The Republican Waffle House on Defending the Innocent Preborn, part two

It was in October of 2011 that the onetime chief executive office of the Godfather’s Pizza chain of fast-found restaurants, Herman Cain, found himself flummoxed and otherwise completely befuddled on a number issues ranging from national security to the surgical execution of the innocent preborn in their mothers’ wombs under cover of the civil law. Exasperated when he made one factual error after another, Cain, who was under siege because of a series of harassment allegations that had been made against him, said, “This is just a whole lot of stuff to now in a little bit of time:

Herman Cain became badly flustered on Monday when asked to assess President Obama’s policy toward Libya, raising new questions about his command of foreign policy as he lurched over five minutes from awkward pauses to halting efforts to address the issue.

Video of Mr. Cain’s appearance on Monday before editors and reporters at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel went viral almost immediately after it was posted online, and drew immediate comparisons to Rick Perry’s recent stumble in a debate when he froze in discussing which federal agencies he would eliminate.

At the interview in Milwaukee, after he was asked his thoughts on Mr. Obama’s handling of Libya, Mr. Cain leaned back and appeared to search for an answer: “O.K., Libya,” he said.

“President Obama supported the uprising, correct?” he said. “President Obama called for the removal of Qaddafi — just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say ‘Yes, I agree,’ or ‘No, I didn’t agree.’  ”

Mr. Cain said he disagreed with the president’s approach “for the following reasons” — then changed course.

“Nope, that’s a different one,” he said. “I’ve got to go back and see.”

He added: “I’ve got all this stuff twirling around in my head.”

Some analysts have grown sharply critical of Mr. Cain’s foreign policy pronouncements in debates and interviews, saying he shows a basic lack of understanding of critical regions of the world. Mr. Cain himself has sometimes fed into this, and in Monday’s interview he said: “Some people want to say, ‘Well, as president, you’re supposed to know everything.’ No you don’t.”

His comments about Libya came after a string of other provocative remarks about foreign policy and related issues.

Those include a statement published Monday in which Mr. Cain suggested that most American Muslims are extremists; a contradictory answer aboutwaterboarding during a Republican presidential primary debate on Saturday focusing on foreign policy; and his statement that if Al Qaeda or another terrorist group demanded, he would consider authorizing the release of every detainee at Guantánamo Bay in return for the release of one American soldier.

J. D. Gordon, Mr. Cain’s spokesman and national security adviser, said the candidate had not been at his sharpest in Milwaukee because of a lack of sleep amid a long day of traveling.

“We were all going on four hours sleep, so he was tired,” Mr. Gordon said in a telephone interview. “When he got the Libya question, it took him a while to get his bearings on it, but he got the answer right.”

Mr. Gordon said Mr. Cain did repeat several times what he said was the correct answer — that the Obama administration should have done a better job assessing the Libyan opposition to Qaddafi and how it would govern.

Even on this point, though, Mr. Cain seemed to contradict himself at the end of the interview, when he said, “I don’t know that they were or were not assessed.”

Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, was unforgiving in a post on his blog at foreignpolicy.com.

“There’s a mercy rule in Little League, and I’m applying it here — unless and until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again, or manages to muster something approaching cogency in his foreign policy statements, there’s no point in blogging about him anymore,” Mr. Drezner wrote. “I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic.”

Jamie Fly, executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, said Mr. Cain’s answer was further argument for additional foreign policy debates by the candidates.

“Past presidents have often been tested very early in their terms,” Mr. Fly said. ”We elect a president solely on an economic rationale at our own peril.”

In the Cain comments about Muslims that were released on Monday, he told GQ magazine he believed that most American Muslims held “extremist views,” explaining that a “Muslim voice” he knows — whom he would not name — told him that was the case.

“I have had one very well-known Muslim voice say to me directly that a majority of Muslims share the extremist views,” Mr. Cain said.

Though the transcript indicates Mr. Cain explicitly said he was talking about Muslims in the United States, Mr. Gordon said Mr. Cain had actually been talking about those in another country. “He doesn’t believe most Muslims in America have extreme views,” Mr. Gordon said.

Mr. Gordon said some other criticisms of Mr. Cain’s foreign policy comments had been unfair.

He also said that Mr. Cain had been spending anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours a day boning up on national security issues, including conversations with some ambassadors, and that he had spoken to the first President Bush and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

“It’s frankly just a lot of stuff to know in a little bit of time,” he said. (Cain Stumbles on Foreign Policy.)

Just a lot of "stuff" to do know in a little bits of time. Ah, yes, the joys of living in our world of naturalism, a world where even those without what used to be required of high school students, a grasp of basic current events, is no longer necessary to be considered a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States of America.

This was the Herman Cain who said Red China did not have nuclear weapons.

This was the Herman Cain who showed basic confusion concerning the taking of innocent human life under cover of the civil law:

MORGAN: Abortion. What's your view of abortion?

CAIN: I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances. And here's why --

MORGAN: No circumstances?

CAIN: No circumstances.

MORGAN: Because many of your fellow candidates -- some of them qualify that.

CAIN: They qualify but --

MORGAN: Rape and incest.

CAIN: Rape and incest.

MORGAN: Are you honestly saying -- again, it's a tricky question, I know.

CAIN: Ask the tricky question.

MORGAN: But you've had children, grandchildren. If one of your female children, grand children was raped, you would honestly want her to bring up that baby as her own?

CAIN: You're mixing two things here, Piers?

MORGAN: Why?

CAIN: You're mixing --

MORGAN: That's what it comes down to.

CAIN: No, it comes down to it's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you're not talking about that big a number. So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make.

Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn't have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.

MORGAN: By expressing the view that you expressed, you are effectively -- you might be president. You can't hide behind now the mask, if you don't mind me saying, of being the pizza guy. You might be the president of United States of America. So your views on these things become exponentially massively more important. They become a directive to the nation.

CAIN: No they don't. I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.

MORGAN: That's a very interesting departure --

CAIN: Yes.

MORGAN: -- from the normal politics.

CAIN: Exactly. (Piers Morgan - CNN.com - Transcripts.)

Leaving aside the business of those harassment allegations against Cain, see Firing Blanks At The Messengers, the former chief executive officer of Godfather Pizza's time in the center ring was over after these interviews. He could not mask the fact that he was a very ignorant man.

There was once a time when naturalists knew something, however distorted, of history and were very conversant in the details of current events, public policy and even constitutional law. The late Richard Milhous Nixon could discourse extemporaneously at length on foreign policy and the state of the world, admitting, of course, that he was a practitioner of amorality whose "foreign policy" involved the government of the United States of America in the business of funding international "family planning" organizations for the very first time. On other matters, however, especially on matters pertaining to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, Nixon shared a lot with the current crop of midget naturalists in 2016 by making things up as he went along.

This is how “deeply” the thirty-seventh President of the United States of America had “thought” about abortion in 1972:

On Jan. 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But the next day, newly released tapes reveal, he privately expressed ambivalence.

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.” (Nixon Comments Disclosed on Abortion and Watergate)

So much for Blessed Martin de Porres, whose father was a white Spaniard and his mother was a Negro from Lima, Peru. Nixon's stand was hideous and reprehensible. It would be interesting to hear how those who defend the nonexistent "right" of a woman to "choose" to kill her baby explain on what grounds they could deny a woman the "right" to kill her baby according to Nixon's racist standard. Are there "limits" to the "right to choose"?

As is the case with almost everyone else in public life in a country founded in false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles, Richard Nixon was making it all up as he went along, oblivious to the fact that a statement of his about abortion on April 3, 1971, made it appear as though he was opposed to abortion as a means of "population control" without mentioning his support of abortion for eugenic reasons. Nixon's stand was hideous and reprehensible:

HISTORICALLY, laws regulating abortion in the United States have been the province of States, not the Federal Government. That remains the situation today, as one State after another takes up this question, debates it, and decides it. That is where the decisions should be made.

Partly for that reason, I have directed that the policy on abortions at American military bases in the United States be made to correspond with the laws of the States where those bases are located. If the laws in a particular State restrict abortions, the rules at the military base hospitals are to correspond to that law.

The effect of this directive is to reverse service regulations issued last summer, which had liberalized the rules on abortions at military hospitals. The new ruling supersedes this--and has been put into effect by the Secretary of Defense.

But while this matter is being debated in State capitals and weighed by various courts, the country has a right to know my personal views.

From personal and religious beliefs I consider abortion an unacceptable form of population control. Further, unrestricted abortion policies, or abortion on demand, I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life--including the life of the yet unborn. For, surely, the unborn have rights also, recognized in law, recognized even in principles expounded by the United Nations.

Ours is a nation with a Judeo-Christian heritage. It is also a nation with serious social problems—problems of malnutrition, of broken homes, of poverty, and of delinquency. But none of these problems justifies such a solution.

A good and generous people will not opt, in my view, for this kind of alternative to its social dilemmas. Rather, it will open its hearts and homes to the unwanted children of its own, as it has done for the unwanted millions of other lands. (Nixon Statement on Abortion, April 3, 1971.) 

