America… “not in any sense Christian”
“….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain of scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57.
Every four years, truths in America can change from one thing to another, even as the center – left’s quest to be the global hegemon moves forward with little regret or inhibition.
The fatal mischief in the U.S. Constitution was in the purposeful moral ambiguity embedded in the Enlightenment concept “liberty”. This is what logically led us all the way to the travesties of Rainbow Wokeism, or to any other abuse of freedom one may wish to read into the concept.
A distortion of “liberty,”(1) in the moral and metaphysical sense is far removed from sacred revelation (John 8:32, 2 Cor. 3:17, etc ) and is blurring the lines between political and metaphysical meanings. This is the crisis of our time. And Catholic Christians cannot go along with it because it is the justification for sin. It violates Christian moral teachings. Our Lord Jesus Christ taught, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin.”—Jn. 8:34-32
This was no accident. It directly targeted our Christian patrimony.
“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…” —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April, 1823; Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon II, 594.
And so it is coming to pass (**). Coming to pass in the media-darkened minds of very many , spurred on by ideological women and men who prefer impulse, passions, control and power over Truth and reason, regardless of the consequences.
It is not any particular foreign or domestic enemy which is destroying us today. It is we ourselves in the acceptance of the Hegelian notion of the Rule of an ever-evolving Law in the broadest possible sense, in applications across all disciplines. In this way man in effect becomes God, the moral lawgiver and Grand Architect of an always unfinished Future (“Progress”).
In the West we face a crisis of identity and thought. But do we really think much at all anymore? Or have we surrendered thought itself to the pleasure principle which is infesting us and eating away our very souls? Chesterton said we must “rethink our way back to thought”. Indeed. If we in the West do not return to a moral conception of the dignity of the human person who, unlike mere animals, is capable of saying “No” to his or her unruly impulses and passions, then we may end as prey for more disciplined rulers.
The Trojan Horse fear in the West is also grounded in our own angst about certain ill-defined notions like “freedom” and “democracy”. We (the citizens, that is) are concerned that people who do not think like us will use precisely these democratic principles to grow in number in order to jockey for positions of power within the borders.
The Revolution. 1776, 1789. Specious Expansion of the Concept “Liberty’
Revolutionary French and aspects of American ideology together are the recipe for this abuse and transvaluation of “liberty” into the unnatural opposite of the liberty given to us by the Lord, Jesus Christ. As Jefferson knew, this “liberty” involved far more than the mere separation of powers in government. This ever-evolving “liberty” was a new way of being. It erodes our true spiritual (and political) liberties and is also the new missionary mandate to change the whole world. Few concepts are more open-ended, or more dangerous.
+ Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange on Reason and the Law of Non-contradiction
Truth does not change with the changes in political regimes, parties or philosophies. But in the American dialectic one only has to wait 4-8 years to see political and moral “laws” change, sometimes radically, in a never-ending openness to new new ways of being.
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” — Jn. 14:6.; Heb. 13:8
“Nature’s God“
Nowhere in the founding documents of this country is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, named. But He is according to biblical Catholic teaching the foundation of all moral order in the universe.
To Whom we pledge heart and soul.
Many Founding “Fathers” were influenced by Enlightenment Deists and similar philosophies bringing a new and false “light,” a “light” at war with traditional Christianity, the gospel, the traditional family and every traditional moral precept (2). The American Founders generally supported the French Revolution’s overthrow of Christendom and the substitution of a “New World,” New “Philosophy,” even if some had problems with the overly bloody methods the French employed in “Year One“.
See Philosophers of the New Light
This is the “New World,” the new gospel, “Enlightenment,” “Science”… announced in blood, the blood of the French Revolution and then in the schools: Novus Ordo Seclorum. Young ‘men’ and ‘women’ since then are expected to kill and die for it because the Revolution worships only itself, worships itself as “progress” for all of humankind. Even pronouns distinguishing biological gender are declared obsolete in the West today, even up to the White House. Nature itself is thus transvalued in service to the new concepts of “progress” and “evolution”.
But there is no moral liberty or right to commit evils, nor is the reality of evil a mere concept of personal choice. There is no moral right to abortion, pornography, or any of the other “legal” evils that are promoted for taxable profit, traditional Catholics believe.
Today everyone must choose. Not to choose is to choose. Signs and wonders are manifest every day everywhere as the new “Science” (Scientism) and Magik, more and more, converge into one.
And if peoples cannot be persuaded of these “truths” by reason itself then they must be persuaded by means of our witness of conscientious objection, come what may.
The Holy Trinity has been, their philosophers think, toppled, replaced by the Masonic Grand Architect whose mission or building project for the world must in their minds remain incomplete, forever seeking final dominion over nature and the entire world.
