The Potomac Still Flows into the Tiber, 2026 edition

We have a natural law duty bound to have true filial piety for the nations in which we have been born or have adopted as our own by means of the legal process of naturalization.

Pope Leo XIII made this very clear in the following passage from Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

Now, if the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings toward the Church. For the Church is the holy City of the living God, born of God Himself, and by Him built up and established. Upon this earth, indeed, she accomplishes her pilgrimage, but by instructing and guiding men she summons them to eternal happiness. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever. For fitting it is to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties toward God are of a far more hallowed character than those toward men.

Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause. Consequently, it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other. We can, certainly, and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the State and the governing powers; but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the Church a feeling of filial piety, and love God with the deepest love of which we are capable. The order of precedence of these duties is, however, at times, either under stress of public calamities, or through the perverse will of men, inverted. For, instances occur where the State seems to require from men as subjects one thing, and religion, from men as Christians, quite another; and this in reality without any other ground, than that the rulers of the State either hold the sacred power of the Church of no account, or endeavor to subject it to their own will. Hence arises a conflict, and an occasion, through such conflict, of virtue being put to the proof. The two powers are confronted and urge their behests in a contrary sense; to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters, for to please the one amounts to contemning the other.

As to which should be preferred no one ought to balance for an instant. It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men, an act of consummate wickedness to break the laws of Jesus Christ, in order to yield obedience to earthly rulers, or, under pretext of keeping the civil law, to ignore the rights of the Church; "we ought to obey God rather than men." This answer, which of old Peter and the other Apostles were used to give the civil authorities who enjoined unrighteous things, we must, in like circumstances, give always and without hesitation. No better citizen is there, whether in time of peace or war, than the Christian who is mindful of his duty; but such a one should be ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.) 

We must love the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity, above all things at all times, and we must love our fellow men for the love of the Most Holy Trinity, which means that we must will for others what God wills for us all: namely, that we sanctify and save our souls as members of His Holy Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can never be a truly just order within nations nor a genuine peace among them.

Thus, of course, we must have true filial love for our countries, each of which has its own distinctive national characteristics that affect most native-born citizens more deeply than they may be aware. However, this patria is premised upon placing First Things first so that the pursuit of the common temporal good may be undertaken in light of man’s Last End.

In other words, it is the solemn duty of civil leaders to foster those conditions within their communities, states, provinces, departments, or nations that advance the honor and glory of the Most Holy Trinity and to assure that, as far as is possible in this fallen world filled with flawed men, public inducements to promote, celebrate and/or enshrine grave sins, which are of their nature injurious to the salvation of souls and thus of the right ordering of nations, are removed.

Pope Leo XIII made this clear in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, and Pope Saint Pius X did so in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

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

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

The men who founded the United States of America did not believe any of this.

Indeed, the American founders believe that it was possible that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America provided the foundation for what they called “civic virtue” even though it is possible for men to be virtuous over the long term without belief in, access to, and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

The founding fathers of the United States of America were naturalists to the core of their being. They expected that their system of governance would be conducive to the creation and sustenance of their “civic virtue” wherein men would present themselves for public office who exhibited statesmanship by explaining their positions to the voters during elections and then, if elected, defending their actions while in office without regard to their own electoral survival but solely on the basis of what they believe constituted the common temporal good.

Unfortunately for them, however, leaving aside the fact that many of the founders descended to the depths of demagoguery during the administration of President George Washington and thereafter following the formation of what became permanently established political parties, it is impossible for men to pursue or to sustain virtue on a merely natural level over time, something that Pope Leo XIII noted in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899:

Nor can we leave out of consideration the truth that those who are striving after perfection, since by that fact they walk in no beaten or well-known path, are the most liable to stray, and hence have greater need than others of a teacher and guide. Such guidance has ever obtained in the Church; it has been the universal teaching of those who throughout the ages have been eminent for wisdom and sanctity-and hence to reject it would be to commit one’s self to a belief at once rash and dangerous.

A thorough consideration of this point, in the supposition that no exterior guide is granted such souls, will make us see the difficulty of locating or determining the direction and application of that more abundant influx of the Holy Spirit so greatly extolled by innovators To practice virtue there is absolute need of the assistance of the Holy Spirit, yet we find those who are fond of novelty giving an unwarranted importance to the natural virtues, as though they better responded to the customs and necessities of the times and that having these as his outfit man becomes more ready to act and more strenous in action. It is not easy to understand how persons possessed of Christian wisdom can either prefer natural to supernatural virtues or attribute to them a greater efficacy and fruifulness. Can it be that nature conjoined with grace is weaker than when left to herself?

Can it be that those men illustrious for sanctity, whom the Church distinguishes and openly pays homage to, were deficient, came short in the order of nature and its endowments, because they excelled in Christian strength? And although it be allowed at times to wonder at acts worthy of admiration which are the outcome of natural virtue-is there anyone at all endowed simply with an outfit of natural virtue? Is there any one not tried by mental anxiety, and this in no light degree? Yet ever to master such, as also to preserve in its entirety the law of the natural order, requires an assistance from on high These single notable acts to which we have alluded will frequently upon a closer investigation be found to exhibit the appearance rather than the reality of virtue. Grant that it is virtue, unless we would “run in vain” and be unmindful of that eternal bliss which a good God in his mercy has destined for us, of what avail are natural virtues unless seconded by the gift of divine grace? Hence St. Augustine well says: “Wonderful is the strength, and swift the course, but outside the true path.” For as the nature of man, owing to the primal fault, is inclined to evil and dishonor, yet by the help of grace is raised up, is borne along with a new greatness and strength, so, too, virtue, which is not the product of nature alone, but of grace also, is made fruitful unto everlasting life and takes on a more strong and abiding character.

This overesteem of natural virtue finds a method of expression in assuming to divide all virtues in active and passive, and it is alleged that whereas passive virtues found better place in past times, our age is to be characterized by the active. That such a division and distinction cannot be maintained is patent-for there is not, nor can there be, merely passive virtue. “Virtue,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “designates the perfection of some faculty, but end of such faculty is an act, and an act of virtue is naught else than the good use of free will,” acting, that is to say, under the grace of God if the act be one of supernatural virtue.

He alone could wish that some Christian virtues be adapted to certain times and different ones for other times who is unmindful of the apostle’s words: “That those whom He foreknew, He predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son.”- Romans viii, 29. Christ is the teacher and the exemplar of all sanctity, and to His standard must all those conform who wish for eternal life. Nor does Christ know any change as the ages pass, “for He is yesterday and to-day and the same forever.”-Hebrews xiii, 8. To the men of all ages was the precept given: “Learn of Me, because I am meek and humble of heart.”-Matt. xi, 29.

To every age has He been made manifest to us as obedient even unto death; in every age the apostle’s dictum has its force: “Those who are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with its vices and concupiscences.” Would to God that more nowadays practiced these virtues in the degree of the saints of past times, who in humility, obedience and self-restraint were powerful “in word and in deed” -to the great advantage not only of religion, but of the state and the public welfare. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

The “civic virtue” that existed in the minds of the American founding fathers was and remains illusory. We need the help of the graces won for us by Christ the King during His Passion and Death of the Holy Cross to be virtuous and to climb the ladder of sanctity with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to His own Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary out of which It was formed.

Democratic republics—and the globalist unions they make with one another--are bound to fall apart because they are founded upon a welter of errors that must degenerate into chaos and open conflict sooner or later.

Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the great Dominican foe of Modernism and the Twentieth Century’s greatest exponent of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, explained the flaws inherent in democracies that lead to their decay and dissolution over time:

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)

Perhaps the events unfolding before our very eyes will be used by Our Lord, Christ the King, to bring about the coming of the Great French Monarch who will unite men around the standard of the Holy Faith and who will do battle with Antichrist before he is killed, thus preparing the way for the final battle between Our Lord Himself and the great deceiver. However, it is my own personal belief that there will have to be many more chastisements have to take place before we the great French monarch comes forward. The current circumstances, however, do show us very clearly that the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity is capable only of producing disorder and of being led by people who are utterly unable to see the events of the world in light of First and Last Things. 

