Do Not Expect Justice From Those Who Are Unjust, part two

Those who have been reading my work since in the inception of this site on February 20, 2004 (or in the decade before by means of my writing for The Wanderer and for the printed version of Christ or Chaos and various lectures I used to give around the country) know these facts very well. However, it is always good to provide a reminder, especially during an election year, especially at a time when the two major organized crime families of naturalism are holding their national nominating conventions. It is at times such as these, when even many believing Catholics lose their minds to put their trust in princes of the false opposites of the naturalist “right” or the naturalist “left,” that a bit of perspective is in order.

The United States of America was founded by men who were the inheritors of the rotten fruit wrought by the first “Brexit” when King Henry VIII took England out of the true Church, thus opening up this once thoroughly Catholic land to the cancerous spread of numerous theological and philosophical errors that have been metastasizing ever since. Sons of the so-called “Enlightenment” that “liberated” men and their nations from the “shackles” of religious dogmatism in favor rationalism and naturalism, some of the founders had a diabolical hatred for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and it was their fervent hope that what they believed to be a “superstition” would die off over the course of time as succeeding generations of Americans became accustomed to the “freedom” to think for “themselves” without the “interference” of clerics.

Yes, some of these nefarious men said this in so many terms:

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. (President John Adams: "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787-1788)

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594).

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821)

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! (John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, quoted in 200 Years of Disbelief, by James Hauck)

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."—James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr„ April I, 1774

". . . Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."—James Madison, spoken at the Virginia convention on ratification of the Constitution, June 1778

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."—-James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance," addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785

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

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

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

John Adams was the first vice president and second president of the United States of America.

James Madison was the secretary of the Constitutional Convention, which met from May 25, 1787, to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (and it is in that capacity that he is considered to be the “Father of the Constitution”), and the fourth president of the United States of America after having served as Jefferson's Secretary of State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. John C. Rao, an associate professor of History at Saint John’s University, New York, explained the assault on history and truth in which Catholics themselves have participated by worshiping at the altar of the founding plaster saints:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some careful distinctions must be made proceeding with a topic that has been explored in my writing and speaking and teaching long before this site was launched as a continuation of the work of the printed journal of the same name, Christ or Chaos, and in my book

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

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

A second distinction that should be made is that the thirteen English colonies in North America located up and down the Atlantic seaboard from what is now the State of Maine to the Georgia-Florida border were not bastions of Christianity. The true popes of the Catholic Church always used the word Christianity to refer to the true Faith, that is, Catholicism. Although adherents of individual Protestant sects may be Christians if they had been baptized validly, Protestantism in all of its mutant forms is heretical. "Christianity" must of its nature be free of heresy. Protestantism, therefore, is neither a means of personal salvation or of social order.

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

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

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

A third distinction that should be made is that the Catholics who arrived in Maryland in 1634 being told by a Jesuit priest to "practice their Faith, but as quietly as possible." This started a "tradition," if you will, now of three hundred eighy two years' vintage, of Catholics subordinating their Faith to the exigencies of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and pluralism and religious indifferentism.

Yes, the history of the Catholic Church in the United States of America is very complex, full of examples of bishops and priests who believed in the Faith but who were "ahead of their time," so to speak, concerning the heresy of "religious liberty" and the religiously indifferentist civil state and also full of examples of bishops and priests who defended the totality of the Faith with great distinction. The bottom line, however, is this: there is a difference between accommodating oneself to the particular realities of a given situation, such as those that existed in a world of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry and various "Enlightenment" philosophies in the Eighteenth Century, and refusing to seek the conversion of a nation to the true Faith. The dangers of this immersion into naturalism were cited by Pope Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, and they were outlined by Father Edward Leen in The Holy Ghost in passages that can be found on the home page of this website.

A very clever trap had been set by the devil to lull Catholics to sleep in the former colonies of the United Kingdom that became the first thirteen states of the United States of America. The adversary raised up Protestants in Europe who attacked the Catholic Church and individual Catholics with a furious abandon, subjecting Catholics in England and Ireland to a particularly vicious persecution that killed thousands of thousands of them and deprived thousands more of their homes and their freedom. This made the tiny number of Catholics of English and Irish descent in the colonies and the original thirteen states "grateful" to the "nice" Protestants who left them alone, for the most part, that is, to practice their Faith privately. This "gratitude" was ingrained in the minds and hearts of Catholic immigrants to the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century, thus predisposing them to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.

