “Democracy,” one must remember this background, and the fact that the elastic word has been used by many Liberals to include even the tyranny of Soviet Russia. Can Democracy be anything but a farce among men, when some of them, including the most influential, belong to a secret society whose real aims and principles have been repeatedly disclosed as political and anti-Christian? The French Catholics, in the sad clarifying light of catastrophe, have recently found the answer to this question. As Our Holy Father Pope Pius XII said in welcoming the French Ambassador after the tragedy of last summer, “Like lightening which flashes through heavy clouds, the devastating lights of war . . . have torn from the eyes of all careful and sincere observers that veil of prejudices which for half a century the voice of the Church, and especially the reiterated warnings of the last Popes, Our venerated predecessors, did not succeed in penetrating . . . May the lessons of this bitter period in acts which permit us to hope in the future for a revival of Christian spirit, particularly in the education of youth . . .” and  “the creation of a new Christian order . . . When will this desired hour arrive? God preserves the secret of it; but We beseech Him to hasten its advent.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, the United States of America has become a slave state controlled by the same set of forces that the Inquisition sought to eliminate from within Holy Mother Church. This is because the United States of America was founded on false principles, including those of “religious liberty” and “religious indifferentism” that contributed to the rise of counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Keeping to theme of providing some historical context to our current situation, therefore, I want to provide you with a reprise of Mr. Walsh’s description of the Anabaptists in the Sixteenth Century who were forerunners of the Communism that has been developing in the United States of America since its founding on false, religiously indifferentist, anti-Incarnational, naturalistic, Pelagian principles and its, as has been noted in past articles on this site, the ultimate rotten fruit of the Protestant Revolution:

Consider the history of the Anabaptists in Europe, whose descendants in heresy are the Southern Baptists, as described by William Thomas Walsh in Philip II and ask yourselves if the United States of America has not suffered—and is not suffering now—from the fatal errors that continue to be held by various Protestant sects from its inception to the present day:

At no time, during the eight years after his return to Spain, could Philip's policy in the Low countries be called tyrannical. He made one concession after another. He assumed the huge and mounting deficit of the government of a rich country. He went to great pains to avoid any undue interference with the lives and privileges of his subjects. As regards religion, he insisted that the Catholic Faith must not be destroyed. What else could a man say of a truth he believed to be divinely ordained?

Even in that respect, considering the times and the anarchical and anti-social tendencies of sixteenth-century Protestantism, he was more lenient than most rulers. It was considered an unusual event, worthy of comment, when a notorious heretic and agitator was burned in Valenciennes in 1563. The man who ordered the execution was not the King, but one of the chief advocates of freedom of worship, the Marquis of Berghes. Jews and heretics acted and spoke as they pleased in Antwerp, without much hindrance. Many of them were Marranos, fugitives from Spain, of whom the Inquisitors in Madrid sent full information.

Granvelle sadly wrote to his friend Perez, “It is laughable to send us depositions made before the Inquisition of Spain so that we can seek the heretics here, as if there were not thousands here to whom we dare say nothing and of whom the King's officers arrest none. Indeed, it is more than a year since a single Calvinist has been arrested in Antwerp. The chief Inquisitor at Antwerp was a rather pathetic fellow, a good studious professor of the University of Louvain with the rare name of Jude Titelmanus (or Tiletanus), who begged to be relieved from his office because the enemies of Christendom mocked and hindered and threatened him and he felt powerless to cope with them.

Philip was lenient, but not from choice. If he had had plenty of money, he probably would have wasted little time in persuasion with the heretics of the north. He understood better than most modern historians the significance of the revolutionary movement. Hence, early in 1563, he sent Margaret a list of suspects in Antwerp, many of them refugees from Spain, and urged her to look into their intrigues; especially those who had thrown stones at the executioner of the notorious heretic Fabricius at Antwerp and then circulated threats of vengeance written in the dead man's blood. He wanted her to give particular attention to one Jean Tulet, fugitive from Bruges and Frankfort, a confessed Anabaptist, and to another named Juan de Moya, “not less pernicious.” The King was informed also that there were in Antwerp “an infinite number of Jews, who assembled in their synagogues, circumcised themselves and performed their ceremonies publicly. He complained also of the open performance, in Antwerp, of some very scandalous comedies “in which they speak ill of my person –a matter of which I would take no notice, if, at the same time, they did not mock our holy Faith and Catholic religion.”

The chief target for the King's intolerance in this important long letter was the “cursed sect of the Anabaptists,” which was extending itself in Holland and Zeeland. “It is a great shame,” wrote Philip, “that this cursed sect which even the heretics of Germany cannot endure, finds a refuge and shelter in my Estates.” The international character of the conspiracy was evident. He was informed that the heretics of the Netherlands were in communication with those of France, and bade her stop this. As for the sect of Anabaptists, he requested her to exterminate the vile thing.

