SOURCE:
http://www.christorchaos.com/DialecticalAmericanism.htm March 2, 2009
Dialectical Americanism
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Men may come and men may go, because God has left plenty of room for the to and fro of their free-will; but the substantial lines of nature and the not less substantial lines of Eternal Law have never changed, are not changing and never will change. There are bounds beyond which one may stray as far as one sees fit, but to do so ends in death; there are limits which empty philosophical fantasizing may have one mock or not take seriously, but they put together an alliance of hard facts and nature to chastise anybody who steps over them. And history has sufficiently taught, with frightening proof from the life and death of nations, that the reply to all violators of the outline of "humanity" is always, sooner or later, catastrophe.
From the dialectic of Hegel onwards, we have had dinned in our ears what are nothing but fables, and by dint of hearing them so often, many people end up by getting used to them, if only passively. But the truth of the matter is that Nature and Truth, and the Law bound up in both, go their imperturbable way, and they cut to pieces the simpletons who upon no grounds whatsoever believe in radical and far-reaching changes in the very structure of man.
The consequences of such violations are not a new outline of man, but disorders, hurtful instability of all kinds, the frightening dryness of human souls, the shattering increase in the number of human castaways, driven long since out of people's sight and mind to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and rejection. Aligned on the wrecking of the eternal norms are to be found the broken families, lives cut short before their time, hearths and homes gone cold, old people cast to one side, youngsters willfully degenerate and -- at the end of the line -- souls in despair and taking their own lives. All of which human wreckage gives witness to the fact that the "line of God" does not give way, nor does it admit of any adaption to the delirious dreams of the so-called philosophers! (Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, Men's Dress Worn By Women.)
Although the late Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, Italy, from May 29, 1946, to July 6, 1987, wrote the words quoted above in an "notification" to his clergy about the harm of women wearing masculine attire, his words have application to the simple truth that false ideas always produce bad consequences. While God does indeed intends to bring good out of the evil done by men, He never positively wills us to commit any evil or positively wills us to believe in false ideas that can lead only to evil consequences. To believe in a falsehood, even if one is sincere in such a belief, is to permit oneself to be led in a thousand different and frequently contradictory directions.
Permit me what I hope will be a brief explanation of this point.
As I have tried to hammer home repeatedly on this site, one of the principal ways in which Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI defects from the Catholic Faith is by holding to a Modernist conception of dogmatic truth that is contrary to right reason logic even on the level of natural reason and has been condemned by the dogmatic authority of the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIII noted in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896, that one falls from the Faith and can no longer be considered a Catholic if he falls from one article of the Faith. Over and above the many other areas that Ratzinger/Benedict defects from the Catholic Faith, the current reigning head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism defects from the nature of dogmatic truth as defined by the Catholic Church. That is enough, in and of itself, to expel him as a member of the Catholic Church.
Although Ratzinger/Benedict, to be fair, may not subscribe completely to the Hegelianism (the absurd belief that truth contains within itself the seeds of its own internal contradiction) of his mentor, the late Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, he does belief that the expression of dogmatic truth is, more or less, the "prisoner" of the circuмstances that gave rise to its expression, that dogmatic truth is so vast and has so many nuances that it is never possible to express it adequately and permanently at any one time, which is why it is necessary for there to be occasional "re-examinations" of dogmatic expressions in order to conform them more fully to the "language" of the mythical entity known as "modern man." Ratzinger/Benedict would say that, yes, of course, absolute dogmatic truths exist, but that they can never be fully understood or expressed other than by words that are "contingent" upon the historical circuмstances which gave rise to their formulation.
Ratzinger/Benedict, as a disciple and progenitor of the "New Theology," sees no contradiction at all in occasional reformulations of the expressions of certain dogmatic truths. To justify novel formulations of dogmatic truths that run counter to the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church, Ratzinger/Benedict has employed various semantic devices throughout his career, settling upon the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" that he discussed in his infamous address to the conciliar curia on December 22, 2005. Paramount to this novel effort to reconcile conciliarism's apostasies with the teaching of the Catholic Church is, of course, Ratzinger/Benedict's abject rejection of the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, Scholasticism. It is absolutely necessary for him to reject Scholasticism in order to have recourse to the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" to justify such things as his own novel conception of dogmatic truth that has been anathematized by the Catholic Church.