However, a native son of the United States of America, Robert Francis Prevost, currently masquerading as “Pope Leo XIV,” does not understand any of this as false principles of the American founding (the religiously indifferentist civil state, separation of Church and State, and religious liberty) are, along with the false principles of the French Revolution as “baptized” by Sillonism and condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, important building blocks of entire conciliar world view.

This is why the false “pontiff” praised the founding principles in general and the Declaration of Independence in particular when in the address he gave on Friday, July 3, 2026, the Feast of Pope Saint Leo II within the Octave of Saints Peter and Paul, when receive the “liberty medal” from the National Constitution Center:

I am honored to accept the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center in this year that marks the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. On the eve of this momentous occasion, I offer a warm greeting to all those assembled at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. As a son of this great country, founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God’s blessings upon America’s future, that the lofty ideals enshrined at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence may continue to guide the flourishing of the nation in unity, justice and peace.

From our youth, most of us have admired the eloquence of those words, with their resounding appeal to the law of nature and to nature’s God as the basis of their assertion that all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While couched in the language of the Enlightenment, that claim is ultimately grounded in an understanding of the human person inspired by the great biblical vision of man and woman being created in the divine image. It is indeed here that we discover the basis of human dignity; dignity which precedes the establishment of any State, and whose custody constitutes its very purpose.

In these past two-hundred and fifty years, for so many peoples throughout the world, it was the firm resolve to achieve the noble vision of the nation’s founders that made America a byword for freedom, as the country opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants, enabling them and their children to play their part in shaping the future of the nation. It was this same love of freedom that inspired the United States, in the darkest hours of the last century, at the time of the two world wars, to look beyond itself and, at great sacrifice, to champion the cause of freedom beyond its own borders. 

As every American knows, however, the path to building a society that would embody those high ideals of liberty and justice for all was not always easy and, in many respects, is still a work in progress.  Indeed, the effort to realize this vision is one that must be taken up anew in each generation and in the face of ever new challenges. Today, as we look to the future, this historic anniversary presents us with the opportunity to reflect once again on the nation’s founding principles in the hope that America will remain ever true to the dream that has earned it the title of land of the free and home of the brave.

The first right enshrined by the nation’s founders was the right to life, for no one who is deprived of life can enjoy liberty or pursue happiness. A country’s vitality is deeply tied to the value it affords to human life in every form and condition, acknowledging the dignity endowed upon every human person by virtue of their very existence.  The inherent worth of every human life has led the noble hearts of generations to praise the marvelous works of the Creator (cf. Ps 139:14) and stand in reverence before so precious a gift. Indeed, it is precisely this reverence that we must continue to cultivate — one that sways the hearts of individuals and inspires laws that recognize and safeguard the gift from the moment of conception to natural death.  Reverence, too, will aid us in discovering that we are guardians and stewards of those entrusted to our care. In this regard, the moral greatness of a nation is manifested, above all, in its capacity to support, protect and cherish the lives of all, especially the most vulnerable and those whose worth is questioned.

Following the right to life, liberty was and is preeminent among the principles revered by the men and women who have sought within this nation’s borders a new beginning, often equating it with previously undreamed-of hope. Though frequently understood as the ability to act as one would like, authentic freedom runs much deeper.  It is founded upon the human person’s capacity to know the truth and adhere to what is good, even at great cost — a sacrifice well known to many who have labored to shape this country.  The desire for truth and freedom, as well as the very pursuit of happiness, continues to inspire people of all generations to ask fundamental questions regarding the meaning of life, our ultimate purpose, and indeed about God, and it is proper for magnanimous hearts to endeavor to answer these questions with sincerity.  These answers inevitably determine the direction which we seek to give to our lives, and America has long championed the religious freedom necessary to follow responsibly the dictates of conscience in this regard, free from fear and coercion, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It is this freedom that holds sacred the inner sphere of the person where convictions are formed and where conscience can guide the decisions made in the intimacy of the human heart.  This same freedom also ensures the right of every person to worship according to one’s own belief, and of individuals, communities and associations to give public expression to their faith.  In fact, religious freedom gave rise to the American tradition of allowing for interfaith dialogue and interreligious cooperation in promoting the public good and enriching the debates on the great moral and ethical issues that have faced the nation and shaped the course of its history. It is my hope that this tradition will continue to bear fruit in a public discourse marked by moderation, respect for the views of others and an ongoing effort to find common ground in promoting the cause of peace and reconciliation, at home and abroad. 

The forbearers of this country, men and women of diverse backgrounds, religions and languages, were able to find that common ground and the strength necessary to pursue a better future.  The principles that inspired America’s founders, rooted as they are in the truth of the human person, brought them together in a single cause, a common dream. Unity lent strength to that dream, giving rise, under God, to the United States of America. E pluribus unum — out of many, one.  In order for a nation to flourish, it must be truly united; united not by goals bound to momentary endeavors, but by ideals that do not fade with the passing of time.  May the principles we have reflected upon today — a shared human dignity, equality and the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence — ever be a source of such unity and a guiding light for the present moment and for the years to come. 

In accepting this award, I therefore pray that this, the 250^th anniversary of the founding of this great nation, may be the occasion of a solemn recommitment to these ideals that have made America a country that values peace and prosperity, a country characterized by generosity and nobility of heart. I commend all of you, as well as the future of the Nation, to the One who is himself the source of true freedom and lasting peace, the One whose very name is Peace.

May God bless America! Thank you! (Address of Robert Francis Prevot/Leo XIV Upon Accepting the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center, USA, 3 July 2026.)

This is a motherlode of both Americanism and conciliarist propaganda, which I will now proceed to dissect as follows.

First, we no one discovered “human dignity” in the Declaration of Independence as the Catholic Church has always been the true champion of true dignity of men as redeemed creatures whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has freed from the power of sin and eternal death if they use their free will to follow Him through His Holy Catholic Church as she holds forth the one and only true standard of authentic human liberty, His own Holy Cross.

Pope Saint Pius X put matters this way in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.  (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Second, the civil state, as noted earlier in this commentary, has a duty to recognize the true God of Divine Revelation and to submit to His Holy Church in all that pertains to the good of souls. This truth was rejected by Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and among so many others, John Calvin, and the Declaration of Independence is a secular, Judeo-Masonic confirmation of this rejection.

Third, the “religious freedom” enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America was not intended primarily to protect the small minority of Catholics from state-sponsored persecution but to protect freethinking rationalists from being silenced by the civil state at the directive of a single religion. This has paved the way to the open worship of the adversary himself, something that is completely permitted by “religious freedom,” which the adversary seeks to use to corrupt Catholics by lulling them to sleep with a de fact religious indifferentism according to the various slogans (“one religion is as good as another” and “God would never send a ‘good’ person to hell just because he is not a Catholic,” etc.)

Fourth, while Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV did refer to the Declaration of Independence as an expression of “Enlightenment” thinking, he nevertheless praised its reference to “Nature’s God” even though this phrase is thoroughly Judeo-Masonic in that it denies the relevance of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Incarnation, Nativity, Hidden Years, Public Life and Ministry, and His Passion, Death, and Resurrection to public life. This might be standard conciliar doctrine but it is not the teaching of the Catholic Church and it is, of course, offensive to Our Lord, who must be at the center of both the private and social lives of all human beings in the world at all times.

Fifth, Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV’s reference to “The One” at the end of his address demonstrates yet again that the conciliar sect is awash with the spirit of Judeo-Masonry, and thus it is that revolutionaries such and Prevost/Leo must always deny the Holy Name of Jesus before men out fear of “offending” those who deny His Sacred Divinity without being the least bit concerning about Him, Christ the King, and His rights over men and their nations.

That is, as I have explained on his site a gazillion times or so, the American founding was a first of its kind event in that it was the first time in the history of mankind that a government was created synthetically and without any common pietas, which, at least nominally, is what bound ancient Rome both as a republic and an empire. The religious was indeed novel and our true popes were quick to condemn it and it has resulted in the triumph of practical atheism around the so-called “civilized world,” something that Pope Leo XIII explained in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude; which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and to inflame many passions, but which lacks all reasonable proof, and all power of insuring public safety and preserving order. Indeed, from the prevalence of this teaching, things have come to such a pass that may hold as an axiom of civil jurisprudence that seditions may be rightfully fostered. For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are as changeable as the will of the people, so that risk of public disturbance is ever hanging over our heads.

