Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => Fighting Errors in the Modern World => Topic started by: Lover of Truth on March 24, 2014, 01:01:02 PM
-
http://www.christorchaos.com/GivingUntoCaesarWhatBelongsToGodAlone.htm
The descent into the abyss of a world that has rejected the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Holy Church is nearly complete. Only a few remaining barriers of moral depravity need to be razed before an active, overt state-sponsored persecution of those who dare to oppose the madness of our times begins with the full backing of large numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
The modern civil state is the work of the devil, who has propagandized the "Sovereignty of Man" now as never before.
Most people in what was once termed the "civilized West" live as sentient beasts, devoid of rationality as they seek wealth, luxury, amusements and an endless array of sentient pleasures.
Most people in what was once termed the "civilized West" believe that the principal purpose of human existence is to acqire, retain and expand wealth. Many are convinced that it is duty of the civil state to provide for their every need, especially in times of personal crisis or natural disaster, caring not how their goodies will be paid for over the course of time as that will be a problem for "someone else," not them.
Most people in what was once termed the "civilized" West believe that "one religion is a good as another," being reafffirmed in that conviction by the words of the actions of the men who have been masquerading as "popes" since October 28, 1958.
Most people in what was once the "civilized" West believe that the conception of children may be "planned," whether by artifical or "natural" means, as a matter of personal "right" and that they be disposed of by chemical or surgical means if an "accident" happens.
Large numbers of people in what was once the "civilized" West believe the elderly or the terminally or the chronically ill may be sent to "hospice" or simply euthanized in the name of "mercy" and "compassion."
Increasingly larger numbers of people now believe that it is wrong to deny those who are inclined to the commission of perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments have the "right to marry those they love." And it is this sentimental drivel that has its origin with the devil and leads straight to Hell that has resulted in the abysmal absurdity of two days of arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States of America on "gαy marriage."
As noted a week ago today in They Have Heard The People Sing, the first day of hearings on Tuesday, March 26, 2013, Tuesday of Holy Week, dealt with the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, centering on Proposition 8 in California. The second day of hearings on Wednesday, March 27, 2013, Wednesday of Holy Week, centered on the constitutionality of a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by the Congress of the United States of America on September 10, 1996, and signed into law by then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton on September 21, 1996.
The questions asked by the justices during oral arguments in the case of Windsor v. United States, which concerned the "right" of a practitioner of perversity to inherit the benefits due to a surviving "spouse" demonstrate the utter depths to which men must fall absent the Catholic Faith, especially at a time when the world is deprived of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the sacramentally barren liturgical rites of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that have resulted in men being devoid of the use of even reason and logic on the purely natural level:
On the second day of intense arguments over the volatile issue of same-sex marriage, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who most likely holds the decisive vote, returned again and again to the theme that deciding who is married is a matter for the states. The federal government, he said, should respect “the historic commitment of marriage, and of questions of the rights of children, to the states.”
That suggests that he is prepared to vote with the court’s four liberal members to strike down the part of the 1996 law that recognizes only the marriages of opposite-sex couples for more than 1,000 federal laws and programs. Such a ruling would deliver federal benefits to married same-sex couples in the nine states, and the District of Columbia, that allow such unions.
If the 1996 law stands, Justice Kennedy said, “you are at real risk with running in conflict with what has always been thought to be the essence” of state power, which he said was to regulate marriage, divorce and custody.
All four members of the court’s liberal wing questioned the constitutionality of the law, though they largely focused on equal protection principles rather than on the limits of federal power.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, said the law effectively created “two kinds of marriage: the full marriage, and then this sort of skim milk marriage.”
Paul D. Clement, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush and is defending the law on behalf of House Republicans, argued that the federal government was entitled to use a uniform definition of marriage across the nation.
Mr. Clement said countless laws over time had been enacted with the traditional definition of marriage in mind. When Congress approved the 1996 law, he said, it was worried that if one state extended the definition to include same-sex couples, those laws would effectively be changed.
“What Congress says is, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” Mr. Clement said of what had happened in 1996. “ ‘Let’s take a timeout here. This is a redefinition of an age-old institution.’ ”
Justice Elena Kagan said there was something else at work.
“Do we really think that Congress was doing this for uniformity reasons, or do we think that Congress’s judgment was infected by dislike, by fear, by animus and so forth?” she asked.
She read a passage from the House record at the time that said the law had been animated by a “collective moral judgment” to “express moral disapproval of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity.”