Pope Saint Pius X, writing in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907, and Pope Pius XII, writing in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, each explained the necessity of those who defect from the teaching of the Church to reject Scholasticism:
If we pass on from the moral to the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first and the chief which presents itself is ignorance. Yes, these very Modernists who seek to be esteemed as Doctors of the Church, who speak so loftily of modern philosophy and show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the one with all its false glamour, precisely because their ignorance of the other has left them without the means of being able to recognize confusion of thought and to refute sophistry. Their whole system, containing as it does errors so many and so great, has been born of the union between faith and false philosophy.
Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labor on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavoring to ruin the Church when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed. Their artifices to delude men's minds are of two kinds, the first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose. They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting war. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: "The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science." They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.'' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)
Hence to neglect, or to reject, or to devalue so many and such great resources which have been conceived, expressed and perfected so often by the age-old work of men endowed with no common talent and holiness, working under the vigilant supervision of the holy magisterium and with the light and leadership of the Holy Ghost in order to state the truths of the faith ever more accurately, to do this so that these things may be replaced by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. The contempt for terms and notions habitually used by scholastic theologians leads of itself to the weakening of what they call speculative theology, a discipline which these men consider devoid of true certitude because it is based on theological reasoning.
Unfortunately these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself, which gives such authoritative approval to scholastic theology. This Teaching Authority is represented by them as a hindrance to progress and an obstacle in the way of science. Some non Catholics consider it as an unjust restraint preventing some more qualified theologians from reforming their subject. And although this sacred Office of Teacher in matters of faith and morals must be the proximate and universal criterion of truth for all theologians, since to it has been entrusted by Christ Our Lord the whole deposit of faith -- Sacred Scripture and divine Tradition -- to be preserved, guarded and interpreted, still the duty that is incuмbent on the faithful to flee also those errors which more or less approach heresy, and accordingly "to keep also the constitutions and decrees by which such evil opinions are proscribed and forbidden by the Holy See," is sometimes as little known as if it did not exist. What is expounded in the Encyclical Letters of the Roman Pontiffs concerning the nature and constitution of the Church, is deliberately and habitually neglected by some with the idea of giving force to a certain vague notion which they profess to have found in the ancient Fathers, especially the Greeks. The Popes, they assert, do not wish to pass judgment on what is a matter of dispute among theologians, so recourse must be had to the early sources, and the recent constitutions and decrees of the Teaching Church must be explained from the writings of the ancients. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)
Popes Saint Pius X and Pius XII described with exactitude the Modernist mind of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict concerning the nature of dogmatic truth, as can be seen from these three statements of his over the years that are absolutely consistent with each other:
In theses 10-12, the difficult problem of the relationship between language and thought is debated, which in post-conciliar discussions was the immediate departure point of the dispute.
The identity of the Christian substance as such, the Christian 'thing' was not directly ... censured, but it was pointed out that no formula, no matter how valid and indispensable it may have been in its time, can fully express the thought mentioned in it and declare it unequivocally forever, since language is constantly in movement and the content of its meaning changes. (Fr. Ratzinger: Dogmatic formulas must always change.)
The text [of the docuмent Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation] also presents the various types of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms - perhaps for the first time with this clarity - that there are decisions of the magisterium that cannot be the last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. The nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circuмstances of the times influenced, may need further correction.
In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century [19th century] about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time [on evolutionism]. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from falling into the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they became obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at their proper time.
(Joseph Ratzinger, "Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation," published with the title "Rinnovato dialogo fra Magistero e Teologia," in L'Osservatore Romano, June 27, 1990, p. 6, Card. Ratzinger: The teachings of the Popes against Modernism are obsolete.)
Secondly, it was necessary to give a new definition to the relationship between the Church and the modern State that would make room impartially for citizens of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence among them and for the freedom to practise their own religion.
Thirdly, linked more generally to this was the problem of religious tolerance - a question that required a new definition of the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions. In particular, before the recent crimes of the nαzι regime and, in general, with a retrospective look at a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.
These are all subjects of great importance - they were the great themes of the second part of the Council - on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.
It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.