The modern reader who shrinks from all this as another example of medieval bigotry, difficult to understand and impossible to condone, has forgotten who and what the Anabaptists were. To Philip, and to most of the men of his time (including Luther and William of Orange) those fantastic forerunners of the Jacobins of 1792 and the Communists of twentieth-century Russia and Spain were enemies of God and man, whom no one in his sane senses could tolerate.

Philip could remember the time (he was then seven) when Melchior Hoffman, one of those furriers who traveled from one end of Europe to the other, let it be known through Lower Germany and the Netherlands that he was a Prophet to whom the Word of the Lord had come, bidding him to establish the New Jerusalem in Strasbourg. His program was simplicity itself, with some remarkable resemblances to that of Mohammed. He undertook to send through the world from the New Jerusalem a hundred and eighty-four Horseman of Extermination, who with Elias and Enoch should pass through the world with the sword, “vomiting flame to destroy the enemies of the Lord.”

Enoch presently appeared in the person a a baker, John Matthiessen. This latter transferred the New Jerusalem to Munster, in Westphalia, where his emissaries found allies in a cloth merchant name Knipperdollinck, who had been active in propagating Lutheranism, and a tailor of Leyden, on John Bockelsohn or Bokelsoon. So successful was their propaganda in Munster that Knipperdollinck was elected burgomaster, and the city passed into their hands. Bockelsohn now revealed himself as the King of Sion, Ruler of all the Earth, and Son of David, while Matthiessen disclosed that he was the Prophet Moses, come to organize a massacre of all the ungodly.

The Reign of Terror which followed would seem incredible if there were not more modern instances to demonstrate the depths of human degradation and blood-lust. The King of Sion, commanded all gold, silver and jewelry to be turned over to his treasury. Communism was proclaimed, with polygamy, community of women, and world-conquest. Rothmann, an ex-chaplain, had four wives. The King of Sion had sixteen. Mass executions began. The corpses of the ungodly piled up, rotting, in the streets. When the chief wife of the King of Sion objected, he cut of her head in the marketplace before a select group of his Loyalist. There followed a delirium of blood letting, with the usual accompaniments of mass drunkeness, mob insanity, indescribable scenes of sadism and bestiality. This went on until a force of landsknechte took the city and slew the leaders and instigators of the anarchy.

The story of Munster alone, to those who were near enough to it to comprehend its horrors and their causes, explains a great deal about Philip II and other men of his sort. To them it was the logical outcome of any departure from the sane unity of the Catholic Church. No one who knew the facts could separate it from Lutheranism and Calvinism and the ancient hatred of the Talmud. These elements were all bound up together in the Munster experiment. The germ of a sinister and growing chapter in modern history was there. The Catholic who loved Christian order and peace instinctively wished to destroy it before it should spread and destroy the world.

It was enough for Philip that Anabaptists were preaching in the Netherlands; the slaughter, the communism, the burning of churches and the torturing of priests and nuns, the anarchy and sex orgies would follow in due time, as a crisis follows pneumonia. It is doing him no injustice as a man of humane instincts and common sense, therefore, to say that he tolerated the Revolution for several years only because he lacked force with which to suppress it. Yes he did tolerate it. It is unhistorical to pretend that he was a tyrant in any sense in which a man of the sixteenth-century (with no heretical axe to grind) would have understood the word.

The results of his tolerance convinced him more and more that it was a mistake. The heretics were not looking for tolerance, of freedom of worship, or equality, or any of the other fine things they talked about. As Professor Merriman has acknowledged, “before long it became evident that some of the revolutionists would not be content with liberty to exercise their own faith, but were even intent of the destruction of Catholicism.” (William Thomas Walsh, Philip II, published originally in 1937 by Sheed and Ward and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1987, pp. 352-355.)

Is there any difference between then and now as the agents of the naturalist “left,” whose amorality, immorality,  communism, hedonism, heathenism, and seething hatred for Catholicism seek the elimination of all opposition and the exclusion of any mention of the Catholic Faith and of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, Himself from public life?

Wake up.

The United States of America was founded on corrupt, decadent principles that are simply manifesting the perfection of the inherent degeneracy at this time. Nothing else. The degeneracy was there the beginning in 1776 and 1787, and it is irresponsible for anyone, especially for a Catholic, to turn a blind eye to this fact.

Once again, true love of one’s country, which is a precept of the Fourth Commandment and of the Natural Law, can never be confused with its idolatry as a force for “good” in the world. True love of country wills her good, the ultimate good of which is her conversion to the true Faith.

Turn off the television and stop being agitated.

Stop getting lost in the “trees” of the latest outrages committed by and/or publicly supported, perhaps even by silence in the face of wanton destruction of private property, and justified by ideological, if not actual, descendants of the Anabaptists?

We must know our history, and it is impossible to keep focused on root causes if one is constantly lost in the “trees” of the outrage du jour or, worse yet, if one thinks that the very thing that got us into this mess. “modern democracy,” is going to get us out of the abyss. I mean, this is like saying the way to escape from Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s rotten agenda is to adhere to a “rigorous” understanding of the “true” meaning of the documents of the “Second” Vatican Council that gave birth to a false church with false doctrines, sacramentally invalid liturgies and invalid holy orders (see Counterfeit Church, Counterfeit Sacraments, Counerfeit Everything, part one, and Counterfeit Church, Counterfeit Sacraments, Counterfeit Everything, part two).