Mr. Clement responded: “Of course, the House report says that. And if that’s enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the statute. But that has never been your approach.”
“Just because a couple legislators may have had an improper motive” is irrelevant, Mr. Clement said, adding that the usual question for the court was simply whether the challenged law was supported by a rational justification.
Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said the 1996 law is deeply unfair and means, for instance, “that the spouse of a soldier killed in the line of duty cannot receive the dignity and solace of an official notification of next of kin.”
The arguments came a day after the court heard a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriages. That argument was murky and muddled, and many of the justices’ questions suggested they were looking for a way to duck the central issue.
By comparison, Wednesday’s case was modest, and the arguments were clear. The court heard a preliminary 50-minute session on whether it had jurisdiction to hear the case, but those issues did not seem to threaten to send the case off the rails.
The court appointed Vicki C. Jackson, a law professor at Harvard, to argue a position not fully supported by any party: that the case’s odd procedural posture meant the court lacks jurisdiction. (Justices Hear Arguments on Defense of Marriage Act.)
Just consider the absurdity of adult human beings speaking in the manner as quoted above.
Consider the absurdity of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed by President Ronald Wilson Reagan on November 30, 1987, and sworn in on February 18, 1988, stating that "you are at real risk with running in conflict with what has always been thought to be the essence” of state power, which he said was to regulate marriage, divorce and custody." The regulation of marriage, divorce and custody" are "thought to be the essence" of state power?
Well, Anthony Kennedy, here is something you must have missed in your catechism classes when you were growing up in your local parish in Sacramento, California, in the 1940s:
Nevertheless, the naturalists, as well as all who profess that they worship above all things the divinity of the State, and strive to disturb whole communities with such wicked doctrines, cannot escape the charge of delusion. Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it a something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature. Innocent III. therefore. and Honorius III, our predecessors, affirmed not falsely nor rashly that a sacrament of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and unbelievers. We call to witness the monuments of antiquity, as also the manners and customs of those people who, being the most civilized, had the greatest knowledge of law and equity. In the minds of all of them it was a fixed and foregone conclusion that, when marriage was thought of, it was thought of as conjoined with religion and holiness. Hence, among those, marriages were commonly celebrated with religious ceremonies, under the authority of pontiffs, and with the ministry of priests. So mighty, even in the souls ignorant of heavenly doctrine, was the force of nature, of the remembrance of their origin, and of the conscience of the human race. As, then, marriage is holy by its own power, in its own nature, and of itself, it ought not to be regulated and administered by the will of civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone in sacred matters professes the office of teaching.
Next, the dignity of the sacrament must be considered, for through addition of the sacrament the marriages of Christians have become far the noblest of all matrimonial unions. But to decree and ordain concerning the sacrament is, by the will of Christ Himself, so much a part of the power and duty of the Church that it is plainly absurd to maintain that even the very smallest fraction of such power has been transferred to the civil ruler.
Lastly should be borne in mind the great weight and crucial test of history, by which it is plainly proved that the legislative and judicial authority of which We are speaking has been freely and constantly used by the Church, even in times when some foolishly suppose the head of the State either to have consented to it or connived at it. It would, for instance, be incredible and altogether absurd to assume that Christ our Lord condemned the long-standing practice of polygamy and divorce by authority delegated to Him by the procurator of the province, or the principal ruler of the Jєωs. And it would be equally extravagant to think that, when the Apostle Paul taught that divorces and incestuous marriages were not lawful, it was because Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero agreed with him or secretly commanded him so to teach. No man in his senses could ever be persuaded that the Church made so many laws about the holiness and indissolubility of marriage, and the marriages of slaves with the free-born, by power received from Roman emperors, most hostile to the Christian name, whose strongest desire was to destroy by violence and murder the rising Church of Christ. Still less could anyone believe this to be the case, when the law of the Church was sometimes so divergent from the civil law that Ignatius the Martyr, Justin, Athenagoras, and Tertullian publicly denounced as unjust and adulterous certain marriages which had been sanctioned by imperial law.