On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)
Apart from the critiques of this philosophically absurd approach to dogmatic truth offered by Popes Saint Pius X and Pius XII that have just been cited, the [First] Vatican Council has solemnly anathematized the very few that has been held by Ratzinger/Benedict throughout the course of his priesthood:
Hence, that meaning of the sacred dogmata is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be an abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.... If anyone says that it is possible that at some given time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmata propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has always understood and understands: let him be anathema. [Vatican Council, 1870.]
Pope Saint Pius X amplified this condemnation--and cited it--in Pascendi Dominci Gregis:
Hence it is quite impossible [the Modernists assert] to maintain that they [dogmatic statements] absolutely contain the truth: for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man; and as instruments, they are the vehicles of truth, and must therefore in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sense. But the object of the religious sense, as something contained in the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes can avail himself of varying conditions. Consequently, the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion.
It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: "These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts." On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason"; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth." Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: "Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation." (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)
It should be noted furthermore that Ratzinger/Benedict's view of the nature of dogmatic truth (that it is expressed merely in contingent terms as a result of the inability of man to express it fully at any one point in time) is an act of blasphemy against the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who has inspired the Fathers of dogmatic councils to express their dogmatic decrees with exactitude and Who has similarly directed true popes to formulate their reiteration of the teaching contained in the Church's Ordinary Magisterium. For Ratzinger/Benedict to be correct, therefore, God Himself would have had to misdirect the Fathers of dogmatic councils and would have to abandon legitimate Successors of Saint Peter as they reiterated articles contained in the Deposit of Faith as they have been understood and taught from time immemorial. This is blasphemous. It is also an absolute impossibility.
Truth is immutable because God, the Author of all truth, is immutable. It is precisely because God does not want his rational creatures, whose intellects have been darkened by the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin and their own Actual Sins, confused about what He has revealed to us through Holy Mother Church and has entrusted to her magisterial authority for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Truth is clear. Truth is certain. Truth is absolute. The expression of truth must remain the same at all times. Truth can never contradict itself. Truth contains within itself no paradoxes. Truth does not give rise to its antithesis.
Those, such as Ratzinger/Benedict, who reject the certainty and permanence of the expression of dogmatic truth believe in a falsehood. They may, as noted at the beginning of this commentary, believe it most sincerely. Sincerity of intention, however, can never make something that is false true. Sincerity of intention and a good motivation can never prevent the evil consequences that must flow from false ideas from occurring. Falsehoods do indeed have a dialectic, if you will, of their very own that cause them to change (or permutate) endlessly over time, causing nothing but one disastrous consequence after another in their wake.
Once again, let me explain.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) believed that history was a clash of competing ideas. Thus it was that he devised what he called the principle of "dialectical idealism" to explain the history of man. Hegel contended that an original idea--the thesis-- contains within itself the seeds of its own internal contradiction, something we know, of course, to be patently false for true ideas but is indeed quite true for false ideas, something that Hegel did not recognized. This original idea or thesis gives rise immediately to its exact opposite--the antithesis--and the clash between the original idea (thesis) and its direct contradiction (antithesis) produces the new idea (the synthesis). The synthesis becomes the "new thesis," which gives rise with its own antithesis, thus producing a new clash and a new synthesis. The "end" of this dialectical process, according to Hegel, was what he called "Ideal Spirit." In other words, God Himself is in the process of "becoming." Hegel would thus give birth to what is known as "process philosophy" and "process theology," beliefs that were held by the proto-Modernism, the excommunicated Father Alfred Loisy.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) accepted the fact that history was defined by the dialectical concept of clash. As a materialist who rejected the existence of God and thus the fact that man has a rational, immortal soul made in His image and likeness, Marx adapted Hegel's dialectical idealism to his own belief that history is defined by the clash of competing economic classes. Marx's dialectical materialism contended that the struggle or clash between different economic classes and systems would result in the "end" of "ideal communism," a stage at which history itself would "end" and "man would begin." The inequitable distribution of wealth will have been remedied by the death of capitalists around the world and the forcible redistribution of their wealth by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is in this mythical stage of "ideal communism" that the state will "wither away and die" as the need for all human competition will have ceased to exist given the equitable distribution of wealth.