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.  (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.) 

Although the claim has been made repeatedly by Americanist Catholics, the American founders were not influenced by Holy Mother Church’s Fathers and Doctors, something that Dr. John C. Rao pointed out over twenty years ago in general terms and was explained in great detail:

I can just imagine what George Washington, a Freemason whose library at Mount Vernon was filled with works on cement-making and other such devotional topics, would really have thought if he had known that he would one day be incensed as a Catholic icon; a new Constantine; and even a Marian visionary to boot. The belly-laugh he would have enjoyed with his buddies at the Arlington Lodge! And what about Benjamin Franklin, fresh from an illuminist workshop in Paris? Did he realize that he was laboring alongside Augustine to build up a Catholic City of God? Or consider the musings of the "liberal " (and non-Mason) Thomas Jefferson with the "conservative" John Adams, recently cited in The New York Sunday Times: "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594). How astonished would they have been to learn that Founder-intoxicated Americanists would not permit such dreams to interfere with their identification as card-carrying Catholic intellectuals: in fact, more reliable ones than men who actually had the temerity to believe in the Trinity, Original Sin, Redemption, and the Resurrection?

Let’s face it. If any of these Founder characters had lived outside of the United States, American Catholics would send them to hell in a hand basket. Too bad poor Robespierre could not have built a career on our side of the Atlantic. Given his own repeated deist references to God, he would have found himself qualifying as a Catholic candidate for canonization rather than for an eternal roasting as a terrorist Frog.

In any case, each time those sweet hosannas to the Founding Fathers ring, my mind turns to a different fatherly fraternity, this one truly worthy of the name—that of the Church Fathers. How many American Catholics can name them? Or, perhaps more fairly, how many American Catholics honestly take them and their works seriously? I mean, really seriously? Oh, they may be piously remembered for miracles associated with their lives, or for one or two anti-Arian citations, or even a couple of passages from their writings, rendered noteworthy through repeated quotation on EWTN. Nevertheless, insofar as daily practical life are concerned, they are dead, buried, and forgotten, consigned to the doctrinal rubbish bin. There is simply no contest in this battle of the ancestors, fraudulent and echt. The score is always the same: Founding Fathers "666"; Church Fathers "0".

American Catholics thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, are ever more confidently inciting the faithful to desert the army of their true spiritual forebears in order to embrace the "let’s-get-real" Founders of the last, best hope of mankind. They are so flush with Founderology that they promote it as though it were the only valid, practical Patrology. This has made a deeper interest in the old Church Fathers not only superfluous, but even harmful and downright impious. Hasn’t everything really valuable that the Fathers could teach us regarding social life been taught more suitably, and in English, by the American Founders? Some narrow patristic arguments, plucked from out of their overarching spiritual vision, may, of course, still be tolerated--if, that is to say, they can support the truly salvific constitutional and economic dogmas of Founderology. But all else is political and social trash, part of that human side of the Church’s Tradition which can easily be shed when reason and science and the inspired eighteenth century American aristocracy has spoken.

What does doctrine-soaked Cappadocia have to do with common sense Philadelphia anyway? What did Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa have to say about states’ rights? Where were Augustine’s comments on checks and balances? Cyril’s meditations on the pre-Civil War perfection of the dance of the sugar plum executives, legislators, and judges? Or Cyprian’s concerns about the right to bear catapults? What about that unconscionable collectivist John Chrysostom, whose neglect of the scientific laws of free enterprise helped disrupt the imperial GNP? Away with them! And the same worship of the Founder-friendly patristic phrase, accompanied by a dismissal of the Founder-phobic patristic spirit is employed to butcher the global vision of Thomas Aquinas, the late Scholastics, and the Church’s whole counterrevolutionary tradition as well.

Give me a determination to make all things jive with the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, and Adam Smith and I’ll give you back a scriptural exegesis which will reveal the Incarnation to have been a humdrum prelude to the real excitement caused by 1776, 1787, and the daily figures from the New York Stock Exchange. Mutatis mutandis, what shows its face in Founderology is the same methodology familiar to us from the modernists of the turn of the twentieth century: that of restraining Christ’s message within a secular strait jacket. Christianity means the mundane as interpreted by this specific band of exegetes and nothing more. Take it or leave it. Live free according to these secular rules or die.

What most intrigues me as an historian is the sustained assault on Catholic History which such Patricide reflects. War on history has, of course, been declared everywhere in Christendom today. Rome has reduced the world before the1960’s to a house of horrors useful only in providing topics for self-deprecating addresses before frenzied anti-Catholic audiences out for blood. Local dioceses bulldoze their past with a passion matched only by Nicolae Ceausescu in pre-1989 Romania. Many elderly Catholics whom I know will deny on a stack of bibles all memory of doctrines and customs which I heard them piously repeat and saw them fervently practice in my childhood in the 1950’s. (For the rest of this superb commentary, please see Founding Fathers 666, Church Fathers 0.)

Although written about twenty-two years ago, Dr. Rao’s analysis, despite his belief that the counterfeit church of conciliarism is the Catholic Church, is timeless as he is an historian who looks at the world through the eyes of the Holy Faith, not through the star-spangled lenses of the heresy of Americanism.

Sadly, though, even many fully traditional Catholics still try to defend the Declaration of Independence as being influenced by various principles set forth by Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Robert Bellarmine without realizing that those influences were attenuated by the time of the rationalistic Eighteenth Century by men who viewed those writings through the corrupted lenses of naturalism and not those of the true Faith:

Now, Fr. Morehouse Millar is convinced that Bellarmine founded a principle of “divided sovereignty” which forms the basis of the American system of government. “Now it is this principle [medieval popular sovereignty], as embodied in our own constitution together with the principle of divided sovereignty, first stated by Bellarmine, that distinguishes our peculiar form of government from that of any other known to history.”[23] This raises a great many questions, though Fr. Millar treats it as a fact of history. Firstly, what precisely is divided sovereignty? Does Bellarmine’s definition of it (if he ever defined it) mean the same as that of the American framers?

In the first place, Fr. Millar is mistaken when he attempts to credit Bellarmine as being the first to come up with this “divided sovereignty,” whatever that is supposed to be. St. Thomas Aquinas annunciated the very same thing two centuries before Bellarmine was born:

Two points are to be observed concerning the right ordering of rulers in a state or nation. One is that all should take some share in the government. The other point is in respect of the kinds of government, or the different ways in which the constitutions are established. The best form of government is in a State or Kingdom, wherein one is given the power to preside over all, while under him are others having governing powers: and yet a government of this sort is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern, and because the rulers are chosen by all. For this is the best form of polity, being partly a kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e., government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose the rulers.[24]

As we have already seen, Bellarmine merely hands on what he received from the tradition.

Secondly, this “divided sovereignty” does not necessarily translate to American Federalism. Bellarmine speaks of a king subject to none. Under the U.S. Constitution, the President of the United States is in fact subject to the other branches. Besides, there are numerous other ways that such a government could be put in place that do not appear like the separation of powers in the US Constitution. As Fr. James Broderick, St. Robert’s first English biographer, notes,

Between [Bellarmine’s] suggestions and the American form of government there are obvious resemblances, but whether the resemblances are more than superficial may be questioned. Bellarmine himself has supplied us with a test. One proof which he gives of the excellence of his polity is the fact that God had provided His Church with just such a form of government (ejusmodi regimen) as the one he was advocating. Now no theologian would admit that the constitution of the Catholic Church was based on a theory of divided sovereignty, even though bishops are real rulers in their dioceses and not the mere vicars or viceregents of the Pope. On the other hand, it may well be doubted whether any jurist or historian would allow that the constitution of the United States is a fairly exact model of the constitution of the Catholic Church. In view of these complementary negations and doubts, must we not frankly abandon any attempt to turn the Cardinal into a sort of prophet of American Federalism?[25]

Furthermore, the context for Bellarmine’s discussion on the best form of government is in the preceding chapters, where Bellarmine is attempting to prove the divine constitution of the Church against Calvin. Calvin had argued that the ideal form of government was not monarchy, not even in a mixed form with aristocracy and democracy, but rather aristocracy properly, as a foundation for his ecclesiology. Calvin’s notion of the Church was based on a magisterium of presbyters’ councils, those trained in the word of God who would expound it to the people and bind them to their interpretation. To defend such an ecclesiology, Calvin sought to fortify his doctrine with a political argument: aristocracy, not monarchy, is the best form of government. To combat this, in defense of the divine constitution of the Church, Bellarmine shows two things: (1) Monarchy is the best form of government; and (2) in the conditions of this world, monarchy mixed with aristocracy and democracy was the most ideal form. Therefore, the way was cleared for St. Robert to demonstrate the Papal monarchy. There is nothing in his ideal form about a division of powers, and the vague notions of divided rule in Bellarmine do not equate to the divisions of the U.S. Constitution. . . .