We did not create ourselves however. And, despite all variations of its practical atheism, nothingness is no-thing, and therefore impotent to “create” anything — but delusions.
And because we sow to the wind we inevitably reap the whirlwind.
“The effect of liberty to individuals is, that people may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints”. —Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
The world has seen. Britain collapsed morally and ecclesiologically even before the United States hatched.
True “Liberty”. Pope Leo XIII.
“Those who are in authority owe it to the commonwealth not only to provide for its external well-being and the conveniences of life, but still more to consult the welfare of men’s souls in the wisdom of their legislation. But, for the increase of such benefits, nothing more suitable can be conceived than the laws which have God for their author; and, therefore, they who in their government of the State take no account of these laws abuse political power by causing it to deviate from its proper end and from what nature itself prescribes.’ — par. 18 of Libertas, encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, on the nature of human liberty. June 1888.
“In this true liberty consists: being free to live according to right reason.” — Leo XIII
Politics in itself, which in the American dialectic is ever changing and evolving, cannot save our souls; and so, despite what we see on Social Media, we cannot make the “political process” ultimate, even if we must try to block the march of evil—and advance the Good whenever we can—by means of it, with ardent prayer. And we musn’t forget the biblical view of history itself which tells us that the ultimate victory over the Antichristic will only come from Jesus Christ at the end of history.
In Catholic-scriptural teaching there is no real “liberty” or “freedom” from God to sin, even if there is an evil political liberty to do so. In Catholic teaching evil has no rights, and money does not necessarily indicate “success” in God’s eyes. Only to prevent greater disorders can some evils be tolerated within carefully circumscribed limits. But evil can never be accommodated or rationalized as not evil.
Isa.5:20: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.“
Jn. 8:12: “Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
8: 31 Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
Year One is the very opposite of Christic Enlightenment (Jn. 8:12, 32) (4)
Pray for the conversion of the United States of America and for all the Catholic and other peoples who have fallen for her seductions— SH, 2004.
Updated
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(1) “Verily no one of sound mind can doubt the issue of this contest between man and the Most High. Man, abusing his liberty, can violate the right and the majesty of the Creator of the Universe; but the victory will ever be with God — nay, defeat is at hand at the moment when man, under the delusion of his triumph, rises up with most audacity. Of this we are assured in the holy books by God Himself. Unmindful, as it were, of His strength and greatness, He “overlooks the sins of men” (Wisd. xi., 24), but swiftly, after these apparent retreats, “awaked like a mighty man that hath been surfeited with wine” (Ps. Ixxvii., 65), “He shall break the heads of his enemies” (Ps. Ixvii., 22), that all may know “that God is the king of all the earth” (Ib. Ixvi., 8), “that the Gentiles may know themselves to be men’ (Ib. ix., 20). — E. Supremi. On the Restoration of All things in Christ. Pope Pius X – 1903, emphasis supplied
(2) The Permanent Revolution, The French Revolution and it’s Legacy, edited by Geoffrey Best, The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
(3) Immanuel Kant. What is Enlightenment?
(4) What was Year One?
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“The prophet foretold that He would be so scourged that the bones of His body would be numbered. We are saved by other stars and stripes than those on the flag; namely, by the stars and stripes of Christ, by whose stars we are illumined—by whose stripes we are healed.” —Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Meditations on the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary.
“See how much the world has changed? Now, what made it change? I think maybe we can pinpoint a date: 8:15 in the morning, the sixth of August, 1945. Can any of you recall what happened on that day? … it was the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. When we flew an American plane over this Japanese city and dropped the atomic bomb on it we blotted out boundaries. There was no longer a boundary between the civilian and the military, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead – for even the living who escaped the bomb were already half-dead. So we broke down boundaries and limits and from that time on the world has said ‘We want no one limiting me’. So that, you people have heard the song, you’ve sung it yourselves: ‘I gotta be me, I gotta be free’. We want no restraint, no boundaries, no limits. Have to do what I want to do. Now let’s analyse that for a moment. Is that happiness: I gotta be me, I’ve got to have my own identity?” — Archbishop Sheen, 1974
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(**) In an age of Presbyterians, Baptists and Catholics, as well as a host of smaller churches and other christians, Jefferson knew this would all take a considerable amount of time. But the trajectory was clear, even for more prominent conservative churchmen like John Adams.
+ Reparation For the Frightful Wounds Inflicted on the Whole of Humanity (NCRegister)
+ A Devout Meditation on Adolf Eichmann by Thomas Merton
Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic
Updated
Catholic Critique 