Like Hegel's dialectical idealism, which is premised on the falsehood that God and His truths are ever evolving in a constant clash of ideas, Marx's dialectical materialism is premised on the falsehood of the rejection of God's existence and thus upon a rejection of man's inherently fallen nature and that man can be satisfied only by the possession of God's very inner life in His immortal soul by means of Sanctifying Grace as a necessary precondition to enjoy the everlasting happiness of the possession of His very Beatific Vision in Heaven after death. How many hundreds of millions of lives have been slaughtered in the effort to "expedite" the "realization" of this falsehood?
As alluded to above, the dialectical concept advanced by Hegel and popularized by Marx, both of which played an important role in legitimizing Darwinism (God evolves, truth evolves, man evolves--either spiritually or economically, the species evolve), was near and dear to the hearts of early Modernists and their successors, including the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., who believed that the Church herself had to "evolve" with the times. The proto-ecuмenists of the early-Twentieth Century, such as the late Abbe Paul Couturier, cited by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II at footnote fifty of Ut Unum Sint, May 25, 1995, and very openly by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in an address to members of Protestant sects and the Orthodox confessions in Cologne, Germany, on Friday, August 19, 2005, was a firm disciple of Chardin's. The belief that the Sacred Liturgy must "evolve" with the times in order to convey the notion that doctrine itself was mutable was at the heart of the "liturgical movement" that had been hijacked by the Modernists in their bent to use the Mass as the means to promote false ecuмenism. We are eyewitnesses to the spiritual wreckage that has been wrought as a result.
Although Hegelianism is false in that truth does not change, does not evolve and cannot contradict itself, Hegelianism's dialectical thesis is true, in a fashion of speaking, as it relates to false ideas. False ideas do change, they do evolve, they do contradict themselves.
Just look at how the falsehoods of Protestantism have "evolved" and mutated over the last nearly five hundred years. From the time of Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., in 1517 to the present day there have arisen over 33,000 different Protestant sects. One cannot keep track of the disparate beliefs that are held by these false sects, many of which do pitched battle with each other, no less the true Faith, on a regular basis.
One can also look at how the falsehoods of conciliarism have "evolved" and mutated over the last forty years. Formerly Catholic parishes in the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are a conglomeration of different "mission statements," some of which state quite frankly that those of perverse "orientations" are "important" members of their "faith communities" as the "journey" of "discovery" unfolds in parish life. Offerings of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service can vary widely--even by the same presbyter--from one time to another even in the same parish, no less from parish to parish. (Believe me, I know. I experienced it for far, far too long, and those experiences became an integral part of the analysis of the Novus Ordo that I provided in G.I.R.M. Warfare.) It is not necessary in most parishes in the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism for those who worship there to be of like point on points of doctrine, which is why Catholics in public life who support the chemical and surgical assassination of innocent preborn children in their mothers' wombs remain in perfectly good standing in these parishes (and not infrequently serve as "lectors" and "extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist").
Here is where the dialectical mutation of the falsehoods of Modernity and Modernism intersect in the lives of ordinary Catholics, many of whom believe that they can indeed call themselves members of the Church in good standing while supporting one abject evil after another or while believing that there is something short of Catholicism that can serve as the basis of personal and social order. Thus it is, you see, that the falsehoods of the condemned heresy of Americanism have played an essential role in helping Catholics all across the ecclesiastical divide accept the false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that are so responsible for the social chaos that is all around us.
Like all other falsehoods, Americanism has its own "dialectic," if you will, as a result of its numerous false premises that most Catholics, including many of those who assist at Masses offered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism in any way at all, accept without realizing for a single moment that they are steeped in one set of contradictions after another, believing that they can be faithful members of the Catholic Church while adhering, perhaps inchoately, to beliefs that are inimical to the Sacred Rights of Christ the King and thus to the common temporal good of nations as that good must be pursued in light of man's Last End.
Let me try, once again, to enumerate the falsehoods of Americanism and to explain how they have mutated in the lives of ordinary Catholics all across the ecclesiastical divide, making advertence, at least in part, to material that I wrote thirteen months ago now, providing a bit of original elaboration in the context of this current article.