Pope Leo XIII noted this in his apostolical letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, the Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae , January 22, 1899:

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

In the apostolic letters concerning the constitution of states, addressed by us to the bishops of the whole Church, we discussed this point at length; and there set forth the difference existing between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.

It is well, then, to particularly direct attention to the opinion which serves as the argument in behalf of this greater liberty sought for and recommended to Catholics.

It is alleged that now the Vatican decree concerning the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff having been proclaimed that nothing further on that score can give any solicitude, and accordingly, since that has been safeguarded and put beyond question a wider and freer field both for thought and action lies open to each one. But such reasoning is evidently faulty, since, if we are to come to any conclusion from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, it should rather be that no one should wish to depart from it, and moreover that the minds of all being leavened and directed thereby, greater security from private error would be enjoyed by all. And further, those who avail themselves of such a way of reasoning seem to depart seriously from the over-ruling wisdom of the Most High-which wisdom, since it was pleased to set forth by most solemn decision the authority and supreme teaching rights of this Apostolic See-willed that decision precisely in order to safeguard the minds of the Church's children from the dangers of these present times.

These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.

We, indeed, have no thought of rejecting everything that modern industry and study has produced; so far from it that we welcome to the patrimony of truth and to an ever-widening scope of public well-being whatsoever helps toward the progress of learning and virtue. Yet all this, to be of any solid benefit, nay, to have a real existence and growth, can only be on the condition of recognizing the wisdom and authority of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benvolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

Pope Leo XIII "took off the gloves" in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, having praised what he could of various elements of the American founding, including the natural virtues of George Washington, in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, before making it clear in that encyclical letter that the American bishops were not doing what they could to Catholicize the nation, especially as pertains to making his own encyclical letters on Church-State relatoins known to the Catholics of the United States of America. Pope Leo wanted to make it abundantly clear in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae that some of the American bishops did indeed want to view the Deposit of Faith through the lens of the American Constitution as the prototype of a "future church" modeled along the lines of "democracy" and "collegiality" and "egalitarianism" and "ecumenism." This telling passage from Pope Leo's Apostolical Letter to the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, is a prophetic warning about the counterfeit church of conciliarism that would owe much of its origins to the heresy of Americanism:

For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive of and desire the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world. (Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

Quite specifically, you see, a nation that is not founded on right principles must degenerate into the barbarism of our present era, having no immutable teaching authority to guide it, choosing to be "guided" by the demigods of national founding fathers and/or by the shifting winds of majoritarian sentiment at any particular point in time. Contradiction and instability are bound to result, as we can see with great clarity today. It is very much beside the point to argue that the "founders" would have opposed this or that social evil. They premised the entire fabric of national life under the Constitution upon the false belief that men could sort out their differences by means of a cumbersome process of negotiation and debate in the national legislative process, believing that there was no single belief that could unite men and guide them in the pursuit of the common good as the supreme and eternal good each man was kept in mind. There is no way, therefore, for naturalists to use a naturalist Constitution to defend against various evils. Evil must win when man does not subordinate himself to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and when men do not have belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:

1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.

2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.

3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.

4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.

5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.

6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.

7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.

8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.

9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her Indirect Power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.

10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are the basis of the actions of civil governance in all that pertains to the good of souls and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church. Civil leaders must, therefore, recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.

This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past twenty-five years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).

The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:

1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation

3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.

4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.  

5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the words of Holy Writ are for a Protestant or to a Modernist, is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact. The likes of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton have no regard for the words of the Constitution or for the just laws passed by Congress, and Donald John Trump is plainly ignorant of some of the fact that there are seven articles in the Constitution and twenty-seven amendments to it since its ratification in 1788. We are governed by men who are contemptuous or law or wholly ignorant of it. Quite a state of affairs.

6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.

A nation founded on false premises, no matter the "good intentions" of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American "popular culture" destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some "naturalist" hero or idea by which to win the "culture wars," oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.

This is what a baptized Catholic, Rafael Edward Cruz, no matter his evangelical fervor in behalf of liberty and immutable truths, does not understand as he fashions himself as the sole defender of all that he considers good in the United States of America, including the Constitution of the United States of America that has always been, is now and will always remain

Yes, of course, truths are immutable. Absolutely.