Finally, there is the question of religious liberty. If, as the legend states, Jefferson had read Bellarmine’s writings in De Laicis, he would not have been able to avoid the final chapter: “The defense of religion pertains to political authority.” Bellarmine opens,

The second error is that of those who, going to the other extreme, teach that rulers should care for the State and the public peace, but they should not be concerned about religion, but should allow everyone to think as he pleases and to live as he pleases, provided he does not disturb the public peace. This error was formerly held by the pagans, who permitted all religions, and allowed the sects of all the philosophers, as St. Augustine says.[34]

St. Robert reviews the testimonies of Scripture and the Fathers, as well as reason, to demonstrate that it is not for the State to grant freedom of religion, but rather it should be zealous in upholding the authority of the Pope, the rights of the Church, and burning heretical books. He closes this way:

Fourthly, liberty of belief is dangerous to those very men to whom it is granted; for liberty of belief is nothing less than liberty of error, and of error in regard to the most dangerous of all matters; for faith is not true if it is not one, ‘One Faith,’ therefore liberty of falling away from this one faith is liberty of plunging headlong into the abyss of errors. Therefore, just as liberty of wandering through the mountains is not permitted to sheep, and for its own safety a ship is not freed from the rudder, nor allowed to be driven by any wind at all, so also for their own safety freedom of belief is not given to the people, after they have given their adherence to the one true faith.

It goes without saying that this is utterly at variance with the thought of the founders. George Mason’s draft for the Virginia Bill of Rights spoke of “religious toleration,” but it was Madison who modified it at the convention to pronounce full equality of every man before the law to follow his own religious belief. (St. Robert Bellarmine and the American Revolution?.)

Several of the founders themselves explained their own contempt for Catholicism in no uncertain terms:

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December, 1813.)

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weigthman, June 24, 1826, ten days before Jefferson's death. This letter is quoted in its entirety in Dr. Paul Peterson’s now out-of-print Readings in American Democracy. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1979, pp. 28-29.)

Jefferson’s letter to Roger Weightman, written just ten days before his death on July 4, 1826, precisely fifty years to the day after the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence (a date of death his shared with his one-time friend turned adversary and then friend again, John Adams), demonstrates clearly this wretched naturalist’s hope for a world freed from the shackles of what he believed to be “monkish superstition.” It is generally not a good thing to go before Christ the King at the moment of one’s Particular Judgment after having written about “monkish superstition.”

Moreover, Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence contained no reference at all even to the generic sort of Judeo-Masonic “Creator” and “Supreme Judge of the Universe” that found their way into the text approved by the delegates of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 2, 1776, and promulgated on this day two hundred forty years ago, although there was a reference to “nature’s God,” which is the not the same thing as the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity.

Here is the text of the beginning and the end of Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, leaving out the deist’s bill of particulars against British King George III, many of whose repressive measures cited by Jefferson have been used by presidential administrations since the time of the War Between the States:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, & to assume among the powers of the earth the equal & independant station to which the laws of nature & of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the change.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles & organising it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. but when a long train of abuses & usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government & to provide new guards for their future security. such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; & such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former systems of government. the history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which no one fact stands single or solitary to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest, all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood. . . .

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injury. a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of 12 years only, on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. we have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend a jurisdiction over these our states. we have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement here, no one of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these were effected at the expence of our own blood & treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain: that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league & amity with them: but that submission to their parliament was no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea, if history may be credited: and we appealed to their native justice & magnanimity, as well as to the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which were likely to interrupt our correspondence & connection. they too have been deaf to the voice of justice & of consanguinity, & when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power. at this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade & deluge us in blood. these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. we might have been a free & great people together; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. be it so, since they will have it: the road to glory & happiness is open to us too; we will climb it in a separate state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!

We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name & by authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce a11 allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Britain & all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve & break off all political connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us & the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert and declare these a colonies to be free and independant states, and that as free & independant states they shall hereafter have power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, & to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honour. (Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence.)

Why trifle with "fidelity" to the words in the Declaration of Independence when Thomas Jefferson himself excluded the word "Creator" from his original draft and when one considers that this hideous libertine hated Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church, showing himself to be an enemy of God and thus a menace to any true concept of social order? 

Moreover, Jefferson's final draft made generic references to an impersonal deity ("Creator," "Nature's God," Supreme Judge of the University") that were used to signify that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, was a matter of complete indifference to men and the fate of their nations. 

However, the Incarnation has taken place. Christ the King was born in anonymity in Bethelehem and died in infamy on the gibbet of the Holy Cross on Good Friday before rising gloriously from the dead on Easter Sunday forty days before His triumphant Ascension into Heaven. Our Redeemer King has founded His true Church, the Catholic Church, as the sole means of human sanctification and salvation, and try as many "freethinkers" and ideologues of one stripe or another have tried since Pentecost Sunday, there is no substitute for the true Faith, something that Pope Pius XI, writing in his stinging condemnation of Nazi racialism in Mit Brennedner Sorge, March 17, 1937, noted with great emphasis:

Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

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

Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side. (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.) 

Pope Pius XI went on to explain that the reform societies is premised upon the reform of the lives of men by means of Sanctifying Grace:

And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.  (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)

In other words, order in the world is premised upon order in the souls of men, who need Sanctifying Grace to overcome their sins and to make reparation for them while seeking to pursue the heights of personal sanctification. Catholic sanctity built and maintained Western civilization for nearly a thousand years, not the pursuit of “dreams” and “destinies” according to the dictates of Judeo-Masonic religious indifferentism.

Contrast Thomas Jefferson's religiously indifferentist rough draft—and even the draft that was promulgated on July 4, 1776—with the Magna Carta, which was composed to restrain the tyrannical impulses of King John, the son of King Henry II, who uttered the infamous words “Will no one rid me of this mettlesome priest?” that resulted in the murder of Saint Thomas Becket on December 29, 1170:

In the first place we have conceded to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs for ever that the English church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we wish that it be thus observed. This is apparent from the fact that we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English church, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III., before the quarrel arose between us and our barons. This freedom we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs for ever. . . .

Thus, we wish and we firmly ordain that the English church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom  shall  have  and  keep  all  these  previously  determined  liberties,  rights,  and concessions, well and in peace, freely and quietly, in their fullness and integrity, for themselves and their heirs, from us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever, as is previously described here. (Magna Carta, June 15, 1215.)

What a difference five hundred sixty-one years can make in the life of the world.

The Magna Carta was an expression of the sentiments of Catholics who were faithful sons of Holy Mother Church, men who sought the approbation of the great Pope Innocent III, who advanced the reforming work of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic de Guzman as they founded their respective religious communities, in order to assure a just administration of the laws in the English realm.

The Declaration of Independence was written by men who were the products of a revolution against Christendom. The Protestants among their number thus believed in corrupted heretical version of what they thought was Christianity, and Charles Carroll, a Catholic who was the signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a Freemason

The founding principles, no matter the intentions of those who held them, were bound to result in the situation in which we find ourselves at the present time as it is a lie to believe that men can be indifferent, both individually and collectively, to the Incarnation, Nativity, Public Life and Ministry, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven of Our Blessed Lord and Jesus Christ yet pursue “civic virtue” and justice over the course of the long term.

Catholicism is the one and only means of human salvation and it is the only true means of providing a just social order, admitting, of course, that the vagaries of fallen human nature are such that there will always be problems, whether great or small, as a result of the Actual Sins of Men. The extent of social problems depends upon the extent to which men attempt, despite their own weaknesses, to cooperate with the graces won for us by Our Lord during His Passion and Death and that are administered unto them by the working of God the Holy Ghost through by means of Sacramental and Actual Graces to reform their lives and to make reparation for their sins. Catholicism is not a panacea. It is, however, the necessary precondition for a just social order, whose maintenance depends upon the free will choices made by individual men and their readiness to submit themselves entirely to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.