Americanism is the exaltation of the spirit of individual human abilities to "build" the "better world" without a complete and humble submission to everything contained in the Deposit of Faith that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the God the Holy Ghost, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. It is thus the exaltation of religious indifferentism (the belief that it doesn't matter what religion one belongs to, if any religion at all, as long as one is a "good" person) over the necessity of belief in the one and only true Faith, Catholicism, as the only means of personal salvation and the only means of social order.
To wit, both "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics in the United States of America believe in the false, naturalistic premises of the American founding, that is, that is possible for men of divergent religious beliefs--or of no religious beliefs at all--to work together as 'brothers" for the common temporal good without regard for man's Last End, the possession of the Beatific Vision for all eternity. Those who subscribe to the "leftist' bent of naturalism believe that the teaching of the Church is of little account in matters of public policy. Those who subscribe to the "rightist" bent of naturalism believe, at least for the most part, that it is not necessary to be confessionally Catholic when discussing matters of public policy, that it is "good enough" to speak of "traditional values" in order to work with Protestants and Jєωs and others to combat the evils of the day.
Americanism is thus the exaltation of the ability of human beings to be virtuous on their own without belief in, access to or cooperation with the Sanctifying Graces that were won by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and that flow into human hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. It is thus the exaltation of the spirit of the heresy of semi-Pelagianism, which asserts that human beings are more or less self-redemptive as they stir up graces within themselves to accomplish whatever "they" set their minds to doing.
Americanism is the exaltation of the spirit of egalitarianism over the truth of the hierarchy that exists in the Order of Creation and in the Order of Grace, that is, the Order of Redemption, making it necessary for there to a separation of Church and State in order that "free men" can choose for themselves how to live. Americanism is, all of its invocations of a generic "God" notwithstanding, the exaltation of the deification of man over man's due submission to God and the authority of His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls and to matters of fundamental justice in according with the binding precepts of His Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.
Americanism is the exaltation of the spirit of "civil" and "religious" liberty" over the true sense of liberty that comes only from the Catholic Faith.
Thus it is that a "dialectic," if you will, was born with the American founding that has splintered, much like Protestantism and all other falsehoods, in many different directions, producing competing political "camps" among Catholics in the United States of America. (See my elaborate discussion of these two strains in We're Not in Kansas Any More, a pertinent section of which I have appended below the Litany of Saints at the end of this current article.)
There are Catholics who are committed to the "leftist" strain of naturalism who see in the tenets of egalitarianism and statism the means to improve the lot of the poor and the marginalized. And then there are those of the "rightist" strain who believe that the very false, naturalistic tenets of the American founding can be used to "retard" various evils, including a statism that is but the logical, inevitable consequence of the founders' false belief that the "civic virtue" of the citizenry--combined with a system of checks and balances within the Federal government and a division of power between the Federal government and the state governments--could serve as a check against the "tyranny of the majority" and/or an excessive growth of power of the Federal government.
There is, of course, one and only check, albeit far from an absolute guarantor against the abuse of power by those who hold office in civil governments. This check is the Social Reign of Christ the King as It is exercised by the Catholic Church. Neither those Catholics committed to the "leftist" strain of naturalism or to the "rightist" strain of naturalism accept this fundamental truth. "Leftists" and "rightists" have views of the civil state based upon variations of the falsehoods of the American founding, not upon the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. The fact that there are differences between the "leftist" and "rightist" strains of naturalism amongst Catholics in the United States of America speaks loudly as to the truth that false premises must produce divergences and clashes in the minds of those who believe that they possess the "true" interpretation of those false premises.
The false premises of the American founding have nothing at all to do with the specific institutional arrangements created by the Constitution of the Untied States of America. Holy Mother Church has taught from time immemorial that she can adapt to any legitimate form of government. The false premises of the American founding have everything to to with the practical sovereignty of man over his own affairs to the absolute exclusion of the Sacred Rights of Christ the King as they must be exercised by the Catholic Church.
This is what I wrote in A Catechism of the Social Reign of Christ the King:
8) Are you saying that the Catholic Church condemns the form of government created in the Constitution of the United States of America?
No. As noted above, the Church can adapt to any particular form of government. She does insist, however, that she be recognized by the civil government as the true religion and that her right to intervene with civil officials as a last resort after the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation be acknowledged in a civil state's organic docuмents and/or a concordat with the Holy See. Everything else is left to the free judgment of men, who are nevertheless bound to pursue their actions in the civil realm in light of their eternal destiny.