Such confusion, starting with the fact that there is no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian" heritage. Truth can never be mixed in with error. Catholicism is the sole means of personal and social order. Nothing else. Not Talmudic Judaism Not the thousands of permutations of Protestantism, each of which is founded on a rejection of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has revealed exclusively to His true Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

Then President Nixon told the nation in 1971 that he considered surgical baby-killing to be "an unacceptable form of population control" and that he opposed "abortion on demand" at the same time he permitted babies to be slaughtered by surgical means on the ground of American military bases in those states that permitted abortion-on-demand. Nixon was oblivious as to the simple truth that no human institution of civil governance has any authority to dispense with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law so as to permit any direct, intentional taking of an innocent human life from the first moment of conception through all subsequent stages until the day of natural death under cover of the civil law. Nixon was saying, in effect, "I am personally opposed to abortion-on-demand, but I will permit surgeons in the employ of the government of the United States of America on American military bases to kill babies in those states that permit abortion-on-demand. After all, this is matter that belongs at the state level, right? Wrong.

Richard Nixon, who accepted the abject moral evil of contraception in order to advance the goals of "population control," reiterated his confused views about abortion following the release of the report on population control that was issued by a commission headed by John D. Rockefeller III, the brother of the then Governor of the State of New York, the pro-abortion Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, and the father of the junior United States senator from West Virginia, John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV, that supported abortion-on-demand:

While I do not plan to comment extensively on the contents and recommendations of the report, I do feel that it is important that the public know my views on some of the issues raised.

In particular, I want to reaffirm and reemphasize that I do not support unrestricted abortion policies. As I stated on April 3, 1971, when I revised abortion policies in military hospitals, I consider abortion an unacceptable form of population control. In my judgment, unrestricted abortion policies would demean human life. I also want to make it clear that I do not support the unrestricted distribution of family planning services and devices to minors. Such measures would do nothing to preserve and strengthen close family relationships.

I have a basic faith that the American people themselves will make sound judgments regarding family size and frequency of births, judgments that are conducive both to the public interest and to personal family goals--and I believe in the right of married couples to make these judgments for themselves.

While disagreeing with the general thrust of some of the Commission's recommendations, I wish to extend my thanks to the members of the Commission for their work and for having assembled much valuable information.

The findings and conclusions of the Commission should be of great value in assisting governments at all levels to formulate policy. At the Federal level, through our recent reorganization of the Executive Office of the President, we have the means through the Domestic Council and the Office of Management and Budget to follow up on the Commission's report. The recommendations of the Commission will be taken into account as we formulate our national growth and population research policies, and our agency budgets through these processes for the years ahead.

Many of the questions raised by the report cannot be answered purely on the basis of fact, but rather involve moral judgments about which reasonable men will disagree. I hope that the discussions ahead will be informed ones, so that we all will be better able to face these questions relating to population in full knowledge of the consequences of our decisions. (Statement About the Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.)

Such confusion, starting with the fact that there is no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian" heritage. Truth can never be mixed in with error. Catholicism is the sole means of personal and social order. Nothing else. Not Talmudic Judaism. Not the thousands of permutations of Protestantism, each of which is founded on a rejection of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has revealed exclusively to His true Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

Then President Nixon told the nation in 1971 that he considered surgical baby-killing to be "an unacceptable form of population control" and that he opposed "abortion on demand" at the same time he permitted babies to be slaughtered by surgical means on the ground of American military bases in those states that permitted abortion-on-demand. Nixon was oblivious as to the simple truth that no human institution of civil governance has any authority to dispense with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law so as to permit any direct, intentional taking of an innocent human life from the first moment of conception through all subsequent stages until the day of natural death under cover of the civil law. Nixon was saying, in effect, "I am personally opposed to abortion-on-demand, but I will permit surgeons in the employ of the government of the United States of America on American military bases to kill babies in those states that permit abortion-on-demand. Perhaps Nixon was prophetically anticipating the now retired Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict's XVI's logically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" that stands the the principle of non-contradiction on its head.

Nixon believed in "the right of married couples to make these judgments for themselves" when, of course, no human being has any right to use contraceptive pills or devices at any time for any reason as to do so is to violate the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage. Although most contraceptives abort and abort most of the time, contraception is in and of itself a violation of the immutable laws of God that bind the consciences of all human beings at all times in all places and under all circumstances without any exception, reservation or qualification whatsoever. One who supports "family planning" as a matter of principle does not believe in God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church and is thus incapable of serving as a agent in behalf of the common temporal good undertaken as it must be in light of man's Last End.

Moreover, "reasonable men" are not free to disagree about the binding nature of the immutable laws of God. Contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave until the General Resurrection on the Last Day must obey God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church. This is not subject to debate or "legitimate" disagreement. Richard Nixon's belief that men could disagree about moral judgments concerning "population control" was very similar to the canards mouth by one of his successors as President of the United States of America, George Walker Bush, who said constantly in 1999 and 2000 during his campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination and in the general election against then Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., that abortion was "a difficult" issue about which "good people" may disagree legitimately. Wrong. No one has any "right" to "disagree" with the laws of their Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.

Other Republicans, most notably Nixon acolyte Robert Joseph Dole, Jr. and John Sidney McCain III among them, have mouthed the same inanity about the slaughter of innocent babes being a "difficult" issue about which people of "good will" could disagree legitimately. This is an approach taken by none other than Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, who said the following at the University of Notre Dame du Lac on Sunday, May 17, 2009:

After I read the doctor's letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn't change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that - when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

That's when we begin to say, "Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.

So let's work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women."

Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature. (Text of Obama Speech at the University of Notre Dame.)

There is no "common ground" between truth and error, between good and evil. The precepts of the Fifth Commandment make it clear that it is never permissible to directly intend to kill an innocent human being as the first end of a moral act.

An expectant mother has no "decision" to make when she discovers that she is carrying a child in her womb. She has a baby to nurture unto birth and then to bring to the Baptismal font to be made a spiritual child by adoption of the Most Blessed Trinity, Whose very inner life is flooded into that baby's soul as the Original Sin and that soul's captivity to the devil is flooded out of it. There is no "decision" to be made. There is no "choice" to be made. There is God's Holy Will to fulfill with love and with perfection, made possible by the supernatural helps won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into human hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of all Graces.

Although I have written (and taught) this repeatedly throughout the course of my professional life as a college professor and speaker and writer, let me reiterate this simple truth once again: Every abortion in an attack mystically on the preborn Baby Jesus in the person of an innocent preborn baby in his mother's womb. No one--and I mean no one--can say that he "loves" Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and support as a matter of public law and/or participate in actively the act of dismembering or burning or poisoning Him mystically in the persons of innocent preborn children by chemical or surgical means.

It is that simple. There is "common ground" to be found. There is only God's Law to be obeyed. Period.

Richard Nixon?

William Jefferson Clinton?

Robert Joseph Dole, Jr.?

Ronald Wilson Reagan?

George Herbert Walker Bush?

Robert Joseph Dole, Jr.

James Earl Carter Jr.?

Sarah Heath Palin?

Richard Bruce Cheney?

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.?

John Forbes Kerry?

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.?

George Walker Bush?

John Sidney McCain III.?

Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro?

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton?

Bernard Sanders?

Donald John Trump?

Rafael Edward Cruz?

John Richard Kasich?

What difference does it make?

Each of these naturalists have supported surgical abortion in at least some, if not all, circumstances. Each of these naturalists without exception supported the chemical assassinations of innocent preborn children in all circumstances without any exceptions whatsoever. The differences among naturalists are always matter of degrees as each naturalist rejects the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Thus it is that Donald John Trump’s now infamous “town hall session” that was moderated by Christopher Matthews on Easter Wednesday, March 30, 2016, displayed no more and certainly no less an amount of ignorance of issues, including that of baby-killing, than any of the naturalists listed above. Trump makes all kinds of errors all the time. So do the others, to say nothing of the lies each tells, including lies about themselves and their opponents. Each is prone to make up facts as they go along. Trump is really no different in this regard than those who have preceded him or those who are in the center ring of their respective circuses in the current election cycle.

Remember, Ronald Wilson Reagan made all manner of gaffes on matters of history and even of policy from time to time. So did George Walker Bush. And don't forgot Leslie Lynch King, Jr.'s (aka Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr.) infamous "liberation" of the countries behind the Iron Curtain in his debate with the equally gaffe prone James Earl Carter, Jr., in San Francisco, California, on October 6, 1976. John Forbes Kerry said that he followed the teachings of "Pope Pius XXIIII." Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Sarah Heath Palin tripped all over themselves in factual errors and policy gaffes. There have been others, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, who just fabricate things about themselves or who carelessly stated policy facts as true that they knew to be false.

As has been noted in so many other commentaries on this site over the years, naturalism breeds ignorance. The level of ignorance that envelopes us today is evocative is vast, compounded by the paucity of grace in the world as a result of the sacramental barrenness of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. The level of ignorance is so vast that most people do not realize how utterly ignorant they are and, worse yet, they do not care to know how ignorant they are. 

Speaking About Baby-Killing on the Fly

Readers of this site should know that I carry no brief for any of the naturalists running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. I have been—and continue to be—critical of each for reasons that have been outlined in the past few months. Such criticism has been founded in an understanding of Catholic truth as applied to the facts of each candidate’s positions. Criticism, however, must be just, and it must be made in the context of actual facts and statements, not media snippets that are used by the adversary to agitate people into frenzied fits.

Such is the case that that occurred as a result of the Christopher Matthews-hosted “town hall” on Wednesday, March 30, 2016, Easter Wednesday, and I want to take a few moments to go through the transcript of that “town hall” as it relates to abortion. Such a review will indicate that Donald Trump, who lacks a true understanding of First Principles, which is why he issues clarification after clarification when making a perceived misstep, was pushed very had by Matthews into taking a position on the sort of punishment to meted out to women who have killed their babies despite the fact that it was obvious Trump had never thought about such a question beforehand.