The spirit of the American founding, therefore, is both Protestant and Judeo-Masonic, and it matters not how many of the founders were Freemasons as each was affected by the spirit of Masonry regardless of their membership (or lack thereof) in one of the lodges. This spirit of Judeo-Masonry is cancerous, which is why it is irrelevant for Catholic defenders of the founding principles to seek to exonerate their heroes because not all of them were Freemasons. Pope Leo XIII explained in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884, that it is not the membership in Masonic lodges that matters. It is Freemasonry’s all pervasive spirit of religious indifferentism and naturalism that matters, and that spirit of Freemasonry infects many Catholics without their even knowing it, something that has been the case from the very beginning of this nation.

Here is what Pope Leo XIII wrote in Humanum Genus on this point:

For, from what We have above most clearly shown, that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view -- namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism.

What We have said, and are about to say, must be understood of the sect of the Freemasons taken generically, and in so far as it comprises the associations kindred to it and confederated with it, but not of the individual members of them. There may be persons amongst these, and not a few who, although not free from the guilt of having entangled themselves in such associations, yet are neither themselves partners in their criminal acts nor aware of the ultimate object which they are endeavoring to attain. In the same way, some of the affiliated societies, perhaps, by no means approve of the extreme conclusions which they would, if consistent, embrace as necessarily following from their common principles, did not their very foulness strike them with horror. Some of these, again, are led by circumstances of times and places either to aim at smaller things than the others usually attempt or than they themselves would wish to attempt. They are not, however, for this reason, to be reckoned as alien to the masonic federation; for the masonic federation is to be judged not so much by the things which it has done, or brought to completion, as by the sum of its pronounced opinions. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

Yes, it is the sum of the "pronounced opinions" of Judeo-Masonry that matters, not any specific program or line of action, although there have been programs and lines of action (the establishment of public schools and the mandating of curricula of study, legislation liberalizing divorce, attempts at imposing laws forbidding the wearing of clerical garb in public and of the operation of parochial schools, the promotion of contraception and abortion, the rapid “normalization” of civil “marriage” for those engaged in perverse acts against nature, all other manner of licentiousness in civil law and public culture) that members of the lodges have undertaken over the course of this nation's history that were meant to be detrimental to the Faith. The Judeo-Masonic spirit convinces even believing Catholics that the social encyclical letters of our true popes don't apply to the United States of America, and that simple statements of Catholic truth, including the one below from Pope Saint Pius X's Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, have been made "obsolete" over the course of time:

For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.) 

Some Americanist Catholics have been so bold over the years as to assert that the Church has no business at all in pronouncing that she has universal principles for the governance of men and their nations that are binding upon the consciences of all men at all times, thus showing themselves to defect from the Faith by refusing to accept these plain words of Pope Pius XII in Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958: 

Assuming false and unjust premises, they are not afraid to take a position which would confine within a narrow scope the supreme teaching authority of the Church, claiming that there are certain questions -- such as those which concern social and economic matters -- in which Catholics may ignore the teachings and the directives of this Apostolic See.

This opinion -- it seems entirely unnecessary to demonstrate its existence -- is utterly false and full of error because, as We declared a few years ago to a special meeting of Our Venerable Brethren in the episcopacy:

"The power of the Church is in no sense limited to so-called 'strictly religious matters'; but the whole matter of the natural law, its institution, interpretation and application, in so far as the moral aspect is concerned, are within its power.

"By God's appointment the observance of the natural law concerns the way by which man must strive toward his supernatural end. The Church shows the way and is the guide and guardian of men with respect to their supernatural end."

This truth had already been wisely explained by Our Predecessor St. Pius X in his Encyclical Letter Singulari quadam of September 24, 1912, in which he made this statement: "All actions of a Christian man so far as they are morally either good or bad -- that is, so far as they agree with or are contrary to the natural and divine law -- fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church." (Pope Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958.) 

Pope Pius XII was condemning the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association's (the rump "church" created by the Red Chinese government that was more or less recognized in ade facto manner by the late Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007 that was reiterated in 2009; see Red China: Workshop for the New Ecclesiology prior to the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio's own sellout of faithful Catholics in Red China to that rump church in 2018) rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of social and economic matters. His condemnation applies just as much to anyone else, including Americanist Catholics, who reject the Social Reign of Christ the King and the authority of the Catholic Church to enunciate the moral principles that must guide governance and economics. No naturalist philosophy or program takes place of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, for its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

Alas, the Modern world is founded in a rejection of this simple truth. "Hope" is then to be placed in all manner of naturalists, whether they be of the "Enlightenment" or of the American founding or the French Revolution or Marxism-Leninism or any of the dozens of others of ideologies and "philosophies" claiming the ability to "improve" the world by means of the naturalistic formulae of Judeo-Masonry, many of which are embraced by various false religions, including that of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, as worthy of at least some respect in the practicalities of the "real" world. This is precisely the goal of the Judeo-Masonic spirit that Pope Leo XIII explicated in Humanum Genus:

But the naturalists go much further; for, having, in the highest things, entered upon a wholly erroneous course, they are carried headlong to extremes, either by reason of the weakness of human nature, or because God inflicts upon them the just punishment of their pride. Hence it happens that they no longer consider as certain and permanent those things which are fully understood by the natural light of reason, such as certainly are -- the existence of God, the immaterial nature of the human soul, and its immortality. The sect of the Freemasons, by a similar course of error, is exposed to these same dangers; for, although in a general way they may profess the existence of God, they themselves are witnesses that they do not all maintain this truth with the full assent of the mind or with a firm conviction. Neither do they conceal that this question about God is the greatest source and cause of discords among them; in fact, it is certain that a considerable contention about this same subject has existed among them very lately. But, indeed, the sect allows great liberty to its votaries, so that to each side is given the right to defend its own opinion, either that there is a God, or that there is none; and those who obstinately contend that there is no God are as easily initiated as those who contend that God exists, though, like the pantheists, they have false notions concerning Him: all which is nothing else than taking away the reality, while retaining some absurd representation of the divine nature.

When this greatest fundamental truth has been overturned or weakened, it follows that those truths, also, which are known by the teaching of nature must begin to fall -- namely, that all things were made by the free will of God the Creator; that the world is governed by Providence; that souls do not die; that to this life of men upon the earth there will succeed another and an everlasting life.

When these truths are done away with, which are as the principles of nature and important for knowledge and for practical use, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality. We say nothing of those more heavenly virtues, which no one can exercise or even acquire without a special gift and grace of God; of which necessarily no trace can be found in those who reject as unknown the redemption of mankind, the grace of God, the sacraments, and the happiness to be obtained in heaven. We speak now of the duties which have their origin in natural probity. That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained, and forbids that it be disturbed; that the last end of men is a destiny far above human things and beyond this sojourning upon the earth: these are the sources and these the principles of all justice and morality.

If these be taken away, as the naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. But, how insufficient such teaching is, how wanting in soundness, and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already begun to appear. For, wherever, by removing Christian education, this teaching has begun more completely to rule, there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. All this is commonly complained of and deplored; and not a few of those who by no means wish to do so are compelled by abundant evidence to give not infrequently the same testimony. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

Yes, there is no “knowledge” of what constitutes justice and injustice in a land that gives full rein to blasphemy and sacrilege, a land where even the adversary himself has “rights” as it is considered to be something akin to a “hate” crime to mention the Holy Name of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which has been banned by United States Department of Defense and its military services from being invoked outside of chaplaincy use.

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when their nations promote public worship of the devil while mocking Christ the King?

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when the civil law sanctions the killing of the innocent preborn and the vivisection of anyone after birth under the aegis of the medical industry’s manufactured, profit-making myth called “brain death”?

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when so many people are unjust in their own personal dealings, when relativism and positivism have become the accepted norms of social conduct?

As has been noted before on this site, we are called by the binding precepts of the Fourth Commandment and of the Natural Law itself to love our country. Authentic love of one's nation, however, wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization, that is, the subordination of everything in her national life to that which redounds to the good of the souls of her citizens as that good as been entrusted to and defined by the one and only true Church, the Catholic Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. One who recognizes this immutable truth of the Catholic Faith can see quite readily that is a day of reparation, not of celebration.