Modern “democracy,” such as it is, the natural result of Protestantism’s revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by Holy Mother Church to assure that those in public life pursue 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 in Heaven.

Here is a reminder that democracy in and of itself is inherently unstable and, in a non-Catholic country, is based upon the abject lie of “popular sovereignty” that leaves no place for a due submission to Christ the King and His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, leads to the very sort of the tyranny that exists in Communist nations of the sort that existed at the time of Anabaptists two centuries before the French Revolution occurred and thus set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution itself:

Democracy is an imperfect regime, as a regime in ratione regiminis, as a result of the lack of unity and continuity in the direction of interior and exterior affairs. Also this regime should only be for the perfect already capable of directing themselves—those virtuous and competent enough to pronounce as is fitting upon the very complicated problems on which the life of a great people depends. But it is always true to say as Saint Thomas noted that these virtuous and competent men are extremely rare; and democracy, supposing such perfection among subjects, cannot give it to them. From this point of view, democracy is a bit in politics what quietism is in spirituality; it supposes man has arrived, at the age or the state of perfection, even though he still may be a child. In treating him as a perfect person, democracy does not give him what is required to become one.

Since true virtue united to true competence is a rare thing among men, since the majority among them are incapable of governing and they have a need of being led, the regime which is the best for them is the one which can make up for their imperfection. This regimen perfectum in ratione regiminis, by reason of unity, continuity, and efficacy of direction towards a single end which is difficult to achieve is monarchy. Above all a tempered monarchy which is always attentive to the different forms of national activity. It is better than democracy or than the feudal regime. Monarchy assures the interior and exterior peace of a great nation, and permits her to long endure. (Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On Royal Government: translated by Andrew Strain, On Royal Government)

“Democracy” is what got us into this mess, and “fighting” for its “restoration” is going to nothing but proliferate errors that have convinced a solid two-fifths to just under one-half of the American public to be committed to all the moral evils of the day and to look to “government” for the “solutions” to both personal and social problems that are but the consequences of their own sins and the multiple errors of Modernity and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Appendix E

Reviewing Wisdom from Pope Pius IX

Pope Pius IX, whose thirty-two year reign (1846-1878) as the Vicar of Christ on earth is second only that of Saint Peter himself, explained what the universal franchise would result in over time once the secret societies got involved and corrupted a process rife with corruption of its very nature:

To allow the masses, invariably uninformed and impulsive, to make decisions on the most serious matters, is this not to hand oneself over to chance and deliberately run towards the abyss? Yes, it would be more appropriate to call universal suffrage universal madness and, when the secret societies have taken control of it as is all too often the case, universal falsehood." (Pope Pius IX, Statement to French pilgrims, May 5, 1874, cited by Abbe Georges de Nantes, CCR # 333, p. 24.)

The universal madness discussed by Pope Pius IX is such that instability cannot help but be the result until the day comes, and that day has arrived now, of course, when the elitists, aided and abetted at present by Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his fellow Jacobin/Bolshevik revolutionaries, decide to create “stability” and “order” by imposing their will upon the supposedly “sovereign” people and make it impossible, in human terms, to oppose them effectively ever again.

As I have noted in numerous commentaries on this site, the little apparent good that a president who calls himself “pro-life” does in his administration by means of various executive orders and presidential directives can be undone with several strokes of pen by a pro-abortion successor. This  what happened on January 22, 1993, when President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton signed did as President of the United States of America on January 22, 1993, was to sign Executive Orders and Presidential Directives permitting the testing of RU-486, the human pesticide, which Federal testing prompted, according to a report in The New York Times in the summer of 1995, some women to get pregnant deliberately in order to kill their babies with the French abortion pill, and permitting the Federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, something that was supported at the time by Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., who would run against Clinton in 1996, and by one John Sidney McCain III, and to rescind the Ronald Wilson Reagan/George Herbert Walker Bush era “Mexico City” policy that prohibited the use of American taxpayer dollars to kill babies surgically in other countries (a policy that has always been fraught with loopholes as been explained on this site countless times). Similarly, President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, used the occasion of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on January 22, 2009, to undo the very, very little apparent good that President George Walker Bush (who did nothing to reverse the marketing of RU-486, by the way) had done from January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009. “President” Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will undo the good, some of which was substantive, and some was apparent, that President Donald John Trump has tried to do since January 20, 2017. The Little Sisters of Poor will be in as much jeopardy after noon on January 20, 2021, as they were until noon on January 20, 2017, although there is a sliver of hope—and it is only that, a sliver—that Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Michael Kavanaugh (who looks to be a vote to guarantee that, as I wrote eight years ago, ObamaCare is Here to Stay, 2012), and Amy Coney Barrett might—emphasis on might) come to their rescue once the Sisters are forced to go the Federal courts  yet again to plead their case.