Let me proceed with the analysis of the transcript, which will be interspersed with a bit of commentary:

MATTHEWS:  OK, look, I'm monopolizing here.

Let's go, young lady? 

TRUMP:  Hello. 

QUESTION:  Hello. I am (inaudible) and have a question on, what is your stance on women's rights and their rights to choose in their own reproductive health? 

TRUMP:  OK, well look, I mean, as you know, I'm pro-life.  Right, I think you know that, and I -- with exceptions, with the three exceptions.  But pretty much, that's my stance.  Is that OK?  You understand? (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)

Donald John Trump understands nothing—and I do mean absolutely nothing—about the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law that prohibit any direct, intentional attack, up to and including one that is deadly, upon an innocent human being at any time for any reason from the first moment of conception until the time of natural death willed by God. No one is “pro-life” who makes a single, solitary “exception” to “Thou shalt not kill” as explicated infallibly by the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

Then again, the so-called "National Right to Life Committee," which takes no stand in oppostion to one of the principal proximate root causes of abortion, contraception, does not demand that candidates oppose all opposition as its official position endorses the deliberate destruction of the innocent preborn in cases where it is alleged that a mother's life is endangered. 

The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a pioneering champion of baby-killing who presided over 70,000 abortions between 1970 and 1974 before quitting for purely scientific reasons once the ulatrasound proved to him the humanity of the preborn baby (he converted to the conciliar structures in 1996), explained on many occasions that medical technology had advanced to such a degree that there is almost never a circumstance in which it is considered to be "medically necessary" to kill a preborn baby to "save" the life of his mother:

The situation where the mother's life is at stake were she to continue a pregnancy is no longer a clinical reality.

Given the state of modern medicine, we can now manage any pregnant woman with any medical affliction successfully, to the natural conclusion of the pregnancy: the birth of a healthy child. [Written statement to the Idaho House of Representatives' State Affairs Committee, February 16, 1990.] (As found in a very good study written in 1994 by Mrs. Judie Brown, the founder and president of the American Life League and Brian Young: Exceptions: Abandoning "The Least of My Brethren," as found at Exceptions: Abandoning the Least of These Thy Brethren.)

If Donald John Trump wants to be truly knowledgeable on the issue of the slaughter of the innocent preborn, which I do not think that he has either the time or the interest in doing, he should the read the aforementioned article by Mrs. Brown and Mr. Young as well as the late Dr. Charles E. Rice's No Exceptions: The Pro-Life Imperative. More importantly than anything else he could read, however, is the allocution that Pope Pius XII gave to an assemby of large families on November 26, 1951, that included a complete and abject rejection of the deliberate targeting of an innocent preborn baby to "save" the life of his mother:

If there is another danger that threatens the family, not since yesterday, but long ago, which, however, at present, is growing visibly, it can become fatal [to societies], that is, the attack and the disruption of the fruit of conjugal morality.

We have, in recent years, taken every opportunity to expose the one or the other essential point of the moral law, and more recently to indicate it as a whole, not only by refuting the errors that corrupt it, but also showing in a positive sense, the office the importance, the value for the happiness of the spouses, children and all family, for stability and the greater social good from their homes up to the State and the Church itself.

At the heart of this doctrine is that marriage is an institution at the service of life. In close connection with this principle, we, according to the constant teaching of the Church, have illustrated a argument that it is not only one of the essential foundations of conjugal morality, but also of social morality in general: namely, that the direct attack innocent human life, as a means to an end - in this case the order to save another life - is illegal.

Innocent human life, whatever his condition, is always inviolate from the first instance of its existence and it can never be attacked voluntarily. This is a fundamental right of human beings. A fundamental value is the Christian conception of life must be respected as valid for the life still hidden in the womb against direct abortion and against all innocent human life thereafter. There can be no direct murders of a child before, during and after childbirth. As established may be the legal distinction between these different stages of development life born or unborn, according to the moral law, all direct attacks on inviolable human life are serious and illegal.

This principle applies to the child's life, like that of mother's. Never, under any circumstances, has the Church has taught that the life of child must be preferred to that of the mother. It would be wrong to set the issue with this alternative: either the child's life or that of mother. No, nor the mother's life, nor that of her child, can be subjected to an act of direct suppression. For the one side and the other the need can be only one: to make every effort to save the life of both, mother and child (see Pious XI Encycl. Casti Connubii, 31 dec. 1930, Acta Ap. Sedis vol. 22, p.. 562-563).

It is one of the most beautiful and noble aspirations of medicine trying ever new ways to ensure both their lives. What if, despite all the advances of science, still remain, and will remain in the future, a doctor says that the mother is going to die unless here child is killed in violation of God's commandment: Thou shalt not kill!  We must strive until the last moment to help save the child and the mother without attacking either as we bow before the laws of nature and the dispositions of Divine Providence.

But - one may object - the mother's life, especially of a mother of a numerous family, is incomparably greater than a value that of an unborn child. The application of the theory of balance of values to the matter which now occupies us has already found acceptance in legal discussions. The answer to this nagging objection is not difficult. The inviolability of the life of an innocent person does not depend by its greater or lesser value. For over ten years, the Church has formally condemned the killing of the estimated life as "worthless', and who knows the antecedents that provoked such a sad condemnation, those who can ponder the dire consequences that would be reached, if you want to measure the inviolability of innocent life at its value, you must well appreciate the reasons that led to this arrangement.

Besides, who can judge with certainty which of the two lives is actually more valuable? Who knows which path will follow that child and at what heights it can achieve and arrive at during his life? We compare Here are two sizes, one of whom nothing is known. We would like to cite an example in this regard, which may already known to some of you, but that does not lose some of its evocative value.

It dates back to 1905. There lived a young woman of noble family and even more noble senses, but slender and delicate health. As a teenager, she had been sick with a small apical pleurisy, which appeared healed; when, however, after contracting a happy marriage, she felt a new life blossoming within her, she felt ill and soon there was a special physical pain that dismayed that the two skilled health professionals, who watched  her with loving care. That old scar of the pleurisy had been awakened and, in the view of the doctors, there was no time to lose to save this gentle lady from death. The concluded that it was necessary to proceed without delay to an abortion.

Even the groom agreed. The seriousness of the case was very painful. But when the obstetrician attending to the mother announced their resolution to proceed with an abortion, the mother, with firm emphasis, "Thank you for your pitiful tips, but I can not truncate the life of my child! I can not, I can not! I feel already throbbing in my breast, it has the right to live, it comes from God must know God and to love and enjoy it." The husband asked, begged, pleaded, and she remained inflexible, and calmly awaited the event.

The child was born regularly, but immediately after the health of the mother went downhill. The outbreak spread to the lungs and the decay became progressive. Two months later she went to extremes, and she saw her little girl growing very well one who had grown very healthy. The mother looked at her robust baby and saw his sweet smile, and then she quietly died.

Several years later there was in a religious institute a very young sister, totally dedicated to the care and education of children abandoned, and with eyes bent on charges with a tender motherly love. She loved the tiny sick children and as if she had given them life. She was the daughter of the sacrifice, which now with her big heart has spread much love among the children of the destitute. The heroism of the intrepid mother was not in vain! (See Andrea Majocchi. " Between burning scissors," 1940, p.. 21 et seq.). But we ask: Is Perhaps the Christian sense, indeed even purely human, vanished in this point of no longer being able to understand the sublime sacrifice of the mother and the visible action of divine Providence, which made quell'olocausto born such a great result? (Pope Pius XII, Address to Association of Large Families, November 26, 1951; I used Google Translate to translate this address from the Italian as it is found at AAS Documents, p. 855; you will have to scroll down to page 855, which takes some time, to find the address.)

Let me repeat: Pope Pius XII slammed the National-Not-Right-to-Life Committee, George Walker Bush, Donald John. Trump, Rafael Edward Cruz, John Ellis Bush, Christopher Christie, Michael Dale Huckabee, Cara Carleton Sneed Fiorina, Marco Antonio Rubio, Richard John Santorum, Randal Howard Paul, Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr. (a member of the fiercely anti-Catholic Seventh Day Adventist sect who supports "brain death" and has himself done research on fetal stem cells while dismissing the execution of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo by means of the withdrawal of her hydration and nutrition as "much ado about nothing--see Ten Years Later), and other all supposedly "pro-life" pols who support any exceptions to the inviolability of innocent human life at any time, including that for the "life of the mother."

As noted just above, no mother has any "choice" to be made between her own life and that of her preborn child. Although the improvements in medical technology have made it possible for expectant mothers with serious maladies to be treated in a manner that will permit a baby to be delivered at the point of viability, whereupon more aggressive treatment of a mother's condition can be undertaken, if possible and advised, it is still nevertheless the case that in those rare circumstances, which certainly do occur now and again, where a mother is faced with the possibility of sacrificing her own life so that her preborn baby can be born. A mother formed in the truths of the Catholic Faith knows that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ meant it when He said the following:

[12] This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. [13] Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15: 12)

A mother who knows the Catholic Faith understands that, as difficult as it can be to those steeped in emotionalism and sentimentality, she can, if she dies in a state of Sanctifying Grace, do more for her child from eternity than she ever could here on the face of this earth. Moreover, those who have died in a state of Sanctifying Grace are more perfectly united to us than they ever were on the face of this earth.