Furthermore, after all power had devolved upon the Christian emperors, the supreme pontiffs and bishops assembled in council persisted with the same independence and consciousness of their right in commanding or forbidding in regard to marriage whatever they judged to be profitable or expedient for the time being, however much it might seem to be at variance with the laws of the State. It is well known that, with respect to the impediments arising from the marriage bond, through vow, disparity of worship, blood relationship, certain forms of crime, and from previously plighted troth, many decrees were issued by the rulers of the Church at the Councils of Granada, Arles, Chalcedon, the second of Milevum, and others, which were often widely different from the decrees sanctioned by the laws of the empire. Furthermore, so far were Christian princes from arrogating any power in the matter of Christian marriage that they on the contrary acknowledged and declared that it belonged exclusively in all its fullness to the Church. In fact, Honorius, the younger Theodosius, and Justinian, also, hesitated not to confess that the only power belonging to them in relation to marriage was that of acting as guardians and defenders of the holy canons. If at any time they enacted anything by their edicts concerning impediments of marriage, they voluntarily explained the reason, affirming that they took it upon themselves so to act, by leave and authority of the Church, whose judgment they were wont to appeal to and reverently to accept in all questions that concerned legitimacy and divorce; as also in all those points which in any way have a necessary connection with the marriage bond. The Council of Trent, therefore, had the clearest right to define that it is in the Church's power "to establish diriment impediments of matrimony," and that "matrimonial causes pertain to ecclesiastical judges."
Let no one, then, be deceived by the distinction which some civil jurists have so strongly insisted upon -- the distinction, namely, by virtue of which they sever the matrimonial contract from the sacrament, with intent to hand over the contract to the power and will of the rulers of the State, while reserving questions concerning the sacrament of the Church. A distinction, or rather severance, of this kind cannot be approved; for certain it is that in Christian marriage the contract is inseparable from the sacrament, and that, for this reason, the contract cannot be true and legitimate without being a sacrament as well. For Christ our Lord added to marriage the dignity of a sacrament; but marriage is the contract itself, whenever that contract is lawfully concluded. . . .
Truly, it is hardly possible to describe how great are the evils that flow from divorce. Matrimonial contracts are by it made variable; mutual kindness is weakened; deplorable inducements to unfaithfulness are supplied; harm is done to the education and training of children; occasion is afforded for the breaking up of homes; the seeds of dissension are sown among families; the dignity of womanhood is lessened and brought low, and women run the risk of being deserted after having ministered to the pleasures of men. Since, then, nothing has such power to lay waste families and destroy the mainstay of kingdoms as the corruption of morals, it is easily seen that divorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of families and States, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people, and, as experience shows us, opening out a way to every kind of evil-doing in public and in private life.
Further still, if the matter be duly pondered, we shall clearly see these evils to be the more especially dangerous, because, divorce once being tolerated, there will be no restraint powerful enough to keep it within the bounds marked out or presurmised. Great indeed is the force of example, and even greater still the might of passion. With such incitements it must needs follow that the eagerness for divorce, daily spreading by devious ways, will seize upon the minds of many like a virulent contagious disease, or like a flood of water bursting through every barrier. These are truths that doubtlessly are all clear in themselves, but they will become clearer yet if we call to mind the teachings of experience. So soon as the road to divorce began to be made smooth by law, at once quarrels, jealousies, and judicial separations largely increased: and such shamelessness of life followed that men who had been in favor of these divorces repented of what they had done, and feared that, if they did not carefully seek a remedy by repealing the law, the State itself might come to ruin. The Romans of old are said to have shrunk with horror from the first example of divorce, but ere long all sense of decency was blunted in their soul; the meager restraint of passion died out, and the marriage vow was so often broken that what some writers have affirmed would seem to be true -- namely, women used to reckon years not by the change of consuls, but of their husbands. In like manner, at the beginning, Protestants allowed legalized divorces in certain although but few cases, and yet from the affinity of circuмstances of like kind, the number of divorces increased to such extent in Germany, America, and elsewhere that all wise thinkers deplored the boundless corruption of morals, and judged the recklessness of the laws to be simply intolerable.
Even in Catholic States the evil existed. For whenever at any time divorce was introduced, the abundance of misery that followed far exceeded all that the framers of the law could have foreseen. In fact, many lent their minds to contrive all kinds of fraud and device, and by accusations of cruelty, violence, and adultery to feign grounds for the dissolution of the matrimonial bond of which they had grown weary; and all this with so great havoc to morals that an amendment of the laws was deemed to be urgently needed.