Catholic principles alone provide the stability that is necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a just social order wherein those who govern do so for the honor and glory of the Most Blessed Trinity and to advance as far as is possible in this fallen, mortal vale of tears the conditions in which men can better sanctify and thus to save their immortal souls. Democratic republics of their nature are inherently unstable, an instability that permits the enshrining of sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and institutionalizing them to such an extent in civil law and throughout what passes for “popular culture” that no amount of pushing naturalist boulders up hills only to have those boulders fall back down on one again is going to anything other result in disillusionment and heartache for those who believe that there is something short of Catholicism that can provide as some kind of “intermediate” framework for the retarding of evil.

If you doubt my word, please re-read the material from William Thomas Walsh’s Characters of the Inquisition quoted above.

Appendix F

Two Exemplars of Catholic Social Teaching within the Past One Hundred Fifty Years

We have not been baptized and confirmed to bear witness to, no less than to take to the streets and be willing to die, for the likes of a well-meaning man, Donald John Trump, who is but a tool of the synagogue and international Zionism and who, not so coincidentally, “bet the farm” that he could win re-election by “threading the needle” in the swing states without trying to match the Biden campaign’s spending and placement of television and radio advertisements. We are meant to bear witness to and to be ready die for the cause of Christ the King and His Catholic Church.

Two men, Carlos Abascal Carranza, the Labor Minister of the United Mexican States from December 1, 2000, to June 1, 2005, and then that country’s Interior Minister from June 1, 2005, to November 30, 2006, and Gabriel Garcia Moreno, the President of Ecuador from August 10, 1869, to the day of his assassination by Freemasons on August 6, 1875, sought to rule according to Catholic principles in order to advance man’s temporal good in their countries in light of his 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.

Carlos Abascar did what he could in Our Lady’s country, Mexico, knowing that, as he had written in his 1973 Master’s thesis, “democracy is a farce” controlled by Freemasons. A close look at his life and accomplishments, starting with his obituary after his death on December 2, 2008, will reveal that his spirit was far different than those of the members of either of America’s organized crime families of naturalism:

MEXICO CITY - Former Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal, an impassioned proponent of putting Christianity back into Mexican politics, died Tuesday of stomach cancer, his conservative National Action Party said. He was 59.

Abascal was a controversial figure in a country with strong anti-clerical traditions.

"A Christian has to transform the world, precisely because he knows how to do it," a visibly frail Abascal said in a speech at a ceremony honoring him just a week before his death. He called on the audience to "carry out the work of the Evangelists in politics, in the economy, in society, always with happiness."

That kind of openly religious language from a high-ranking official had seldom been heard in Mexico since the 1860s, when reform President Benito Juarez passed laws aimed at breaking the economic and social domination of the church in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation.

Following the 1910-17 revolution, the government passed ever-stricter anti-clerical laws, leading to an armed uprising by militant Catholics in the late 1920s, an event that further widened the breach between politics and religion.

Abascal served as labor secretary under former President Vicente Fox from 2000-05, when he took over the interior department, Mexico's top national security post, for about a year.

As labor secretary, he was known for his largely unsuccessful attempt to reform Mexico's antiquated labor laws. His appointment was controversial because he had previously served as a leader of the Mexican Employers' Confederation, reflecting the conservative and pro-business tenor of Fox's administration.

Fox and his wife Marta Sahagun issued a joint statement saying "we have lost a great Mexican, a great man who dedicated his life to the service of others and the promotion of authentic spiritual and moral values."

In his own statement, President Felipe Calderon called Abascal an "exemplary Mexican" who was "committed to the country's democracy."

Abascal was fiercely criticized for his efforts to get Carlos Fuentes' novel "Aura" dropped from a suggested reading list at his daughter's private junior high school, on the grounds it was too racy. The 2001 incident resulted in a reprimand for the teacher who assigned the list.

The novel contains a brief, stylized account of a romantic encounter beneath a crucifix of the kind commonly hung above beds in Mexico.

At a book fair in Guadalajara on Monday, Fuentes said the attempt to ban "Aura" was the best thing that could have happened to the novel. He did not mention Abascal.

"Thanks to that censorship, sales of the book multiplied, they jumped to 20,000 copies a week," Fuentes said an event titled, "One thousand young people read Aura."

Abascal is survived by his wife and five children. A memorial service was scheduled for Tuesday.  (Tyler Paper - Tyler Morning Telegraph.) 

A 2005 story in the Mexican newspaper Jornada reviewed Carlos Abascal Carranza's views of Church-State relations, which readers of this site will recognize quite readily. (The text below was translated by a then extant online translation service, Yahoo Babel Fish, twelve years ago and is thus rather rough around the edges. Readers will be able to get the gist of the article however.)

The power of the Church is superior to that of the State. When the majority of the town is Catholic, the government must declare official that religion. The democracy is a “promoted farce” in Mexico by the forces of Freemasonry.