The problem is, Senator Cruz, that the founding principles that you exalt are the product of a revolution against the immutable truths that Christ the King entrusted solely to His Catholic Church to defend and proclaim infallibly in His Holy Name and by His own Divine authority. Our Lord did not appoint you or the man who took you out of the Holy Faith as a child, Raphael Bienvenudo Cruz, to serve as his “anointed” spokesmen. The false revolution that swept your father and your family out of the true Church—a false revolution with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has “reconciled—started a warfare against the very immutable truths that you claim so passionately to defend.

Then again, of course, why should a egotistic, self-serving, caustic supporter of contraception who speaks about a supposed “civil liberty” to be “gay or straight,” Rafael Edward Cruz, know anything about the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ when the average Catholic in the United States of America never heard anything about the Social Reign of Christ the King before the false "Second" Vatican Council? The American “way” helped shape Dignitatis Humanae, December 7, 1965, and all that has followed in its wake. The devil thus convinces the average Catholic that there is indeed some naturalistic or inter-denominational or non-denominational way to address and ameliorate social problems, making the following statement of Catholic truth concerning the nature of the civil state and its obligations to foster the Last End of man completely foreign to him:

American "civil liberty" has given, therefore, free "rein" to errors of every type imaginable, spreading poisons in this country and throughout the world. As will be explained in tomorrow's commentary, the organized crime families known as "political parties" in the United States of America oppose each other on naturalist grounds, disagreeing only on the margins on some issues while they agree most fundamentally in augmenting the power of the state to serve as our ultimate "secular savior." Having first been founded on the false premises of the "sovereignty of the people" rather on the Sovereignty and the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, the government of the United States of America has become oppressive to an extent that makes King George III seem like a member of the Libertarian Party. There is only one answer to this madness of secularism and naturalism and pluralism and religious indifferentism: the conversion of the United States of America to become the Catholic States of America.

Yes, the work of converting individual men and their nations is a continuous one. Each of us could lose the Faith if we do not keep close to the Mass of the ages and accuse ourselves regularly—if at all possible in this time of apostasy and betrayal--in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. Those who are privileged to live near a chapel where Our Lord’s Real Presence resides for their adoration and petition should seek to do visit Him regularly. And as is noted so consistently on this site, we must close to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary by offering as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permit. This having been noted, however, we must seek the conversion of others and of the nation in which we live and are called to love without looking for results.

Remember the great missionaries who worked for the conversion of the peoples of Americas. Saint Francis Solano, whose feast day is Saturday, July 24, 2016, Blessed John Massias, Saint Turibius Mogroveio, The North American Martyrs, The Venerable Marie of New France, Father Antonio de Jesus Margil, the Apostle of Texas, Father Pierre Jean De Smet. Blessed Rose Philippine Duchesne, Father Junipero Serra. Mother Katherine Drexel. When was the last time Catholics in the United States of America were exhorted en masse to pray and to work for the conversion of the nation?

Well, there is nothing to stop us from doing so in our own homes today by refusing to participate in a celebration of a history of rebellion against the authority of Our Lord and His Holy Church, of the promotion of the most vile evils imaginable under cover of law and in every aspect of our popular culture in the name of "freedom."

We must make reparation for the sins of a nation founded on false principles that has influenced most Catholics in this country to think in worldly, naturalist terms rather than in the supernatural terms of the true Faith.

We should mourn the millions of babies killed under cover of law by chemical and surgical means in this nation as most Americans celebrate their “freedoms,” which are fast disappearing, of course, without giving the daily carnage of the preborn a moment's thought.

We should mourn the degradation of a culture wherein the young are formed by the prevailing fashions of the moment and wherein parents who attempt to educate their children at home are carefully monitored by the civil authorities.

We should mourn the fact that those who promote perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments can be accorded "civil rights" and be permitted to march openly in their degrading displays of indecency.

We should mourn the wars, both domestic and foreign, that have been fought to cement the power of the Federal government and/or to serve the interests of the organized forces of naturalism here and abroad.

In the midst of all of the triumph of statism as the ultimate rotten fruit of the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King, it is perhaps wise to turn to the humble example of Saint Vincent de Paul, who thought himself as a “worm creeping upon the earth,” to help us to exhibit humility in our daily lives, which is quite a contrast to the egotism displayed by the lords of naturalism, whether they belong to the false opposite of the “left” or of the “right.” Moreover, our souls must be at peace in the midst of all of the turbulence that shakes the foundations of the illusory worlds of Modernity and Modernism, the latter of which has robbed the world of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces.