Can anyone, therefore, doubt that laws in favor of divorce would have a result equally baneful and calamitous were they to be passed in these our days? There exists not, indeed, in the projects and enactments of men any power to change the character and tendency with things have received from nature. Those men, therefore, show but little wisdom in the idea they have formed of the well-being of the commonwealth who think that the inherent character of marriage can be perverted with impunity; and who, disregarding the sanctity of religion and of the sacrament, seem to wish to degrade and dishonor marriage more basely than was done even by heathen laws. Indeed, if they do not change their views, not only private families, but all public society, will have unceasing cause to fear lest they should be miserably driven into that general confusion and overthrow of order which is even now the wicked aim of socialists and communists. Thus we see most clearly how foolish and senseless it is to expect any public good from divorce, when, on the contrary, it tends to the certain destruction of society. (Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum, February 10, 1890.)
So much for the "essence" of state power, Tony Kennedy. Yet it is that Anthony Kennedy remains a "Catholic" in "good standing" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism despite twenty-five years of decisions in favor of contraception, abortion and sodomy, including his infamous opinion, signed by Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ronald Wilson Reagan's first appointee to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert Casey, June 29, 1992:
Although Roe has engendered opposition, it has in no sense proven unworkable, representing as it does a simple limitation beyond which a state law is unenforceable. P. 835.
(e) The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves human values, and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly measured, neither can the certain costs of overruling Roe for people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed. Pp. 855-856. (Text of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.)
Anthony Kennedy is just another Catholic sophist in public life, a man who continues to give unto Caesar what belongs to God alone.
There was also the spectacle of Ruth Bader Ginsburg decrying "two kinds of marriage" and Elena Kagan decrying the condemnation of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ behavior by some sponsors of the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States House of Representatives that prompted former United Staes Solicitor General Paul Clement, who represented the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of Representatives, to assert that the fact that "a couple legislators may have had an improper motive" was irrelevant to the Act's constitutionality.
Improper motives?
What, Mr. Paul Clement, who now teaches as an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is improper about declaring ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ behavior to be immoral?
If this is so, Mr. Clement, then you have a problem with God Himself:
And when the men rose up from thence, they turned their eyes towards Sodom: and Abraham walked with them, bringing them on the way. And the Lord said: Can I hide from Abraham what I am about to do: Seeing he shall become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the nations of the earth shall be blessed? For I know that he will command his children, and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, and do judgment and justice: that for Abraham's sake the Lord may bring to effect all the things he hath spoken unto him. And the Lord said: The cry of Sodom and Gomorrha is multiplied, and their sin is become exceedingly grievous.
I will go down and see whether they have done according to the cry that is come to me: or whether it be not so, that I may know. And they turned themselves from thence, and went their way to Sodom: but Abraham as yet stood before the Lord. And drawing nigh he said: Wilt thou destroy the just with the wicked? If there be fifty just men in the city, shall they perish withal? and wilt thou not spare that place for the sake of the fifty just, if they be therein? Far be it from thee to do this thing, and to slay the just with the wicked, and for the just to be in like case as the wicked, this is not beseeming thee: thou who judgest all the earth, wilt not make this judgment.
And the Lord said to him: If I find in Sodom fifty just within the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. And Abraham answered, and said: Seeing I have once begun, I will speak to my Lord, whereas I am dust and ashes. What if there be five less than fifty just persons? wilt thou for five and forty destroy the whole city? And he said: I will not destroy it, if I find five and forty. And again he said to him: But if forty be found there, what wilt thou do? He said: I will not destroy it for the sake of forty. Lord, saith he, be not angry, I beseech thee, if I speak: What if thirty shall be found there? He answered: I will not do it, if I find thirty there.
Seeing, saith he, I have once begun, I will speak to my Lord. What if twenty be found there? He said: I will not destroy it for the sake of twenty. I beseech thee, saith he, be not angry, Lord, if I speak yet once more: What if ten should be found there? And he said: I will not destroy it for the sake of ten. And the Lord departed, after he had left speaking to Abraham: and Abraham returned to his place. (Genesis 16: 16-33)
And he said to him: Behold also in this, I have heard thy prayers, not to destroy the city for which thou hast spoken. Make haste and be saved there, because I cannot do any thing till thou go in thither. Therefore the name of that city was called Segor. The sun was risen upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor. And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about, all the inhabitants of the cities, and all things that spring from the earth.
And his wife looking behind her, was turned into a statue of salt. And Abraham got up early in the morning and in the place where he had stood before with the Lord, He looked towards Sodom and Gomorrha, and the whole land of that country: and he saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace. (Genesis 19: 21-28.)
Did God have an "improper motive" for raining down brimstone and fire upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, Mr. Clement?
Oh, that never happened, you say? It's just a made-up story?