Those ideas were defended by the present secretary of Interior, Carlos Abascal Carranza, when he obtained his title of lawyer in 1973.

Abascal is now in center of a controversy because the Catholic Church has condemned the inclusion of Plan B emergency contraceptive in basic medical care. The Secretary of the Interior has opposed this policy even though it had been published in the Official Newspaper of the Federation the day before he expressed himself.

The ideas of Abascal Carranza were expressed thirty-two years ago in his professional thesis entitled, relations between the spiritual power and the temporal power, published by Publishing Tradition.

In his academic thesis, the present person in charge of the relations of the government with the churches considers that the Catholicism has priority on any other religion; he insists that religious marriage be recognized by the Mexican laws, and pleads so that the Church will not be subject to the appropriation of its material goods by the civil state.

He questions the lay or state-run-education and he indicates that the State must allow the Catholic Church to give religious education in all the schools which are attended by Catholics.

For Abascal, the culminating moment of the history of the humanity is Thirteenth Century, when Europe obtains its “greater unit for all time” and takes as it names own the one of Christendom and the Church is “masterful mother and teacher.

But Abascal states that liberal ideas flowing from the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation looked for to destroy to the Catholic Church and, with time, the Pope became a decorative figure in the international plane.

In conformity with this situation, in the 112 pages of the text seeks to end the slavery of the Church [in Mexico] and that the [anti-clerical] State “is reduced to its normal proportions recognizing the superiority of the spiritual realm over the temporal."

At the beginning of the thesis, of which thousand units were published, the then student of the Free School of Right recognized that when approaching that subject one must look for applause nor the admiration from others as a result of the influences of the Mexican Revolution and its false legal philosophies. .

' In this act, that is most personal of our professional studies, I aspire solely to expose and to defend in a field in that the Truth has been falsified by the Revolution and that that falsehood is now the foundation of civil law and service."

Abascal indicated his confidence in God in which his thesis makes some good and optimistic predictions, declaring, in the middle of atrocious persecutions, that Christianity will manage to rise “majestic, proclaiming its rights, although undergoing injustices…”

The unique written work of the ex- Secretary of Labor put in plain language reflects the thought of a Catholic man at a time in which the relation between Church and State in Mexico was nonexistent, but his proposals went beyond deploring that situation.

The most perfect legislations, inspired by the Christianity

For the then aspiring to obtain the title of lawyer in right, the most perfect legislations have been those that have had Christian foundations.

In his defense of the Catholic Church, he affirms that the power of the Church is superior to that of the State and, therefore, he says, it has an undeniable spiritual priority on the state.

The State is forced to protect the Church by limiting the extent to which it will be necessary to grant "liberties" to other religions, because it is undeniable that Truth and the error cannot have the same rights , and consequently the State must try to guarantee and to defend the freedom and the right of the man of not being deceived with false and erroneous doctrines”.

The State, adds, must be at the service of the Church. “The tendency of the man towards God is an innate right of the man who the State must protect”, it affirms.

Even in a mixed or pluralistic society, it adds, the Catholic will have right to demand a preferential treatment.

''A town that is Catholic in its majority must have, even for natural reason, a government which proclaims the Catholic religion its official religion, and that tolerates the other religions within rational limits, not to violate the freedom of conscience in matters of worship. That government must favor and protect the action of the Church and to maintain harmonicas relations with her ", affirmed Abascal.

Critic to the vote of '' vague ''

In the fourth chapter, “legal Reasons of standard order," Abascal criticized those who advocated the end of the confessional Catholic State in order to adapt the Church to the reality of the modern democratic State.

But it explains that those who affirm that the democracy is the last hope of freedom they are starting from a false assumption, because “the democracy is a deceit”.

Abascal then criticized liberal democracy and the universal vote, when considering that the majority of the voters, between whom it mentions to “vague, vicious, ignorant and honest people”, cannot understand the form of more advisable government for Mexico nor the nature of the proper relation between the State and the Church.

When approaching the situation of Mexico, indicates: '' the democracy is a farce as which the Masonry in Mexico has used, like everywhere, to make believe to a confused and disoriented majority that the government is doing its will and that this one is necessarily good ".

According to Abascal, the liberal democratic principle does not operate, because the “famous general will” is modeled to the taste of great means of diffusion handled directly by the State and anonymous capitals.

It considers that the fundamental bases of a society do not have to be determined by means of the universal vote, “because the votes do not have to be counted but to be weighed”.

It indicates that the majority of the voters cannot understand the form of more advisable government in Mexico and the nature of the relations that must exist between the State and the Church.

In this line, Abascal affirms: “democracy is the way that has chosen the international forces of the subversion to reach the absolute power with the restoration of the Communism, that is indeed the against-Church ''.

Later on, Abascal warns that liberal democracy is one ''trap'' and, therefore, the principle does not have to be accepted of which all the doctrines and religions have the same right to be spread and defended.