We must think supernaturally at all times. We must think as Catholics at all times no matter the natural pull of human emotions and heartstrings that will certainly affect each of us at various times. We are flesh and blood human beings. We would be heartless creatures if we were not torn in difficult circumstances of facing  an earthly separation from our loved ones by means of what is considered to be an "early" death. We must love God's Holy Will first and foremost, praying to His Most Blessed Mother to send us graces to accept His will so that we can obey it as we observe every precept of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Naturalists, of course, do not understand this, which is why almost all of those in public life who say that they are "pro-life" support the direct, intentional taking of innocent human lives in their mothers' wombs under any conditions at all. Such people cannot see the contradiction represented by claiming to be "pro-life" while supporting the direct killing of babies in some instances.

Donald John Trump, who is completely unschooled in First and Last Things, does not understand this. Neither does Christopher Matthews, something that the transcript below will prove beyond any doubt:

MATTHEWS:  What should the law be on abortion?

TRUMP:  Well, I have been pro-life. 

MATTHEWS:  I know, what should the law -- I know your principle, that's a good value.  But what should be the law?  (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)

Interjection Number Two:

Christopher Matthews was setting up Donald John Trump for a line of questions that he knew would expose Trump’s lack of having given the matter of the surgical execution of the innocent preborn any sustained thought. For far from believing that “pro-life” is a “good value,” Christopher Matthews, a 1967 graduate of Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, is on record as stating that the 2012 Republican Party platform on abortion was akin to Mohammedan Sharia law, a veritable “imposition of religion” upon society:

MSNBC host Chris Matthews suggested that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan if elected would run the country according to a “religious theory” -- likening their pro-life stance to "Shariah."

Matthew made the remarks during his preview to the Tuesday night presidential debate in which he also suggested the Republican presidential ticket would give a just-fertilized egg the 14th Amendment rights of life, liberty and property.

“Whatever that means,” Matthews continued, as reported first by the website NewsBusters. “An egg that had just been fertilized, right after sex, if you will.”

“And to have that notion that that would be a person under this personhood thing that Ryan’s pushing, and under the 14th Amendment rights, the platform that Romney’s running on. This is extremism. I say (to the) center right tonight -- it's almost like Shariah."

Matthew also suggested Romney and Ryan were telling Americans that they would “operate under a religious theory, under a religious belief. We're going to run our country this way, to the point of making a woman's decision to have an abortion, her reproductive rights, as criminal, perhaps murderous.” (Matthews Suggests Romney and Ryan Would Run the United States of America Under Religious Theory.)

Although the Catholic renegade named Christopher Matthews had established his fear of the pro-life position decades ago (he did, after all, work for six years as the Chief of Staff for the late pro-abortion Catholic named United States Representative Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., who was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from January 3, 1977, to January 3, 1987), he has intensified his demagoguery in the past fifteen years or so. That Donald John Trump was as ignorant of this fact as he was about a Wisconsin talk show host named Charlie Sykes, who is on a crusade to stop Trump’s nomination, before appearing on Sykes’s radio program speaks very poorly for those advising him. Bluff and bluster can carry one only so far. A good deal of preparation and study are need if one seeks to discourse on a variety of subjects simultaneously, and it is always a nifty idea to know a little bit about one’s interrogator.

Trump was lulled to sleep by the fact that he has been a frequent guest on Matthews’s Hardball program over years. Indeed, it was on one occasion in the late-1990s that Matthews, seeming to be in awe of his interviewee, said, “You ought to run for president,” to which Trump replied something along the lines of, “Are you kidding me? Look at Clinton and the women. What do you think would happen to me with all the women?” This was Trump’s way of saying that he had the same sort of skeletons as then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, upon whom Matthews had turned against following the Clinton’s likes about Monicagate.

Christopher Matthews is not an “honest broker” when it comes to the issue of the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn. Matthews constantly plays the role of demagogue by claiming that those who seek to restore full legal protection to the innocent preborn are religious “fanatics” even though some of the pagans of ancient Greece and Rome were unstinting in their denunciations the barbaric killing of preborn babies:

The moral proscription of the direct, intentional taking of any innocent human life that is found in the Natural Law was explicated by some of the pagans of antiquity, including Ovid, Juvenal, and, of course, the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates himself:

Of what avail to fair woman to rest free from the burdens of war [i.e. pregnancy], nor choose with shield in arm to march in the fierce array, if, free from peril of battle, she suffer wounds from weapons of her own, and arm her unforeseeing hands to her own undoing?

She who first plucked forth the tender life deserved to die in the warfare she began. Can it be that, to spare your bosom the reproach of lines, you would scatter the tragic sands of deadly combat? -De Nuce, lines 22-23; cf. Amores 2.13 (Ovid, 43 B.C.-65 A.D.)

Poor women…endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing to which their lot condemns them; but how often does a gilded bed contain a woman that is lying in it? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb. (Juvenal, c.57/67-127, Pagan Sources.)

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art. (Hippocrates, The Hippocratic Oath.)

A “religious issue,” Christopher Matthews?

No, the taking of innocent of human life is proscribed by the binding precepts of the Natural Law, which, to instruct you on what you should have learned at Holy Cross College from 1963 to 1967, to the immutable moral laws that exist in the nature of things that can be known from reason alone, unaided by the light of Divine revelation, and do not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity.

Go argue with Cicero, Christopher Matthews, and see if the Natural Law was “invented” by the Catholic Church:

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

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

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

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

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

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established ( by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

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

Christopher Matthews believes none of this. Why should he? He was formed in the cradle of conciliarism and has lived into his seventies to see a putative "pope" and his trusted "cardinals" question the existence of the Natural Law and thus of any concept of obective moral norms that would make unrepentant sinners, including those steeped in aberrant acts of gross perversity, that would fill the hearts of such people with guilt. Matthews has lived long enough to see his brand of subjective "Catholicism" (which is nothing other than Modernism) receive open "papal" approbation. Quite a heady thing for a man who sanctimoniously condemns those who know that God's laws bind all human beings at all times and in all circumstances.

Back to the Matthews’s line of questioning of Trump eight days ago now: 

TRUMP:  Well, you know, they've set the law and frankly the judges -- I mean, you're going to have a very big election coming up for that reason, because you have judges where it's a real tipping point. 

MATTHEWS:  I know. 

TRUMP:  And with the loss the Scalia, who was a very strong conservative... 

MATTHEWS:  I understand. 

TRUMP: This presidential election is going to be very important, because when you say, "what's the law, nobody knows what's the law going to be.  It depends on who gets elected, because somebody is going to appoint conservative judges and somebody is going to appoint liberal judges, depending on who wins. 

MATTHEWS:  I know.  I never understood the pro-life position. 

TRUMP:  Well, a lot of people do understand. 

MATTHEWS:  I never understood it.  Because I understand the principle, it's human life as people see it. 

TRUMP:  Which it is. 

MATTHEWS:  But what crime is it?

TRUMP:  Well, it's human life. 

MATTHEWS:  No, should the woman be punished for having an abortion? 

TRUMP:  Look... 

MATTHEWS:  This is not something you can dodge. 

TRUMP:  It's a -- no, no... 

MATTHEWS:  If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under law.  Should abortion be punished? 

TRUMP:  Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party and Conservative Republicans would say, "yes, they should be punished." 

MATTHEWS:  How about you? 

TRUMP:  I would say that it's a very serious problem.  And it's a problem that we have to decide on.  It's very hard. 

MATTHEWS:  But you're for banning it? 

TRUMP:  I'm going to say -- well, wait.  Are you going to say, put them in jail?  Are you -- is that the (inaudible) you're talking about?   

MATTHEWS:  Well, no, I'm asking you because you say you want to ban it.  What does that mean? 

TRUMP:  I would -- I am against -- I am pro-life, yes. 

MATTHEWS:  What is ban -- how do you ban abortion?  How do you actually do it? 

TRUMP:  Well, you know, you will go back to a position like they had where people will perhaps go to illegal places. 

MATTHEWS:  Yes? 

TRUMP:  But you have to ban it. 

MATTHEWS:  You banning, they go to somebody who flunked out of medical school. 

(Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Three:

Sure, Christopher Matthews, with “safe and legal” abortion women can go to “doctors” such as Kermit Gosnell, who was able to run his own house of horrors because the abortion lobby made sure that its paid stooges in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania did not enforce existing regulations of this bloody trade.

Donald John Trump is ignorant of facts. Christopher Matthews is a demagogue.

One can see that Donald John Trump was dumbfounded by Matthews’s persistence in getting him to describe what the “crime” of abortion is and how it should be punished. One can see also that Christopher Matthews does not believe that a preborn baby is a human being and that those seeking to defend the life of the human being want to “give” rights to being whose very humanity he appears to deny.

Christopher Matthews is thus willfully ignorant of the plain facts of biology as a preborn baby’s DNA structure is established at the moment of fertilization, a moment that he mocked four years ago. The only thing added to that child from the moment of fertilization until birth is time and nutrition, and only a human being has human DNA (admitting that all manner of monstrous scientific experiments are being conducted that seek to manufacture hybrid creatures, which is nothing other than science fiction come life as a direct result of Martin Luther’s revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church). Christopher Matthews’s argument was not with Donald Trump. It is with God and the simple facts of biology that He, the Creator and the Author of life, willed into existence in the first week of Creation.