Some careful distinctions must be made proceeding with a topic that has been explored in my writing and speaking and teaching long before this site was launched eighteen years ago as a continuation of the work of the printed journal of the same name, Christ or Chaos, and in my book Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism.

One of the first distinctions that should be made is that it is likely the case that the abuses, no matter how exaggerated by the American colonists in favor of independence from the United Kingdom, associated with King George III would never have arisen if England had remained Catholic. The Kings of England would have continued to recognize the fact that they had to reign their subjects with a view to promoting all that redounded to their sanctification and salvation as members of the Catholic Church, understanding that Holy Mother Church possessed the right, exercised as an absolute last resort following the discharge of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to intervene with them when the good of souls demands such an intervention.

We must keep very much in mind, therefore, that the very conditions that were used as the pretext for the "Declaration of Independence" and the American War for Independence from England and also from Christ the King and His true Church might never have existed if England had remained Catholic. The devil wants men and their nations to assert their "independence" from the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised exclusively by the Catholic Church. Catholic England's break from the Faith under King Henry VIII—and his subsequent persecution and execution of Catholics who remained faithful to Rome as he confiscated the lands of monasteries and convents to distribute them amongst his political supporters, making them dependent upon the Protestant Revolt in England for their very property and wealth--was used by the devil so as to foment all manner of mischief in subsequent centuries, including the founding of the first secular, religiously indifferentist nation in the history of the world, the United States of America.

A second distinction that should be made is that the thirteen English colonies in North America located up and down the Atlantic seaboard from what is now the State of Maine to the Georgia-Florida border were not bastions of Christianity. The true popes of the Catholic Church always used the word Christianity to refer to the true Faith, that is, Catholicism. Although adherents of individual Protestant sects may be Christians if they had been baptized validly, Protestantism in all of its mutant forms is heretical. "Christianity" must of its nature be free of heresy. Protestantism, therefore, is neither a means of personal salvation nor of social order.

To wit, the grubby little Calvinists who founded the Plymouth Colony, which lasted between 1620 and 1691 before being subsumed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony, left England (and the Netherlands) in the hope of founding a settlement free of any taint of "impurity" in religion, that is, free of any taint of the remaining vestiges of Catholicism (hierarchy, sacramental system, veneration of the saints, including Our Lady, the sporadic, intermittent reliance upon an attenuated version of "Apostolic Tradition") found in the Anglican "Church."

The Calvinists hated the Catholic Church, and they loathed Catholics. Although they had great natural fortitude, to be sure, they believed quite resolutely that no man needed to follow the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and that no man needed to be sanctified by the worthy reception of Holy Communion or that he had the obligation to worship God in the ineffable, august Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Such wretched beliefs are from Hell, not from God. Such people are to be pitied, not exalted as "role models' for the triumph of a notion of "civil liberty" that is indifferent, if not directly hostile, to the pursuit of man's Last End as a member of the Catholic Church.

This legacy of anti-Catholicism, which was strong in each of the thirteen colonies, would lead Protestant landowners to subject the free Catholics of Acadia who were expelled from their homes by Governor Charles Lawrence in 1755 to slavery in many instances. It is indeed more than a little curious that few great "flag wavers" of the "American" way mention the fact that members of heretical sects enslaved Catholics whose families had been broken up by Charles Lawrence and sent hither and yon, including to the colonies in what became the United States of America. To recount this history accurately might interfere, I suppose, with the mythology of "decency" that is said to have characterized the people in the English colonies who believed that material success was a sign of divine election and that there could be no greater "tyranny" for man than to be "yoked" to the "dictates" of the priesthood.

Readers will notice that the men noted for their devotion to “liberty” in the thirteen colonies of what became the United States of America did not believe that “liberty” extended to the Catholic refugees from Acadia, enslaving some and persecuting the rest. It was this hatred of Catholics that caused colonists to consider the Quebec Act as “intolerable” as it was a sign, at least to them, that the British were beginning to slacken in their resolve against “popery” when the truth of the matter was the act demonstrated British pragmatism in the face of a populace more numerous and prosperous than were the Acadians who were dispersed in Nova Scotia. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caught in the Devil’s Trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father John Carroll was sincerely concerned about the growth of the Faith in the United States of America. He simply believed that a way could be found to do this without appearing to threaten the Protestants.  

An admirer of Father Carroll, Jay P. Dolan, quoted Carroll at length on the matter:  

I consider powers issued from the Propaganda not only as improper, but dangerous here. The jealously in our Governments of the interference of any foreign jurisdiction is known to be such that we cannot expect, and in my opinion ought not to wish, that they would tolerate any other, than that which being purely spiritual, is essential to our Religion, to wit, an acknowledgment of the Pope’s spiritual Supremacy, and of the see of S. Peter being the center of Ecclesiastical unity. The appointment therefore by the Propaganda of a Superior for this Country appears to be a dangerous step, and, by exciting the jealousy of the governments here may lend much to the prejudice of Religion, and perhaps expose it to the reproach of encouraging a dependence on a foreign power, and giving them an undue internal influence by leaving with them a prerogative to nominate to places of trust and real importance, and that ad scum beneplacitum [at their own pleasure]. (Quoted in Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, Doubleday, 1985, p. 106.)  

The future proto-bishop and archbishop in the United States of America, John Carroll, also believed passionately in what Pope Saint Pius X would term a thesis absolutely false, separation of Church and State, a thesis that was condemned repeatedly by pope after pope in the Nineteenth Century. No matter Archbishop John Carroll’s becoming a bit more “conservative” in his later years, especially concerning the necessity of Church discipline and the retention of Latin in the Sacred Liturgy despite having supported the use of the vernacular thirty years previously (in the 1780s), he remained a champion of the falsehoods of “separation of Church and State” and “religious liberty” until the day he died on December 3, 1815. This was no mere pragmatic concession to the reality of the situation in which Catholics found themselves. This was a complete and total commitment to these insidious falsehoods as a matter of firmly rooted principle, thus preparing the way for the triumph of conciliarism in our own days:  

In addition to being independent and American, a third dimension of the republican blueprint of Catholicism was an insistence on the separation of church and state. In the seventeenth century, Lord Baltimore had implemented this practice when he refused to allow the Jesuits any special privileges; at the time, it was a pragmatic decision rooted in the necessity for religious toleration in a Catholic colony populated by Protestants. With the Protestant takeover in Maryland, religious toleration became an orphan. Only with the [American] Revolution, did this republican idea became actualized once more. This time it emerged not as a pragmatic concession to a religiously plural environment, but as a fundamental human right endorsed by the Revolution. Catholics accepted this rights-ofman philosophy and enthusiastically supported the concept of a free church in a free society. Such thinking placed American Catholics squarely in the mainstream of Catholic Enlightenment thought. (Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, Doubleday, 1985, p. 108.)  

Such a description could have been written by Antipope Emeritus Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself, who does indeed see the events of the American Revolution as decisive in shaping the ethos of the “Second” Vatican Council:

In the meantime, however, the modern age had also experienced developments. People came to realize that the American Revolution was offering a model of a modern State that differed from the theoretical model with radical tendencies that had emerged during the second phase of the French Revolution. (Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to Members of the Roman Curia, December 22, 2005.)  

The model of the “modern State” “offered” by the American Revolution was no less radical than the one that emerged during the “second phase of the French Revolution.” Although many Catholic apologists of the American founding have sought to portray it as different than the radicalism of the French Revolution, the differences are matters of degree, not of kind, as the principle root is the same: the belief that men and their nations could be well-organized absent a due subordination to the Sacred Deposit of Faith as It has been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which is hinged the totality of social order. The devil had to attack France with the violence and bloodshed that began to be unleashed on July 14, 1789, as the Cross of the Divine Redeemer had been planted firmly into the French soil; he used more subtle–and hence more insidious–means to co-opt American Catholics into becoming just as hostile to the Social Reign of Christ the King as were the Jacobins of the French Revolution.  