Abascal asked if the Church can adapt to '' deceptive system in itself '', as is the democracy, and accept it like good. He maintains that this is not possible, because the Catholics are imbuidos in the game of the democracy and so are separated that “no remedy can be tried nor by the route of the respect of the vote, by the deceit of the system that is in the hands of the propaganda ''.

He says that the force of the propaganda in a freedom regime from one day to the next changes to the mentality and the customs of the town.

“Without speaking of subjects of high policy nor of difficult theological speculations, we are not seeing it with the popular voting by acclamation in favor of the mini skirt, of the artificial control of the natality [contraception] and the free love?”, Abascal asks.

Abascal notices that the democracy has “remarkable vices of origin” and for that reason the Church does not have to be subject to a democratic regime.

At the end of his study, that the principal reason to vote in Mexico '' is for a decided Catholic reaction in intelligences, the customs and the institutions '' to restrain the Communism.

“Catholicism, affirms, is the unique force that can contain it and destroy it.” (Jornada.)

On a purely human level, good friends, late Carlos Abascal Carranza's analysis of Church-State relations, summarized by Jornada in 2005, is quite refreshing. It should be very inspiring to each of us to know that  the truths of the Catholic Church Social Teaching have been defended far more ably and eloquently by others elsewhere in the Americas in recent decades, including those of unquestioned personal virtue who were indeed able to use the residual Catholicism extant in Our Lady's country, Mexico, to hold public office in order to seek to plant seeds for the restoration of Christendom. The late Carlos Abascal Carranza called democracy a “farce,” and it is clear that the his 1973 legal thesis was aimed directly at the heart of Dignitatis Humanae, December 7, 1965. Someone fluent in Spanish would be doing a great service to Catholics worldwide by translating the text of that thesis into English.

Although Carlos Abascal Carranza's "practical" influence in Mexican politics was limited in its scope, he was nevertheless a defender of the Social Reign of Christ the King in a land where the very Mother of God herself appeared to seek the conversion of the entirety of the Americas to that Kingship of her Divine Son, the very land where thousands upon thousands of priests and consecrated religious and ordinary lay Catholics were put to death by the Masonic revolutionaries in the first decades of the Twentieth Century—with the full support and backing of the government of the United States of America from administrations of both organized crime families of naturalism (the Republicans and the Democrats). Carlos Abascal Carranza sought to plant a few seeds for the restoration of Christendom in a formerly Catholic country where the residue of the Faith is still strong in so many areas. That he was able to maintain the true Social Teaching of the Catholic Church despite the conciliar revolution is nothing other than a miracle of Our Lady's graces.

[Mind you, this discussion in support of the late Carlos Abascal Carranza's work in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King is not to indemnify any association that he maintained with the counterfeit church of conciliarism. That is for God alone to judge. It is clear, however, that Mr. Abascal Carranza was at odds with conciliarism's apostate view of Church-State relations and defended most publicly the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the Social Reign of Christ the King. It took me long enough to see the truth of our ecclesiastical situation, and I would like to think that my own work in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the two decades before I did come to recognize that those who defect from the Faith cannot hold ecclesiastical office legitimately was not invalidated entirely because of my self-induced blindness. It would be wrong, I believe, to denigrate Mr. Abascal Carranza's work validating the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church because he did not see the truth of the ecclesiastical situation before he died. He knows now. That is all that matters.]

Perhaps the most famous of recent defenders of the Social Reign of Christ the King, however, was the late Gabriel Garcia Moreno, President of Ecuador in South America, between August 10, 1869, and August 6, 1875. Consider the accomplishments, both spiritual and temporal, of this martyr for the Social Reign of Christ the King, during his second administration:

• Built the Main Seminary in Quito and Minor Dioceses in Ibarra, Riombamba and Loja.
• Brought the Mission Priests, called Lazarites, from France, so that they could be in charge of the Seminaries as teachers in the formation of the parish clergy.
• Organized the arrival of inspectors of the existing regular orders that had been established since colonial times in the hopes of reforming convent life.
• Brought the Sisters of Charity from France to manage the hospitals and orphanages.
• Brought the Sisters of Providence from Belgium for the education and care of orphan girls.
• Put the French Redemptorist Priests in charge of catechizing indigenous from the provinces of Chimborazo and Azuay in their native Quichua language.
• Entrusted the care and education of prostitutes to the French nuns of the Good Shepherd.
• Modernized the Studies of Medicine brining a surgeon and a clinical doctor from France to be professors in the Faculty.
• Created the Maternity Hospital under the direction of a French obstetrician.
• Began the famous Poly technical School bringing seven German Jesuit scholars as professors plus an Italian to teach the subjects of Architecture, Engineering, Machine Construction, Chemistry and Pharmacy, Metallurgy and Mining, Topography, Surveying, and Natural Sciences (Botany, Zoology, Geology, Meteorology, etc.).
• Constructed in the center of La Alameda Park, the Astronomical Observatory, providing it with the most precise instruments of that time.
• Established the Schools of Fine Arts and the National Conservatory of Music with Italian teachers and gave scholarships to Ecuadorian artists to go to Europe and perfect their knowledge.
• Initiated literacy for adults in barracks, jails and penitentiaries.
• Was the only governor to protest about the usurpation of the Pontifical States in 1871.
• Adopted the Decimal Metric System that had just been established in France.
• Established Standardized Schools for forming secular teachers, as well as indigenous teachers from Imbabura and Loja.
• Began construction of the Southern Railroad, called from Haguachi, under the direction of Engineer Kelly.
• Had the necessary material brought from Europe to set up telegraphic lines.
• Constructed 400 kilometers of country roads and 300 kilometers of highway.
• Ordered the dredging of the Guayas River and placing of lighthouses and buoys in the coasts to protect national navigation.
• Had Eucalyptus seeds brought from Australia.
• Created the Mortgage Bank for loans to farmers.
• Had the great project of bringing Benedictine Priests for administering a Model Farm and an Agriculture School, in the Canchacoto plateau.
• Projected the coming of ten thousands German Catholic families for colonizing the Amazon Region.
• Signed the executive order on the Decree of the Consecration of the Republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
• Promulgated decrees of suppression for the vices of incest and alcoholism. (Francisco Salazar Alvarado, Encounter with History: Garcia Moreno, Catholic Leader of Latin America, published in the United States of America in 2006 by the Apostolate of Our Lady of Good Success, pp. 88-89.) 