A failure on the part of a civil government to recognize the true religion leads to the proliferation of one evil after another. Those who do not recognize that the civil state has a necessity to recognize the true religion and to yield to her magisterial authority in all that pertains to the good of souls will wind up considering themselves "independent" of that magisterial authority or they will wind up attempting to use that civil state's false premises to combat the evils of the day, making them modern day versions of the mythical Sisyphus (see A World of Sisyphuses and It's Still a World of Sisyphuses). This is the inevitable "dialectic" produced by Americanism, which has played such a key role in shaping the counterfeit church of conciliarism's embrace of "religious liberty" and the "separation of Church and State," both of which have been condemned by the authority of the Catholic Church from time immemorial.
The falsehoods of the American founding, you see, must lead to social chaos and disorder. The falsehoods of the American founding must lead to the triumph of statism. The falsehoods of the American founding must wind up convincing Catholics all across the ecclesiastical divide that there is some naturalistic or "inter-denominational" means short of Catholicism to "resolve" problems that have their remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in our own Actual Sins and thus can be ameliorated only by a reform of individual lives in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. The falsehoods of the American founding must wind up producing a "dialectic" that is premised upon the necessity of the clash of "competing interests" (see James Madison's The Federalist, Numbers 10 and 51) as the means of "safeguarding" personal liberty.
We see this "dialectic" at work at present with the news of the Wizard of Obama's appointment of the pro-abortion Catholic Governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, who has worked closely with the notorious Wichita, Kansas, late-term baby-killer, George Tiller (see Kansas Gov Kathleen Sebelius Held Secret Event With Late-Term Abortionist George Tiller), as the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Sebelius is an unreconstructed pro-abort, and one who has maintained her "good standing" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism despite the admonition delivered to her last year by the conciliar "archbishop" of Kansas City in Kansas, Joseph Naumann, to refrain from receiving what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service.
"Liberal" Catholics, most of whom support the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, are hailing Sebelius's appointment, believing that one can be privately "opposed" to child-killing" while supporting it publicly as a matter of yielding to "majoritarian" sentiment and the "rule of law."
This "liberal" view of the bifurcation of one's "private" beliefs and one's public positions is pure Americanism: the belief that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to the Catholic Church are of no account in public-policy decision-making, a view that has been condemned repeatedly by the authority of the Catholic Church as an absurdity. This is what Pope Leo XIII wrote on the matter in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:
Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue.
"Conservative" Catholics are upset with the Sebelius appointment, which was made by the Wizard of Obama after his first nominee to be Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, former United States Senator Thomas Daschle, yet another pro-abortion Catholic in public life who remains in "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, had to withdraw because he had "forgot" to report large amounts of income he had earned as a lobbyist after his defeat for re-election in 2004. The opposition of these "conservative" Catholics is most understandable as no one who supports baby-killing by chemical or surgical means in a single, solitary instance is fit to hold any office, whether elected or appointed, in any government anywhere in the world.
Committed, however, to the falsehoods of Americanism, which teaches us that we are going to "correct" various evils at the ballot box and by our active participation in the ʝʊdɛօ-Masonic fraud that is electoral politics as it is monopolized by the two major organized crime families in the United States of America, the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, many of these "conservative" Catholics have now found their "voices" to protest an appointment as horrific as that as Sebelius's, after eight years of utter silence as their partly "pro-life," partly pro-death "conservative" statist, George Walker Bush, appointed one pro-abort after another to the highest echelons of his administration, including the Catholic pro-abort Tom Ridge to be the first Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security (see an article I wrote in 2001 on Ridge's appointment as "homeland security czar" prior to the creation of the mess of a Cabinet department that has fouled up one disaster relief effort after another, No Homeland Security for the Preborn).