Matthews was on a mission to press Trump as hard as he could because he, Matthews, does not believe that is either desirable or permissible to “force” a woman to bear a child she does not want to bring to birth.

In other words, Christopher Matthews, who supports a variety of nanny-statists who use the civil law as a weapon to force citizens to wear seat-belts when driving or riding in a motor vehicle and to place warning labels on packages of cigarettes and smoking and chewing tobacco (which Mayor Warren Wilhem/Bill deBlasio of the City of New York, New York) or require the content or sodium and sugar to be listed on restaurant menus, believes that the accepted fact of abortion as a supposed “constitutional right” is beyond question and that is irreversible because a ban on it would be unenforceable in the practical order of things.

What this misses, however, is the simple truth that human positive law (those laws and ordinances made by human institutions of civil governance) serves a two-fold function.

Human positive law serves to educate citizens as what is legally permissible or impermissible and it serves as a means to punish those who violate it.

Obviously, human positive law can be abused by men to permit that which is impermissible and to punish that which is no crime at all, which has been done by tyrants throughout history and is being done at the present time in the “civilized” and supposedly “free” Western world.

That having been noted, human positive law is supposed to serve as an educative tool to deter citizens from behaving wantonly in violation of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as well as those ordinances that God leaves to human wisdom to institute for the provision of public safety and social order.

It was simply not the case prior to the 1960s that over a million women a year were seeking to kill their babies in back-alley abortuaries. As Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who was one of the pioneers in the pro-baby-killing movement in the 1960s, noted so frequently, he worked with others to exaggerate the numbers of women killing their children in order to create a “demand” for a change in the civil law to “save” the lives of women choosing to employ the services of the back-alley butchers. Nathanson and his confederates knew that law does change behavior, and that it would be, humanly speaking, very difficult to reverse “liberalized” abortion laws once women began to rely upon them in the name of “freedom” to do with their “bodies” as they pleased.

Given the fact that the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn has become an institutionalized fact life in the United States of America, it is therefore very important for one who aspires for public office to speak to the truth clarity. Farce that the American electoral process is and will ever remain, the only possible rational good that can be accomplished by running for office is to use the public forum as a means to help souls to think clearly about matters about which most people emote and others, such as Matthews and his pro-abortion pals, demagogue.  

Dissatisfied with Trump’s efforts to refuse to take his bait, Matthews kept pressing and pressing until the part that made headlines and was played out of context as a snippet on news radio programs, although Trump pressed Matthews on the fact on the latter’s dissent from Catholic moral teaching:  

TRUMP:  Are you Catholic? 

MATTHEWS:  Yes, I think...

TRUMP:  And how do you feel about the Catholic Church's position? 

MATTHEWS:  Well, I accept the teaching authority of my Church on moral issues. 

TRUMP:  I know, but do you know their position on abortion? 

MATTHEWS:  Yes, I do. 

TRUMP:  And do you concur with the position? 

MATTHEWS:  I concur with their moral position but legally, I get to the question -- here's my problem with it... 

(LAUGHTER) 

(Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Four:  

Mind you, I have not seen the town hall, either when it was telecast or as it is stored online as I do not have the gigabyte allowance or the time available to watch such a time-consuming program.

However, the transcript speaks for itself, and Donald John Trump did what no Catholic “bishop” has ever done with Christopher Matthews, namely, question his interrogator about the conflict between his “personal” position and the teaching of the Catholic Church. Although, again, I support none of the naturalists, including Trump, for reasons explained many times on this site, Trump’s interrogation of Matthews was excellent, but it led to succumbing to Matthews’s pressure to answer what kind of penalties should be imposed upon women who kill their babies.

The truth is that Pope Leo XIII condemned anyone who would dare to separate his personal beliefs from his public positions and/or actions:

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

 

One must exhibit Catholic integrity, not seek to take refuge in the lie advanced by Martin Luther, namely, that a prince be a Christian but it is not as a Christian that he ought to rule:

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

Christopher Matthews lacks that integrity as his “religion” is Democratic Party “activism,” something that has long been the legacy of the manner in which Catholic immigrants permitted themselves to be socialized into the “mainstream” of American life by means involvement in the political party that welcomed them to advance its own ends—the acquisition and retention of power—then just as much as it is doing so with illegal immigrants today. Many, although not all, Catholics who came to this country in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries equated being a member of the Democratic Party as something required by one’s baptism as a Catholic. Christopher Matthews sees “liberalism” as the means to social salvation, eschewing the fact that the Catholic Church is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, and he, like such pro-abortion stalwarts as the late Mario Matthew Cuomo and Edward Moore Kennedy, among so many others, believes he has a mission to tell what he thinks is the Catholic Church to keep out of “private” matters.

Then New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo put it his own quite patented demagogic way when gave the principal nominating speech at Madison Square Garden in the City of New York in behalf of Clinton's nomination on July 15, 1992, athe 1992 Democratic National Convention. 

America needs Bill Clinton for still another reason. We need a leader who will stop the Republican attempt, through laws and through the courts, to tell us what god to believe in, and how to apply that god's judgment to our schoolrooms, our bedrooms and our bodies. (Nominating Speech by Mario M. Cuomo) 

This is, in essence, what Christopher Matthews was saying to Donald John Trump.  

Trump pushed some really hot buttons that got Matthews quite exercised:

TRUMP:  No, no, but let me ask you, but what do you say about your Church?  

MATTHEWS:  It's not funny. 

TRUMP:  Yes, it's really not funny. 

What do you say about your church?  They're very, very strong. 

MATTHEWS:  They're allowed to -- but the churches make their moral judgments, but you running for president of the United States will be chief executive of the United States.  Do you believe...  (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Six:

There is only one true Church, Mr. Matthews. It is the Catholic Church. None other. She does not make “moral judgments.” She is the sole and infallible explicator of all that is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Every Catholic is duty-bound to obey all that is taught by the Catholic Church. No Catholic is morally “free” to dissent from the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Well, back to Donald Trump’s prosecution of Christopher Matthews, which is really the untold story of last week’s MSNBC town hall:

TRUMP:  No, but... 

MATTHEWS:  Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no as a principle? (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Seven:

Perry Mason, call your office. Christopher Matthews was on a mission to make Donald Trump look bad even before Trump began to interrogate him so much that it got under his morally relativist skin.

That having been noted, though, Donald John Trump was singularly unprepared to answer to return “serve” in this instance as his understanding of issues is not very deep, which is why he can say such things as Planned Barrenhood does “good” things for women and that education is an important function of the Federal government of the United States of America.

TRUMP:  The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment. 

MATTHEWS:  For the woman? 

TRUMP:  Yes, there has to be some form. 

MATTHEWS:  Ten cents?  Ten years?  What? 

TRUMP:  Let me just tell you -- I don't know.  That I don't know.  That I don't know.  

MATTHEWS:  Why not? 

TRUMP:  I don't know. 

MATTHEWS:  You take positions on everything else.

TRUMP:  Because I don't want to -- I frankly, I do take positions on everything else.  It's a very complicated position.  (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Eight:

This is what made all the headlines of radio newscasts (and I suppose television newscasts) as well as the commentary in cyberspace. The “controversy,” though, was generated by a man with a guilty conscience, Christopher Matthews:

MATTHEWS:  But you say, one, that you're pro-life meaning that you want to ban it. 

TRUMP:  But wait a minute, wait a minute.  But the Catholic Church is pro-life. 

MATTHEWS:  I'm not talking about my religion. 

TRUMP:  No, no, I am talking about your religion.  Your religion -- I mean, you say that you're a very good Catholic.  Your religion is your life.  Let me ask you this...

MATTHEWS:  I didn't say very good. I said I'm Catholic.  

(LAUGHTER) 

And secondly, I'm asking -- you're running for President.  

TRUMP:  No, no...  

MATTHEWS:  I'm not. 

TRUMP:  Chris -- Chris. 

MATTHEWS:  I'm asking you, what should a woman face if she chooses to have an abortion?  

TRUMP:  I'm not going to do that. 

MATTHEWS:  Why not? 

TRUMP:  I'm not going to play that game.  

MATTHEWS:  Game?  

TRUMP:  You have... 

MATTHEWS: You said you're pro-life.  

TRUMP:  I am pro-life. 

MATTHEWS: That means banning abortion. 

TRUMP:  And so is the Catholic Church pro-life. 

MATTHEWS:  But they don't control the -- this isn't Spain, the Church doesn't control the government. (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Nine:

Here is a little newsflash for you, Christopher Matthews: Spain does not recognize the Catholic Church as its official religion. What appear to be officials of the Catholic Church does not control the government.

Matthew’s invocation of Spain calls to mind the brutal efforts of Thomas Cromwell, who succeeded Saint Thomas More as the Chancellor of the Realm when More resigned after taking the oath of loyalty to King Henry VIII as the “supreme head of the Church in England,” to bludgeon More’s longtime friend, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, into serving on rump panel that was being convened to persecute More:

CROMWELL The King particularly wishes you to be active in the matter.

NORFOLK (Winded) He has not told me that.

CROMWELL (Politely) Indeed? He told me.

NORFOLK But why?

CROMWELL We feel that, since you are known to have been a friend of More's, your participation will show that there is nothing in the nature of a "persecution," but only the strict processes of law. As indeed you've just demonstrated. I'll tell the King of your loyalty to your friend. If you like, I'll tell him that you "want no part of it," too.

NORFOLK (Furious) Are you threatening me, Cromwell?