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., provided us with an inspiring account of the holy life and humble work of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Apostle of the Poor:

Vincent was a man of faith that worketh by charity. At the time he came into the world—viz., at the close of the same century in which Calvin was born—the Church was mourning over many nations separated from the faith; the Turks were harassing all the coasts of the Mediterranean. France, worn out by forty years of religious strife, was shaking off the yoke of heresy from within, while by a foolish stroke of policy she gave it external liberty. The Eastern and Northern frontiers were suffering the most terrible devastations, and the West and centre were the scene of civil strife and anarchy. In this state of confusion, the condition of souls was still more lamentable. In the towns alone was there any sort of quiet, any possibility of prayer. The country people, forgotten, sacrificed, subject to the utmost miseries, had none to support and direct them but a clergy too often abandoned by their bishops, unworthy of the ministry, and wellnigh as ignorant as their flocks. Vincent was raised up by the Holy Spirit to obviate all these evils. The world admires the works of the humble shepherd of Buglose, but it knows not the secret of their vitality. Philanthropy would imitate them; but its establishments of to-day are destroyed to-morrow, like castles built by children in the sand, while the institution it would fain supersede remains strong and unchanged, the only one capable of meeting the necessities of suffering humanity. The reason of this is not far to seek: faith alone can understand the mystery of suffering, having penetrated its secret in the Passion of our Lord, and charity that would be stable must be founded on faith. Vincent loved the poor because he loved God whom his faith behold in them. “O God!” he used to say, “it does us good to see the poor, if we look at them in the light of God, and think of the high esteem in which Jesus Christ hold them. Often enough they have scarcely the appearance or the intelligence of reasonable beings, so rude and so earthly are they. But look at them in the light of faith, and you will see that they represent the Son of God, who chose to be poor; He in His Passion had scarcely the appearance of a man; He seemed to the Gentiles to be a fool, and to the Jews a stumbling-block, moreover He calls Himself the evangelist of the poor: evangelizare puperibus mist me. This title of evangelist of the poor is the one that Vincent desired for himself, the starting-point and the explanation of all that he did in the Church. His one aim was to labour for the poor and the outcast; all the rest, he said, was secondary. And he added, speaking to his sons of St. Lazarus: “We should never have labored for the candidates for priesthood, nor in the ecclesiastical seminaries, had we not deemed it necessary, in order to keep the people in good condition, to preserve in them the fruits of the missions, and to procure them good priests. That he might able to consolidate this work in all its aspects, our Lord inspired Anne of Austria to make him a member of the Council of Conscience, and to place in his hands of the office of extirpating the abuses among the higher clergy and of appointing pastors to the churches of France. We cannot here relate the history of a man in whom universal charity was, as it were, personified. But from the bagnio of Tunis, where he was a slave, to the ruined provinces for which he found millions of money, all the labours he underwent for the relief of every physical suffering were inspired by his zeal for the apostolate: by caring for the body, he strove to reach and succour the soul. At a time when men rejected the Gospel while striving to retain its benefits, certain wise men attributed Vincent charity to philosophy. Nowadays they go further still, and in order to deny the author of the works they deny the works themselves. But if any there be who still hold the former opinion, let them listen to his own words, and then judge of his principles: “What is done for charity’s sake is done for God. It is not enough for us that we love God ourselves; our neighbour also must love him; neither can we love our neighbour as ourselves unless we procure for him the good we are bound to desire for ourselves—viz., divine love, which unites us to the Sovereign Good. We must love our neighbour as the image of God and the object of His love, and must try to make men love their Creator in return, and love one another also with mutual charity for the love of God, who so loved them as to deliver his own Son to death for them. But let us, I beg of you, look down upon this Divine Saviour as a perfect pattern of the charity we must bear to our neighbour.”

The theophilanthropy of a century ago had no more right than had an atheist or a deist philosophy to rank Vincent, as it did, among the great men of the Calendar. Not nature, nor the pretended divinities of false science, but the God of Christians, the God who became man to save us by taking our miseries upon Himself, was the sole inspirer of the greatest modern benefactor of the human race, whose favourable saying was: “Nothing pleases me except in Jesus Christ.” He observed the right order of charity, striving for the reign of his Divine Master, first in his own soul, then in others, and, far from acting of his own accord by the dictates of reason alone, he would rather have remained hidden for ever in the face of the Lord, and have left but an unknown name behind him.