Well, apart from blaspheming God the Holy Ghost, under whose Divine inspiration Holy Writ was composed, such an assertion would also blaspheme Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Who referred specifically to the just punishment that had been imposed on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha where the sins of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ behavior were rampant when He warned that a worse fate than that of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha await those who live in places where His Apostles and disciples have to shake the dust off of their feet because His Gospel has not been accepted:
And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till you go thence. And when you come into the house, salute it, saying: Peace be to this house. And if that house be worthy, your peace shall come upon it; but if it be not worthy, your peace shall return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust from your feet. Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. (Matthew 10: 11-15.)
Undaunted, however, more and more politicians of both major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America are announcing their support for "gαy marriage:"
Two more senators, one from each party, announced their support for same-sex marriage on Tuesday. Their shifts appear to mark 50 votes to legalize such unions in the Senate.
Mark Kirk of Illinois joined Rob Portman of Ohio on the small list of Senate Republicans who back legalizing marriage for gαy couples.
“When I climbed the Capitol steps in January,” Mr. Kirk said, referring to when he returned to work after spending a year recovering from a stroke, “I promised myself that I would return to the Senate with an open mind and greater respect for others.”
He continued, in a statement: “Same-sex couples should have the right to civil marriage. Our time on this earth is limited; I know that better than most. Life comes down to who you love and who loves you back — government has no place in the middle.”
Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, took to Facebook to announce his support.
“As our society has changed and evolved, so too has the public’s opinion on gαy marriage – and so has mine,” he wrote, adding that the Golden Rule had prompted him to believe that “all Americans should be free to marry the people they love and intend to share their lives with, regardless of their sɛҳuąƖ orientation.”
More senators have been announcing their support of same-sex marriage almost daily, including Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Monday. (The Caucus: G.O.P. and Democratic Senators Back gαy Marriage.)
Yes, they heard the people sing, "Give us Barrabas! Give us Barrabas! We have no king but Caesar! We gladly give unto Caesar what belongs to Christ the King as Caesar alone is our god and none other."
Nothing will happen to United States Senator Robert "Bob" Casey (D-Pennsylvania) for his recent announcement. He will not be sanctioned in any manner by "Bishop" Joseph C. Bambera of his home Diocese of Scranton. Robert Casey, Jr., will remain in perfectly good standing in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
Why not?
So has Daniel Malloy, Martin O'Malley, Andrew Mark Cuomo, Patrick Quinn, Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Peℓσѕι, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and a plethora of others.
After all, the conciliar "bishops," most of whom have been "gαy friendly" in actual pastoral praxis (and not a few in their own private lives) and in the very culture they have helped to foster in their chancery offices, parishes, schools, universities, seminaries, convents and religous miseducation programs. They are tripping all over themselves know to demonstrate just how "gαy friendly" they are even though they say that they are opposed to "gαy marriage":
Still, Dolan has always been viewed as a more pastoral figure than many hard-line American prelates. He has tried to steer the hierarchy on a politically realistic course, even when he's eagerly taken on the White House on issues such as the Obamacare mandate for employers to provide free contraceptive insurance coverage.
Christopher Hale, co-founder of the Millennial blog for young Catholics and an adviser for President Obama's re-election campaign, said he's had constructive exchanges with Dolan, and said Dolan's office had responded positively to Hale's March 26 Washington Post column that urged the very kind of pastoral shift on gαys that Dolan seemed to adopt.
Hale also cited a Religion News Service column by Michael O'Loughlin calling for a shift in emphasis that he said Dolan's office also appreciated. "I know he listens," Hale said of Dolan. "I know he has his finger to the wind on this issue" of the church's attitude towards gαys and lesbians.
Other leaders apparently do as well.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, and his predecessor, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, were also on Sunday morning news shows addressing the issue of gαy rights and stressing that the Catholic Church needed to be welcoming. As McCarrick put it, the church could be open to civil unions as an alternative to gαy marriage.
Interestingly, it's the same approach Francis tried to take in Argentina, voicing support among Argentine bishops for civil unions against a national bid to allow gαy marriage. He ultimately lost both battles.
Church officials insist that the Catholic bishops have always taken a "hate the sin, love the sinner" approach, and that the positive comments by Dolan and other churchmen are nothing new.
"A disagreement on the definition of marriage is a serious disagreement. It is not, however, separation from the love of God," Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the USCCB, wrote in a blog post.
