Yes or no, please.  

This is tangentially related to the Fatima thread.


 

At the risk of sounding like Bill Clinton, it depends on what you mean by greatest.  I am not Myrna, however, so perhaps I should just move along to another thread.

I don't have to ask Raoul the same question, we all know he thinks France is the greatest, good to know too, that when Raoul gets there the SSPX has a fairly strong presence in France.  

No far from it and it never was.

I would say the number one reason Catholics (not counting the crisis - although this reason is one of the reasons for the crisis) have not successfully resisted this culture is that they do not understand that modern institutions are their enemies.  They are more interested in helping themselves by working with these institutions than they are in helping each other.  

Myrna said:

There is no place that I would rather be!

Gee, that doesn't sound like a yes or no.

SJB told me on the Fatima page that American patriotism is not the same as Americanism, and that no one is saying that America is the greatest country ever.  I wanted to show him just how wrong he is.  He has no idea some of the things that I've heard from Catholics in this country.  

I believe that Americanism has transmogrified into a new and more subtle form.  No one will say, since Leo XIII, that the separation of Church and state is a good thing; but they will proclaim "liberty" and "freedom," and in a suggestive and hypnotic way this could be said to amount to the same thing.  It's like a repressed Americanism.  Hopefully it avoids heresy, but it still makes me nervous.

Something hit me the other day.  This country has good people in it, Catholics with genuine charity, but they hold certain errors on non-dogmatic matters that render them slightly alien to me, and vice versa.  The Tea Party mentality that they think is anti-communist, in reality is just the opposite, because if left unchecked it will make us all like the Chinese, serfs to the elite.  

There is a mutual respect between these Catholics and myself, for what we have in common -- and sometimes they easily exceed me in terms of spiritual advancement and charity on a person-to-person basis -- but also a mutual unease, due to our very different politics.  It is now totally clear to me that I belong in France.  

But this repressed Americanism, this John Birch-y kind of atmosphere, may explain why I mistrusted the Fatima secrets.  How often have we heard from the likes of the UN about "peace" while at the same time they engage in wars to bring about THEIR kind of peace?  It seemed unlikely to me that Mary would sponsor a ʝʊdɛօ-Masonic peace -- that is why I was skeptical of Fatima. I now think I was wrong, because in 1929 consecrating Russia may have changed history, and brought about another kind of peace.  But I can see why I was paranoid.  

No time like the present.  

Rauol, just so you know, France is America's competitor in claiming the title of Whore of Babylon, since she is the Eldest Daughter of the Church and currently in apostasy.

Im not denying France's role in the Restoration, but keep in mind, it's a bi-polar nation just like this one.