“Let us honour,” he wrote, “the hidden state of the Son of God. There is our centre; there is what He requires of us for the present, for the future, for ever; unless His Divine Majesty makes known in His own unmistakable way that He demands something else of us. Let us especially honour the Divine Master’s moderation in action. He would not always do all that He could do, in order to teach us to be satisfied when it is not expedient to do all that we are able, but only as much as reasonable to charity and conformable to the will of God. How royally do those honour our Lord who follow His holy Providence, and do not try to b beforehand with it! Do you not, and rightly, wish your servant to do nothing without your orders? And if this I reasonable between man and man, how much more so between the Creator and the creature!” Vincent, then, was anxious, according to his own expression, to “keep alongside of Providence,” and not to outstep it. Thus he waited seven years before accepting the offers of the General de Gondi’s wife, and founding his establishment of the Missions. Thus too, when his faithful coadjutrix, Mademoiselle Le Gras [Saint Louise de Marillac], felt to devote herself to the spiritual service to the Daughters of Charity, then living without any bond of common life, as simple assistants to the ladies of quality whom the man of God assembled in his Confraternities, he first tried her for a very long time. “As to this occupation,” he wrote, in answer to her repeated petitions, “I beg of you, once for all, not to think of it until our Lord makes known his will. You wish to become the servant of these poor girls, and God wants you to be His servant. For God’s sake, Mademoiselle, let your heart imitate the tranquility of our Lord’s heart, and then it will be fit to serve Him. The Kingdom of God is peace in the Holy Ghost. He will reign in you if you are at peace. Be so, then, if you please, and do honour to the God of peace and love.”

What a lesson given to the feverish zeal of an age like ours by a man whose life was so full! How often, in what we can good works, do human pretensions sterilize grace by contradicting the Holy Ghost.! Whereas Vincent de Paul, who considered himself “a poor worm creeping on the earth, not knowing where he goes, but only seeking to be hidden in Thee, my God, who art all his desire.”—the humble Vincent saw his work prosper far more than a thousand others, and almost without his being aware of it. Towards the end of his long life he said to his daughters: “It is Divine Providence that set your congregation on its present footing. Who else was it, I ask you? I can find no other. We never had such an intention. I was thinking of it only yesterday, and I said to myself: Is it you who had the thought of founding the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity? Oh! certainly not. Is it Mademoiselle Le Gras? Not at all. O my daughters, I never thought of it, your ‘souer evante’ never thought of it, neither did M. Portail (Vincent’s first and most faithful companion in the Mission). Then it is God who thought of it for you; Him, therefore, we must call the Founder of your Congregation, for truly we cannot recognize another.

Although with delicate docility, Vincent could no more forestall the action of God than an instrument the hand that uses it, nevertheless, once the divine impulse was given, he could not endure the least delay in following it, nor suffer any other sentiment in his soul but the most absolute confidence. He wrote again, with his charming simplicity, to his helpmate given him by God: “You are always giving way a little to human feelings, thinking that everything is going to ruin as soon as you see me ill. O woman of little faith, why have you not more confidence and more submission to the guidance and the example of Jesus Christ? This Saviour of the world entrusted the well-being of the whole Church to God His Father; and you, for a handful of young women, evidently raised up and gathered together by His providence, you fear that He will fail you! Come, come, Mademoiselle, you must humble yourself before God.”

No wonder that faith, the only possible guide of such a life, the imperishable foundation of all that he was for his neighbour and in himself, was, in the eyes, of Vincent de Paul, the greatest of treasures. He who had pity for every human suffering, even though well deserved; who, by an heroic fraud, took the place of a galley-slave in chains, was a pitiless foe of heresy, and could not rest till he had obtained either the banishment or the chastisement of its votaries. Clement XII, in the Bull of canonization, bears witness to this, in speaking of the pernicious error of Jansenism, which our saint was one of the first to denounce and prosecute. Never perhaps, were these words of Holy Writ better verified: The simplicity of the just shall guide them; and the deceitfulness of the wicked shall destroy them. Though this sect expressed, later on, a supreme disdain for the Monsieur Vincent, it had not always been of that mind. “I am,” he said to a friend, “most particularly obliged to bless and thank God, for not having suffered the first and principal professors of that doctrine, men of my acquaintance and friendship, to be able to draw me to their opinions. I cannot tell you what pains they took, and what reasons they propounded to me; I objected to them, amongst other things, the authority of the Council of Trent, which is clearly opposed to them; and seeing that they still continued, I instead of answering them, quietly recited my Credo; and that is how I have remained firm in the Catholic faith.” (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Time After Pentecost, Book IV, pp. 136-143.)