CROMWELL My dear Norfolk . . . This isn't Spain.  (Script from A Man For All Seasons.)

Mr. Matthews, only the following states recognize the Catholic Church as their official religion: Costa Rica, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, The State of Vatican City.

Pope Saint Pius X made it clear that the civil state has the obligation to pursue the common temporal good in light of man’s last end, which is the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven:

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. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)  

Civil leaders must foster the conditions wherein men can best sanctify and to save their souls as members of the Catholic Church, and those in civil authority must yield to the authority of the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls. The binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law apply to men as individuals and when they act collectively in positions of civil authority. True liberty comes from obeying God in all that pertains to the good of souls, not in the assertion of one’s own will in contradiction of His eternal laws. Such is licentiousness, not liberty.

Moreover, Christopher Matthews's vigorous defense of baby-killing under the civil law and his most shallow, sophisic invocation of render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars demonstrates that he has zero familiarity with the patrimony of the Catholic Church concerning the necessity of opposing unjust laws, a patrimony that was summarized as follows by Pope Leo XIII in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

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

Then again, Christopher Matthews believes that it unjust to stop women from killing their babies, not to permit them to do so, thereby placing his soul in great jeopardy in the objective order of things, recognizing that God alone knows the subjective state of human souls.

I know that I am casting my pearls before swine, namely, the likes of Christopher Matthews and other Catholics of his ilk, including the false "pontiff" at the Casa Santa Marta. However, perhaps one reader of this site will be helped by this exercise.

I return now to the transcript of the MSNBC town hall:

TRUMP:  What is the punishment under the Catholic Church?  What is the... 

MATTHEWS: Let me give something from the New Testament, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."  Don't ask me about my religion.  (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.)  

Interjection Number Ten:

Touchy, touchy, Christopher Matthews. Donald Trump really got under your skin.

Here is another newsflash for you, Mr. Matthews: Caesar does not have any authority to contravene the laws of God. The caesars of this world are bound to render under God what is His due, starting with a recognition of His true religion and a due submission to the authority of His Holy Church, founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, in all that appertains to the good of souls. While the Church and State have autonomous spheres of competency, she has the right to interpose herself if civil leaders propose to do something—or have in fact done something—contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and thus harmful to the common temporal good and to the eternal good of souls.

This is how Pope Pius IX and his successor, Pope Leo XIII, explained this irreformable teaching: 

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

So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from 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.)

Christopher Matthews is just nine years younger than another American, a South American, that is, by the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. His line of questioning Donald Trump was worthy of the Argentine Apostate himself as both reject the immutable truths contained in Quanta Cura and Immortale Dei. 

Yes, there is more of the transcript to go:

TRUMP:  No, no... 

MATTHEWS:  I'm asking you.  You want to be president of the United States. 

TRUMP:  You told me that... 

MATTHEWS:  You tell me what the law should be. 

TRUMP:  I have -- I have not determined... 

MATTHEWS:  Just tell me what the law should be.  You say you're pro-life. 

TRUMP:  I am pro-life. 

MATTHEWS:  What does that mean? 

TRUMP:  With exceptions.  I am pro-life. 

I have not determined what the punishment would be. 

MATTHEWS:  Why not? 

TRUMP:  Because I haven't determined it. 

MATTHEWS:  When you decide to be pro-life, you should have thought of it.  Because... 

TRUMP:  No, you could ask anybody who is pro-life... 

MATTHEWS:  OK, here's the problem -- here's my problem with this, if you don't have a punishment for abortion -- I don't believe in it, of course -- people are going to find a way to have an abortion. (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.) 

Interjection Number Eleven:

This is the sort of sophistic sloganeering about the chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn babies that has been used for four decades now.

Do we have to wait for all bank robberies to stop to pass legislation forbidding such robberies an applying civil penalties upon those who commit them?

Do we have to wait for all citizens to stop speeding before passing legislation to prohibit speeding and penalize speeders?

Men will always break the laws of God and the just laws of their communities and nations. This does not mean that we surrender to anarchistic libertarianism.

To the final part of the transcript:

TRUMP:  You don't believe in what? 

MATTHEWS:  I don't believe in punishing anybody for having an abortion. 

TRUMP:  OK, fine.  OK, (inaudible). 

MATTHEWS:  Of course not.  I think it's a woman's choice.  

TRUMP:  So you're against the teachings of your Church?

MATTHEWS:  I have a view -- a moral view -- but I believe we live in a free country, and I don't want to live in a country so fascistic that it could stop a person from making that decision. 

TRUMP:  But then you are... 

MATTHEWS:  That would be so invasive. 

TRUMP:  I know but I've heard you speaking... 

MATTHEWS:  So determined of a society that I wouldn't able -- one we are familiar with.  And Donald Trump, you wouldn't be familiar with. 

TRUMP:  But I've heard you speaking so highly about your religion and your Church. 

MATTHEWS:  Yes. 

TRUMP:  Your Church is very, very strongly as you know, pro-life. 

MATTHEWS:  I know. 

TRUMP:  What do you say to your Church? 

MATTHEWS:  I say, I accept your moral authority.  In the United States, the people make the decision, the courts rule on what's in the Constitution, and we live by that.  That's why I say. 

TRUMP:  Yes, but you don't live by it because you don't accept it. You can't accept it.  You can't accept it.  You can't accept it. 

MATTHEWS:  Can we go back to matters of the law and running for president because matters of law, what I'm talking about, and this is the difficult situation you've placed yourself in. 

By saying you're pro-life, you mean you want to ban abortion.  How do you ban abortion without some kind of sanction?  Then you get in that very tricky question of a sanction, a fine on human life which you call murder? 

TRUMP:  It will have to be determined. 

MATTHEWS:  A fine, imprisonment for a young woman who finds herself pregnant? 

TRUMP:  It will have to be determined. 

MATTHEWS:  What about the guy that gets her pregnant?  Is he responsible under the law for these abortions?  Or is he not responsible for an abortion? 

TRUMP:  Well, it hasn't -- it hasn't -- different feelings, different people.  I would say no.

MATTHEWS:  Well, they're usually involved. (Full Transcript of MSNBC Donald Trump Moderated by Christopher Matthews.) 

Final Interjection: 

Well, this entire line of questioning was complete showboating on the part of Christopher Matthews as he knows that even if the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, the Feast of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, the surgical execution of the innocent preborn would continue as is in forty-three of the fifty states.

Moreover, the legislation that existed at the state level in the decades before those two nefarious Supreme Court decisions did not punish the women, who were treated as a second victim by the law. A very good study by Mr. Clark Forsythe of Americans United for Life provides the facts of the matter in a very comprehensive manner. (The States Did not Prosecute Women for Abortion Prior to Roe v. Wade.)

Although it is certainly true today that many women resort to the surgical killing of their children with wanton callousness as a result of their total self-absorption and obsession with carnal gratification as an end in and of itself, there remain many others who are exploited by “boyfriends,” husbands, casual acquaintances, parents, employers, and physicians to “choose” that which they have do right from God to do: to kill a child whose only “crime” has been to be conceived. Such women have been catechized by the concentration camps known as public schools and universities and, of course, by the so-called “entertainment” industry into becoming veritable “daughters of Eve,” not daughter of the New Eve, Our Lady, who made possible our very salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the Father at the Annunciation. 

This having been noted, though, everyone participating in an abortion commits a Mortal Sin in the objective order of things and thus brings down the wrath of God upon their souls. Catholics who participate in an abortion suffer the automatic penalty of excommunication, and must then present themselves to a true bishop or a true priest to be Absolved of their sins and then to have the penalty of excommunication lifed. Moreover, every woman who kills her child suffers spiritual and emotional scars that may cause some of them to resort to drugs or to drink to anesthetize a guilt that they do not admit exists or is attribute to the crime of having killed their own child. Some suffer bodily harm, up to and including unintentiona sterilization and death. No one "escapes" from an abortion in this life, and no one will be able to escape from it in eternity if he or she does not repent before death. There are many supernatural and natural consequences of child-killing, and the fact that the civil state did not punish women before Roe v. Wade is in no way to minimize the accountability that one must make to God for taking an innocent human women.

In this regard, of course, Planned Barrenhood has been particularly exploitive of women in pressuring them to kill their children, which is one of the reasons that Donald Trump’s praise of this organization that has been evil from its very inceptions is more telling of his lack of thought on the issue of abortion than not having a ready answer for Christopher Matthews’s repeated efforts on the question of who gets punished for abortion. 

Matthews showed himself to be a complete hypocrite and a shameless demagogue by the way in which he went after Trump on the red herring of punishing women. Christopher Matthews believes that no one should be punished for an abortion. Yet it is there is one who is punished with brutality: the innocent preborn child.

Unfortunately for Donald John Trump, however, his lack of preparedness caused him to fold pretty much in the manner of Willard Mitt Romney four years ago when he, Romney, had to “clarify” his own ever-shifting views on the surgical execution of the innocent preborn.

This is what Trump said to John Dickerson on the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Face the Nation program on Sunday, April 3, 2016, Low Sunday:

DICKERSON: Let me ask you next about abortion. What would you do to further restrict women's access to abortions as president?

TRUMP: Well, look, I just -- I know where you're going. And I just want to say, a question was asked to me. And it was asked in a very hypothetical, and it was said illegal, illegal.