You want a description of what Christendom, that is, the Social Reign of Christ the King, in today's world would look like, my friends?

You have it right here.

A concern for the spiritual welfare of citizens combined with an effort to improve the temporal conditions of these citizens in light of their Last End.

This is the sort of Catholic vision that the naturalists, most of whom have never heard of Gabriel Garcia Moreno or his many accomplishments, mock and compare with the theocracies of the Protestant Revolt and Mohammedanism.

This is the sort of Catholic vision that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI believes is impossible to restore as pluralism is, according to his own warped, Hegelian view of history, an "irreversible" fact of life.

This is the sort of Catholic vision that should inspire us to reject the empty-headed naturalists of the false opposites of the "right" and the "left" as we seek to plant the seeds for the Social Reign of Christ the King in our own families, starting with Home Enthronement of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Gabriel Garcia Moreno secured Ecuador's Consecration to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The land that had been favored two centuries before with the apparitions of Our Lady of Good Success to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres was favored by the presidency of a man who understand that the hearts of his citizens had to beat in unison with the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus:

The Consecration of Ecuador to the Sacred Heart of Jesus filled his religious and political opposition with fury.

Jesuit Father Manuel Jose Proano had written to the President a letter suggesting the possibility of the consecration, and the President responded in a letter, demonstrating his parallel thoughts.

The following are excerpts of the letter:

"There can be no more plausible idea nor more agreeable in sentiments this idea that stimulates me to promote in all sense the prosperity and happiness of the country, whose government has been entrusted to me by Divine Providence, providing it with the highest moral and religious perfection, which calls us to the practical utterance of Catholicism. I recognize the faith of the Ecuadorian people; and that faith imposes on me, the sacred duty of conserving their deposit intact, even if it were at the cost of my own life. I do not fear men, because God is much higher!... And if, in that time, it was the undeniable duty of every sincere son of the Church, to confirm the faith of the heart with the most explicit, re-iterated and solemn utterances of the lips, this doubtlessly true in the present period, when still among the believing people, the endemic illness of the century is weakness of character. I am hated, I am abhorred; but I, in the observance of our Father, Jesus, recognize myself as unworthy of such glory. I do not fear men, then, but I say: Is Ecuador a worthy offering for the Heart of the God-Man?... The Heart is holy, immaculate; and have we achieved enough moralization of the peoples?... Have we sanctified the domestic home?... Does justice reign in the Forum, peace in the families, harmony among the citizens, fervor in the churches?... The Heart of Jesus is the throne of Wisdom: and do the Ecuadorian people accept all His teachings, are they docile and submissive to this Divine teaching, do they receive and accept lovingly His inspirations, do they refuse all the errors of the century and overcome all present perversion of ideas?...I do not fear men, but I fear that this country is still not a worthy offering for the Heart of Jesus Christ. We ask the Lord with fervent prayers to send us saintly missionaries, tireless apostles; that at least fifty priests who are charitable and zealous to travel throughout all the territory, visit our peoples, without leaving any corner untouched, teach and practice the Gospel, and convert, and then present a people purified with divine blood and pure hearts to God; then, we will raise a new Church to the Divine Heart..." (Francisco Salazar Alvarado, Encounter with History: Garcia Moreno, Catholic Leader of Latin America, published in the United States of America in 2006 by the Apostolate of Our Lady of Good Success, pp. 94-96.) 

The Catholicity expressed by the late Gabriel Garcia Moreno in this letter is what should resonate deep—and very deep—into the heart and soul of every single Catholic on the face of this earth, including the "pluralistic" United States of America, as we refuse to make any compromise with the "errors of the century" and as we overcome with the graces sent to us by Our Lady "all present perversion of ideas."