This is far, far from the spirit of naturalism. Indeed, naturalism is the antithesis of Catholicism and leads to the triumph of abject barbarism and hedonism which are enabled and enforced by the brute force of the civil state as it administers a false “charity” of redistributing wealth in order to make all equally poor and equally subservient to those who hold the reins of civil power.

Dom Prosper Gueranger’s description of Saint Vincent de Paul also places him quite at odds with the man who despises the Council of Trent and its doctrinal surety as he embraces heretics while professing heresy all on his own, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (and each of his five predecessors as heads of the false conciliar sect).

May we make the prayer to Saint Vincent de Paul composed by the founder of the Liturgical Movement before it was hijacked by Modernists in the 1920s and thereafter our own:

How full a sheaf dost thou bear, O Vincent, as thou ascendest laden with blessings from earth to thy true country! O thou, the most simple of men, though living in an age of splendours, thy renown far surpasses the brilliant reputation which fascinated thy contemporaries. The true glory of the last century, and the only one that will remain to it when time shall be no more, is to have seen, in its earlier part, saints powerful alike in faith and love, stemming the tide of Satan’s conquests, and restoring to the soil of France, made barren by heresy, the fruitfulness of its brightest days. And now, two centuries and more after thy labours, the work of the harvest is still being carried on by thy sons and daughters, aided by new assistants who also acknowledge thee for their inspirer and father. Thou art now in the kingdom of heaven where grief and tears are no more, yet day by day thou still receives the grateful thanks of the suffering and the sorrowful.

Reward our confidence in thee by fresh benefits. No name so much as thine inspires respect for the Church in our days of blasphemy. And yet those who deny Christ now go so far as to endeavour to stifle the testimony which the poor have always rendered to Him on thy account. Wield, against these ministers of hell, the two-edged sword wherewith it is given to the saints to avenge God in the midst of the nations: treat them as thou didst the heretics of thy day; make their either deserve pardon or suffer punishment, be converted or be reduced by heaven to the impossibility of doing harm. Above all, take care of the unhappy beings whom these satanic men deprive of spiritual help in their last moments. Elevate thy daughters to the high level required by the present sad circumstances, when men would have their devotedness to deny its divine origin and have cast off the guide of religion. If the enemies of the poor man can snatch from his death-bed the sacred sign of salvation, no rule, no law, no power of this world or the next, can cast out Jesus from the soul of the Sister of Charity, or prevent his name from passing from her heart to her lips; neither death nor hell, neither fire not flood can stay him, says the Canticle of Canticles.

Thy sons, too, are carrying on thy work of evangelization; and even our own days their apostolate is crowned with the diadem of sanctity and martyrdom. Uphold their zeal; develop in them they own spirit of unchanging out of thy own, and placed by Rome to thy credit and under thy patronage. May they gather their heat from the divine fire which thou didst kindle on the earth; may they ever seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, never deviating, in thy choice of means, from the principle thou didst lay down for them of “judging, speaking, and acting, exactly as the Eternal Wisdom of God, clothed in our weak flesh, judged, spoke, and acted.” (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Time After Pentecost, Book IV, pp. 145-146.)

Although most contemporary members of the Congregation of the Mission have lost the Catholic Faith, thus rendering Dom Gueranger’s observation about their zeal in the Nineteenth Century outdated, we still have the witness given to us by the Vincentians of the past, to say nothing of the debt we owe to the Daughters of Charity, which was so favored by Our Blessed Mother in the convent at Rue de Bac in Paris, France, by Our Lady’s giving the image of the Miraculous Medal to Saint Catherine Laboure and, ten years later, giving Sister Justice Bisqueyburo the Green Scapular. Catholics in the United States of America owe a particular debt of gratitude to one of Saint Vincent de Paul’s spiritual daughters, Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, for the work she did in establishing Catholic schools in this country.

With the same unshakeable faith and the peace of Christ that abided in the soul and animated the work of Saint Vincent de Paul, may we pray to Our Lady in these troubling times to see our hope only in the Catholic Faith and to abide in the peace of her Divine Son no matter what happens in the world and no matter what kind of persecutions may come our way in the future.

Our Lady told us that her Immaculate Heart would triumph in the end. We must ever confident that this is so, and thus be content to do our daily duties with peace of mind and with hearts that are consecrated to her Divine Son’s Most Sacred Heart through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!  

Our Lady, Mother of God, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Praxedes, pray for us.