I have been told by some people that was an older line answer and that was an answer that was given on the basis of an older line from years ago, very -- on a very conservative basis. But...

DICKERSON: Your original answer, you mean.

TRUMP: My original.

DICKERSON: About punishing women. TRUMP: But I was asked as a hypothetical, hypothetically, hypothetically.

The laws are set now on abortion. And that's the way they're going to remain until they're changed.

DICKERSON: Because you had said you wanted -- you told Bloomberg in January that you believed abortion should be banned at some point in pregnancy. Where would you do the ban?

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: I would have liked to have seen this be a states' rights. I would have preferred states' rights. I think it would have been better if it were up to the states.

But, right now, the laws are set. And that's the way the laws are.

DICKERSON: But do you have a feeling how they should change? There are a lot of laws you want to change. You have talking about them, everything from libel to torture. Anything you would want to change on abortion?

TRUMP: At this moment, the laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way.

DICKERSON: Did you think it's murder, abortion?

TRUMP: I have my opinions on it, but I would rather not comment on it.

DICKERSON: You said you're very pro-life. Pro-life views it that it's abortion -- that abortion is murder.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: But I do have my opinions on it. I would rather -- I just don't think it's an appropriate forum.

DICKERSON: But you don't disagree with that proposition that it's murder?

TRUMP: What proposition?

DICKERSON: That abortion is murder?

TRUMP: No, I don't disagree with it.  (Transcript of Face the Nation Interview with Donald Trump, April 3, 2016, Low Sunday.)

Such utter confusion of first principles.

Trump’s confusing pattern of self-contradiction when pressed about the issue of abortion is merely demonstrates the continuing effects of the theological and moral relativism that were sent into motion by Father Martin Luther, O.S.A. on October 31, 1517, and that have been capitalized upon by the combined forces of Judeo-Masonic naturalism for the past three hundred years now. Donald John Trump is thus as much a product and victim of Modernity as Christopher Matthews is a product and victim of Modernism.

Oh, by the way, one of Trump’s representatives, Hope Hicks, issued the following “clarification” following the release of a summary of his remarks that was issued by the Columbia Broadcasting System on April 1, 2016, Easter Friday:

"Mr. Trump gave an accurate account of the law as it is today and made clear it must stay that way now --until he is President," Hicks said. "Then he will change the law through his judicial appointments and allow the states to protect the unborn. There is nothing new or different here." (Trump Says Don't Change Abortion Laws.)

The “clarification” made it clear that it would be up to the courts, not to a “President Trump” or to Congress to protect the preborn at the state level. Alas, as was noted in part one of this very long commentary, it is not up to human beings to “decide” matters of moral right and wrong. It is not up to the “states.” It is up to the people to obey the law of God and for those in civil government to conform the civil law to it. (See my four part series about Obergefell v. Hodges, June 26, 2015: Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part one, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part two, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part three, and Arguing Who Decides That Which is Beyond Humans To Decide, part four.)

Certainly, men can argue about the sort of punishments that should be meted out to those adjudged guilty of various crimes, including the killing of the preborn, after the administration of the due process of law. Men are not free, however, to argue about that which is beyond the ability of mere mortals to decide.

It is the “physicians” and the owners of abortuaries, including the members of the corporations that own hospitals, who would be jailed for a long time, perhaps for life, if not sentenced to death for the killing of the innocent preborn if we lived in a country informed by Catholic truth.

Instead, we live in a world where baby-killers are honored members of their communities. One of them. Emma Bonino, the Margaret Sanger of Italy, was even hailed recently by “Pope Francis” for her work with refugees in Italy:

February 25, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- In a February 8 interview with one of Italy’s most prominent dailies, Corriere Della Serra, Pope Francis praised Italy’s leading proponent of abortion – Emma Bonino -- as one of the nation’s “forgotten greats,” comparing her to great historical figures such as Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman.  Knowing that his praise of her may be controversial, the Pope said that she offered the best advice to Italy on learning about Africa, and admitted she thinks differently from us. “True, but never mind,” he said. “We have to look at people, at what they do.”

At 27, Bonino had an illegal abortion and then worked with the Information Centre on Sterilization and Abortion which boasted over 10,000 abortions. There are famous photos of Bonino performing illegal abortions using a homemade device operated by a bicycle pump.  Arrested for the then-illegal activity she spent a few days in jail and was acquitted and entered politics.

When she was appointed Italy’s foreign minister in 2013 there was a general outcry from life and family leaders at the appalling situation.

Responding to the Pope’s praise of Bonino, pro-life leaders in Italy expressed disbelief.  “How can the pope praise a woman that is best known in Italy for practicing illegal abortion and promoting abortion?” commented Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro, who was until last year the head of the Rome office of Human Life International.

Luca Volonte, an Italian politician and the president of the pro-life Novae Terrae Foundation, told LifeSiteNews he believed the Pope “was not really informed about how much Mrs. Bonino has done in Italy and at the international level to promote abortion and euthanasia.”  Even though he admits “she did well in Egypt,” he adds that even there “she promoted her anti-life values.”  The Pope, said Volonte, “was wrong and worse were the members of His secretariat for not informing him.”

The Pope’s possible ignorance of Bonino’s stance is unlikely given his justifications in the interview.  She has been for decades the most prominent supporter of abortion in Italy.  Moreover, the Pope already received criticism for his contact with Bonino in 2015 when he called her about her cancer and invited her to the Vatican. (Jorge Calls Abortion Promoter One of Italy's Forgotten Great.)

The only thing “great” about Emma Bonino is that she is a great killer of innocent babies.

Although I am unstinting in my criticism of Donald Trump (who has yet to realize that one in public life is going to be criticized and to be asked hostile questions all the time) and every other naturalist in public life today, we live at a time when the supposed “pope” makes the ignorance of naturalists seem altogether understanding. This is neither to indemnify nor to enable Donald Trump’s lack of knowledge of first principles.

It is, though, to note that our situation is going to get worse, not better, in the years ahead, because even the half-hearted pro-life rhetoric that used to emanate from the likes of Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul  II (Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI made a conscious decision not to speak about abortion very much) that caused no Catholic or non-Catholic public official to stop supporting the chemical and surgical execution of babies has been replaced by the open embrace of such officials and open practitioners of every perverted moral practice imaginable.

It was, believe it or not, seven months ago now, that Bergoglio referred to the execution of innocent children as an “existential dilemma,” thereby echoing the exact tenor of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro’s remarks at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, on Sunday, May 17, 2009:

Many others, on the other hand, although experiencing this moment as a defeat, believe that they have no other option. I think in particular of all the women who have resorted to abortion. I am well aware of the pressure that has led them to this decision. I know that it is an existential and moral ordeal. I have met so many women who bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision. What has happened is profoundly unjust; yet only understanding the truth of it can enable one not to lose hope. (Jorge to Rino: Yo, Time to Blow Some More Smoke in the Faces of the Gullible.)

As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called The Audacity of Hope. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an email from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life, but that's not what was preventing him from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website - an entry that said I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor said that he had assumed I was a reasonable person, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable.

He wrote, "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."

Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor's letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn't change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that - when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

That's when we begin to say, "Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.

So let's work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women."

Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature. (Text of Obama/Soetoro Speech at the University of Notre Dame du Lac.)

Although Bergoglio was not wrong to say that many women have killed their babies surgically as a result of pressure being placed upon them by the fathers of their children and/or their own parents and friends, to say nothing of the butchers at facilities such as Planned Barrenhood and of obstetricians and gynecologists who love to strike fear into the hearts of older women about the "dangers" to themeslves and their preborn child if they do not kill the baby, the false "pope" did not name the source of this pressure, thus leaving open for the consideration of other "pressures" (such as the necessity of holding onto a particular job, pursuing one's studies, facing economic poverty, the possibility of a child to be born with one or more birth defects) as making a woman's "decision" more difficult to the extent that they experience what he describes as an "existential and moral ordeal." Obama/Soetoro referred to a "heart-rending decision."

Without for a moment minimizing the scars of women who have had their babies killed by surgical executioners, the fact remains that there is no "decision" to be made, only a child to be welcomed and love unto his eternal salvation. A woman must be instructed in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance that she must be sorry not only for the act of child-killing but must repent of the act of fornication that led to the conception of the child she paid to have murdered if she is in the state or to repent for the act of adultery in the case of a married woman. Moreover, married women who have killed their children because of pressure from husbands and/or the various ecomonic considerations must be counseled to welcome as many or as few children as God wills for them to have without seeking to frustrate the natural process of the transmission of life. Then again, the counterfeit church of concilairism has inverted the ends of marriage, making it "understandable" to the likes of Bergoglio that a married woman might have to "agonize" over accepting the child given her by God.

It is no accident that the figure of Antichrist in the White House who supports unrestricted baby-killing and the figure of Antichrist in the Casa Santa Marta within the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River who says tht he is opposed such killing speak of the crime of willful murder with such great "understanding" of the "difficulties" involved. Most, although far from all, of those "difficulties," however, are entirely self-made, stemming from an unwillingess to keep oneself from the near occasion of sin and a casual embrace of contraception as that which is normal, natural and completely morally acceptable.

To write as "Pope Francis" did to Salvatore Rino Fisichella seven months ago makes it appear as though there are circumstances in which a woman may be convinced that it is "necessary" for her to kill her preborn child and that she can do so with the certain knowledge of absolution in the conciliar church's "Sacrament of Reconciliation" no matter her rationale for having done so. A good confessor must make the necessary distinctions in each circumstance is presented before him, and if he cannot administer absolution if it is his judgment that the pentinent is not comittted to amend her life after having killed the fruit of her womb. Will she give up her sins of fornication if she is single or, if giving, give up her adultery?  