What these "conservative" Catholics forget is that almost none of them uttered word one, shall we say, when the "conservative" statist, George Walker Bush, appointed pro-aborts such as Ridge and Colin Powell and Andrew Card and Christine Todd Whitman and Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey and Condoleeza Rice and Michael Chertoff, Donald Rumsfeld, et al., to top positions in his administration. Why have their now discovered their "voices" after so much silence during the administration of former President George Walker Bush? Why is there so much outrage over Kathleen Sebelius, whose support for abortion and her association with George Tiller is truly egregious, to be sure, when there was next to no outrage over Bush's pro-abortion appointees and for his constant electoral support for pro-abortion Republicans, including Bush's support for the fully pro-abortion Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania in his 2004 primary against partly pro-life and partly pro-abortion United States Representative Patrick Toomey.
Well, there is a reason for the silence, and it is found in the never-ending evil consequences caused by the falsehoods of Americanism, which of themselves owe so much to the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent rise of ʝʊdɛօ-Masonry.
The Protestant Revolt unleashed a violent, blood assault upon the true Church and her members. Although it is certainly the case that the Dutch Calvinists were brutal in the execution of the Martyrs of Gorkhum (see note below) and that the Swiss Calvinists hunted down and killed Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen for daring to contradict their heresies that come from the devil himself, the violent assaults against Catholics that were unleashed during the Protestant Revolt were the most harsh in England and Ireland. Over 72,000 Catholics were killed in England after King Henry VIII had himself declared "supreme head of the Church in England" by an act of the Parliament in 1534 and the time of his death of 1547 (this figure is found in Dr. Warren Carroll's The Cleaving of Christendom). Another violent outburst against Catholics took place during the reign of Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, who employed the notorious "priest-catcher," Richard Topcliffe, who had a private torture rack in the basement of his house that he used to "stretch" priests by as much as a much as a foot!
Weary of the persecutions and the heavy taxation and the suppression of the Mass, those Catholics from England and Ireland who fled to the United States of America in its infancy in the early part of the Nineteenth Century were "relieved" to find that they could practice their Faith openly and without persecution from the Federal government. To be sure, many of these immigrants faced unjust discrimination from Protestant and Masonic nativists. Much violence was done to them and to their persons on occasion. Various state laws discriminated against Catholics. Other state laws were designed to insure the "Americanization" of the Irish immigrants, which is why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the behest of the Unitarian named Horace Mann, created the first state department of education in 1837 as a means of "standardizing" educational standards in public schools so that the children of Catholic immigrants would learn the ways of religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and democracy.
One author, evidently not a Catholic, put the matter this way:
There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.
Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.
Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme? One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world. What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.
Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state-sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient. He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them. At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution. (Steven Yates, A Book Review of Bruce Shortt's "The Harsh Truth About Government Schools," The Harsh Truth About Government Schools by Steven Yates.)
Despite the persecutions and the attempts to neutralize their Faith, however, most Catholics in the Nineteenth Century , including most bishops and priests, were "grateful" to be able to practice the Faith openly and to have their devotions and processions. Very few saw the inherent dangers of the religiously indifferentist nature of the Constitution of the United States of America and saw it as a "virtue" to be able to live side-by-side with non-Catholics in a country that was said, albeit falsely, to be founded on some generic sense of "Christian" principles. Very few realized that the devil had raised up the bloodthirsty Protestant revolutionaries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries to make the "nice and tolerant" Protestants of the United States of America seem trustworthy by comparison, lulling many Catholics to sleep in the belief that the American Constitution, far from being a threat to the integrity to the Faith and an offense to the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, was a "model" of true "religious liberty" for the rest of the world.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, explained the falsity of this belief. While he recognized that Constitution was not openly hostile to the Faith and that the Church was able to minister to the spiritual needs of her children in the United States of America, he rejected the American system of Church-State relations as the "model" for the rest of the world:
Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circuмstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.
Pope Leo was explaining that the growth of the Church in the United States of America was the result of graces "with which God has endowed His Church," not the result of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Unlike Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who sees the American system of "separation of Church and State" as the prototypical model for the rest of the world, Pope Leo rejected the American system as the "model" for the rest of the world, recognizing that it posed the danger of convincing Catholics to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than the world through the eyes of the true Faith, as he explained in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899:
The underlying principle of these new opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. It does not need many words, beloved son, to prove the falsity of these ideas if the nature and origin of the doctrine which the Church proposes are recalled to mind. The Vatican Council says concerning this point: "For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention to be perfected by human ingenuity, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence that meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother, the Church, has once declared, nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them." -Constitutio de Fide Catholica, Chapter iv.