There are others who claim that the “independent” spirit that has long characterized Catholicism in the United States of America is the reason that the traditional movement had a much larger following, relatively speaking, than in Europe. One may concede that point, only to note, however, that there would be no need for any kind of traditional movement anywhere in the world if the virus of Americanism had not incubated during colonial days and then began to spread following the end of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, which, as will be seen in volume two of this book, would later infect the entirety of the world and become the very foundation of the conciliar church’s embrace of separation of Church and State and religious liberty and of false ecumenism itself.  

Jay P. Dolan came to this conclusion in an admiring, not critical, way in The American Catholic Experience:

For Roman Catholics, modernism is a term generally associated with a theological controversy that surfaced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But the rise of historical-mindedness, or what can be called the modernist mentality, clearly predated this controversy. As regards European Catholicism, the evidence for this is extensive. Even though the evidence is not so extensive for American Catholicism, a definite modernist impulse can be discerned in some leading American Catholic thinkers. Though they did not call themselves modernists, nor did the self-conscious think of themselves as such, they were thinking and acting according to a modern perspective that theologically viewed the church as historically conditioned–unlike the classicist or neo-Scholastic mentality, which viewed it as unchanging and immune to the influence of history.  

John Carroll was an intellectual heir of the Enlightenment, and his thinking on the nature of the church leaned in the modern direction. As previously noted in the chapter on republican Catholicism, John Carroll wanted to adapt certain practices of the church to the American environment. These included the training of priests, an English liturgy, friendly relations and cooperation with Protestants, and a church independent of foreign interference. In this manner he envisioned a church in the United States distinct from Roman Catholic churches in other countries. Such a program of adaptation to the American cultural situation clearly pointed in the modernist direction. Though these types of adaptation were more external and would not alter the intrinsic meaning of the church, Carroll did go further. He advocated the separation of Church and state, and promoted the idea of religious liberty. This touched on the very meaning of the church. According to the institutional model, the church was the one perfect society, and the state or civil society was subject to the rule of the church. Carroll promoted a different point of view, and in doing so modified the institutional model of the church as the one perfect visible society. Though he never fully explained how church and state would be separated and the consequent relationship between the two, his advocacy of the general concept of separation according to the American model clearly put him at odds with the prevailing model of the church as the one perfect society. In addition, Carroll celebrated religious liberty, not as a pragmatic concession to a religiously pluralist society, but as a natural human right. This, too, challenged the prevailing Roman Catholic position that said error had no rights and false religious beliefs could not be tolerated. The logic of Carroll’s position suggested that, in a religiously pluralist society, Roman Catholicism could not claim to be the one and only visible church.   

In advocating these positions on religious liberty and the separation of Church and state, Carroll was implying that the understanding of the church should be adapted to the cultural context, in this case the United States. Such thinking reflected a historical consciousness, a modern mentality in other words, when it came to defining the meaning of the church. This does not mean that Carroll self-consciously was adopting a historical, modern perspective in place of the classicist point of view. Nor was Carroll alone. During the Republican era, other American Catholics advocated religious liberty and separation of church and state. Unlike in Europe, such thinking did not result in a new school of thought or a new theology, but it did set a precedent. The precedent was the need of the church to adapt itself to the American context, not just in externals, but even in its very definition. (Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, Doubleday, 1985, pp. 304-305.)  

The process of converting Catholics to an acceptance of the secular state of Modernity began with the arrival of Catholics in Maryland in 1634. It became institutionalized in the decades thereafter, anchoring itself upon the mooring provided by the Constitution and the “founding principles.” The process of adaptation used by John Carroll has become that of the conciliar church. Unfortunately, for John Carroll, however, his desire to adapt the Faith to the American experience resulted in the precise thing he feared: Catholics becoming more and more Protestant in their mentality over the course of time:  

Obviously, American Catholicism did not seem to have a promising future [in 1785], and Father Carroll’s report reflects his deep concern for its chief problem of “leakage.” By then, the country contained an estimated quarter-million lapsed Catholics, ordinary people who, unlike the wealthy planters of Maryland, and farmers of Pennsylvania, had found it exceedingly difficult to practice their religion. With the shortage of priests continuing, and the immigrant tide rising daily, many more were to be lost irrevocably. Even today [1970], the presence of so many Protestant Irish in the South testifies to the mass defection of their ancestors. They lost their faith, wrote Father Carroll, not only because they found no place to practice it or found hostility to the public profession of it too much to bear, but also because of “unavoidable intercourse with non-Catholics.” This produced moral laxness, or at least a relaxing of comparatively stricter Catholic morality, and what the prefect apostolic considered a greater danger: mixed marriages. Again and again, Carroll was to complain of this problem and his helplessness against it. In 1798 he wrote to a friend in England: “Here our Catholics are so mixed with Protestants in all the intercourse of civil society and business public and private, that abuse of intermarriage is almost universal and it surpasses my ability to devise an effectual bar against it. No general prohibition can be exacted without reducing many of the faithful to live in a state of celibacy.” In other words, if one Catholic family was set down in a community of, say, thirty Protestant families, where would the Catholic children find partners? And if they accepted reality and chose them from among the Protestants, would it be very likely that the offspring of the dominant majority would embrace an abhorred minority faith? If one is to judge from so distinguished a Catholic as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, here is the answer: all of Carroll’s children married non-Catholics; and apparently none of his grandchildren were raised as Catholics. Another outstanding Catholic, Dominick Lynch of New York, one of the pillars of the Church who signed the letter to Washington, fathered a family of thirteen children, but within a few generations almost all of his descendants were lost to the faith. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, 1970, p. 64.)  

Archbishop John Carroll found himself in a quandary as he never wavered in his support for the very thing that made it possible for the pluralism about which he complained to flourish and thus to take hold of the minds, hearts and souls of Catholics in the United States of America: the founding principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the very framework of the American Constitution that enshrined the principles of separation of Church and State and religious liberty without ever using those exact words; and it would be the rotten fruit of those principles that was to plant insidious seeds for the rise of a counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church headed by men who believed that the expression of Church teaching is indeed historically conditioned and must be adapted to the circumstances of time and place.  

Behold the results that are upon us today, both in the United States of America and the rest of the world.

Behold, and behold as well how the likes of Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV and even some sedevacantist Catholics still cling to the Declaration of Independence, albeit for apparently “different” reasons without realizing the common threads of error that, in this instance, unite the latter to the former.

Yes, the Potomac still flows into the Tiber.

Concluding Remarks

Robert Francis Prevost Leo/XIV’s embrace of the “Declaration of Independence” is thus very telling as the founding principles are, as mentioned earlier in this commentary, essential building blocks in the conciliar sect’s endorsement of that which the Catholic Church has always condemned: Religious Liberty, separation of Church and State, and false ecumenism.

Once again, therefore, Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV has given us proof that he teaches falsehoods condemned repeatedly by Holy Mother Church, which is why we must continue to pray for the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter.

The papacy is a subject for our veneration, not mockery and scorn, something that Dom Prosper Gueranger pointed out in his reflection for this very day, July 6, the Octave of the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul:

Firmly resting upon Peter, the Church turns to him whom the Spouse has given to be her Head, and testifies to him no less veneration and love, than obedience and fidelity; such is the craving of her gratitude. Moreover she is fully aware of what is thus expressed by St. Peter Damian (or as others say by a disciple of St. Bernard), “none may pretend to intimacy with our Lord, unless he be intimate with Peter.” How admirable is this unity in God’s advance towards his creature! but, at the same time, how absolute is the law of the creature’s progress to the Life Divine. God is not found, save in Jesus; nor Jesus, save in the Church; nor the Church, save in Peter. If you had known Me, said Christ, you would, without doubt, have known my Father also; but the Jews sought God, outside of Jesus, and their efforts were vain. Since then, others have come, wanting to find Jesus, while setting aside his Church; but that which God has joined, what man shall put asunder? So these men, running after a Christ, a phantom of their own conceptions, have found neither Jesus Christ nor his Church. In fine, others are sons of the Church, yet they persuade themselves that in those pastures where, by right, the soul may feed upon God, they have none to seek, save the divine Shepherd, who dwells in heaven. By the very fact of his having committed to another, the care of feeding both lambs and sheep, Jesus seems to have had quite a different view; for these words imply, not only some, either mere beginners and the imperfect, or the strong and saints, but all, little and great, whom the heavenly Shepherd confided to Simon-Barjona, to be, by him, fed, directed, advanced, and guarded.