These are not heartless or insensitive questions. As the late Father John Joseph Sullivan instructed his students at Holy Apostles Seminary when I was his student there, priests do not beat up penitents in the confession. At the same time, however, they have the obligation to ask prudent questions in a fatherly manner that bear on the circumstances of a sin if they judge such questions necessary. Bergoglio, though, is making it appear as though there can never be a circumstance in which a woman who has killed her child can be denied absolution (not that it is available from a conciliar presbyter, of course) in the “Sacrament of Reconciliation.” Sadly, there are such circumstances if a priest judges that there is not true contrition and a firm purpose on the part of the penitent to amend his life. Bergoglio is making it appear that the retention of sins in the case of abortion would not be “merciful.”

 

Lacking any instruction in First and Last Things, Donald Trump’s confusion about abortion is certainly understandable, but even those in public life who know more have been undercut by “Pope Francis,” a man whose entire work these past three years is about to be enshrined in an exhortation designed to indemnify and excuse unrepentant sinners in their lives of perdition.

No, the way out of this does not run through the ballot box. We are living in a time of great chastisements that require us to pray, fast, sacrifice and to be ever ready to offer up the sufferings of the moment to Our Lord through His Most Blessed Mother’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

This time of chastisement will pass in God’s good time. We must, therefore, keep our eyes focused on the supernatural truths in order to keep from despairing in the midst of the onslaught of evil that is unfolding before our very eyes. We must remember that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, He Who sitteth at the right hand of His Co-Eternal and Co-Equal God the Father in Heaven, wants us to live in peace even in the midst of terrible turmoil.

Father Maurice Meschler’s reflection on the life of Christ the King in Heaven should thus console us at this time when it appears all is darkness around us:

CHRIST'S SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD.

Mark xvi. 19. And the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God.

Ps. cix. 1. The Lord said to my Lord: “sit thou at my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool.”

We will now consider the life of the God-Man in His glory, This is briefly indicated in the words of St, Mark: “Jesus. . . sitteth on the right hand of God.”

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THIS LIFE.

This sitting at the right hand of God is first a life of the most sublime, supreme and divine power, majesty and glory. It signifies nothing less than the full possession and equal share of the power and glory of the Father and all divine honours. This place on the Father's throne belongs to our Saviour by right as God-Man, inasmuch as the Person of the God-Man is the Second Person in the Godhead. But as regards His human nature the “sitting at the right hand of the Father” signifies merely a place of honour near the Godhead and precedence over all other creatures, because this human nature surpasses every other created being in holiness and abundance of gifts and dignities. The seat at the right hand is always a special honour and distinction. So, take it as we will, this expression denotes a peculiar privilege of Christ's, which He shared with no one else. Whilst all the other creatures of God who have attained to bliss – even the highest among the angels – stand round the Father's throne and serve Him (Dan vii. 10), the God-Man has His place on the throne itself (Heb. I. 13; xii. 2), and receives conjointly with the Father the highest divine honour, the homage, praise and adoration of the blessed spirits who surround the Divine Majesty in a million circles, casting their crowns at His feet and adoring Him with incessant thanksgiving and divine praise, as the Apocalypse testifies (Apoc. iv. 3 seq.; v. 8 seq.; xi. 15 seq.) This heavenly service never ceases day or night.

Secondly, Christ's sitting at the right hand of the Father is a life of the sweetest rest and securest peace. That is why it is called “sitting” for this term expresses the immutability and indestructibility of this kingdom of honour, power, and joy. Christ now rests from His journeys, labours and fatigues, in blissful repose. He only words exteriorly by His word of command and through His servants. No foe can reach the sublime elevation of His throne; unbounded peace hovers over His kingdom, and as far as the horizon of eternity extends the heavens are unclouded and blissfully serene, heavenly stronghold whose gates stand open day and night (Apoc. Xxi. 25. Isa. lx. 11), and where death and mourning and sorrow shall be no more (Apoc. Xxi. 4), but everywhere the beauty and contentment of peace! What can be compared to this heavenly repose and imperishable peace?

But this peace does not hinder His life from being one of immense activity. The occupation of the God-Man is the government of His kingdom on earth and in heaven. As Head of the whole creation and universal Mediator, as King and High Priest, He is the noble instrument of all God's exterior communications, the intermediary of all graces and rewards, and the executor of all judgments and punishments. He is constantly shedding beams of joy and rapture upon the Church Triumphant, comfort and alleviation upon the Church Suffering, light, and strength, and purity upon the Church Militant, and pouring down the sweet sunshine of the light of faith upon the heathen world. He is always praying for us and offering the immeasurable price of His Wounds, together with our prayers and works, to the Father; at every moment He is judging souls and deciding their eternal fate. As Moses stood upon the shore of the Red Sea and directed the passage of his people through the depths of the water, Christ stands upon the heights of heaven and guides His Church through the stormy sea of time. But time is no longer the boundary of His empire; everything, temporal as well as eternal, is subject to His command. His had gathers up the threads of the government of the world; He guides the destinies of individuals and of nations; He exalts and degrades, calls, effaces, rewards, and punishes; He takes away the lives of princes – He, “the terrible with the kings of the earth” Ps. Lxxv. 13), and no mortal can escape His power. Such is the activity of the God-Man in heaven.

Fourthly, Christ's sitting at God's right hand is a life of the most wonderful success and victorious triumph. He reigns as God. His power is over all, and is not felt; it works everywhere, and is not perceived; He forces no one, and yet all serve Him; He leaves His creatures the most untrammeled freedom, and weaves their criminal abuse of it into the texture of His plans; He draws back from them as though He were obstructed and vanquished, and yet entices them whither He wishes to lead them. The government of the God-Man is like His life, without mistake or repentance. Calmly and with divine joy He watches from His throne the rush and hurry of mundane affairs, and their impetuous course “maketh the city of God joyful” (Ps. Xiv. 5); however wild and unruly they seem, they are only His servants, and accomplish His will to the glory of His Father and the weal of the elect throughout all ages of the world, until the last wave rolls up and breaks on the shore of eternity. Then He will rise to judge the world, separate the just from the wicked, and put all things under His Father's feet (1 Cor. xv. 26 28). The Apocalypse gives us a vivid description of this life and reign of the God-Man at God's right hand. There we see the Lamb upon the throne of His glory (Apoc. v. 6; vii. 17; xiv. 14); the seals of the destiny of the world and of each individual are in His hand (Apoc. v. 5); He executes this destiny (Apoc. Xiv. 14; xix. 11); He is the source of the bliss of the elect (Apoc. ii. 26; iii 21; vii. 17; xiv. 1; xxi. 22; xxii. 1) and the object of royal and divine honour (Apoc. v. 12; vii. 10).

CONCLUSIONS

And what conclusions are we to draw from our meditation upon this glorious life?

Its first fruit should be admiration, adoration, praise, and devoted service of our Divine Saviour. He sits upon the throne of the Father in unity with Him and the Holy Ghost, as one God; so let us honour and serve Him as our God. Our homage and adoration here below is but an echo of the eternal song in heaven, as is so beautifully expressed in the liturgical hymn of praise Gloria in excelsis Deo. Let us rejoice at our Saviour's glorious and joyful reign and congratulate Him upon it (Ps. Cxliv).

Secondly, we shall one day share with our Saviour the glory of this active and powerful life and reign with Him (Apoc. ii. 7; xiv. 13. Ps. Cxlix 5 seq. Eph. ii 6). So let us reflect upon it with interest and love in order to encourage ourselver to work here below for Christ's kingdom. Heaven, with its honours and joys and eternity, is the glorious part of this kingdom, whilst to the Church on earth is allotted the stress of the fighting and labour.  Christ needs our prayers, our wrok, our conflicts, and our sufferings. They are the material for heaven, so let us not grow weary. We cannot devote our lives to a more glorious cause; success is sure, glorious and eternal.

Thirdly, let us not despond when the scales of the fight tremble and the issue seems to waver in the balance. God permits this to try our confidence. If we feel our strength failing, let us cast an upward glance at the peace and bliss of the eternal kingdom, past whose rocky base the history of the world sweeps and melts into space without disturbing its peace, and on whose pinnacles the reflection of the final victory is already shining, – that victory that will end the battle in the evening of the world's existence and establish for ever the supremacy of Christ. O that this kingdom of His might be the object of our work, the constant subject of our prayer, the motive of our sufferings and labours, and the beginning and completion of our joy! (Ps. Cxxxvi. 5 seq.) (Father Maurice Meschler, S.J., The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Son of God, in Meditations, Volume II, Freiburg Im Breisgau 1928 Herder & Co., Publishers to the Holy Apostolic See, pp. 575-579.)

May we pray to Our Lady every day for us to live in the peace of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, a peace that can be had only by being in a state of Sanctifying Grace, a peace that no potentate in this passing, mortal vale of tears, no matter how seemingly powerful and fearsome, can take away from us.

We plant seeds for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King as the fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which will occur when a true pope is restored miraculously to the Throne of Saint Peter and Our Lady’s Fatima Message is fulfilled by a proper consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by that true pope with all of the world’s true bishops.

Why should we live in fear with Our Lady and Saint Joseph so near?

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

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