We cannot consider as altogether blameless the silence which purposely leads to the omission or neglect of some of the principles of Christian doctrine, for all the principles come from the same Author and Master, "the Only Begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father."-John i, I8. They are adapted to all times and all nations, as is clearly seen from the words of our Lord to His apostles: "Going, therefore, teach all nations; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world."-Matt. xxviii, 19. Concerning this point the Vatican Council says: "All those things are to be believed with divine and catholic faith which are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal magisterium, proposes for belief as having been divinely revealed."-Const. de fide, Chapter iii.
Let it be far from anyone's mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ. . . . .
But, beloved son [James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore], 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.
Pope Leo XIII was condemning a spirit in the falsehood of Americanism that would lead directly to conciliarism (false ecuмenism, religious liberty, separation of Church and State, novelty and innovation). Very few Catholics understood this in 1899. Very few Catholics understand this now, one hundred ten years after Pope Leo wrote these prophetic words in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae.
Indeed, most Catholics in the United States of America in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century saw partisan politics as the means of upward social, political and economic mobility. Leaders of the Democratic Party saw in these immigrants and their children the means to win elections, thus welcoming them with open arms and making it relatively easy for them to advance the ranks of ward politics. There was a price to be paid for this, of course: one could not be confessionally Catholic in his public discourse. One had to speak in generic, inter-denominational or non-denominational terms, thus advancing the agenda of ʝʊdɛօ-Masonry as the Incarnation and Redemptive Act of the God-Man, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, was held to be of no account whatsoever in public life.
The "identification" of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that a story was told in the 1930s of a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, who was praying a Novena to Saint Monica for the return of her son to the Faith. A friend asked her what had happened to her son. The woman praying the Novena said in great distress, "He's become a Republican!" Yes, being a Democrat and being a Catholic were considered to be inseparable by the lion's share of Catholics in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries.
This alliance of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that they overlooked the blatant anti-Catholicism of the likes of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt time and time again. After all, it was the "party" that mattered. Oh, it was too bad that Wilson supported the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico. Catholics just voted for the Democratic Party, which permitted Franklin Roosevelt, who, unlike his statist predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he worked as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, cultivated friendships with Catholic prelates in order to coopt them into supporting his own statist plans, to unleash a veritable campaign team of Catholic bishops and priests to denounce any "conservative" Catholic who dared to criticize his policies. As noted in We're Not in Kansas Any More two months ago now, Roosevelt unleashed the "Right Reverend New Dealer," Monsignor John A. Ryan, to denounce the courageous Father Charles Coughlin for him during his re-election campaign in 1936. And Francis Cardinal Spellman was known as "FDR's errand boy in a miter."
It was, however, after World War II that fissures began to break in the solid Catholic support for the Democratic Party. The threat posed by the spread of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe and the fall of China to the forces of Mao Zedong in 1949 led some Catholics to turn more and more to the Republican Party, convincing themselves that they could purge that stronghold of anti-Catholic Masons and nativists and transform it into a bastion of "conservatism" to turn back the New Deal and to win the Cold War.
The fissures in Catholic support became more pronounced in the years after the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, especially during the years of the administration of President Ronald Wilson Reagan. Having convince themselves that electoral politics was the means to "transform" the country, well-meaning Catholics of the "conservative" bent engaged in what could be termed a Manichean struggle with Catholics of the "leftist" bent, each side armed with "bishops" who supported their own particular brand of Americanism, each convinced that the "other" side was composed of "bad guys" as they represented the '"true" interpretation of the Constitution and the "rights" of Catholics in a pluralistic society.
Just as Democrats and Republicans agree on the basic naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of the American founding, disagreeing on the specifics as to the conduct of public policy in light of those principles, so is it the case that "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics accept those same false principles as they diverge on the specifics of public policy according to the political "camp" which they believe represents the best means of achieving various goals. Both "liberal" and "conservatives" Catholics are as one in rejecting these simple truths of the Catholic Faith as binding upon their consciences and that they apply to the concrete circuмstances to be found in the United States of America, believing that their naturalistic or non-denominational ideas and plans and strategies can "win the day" for their respective causes:
. . 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.)
That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)
God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doc