O thou soul that hungerest after God, go to Peter; think not, otherwise, to appease thy cravings. Formed in the school of the holy Liturgy, thou hast surely no part with such as neglect the Humanity, as they say (speaking of Mary’s Divine Son), in order to come all the more assuredly to the word; but in like manner take care, thou also, not to turn God’s Vicar into an obstacle in thy path. Jesus longs for the blissful meeting, even as thou dost; be certain, therefore, that what he places between thee and himself, on the way, is no obstacle, but a help. Just as in the adorable Eucharist, the sacred species are but to point out to thee where he is whom, of thyself, thou couldst never find here below; so too the mystery of Peter has no other end but this, to show thee with absolute certainty He Who resides for thee in the Divine Sacrament, in his proper substance, resides also for thee, in his authority and infallible guidance. These two mysteries complete one another; they walk hand in hand an will both cease at the same moment,—at the moment when our eyes may gaze at last directly upon Jesus; but, from now till then, the Church sees herein not so much an intermediary or a veil, as the most precious Sign of the invisible Spouse. Therefore, wonder not, if the homage she pays to Peter seems to rival that which she bestows on the Sacred Host; in her multiplied genuflections which she makes before both, she is indeed adoring; adoring not that man, it is true, whom we see seated on the apostolic throne, nor yet the mere species perceived by our senses on the altar; but, adoring, in both instances, the same Jesus, who is silent in the Eucharistic Sacrament, and who speaks and commands in his Vicar.

Further still, she knows that Peter alone can give her the Sacred Host. Baptism which makes us to be sons of God, and all the sacraments which multiply the divine energies within us, are a treasure which he alone has license to dispose of legitimately, either by himself or by others. It is his word, throughout the world, that, in every grade of authorized teaching, gives birth within souls to faith, the beginning of salvation, and develops it from these humble commencements right up to the luminous summits of sanctity. And because, on the mountain heights, the life of the Evangelical counsels of the chosen garden reserved to himself by the Spouse, Peter must needs likewise claim as his own, the guidance and protection, in a more special manner, of religious communities, for he is wishful to be always able himself to offer directly to Jesus, the fairest flowers of that holiness of which his exalted ministry is the very principle and support. Thus sanctified, to Peter again, does the Church address herself, when she would learn in what way to approach her Spouse, in her worship; she says to him, as heretofore, the disciples said to Our Lord: Teach us to pray, and Peter, animated with what he knows so well of the gorgeous pomp of worship in the heavenly country, regulates for us here below the sacred ceremonial, and dictates to the Bride herself the theme of her songs. Lastly, who but Peter can add to her holiness, those other marks of unity, catholicity, and apostolicity, which are, in face of the whole world, her irrefragable right and title to the throne and to the love of the son of God.

If we are truly sons of the Church, if in very deed it is from the heart of our Mother, that we draw our sentiments, let us well understand what should be our gratitude, respectful love, tender confidence, and utter devotedness of our whole being, towards him from whom, by the sweet Will of God, come all these good things. Peter, in his own person and in that of his successors, specially in him who in these our own days bears the weight of the whole world and our burdens also, ought to be the constant object of our filial reverence and homage. His glories, his sufferings, his thoughts should become ours. Forget not that He of whom the Roman Pontiff is visible Representative, has willed that every one of his members should have their invisible share in the government of his Church; the responsibility of each one in a point of such major importance, is clearly indicated in the great duty of prayer, which in God’s sight is of more value than action, and which is rendered by love, stronger than hell. Then, there is that other strict duty of alms-deeds, whereby we are obliged to come to the relief of the indigent, even of our humblest brother: if so, can we deem ourselves free with regard to the Bishop and Father of our souls, when unjust spoliation makes him know, in the necessities of his immense administration, cramping want and difficulty? Happy they who to the tribute of gold, may be allowed to add that of blood! but all are not granted such an honor!

On this, the last day of the Octave consecrated to the triumph of these two Princes of the Apostles, let us, once again, salute the city which was witness of their final combat. She is guardian of their tombs and continues to be the the See of Peter’s successors; by this double title, she is the vestibule of heaven, the capital of the spiritual empire. The very thought of the august trophies that adorn both banks of her noble river, and of all those other glorious memories that linger around her, made the heart of St. John Chrysostom exult with enthusiasm, beneath his eastern sky. We give his words as addressed to the people, in one of his Homilies: “In very deed, the heavens illumined by the fiery rays of the meridian sun, have naught comparable to Rome’s resplendent rays shed over the whole earth by these two luminaries of hers. Thence will Paul arise, thence Peter likewise. Reflect, yea tremble, at the thought of what a spectacle Rome is to witness, when Peter and Paul rising up from their graves, shall be borne aloft to meet the Lord. How brilliant in her roseate hue is Rome before the eyes of Christ! What garlands encircle this city! With what golden chains is she girded! What fountains are hers! Oh! this city of stupendous fame! I admire her, not because of the gold wherewith she abounds, nor because of her proud porticoes, but because she holds within her these two Pillars of the Church.” Then the illustrious orator goes on to remark how he burnt with longing desire to visit these sacred tombs, the treasure of the world, the secure rampart of the queen-city.

In these our own days, the bishops of God’s Church are bound by law to come at fixed intervals, from their various dioceses, throughout the world, to visit the basilicas raised over the precious remains of Peter and Paul; like this latter, they too must needs come and see Peter, still living in the Pontiff, his successor in the primacy. Although simple Christians are not subject to the same obligation to which bishops are bound by oath, yet ought every true Catholic frequently to visit in thought, at least, these blessed hills, whence flow the streams of salvation that divide and carry their waters over the whole world. One of the most consoling symptoms, at the present sad time, is the visible stir which is evidently taking hold of the masses, and urging them to the Eternal City. A movement, which must be encouraged as much as possible, because it is a return to the wisest traditions of our forefathers; and in these days the facility for such a pilgrimage, once in a lifetime, is so great, that few or none would thereby undergo any serious inconvenience, as regards either their family or social position.

But if some there be who really cannot apply to themselves in this literal sense these words of the Psalm: “I have rejoiced at the things that have been said to me, we shall go into the House of the Lord;” let them, at least, make these sentiments of true spiritual patriotism their own, and more so than did the Jews of yore: “May there be abundance for them that love thee, O true Jerusalem! Let peace be in thy strength and abundance in thy towers. For the sake of my brethren who are in thee, this is my prayer: yea this is my prayer, because thou art the house of the Lord our God.” (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Octave of the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, July 6.)

The See of Peter is our safeguard against doctrinal impurity just as it is the rock that guarantees fidelity in all that pertains to Faith and Morals, and it is offensive to the very Divine Constitution of Holy Mother Church to even suggest that there can be a “loyal opposition” to the one who is Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s very vicar here on earth.

I have long contended that the worst enemies of believing Catholics when the “loving” and so very “tolerant” merchants of the slaughter of the innocent preborn and apologists for all that is indecent, impure and hideous in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity control all three branches of the Federal government of the United States of America launch their overt schemes of persecution against us that believing Catholics will be fingered by the conciliar “bishops,” who will serve as the apologists for and cheerleaders of our own show trials to eradicate all dissent from the prevailing cultural agenda of evil.

We must take seriously the following words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that are contained in Chapter Ten of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew:

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

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

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

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

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

[41] He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward of a prophet: and he that receiveth a just man in the name of a just man, shall receive the reward of a just man. [42] And whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, amen I say to you, he shall not lose his reward. (Matthew 10: 16-40.)

We must never fear to proclaim the truths of the Holy Faith, especially as the time of the Roman caesars and their persecution of believing Catholics has returned, this time with the full support and enabling of a putative Successor of Saint Peter and many of his equally putative clergy.

We must always remember that this is the time that God has appointed from all eternity for us to live and thus to sanctify and to save our immortal souls as members of the Catholic Church. The graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flows into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, are sufficient for us to handle whatever crosses—personal, social, and ecclesiastical—that we are asked to carry.

We must always give thanks to God for each of our crosses as we seek to serve Him through Our Lady in this time of apostasy and betrayal, making sure to pray our Rosaries of reparation as we give unto the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary the fruits of all our efforts to restore all things in Him, Christ the King.

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.