Like Carlos Abascal Carranza's 1973 legal thesis, which was filled with the truths of the Holy Faith, the mind of Gabriel Garcia Moreno was filled only with Catholicism. Nothing else:

"There is no morality without Religion."

"All our small advances would be short-lived and untruthful, if we did not found the social order of our Republic on the Rock of the Catholic Church, always combated against yet always the conqueror."

"Our rapid progress will not serve for anything if the Republic does not advance daily in morality, in accordance with the reform of customs by the free action and salvation of the Catholic Church."

"I must confess, in all justice, that we owe everything to God, not only the growing prosperity of our small Republic, but also the means I employ for developing it, and even the desire that He has inspired me to work for HIs glory."

"Oh that God illuminate me, direct me in all things, and grant me the grace to die in defense of the Faith and Holy Church!"

"We will preserve the true Faith of our elders unharmed, even at the cost of our own life."

"The hope of every true Catholic must be founded, after God, on The Holy Virgin Mary."

"We who feel daily the effects of the continuous protection of Divine Providence; who see our incomes increased threefold in seventy-two percent, without new contributions, with actively continued spacious and comfortable communication roads, with public education developed progressively at all levels, with charitable organizations extended and multiplied to relieve the unfortunate and above all, with habits improved in accordance with the awakening of religious sentiment in the people, we are far from attributing to ourselves the merit we do not have, and recognize thankfully that we only owe to God the prosperity the Republic enjoys, since it constituted itself in 1869 as a Catholic nation."

"Hope would have abandoned me if I had not raised my eyes and heart to Heaven. . . ."

"The enemies of God and the Church can kill me; but GOD DOES NOT DIE!"

"If my enemies attack me for some crime I have committed, I ask their pardon and will try to mend my ways; but they conspire against me because I really love my Nation, because I try to save its most precious treasure--the Faith--, as I am and show myself to be the submissive son of the Church [...];  I must not, then, answer them any other thing than GOD DOES NOT DIE!"

"A true friend of liberty is he who tries to moralize his country; that he attempts to rectify social injustices and associates himself with good men to work tirelessly in favor of the Nation."

"The greatest enemies of our independence are licentiousness, demagogy and anarchy." (Francisco Salazar Alvarado, Encounter with History: Garcia Moreno, Catholic Leader of Latin America, published in the United States of America in 2006 by the Apostolate of Our Lady of Good Success, pp. 99-101.)

Gabriel Garcia Moreno did indeed pay with his life for his efforts to make Catholicism the one and only foundation of personal and social order in Ecuador. What did he say to the machete-wielding assassin, Faustino Rayo, as he, Moreno, staggered from the blows to the head that he received on the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, August 6, 1875:

"GOD DOES NOT DIE!" (Francisco Salazar Alvarado, Encounter with History: Garcia Moreno, Catholic Leader of Latin America, published in the United States of America in 2006 by the Apostolate of Our Lady of Good Success, p. 41.) 

Gabriel Garcia Moreno's martyrdom on behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King produced the Consecration of Ecuador to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the bishops of that country seventeen years later, in the year 1892. Paying homage to his fallen predecessor, President Luis Cordero Crespo ordered that a decree by the legislature of Ecuador also consecrated the country to the "Immaculate Heart of Mary, and recognizes the August Mother of God as the sublime Queen, Most Beloved Mother and special protector of this Republic" that was passed on August 5, 1892, be executed on August 6, 1892, the seventeenth anniversary of Gabriel Garcia Moreno's martyrdom. The Apostle of the Social Reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Ecuador won from eternity the consecration of his beloved country to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Our Lady has given us many defenders of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Americas. The late Carlos Abascal Carranza, whose immortal soul should be kept in our prayers, was one of these. He reiterated some of the themes of that thesis just a week before his death thirteen years ago on Tuesday, December 2, 2008. Gabriel Garcia Moreno was another. And so was the late Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J., who was put to death by the Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico on November 23 1927, saying to the members of the firing squad after he had kissed his Crucifix and "stood with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross:"

"May God have mercy on you. May God bless you. Lord, You now that I am innocent. With all my heart, I forgive my enemies." As the gendarmes took aim, in a firm, clear voice, he spoke his last words: "Viva Cristo Rey!"--"Long live Christ the King." (Ann Ball, [Blessed] Miguel Pro: 20th Century American Martyr, TAN Books and Publishers, 1996, p. 80.) 

Can Our Lady count on you and on me to be willing to lay down our lives in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

Can Our Lady count on us to make reparation of our sins and those of the whole world by offering to her Immaculate Heart with love and with joy all of our prayers and sufferings and humiliations and calumnies and mortifications and penances for the re-conversion of the Americas to the Catholic Faith?

Can Our Lady count on us to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit to the see the reign of error and deceit, foisted upon us by the forces of the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "reconciliation," will end sooner rather than later as a result of the fulfillment of her Fatima Message?