Yet that's not the message many bishops had been sending. During the 2012 presidential campaign, a number of bishops said that those who support civil marriage for gαys should be barred from Communion, and Dolan and other bishops cast the battle over gαy marriage, and against Obama, in almost apocalyptic terms.
Other church leaders used especially harsh language to describe gαys and lesbians, and some barred children from attending Catholic schools because their parents are gαy. Many also equated support for civil marriage for gαys with support for abortion, an action that is grounds for automatic excommunication.
As Dolan himself conceded on Easter, though, the bishops "try our darnedest to make sure we're not an anti-anybody," but up to now "we haven't been too good at that."
While gαy rights activists in the Catholic Church welcomed the change of tone as "nothing short of an Easter miracle," in the words of Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, church leaders also stress that they aren't softening their opposition to same-sex marriage.
At most, it appears that some leaders could be open to favoring civil unions or some alternative to gαy marriage — an option that may not even be on the table anymore. Another strategy: shifting the focus from blistering opposition to gαys and lesbians to ensuring that religious freedom and conscience rights are respected in future gαy rights laws.
That itself could be significant, though it's not clear whether that will be enough to alter the dynamic that has built up in recent years. To be sure, the hierarchy will also face strong calls from its right flank to take a more vocal stand against gαy rights.
"Why aren't their (Catholic) bishops appearing on the tube with David Gregory and Piers Morgan to defend the institution of marriage as a union of one man and one woman?" Michael Reagan wrote in a March 28 column at the conservative news site, Townhall.com.
"Like the bank executives that are too chicken to stand up to the federal bullies in Washington, and like the energy company bosses in California who won't stand up to the Green Socialists in Sacramento, the churches cower in fear," Reagan wrote.
Dolan didn't give up the doctrinal ship in his recent appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He spoke to gαy men and lesbians saying, in part, "... we want your happiness... and you're entitled to friendship.' But the church does not see them as entitled to married love.
And Wuerl brought that point home in his Fox News Sunday appearance. He told Chris Wallace:
"The only thing I worry about is someone saying to me, 'You, because you believe that sex is intended for marriage and because you believe that marriage is indissoluble and because you believe that marriage is between a man and a woman that somehow you don't belong here, that somehow this is bigotry or this is hate speech.' That's what I worry about. There has to be room enough in a society as large, as free as pluralistic as America to make space for all of us." (Is Conciliar shift on practioners of moral perversity substance or style?)
Yes, these apostates have "heard the people sing."
Moreover, these apostates, committed sons of the heresy of Americanism that each and every single one of them is, have helped to teach the people to "sing" for their "rights" in a land of religious indifferentism, naturalism, semi-Pelagianism and civil and religious "liberty."
Yes, it is the conciliar "bishops," now aided and abetted by their "popes" and their current Petrine Minister, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who have helped to create an atmsophere so redolent in a celebration of the "diversity" and "pluralism" of the modern civil state that they must now react with sensitivity as the people sing songs that cause them to extol a society that is "large" enough and "free" enough to provide space even to those who might believe, however tenuously, to some concept of objective moral truths. But that's all that these apostates want, some "space."
Well, these apostates have been given "space" enough to ruin souls for far too long, resulting in the inability of Catholics to know right from wrong and to be unwilling even to come to the defense of truth for fear of "offending" some relative or friend steeped in one or more of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and, of course, in the ruination of the domestic cell of the Church, the family, and thus of society-at-large.
Even a thorough-going naturalist, David Stockman, who was the Director of the Office of Management and the Budget under President Ronald Wilson Reagan from January 21, 1981, to August 1, 1985, and who is a complete and total supporter of chemical and surgical baby-killing, understands that the profligate government spending and smoke-and-mirrors budgeting and irresponsible monetary policy of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has brought this country to the point of irreversible fiscal ruin. What he does not realize is that the situation he assesses so accurately has been caused by the moral decay within the souls of men that have been codified in law and accepted widely in society, including by himself, in the name of "freedom" and choice."
A brief look at Stockman's analysis, however, does reveal that the future is bleak for the United States of America, and a believing Catholic knows that it must be bleak because any nation that does not subordinate itself to the Social Reign of Christ of the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church is bound to founder on the rocky shoals of its own false founding premises and subseqent failed public policies:
These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incuмbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.
That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is. (Sundown in America.)
What David Stockman does not realize is that his own support for baby-killing and, presumably, "gαy marriage" has precipated the rise of statism just as happened as the Romans of anitquity became more and more immersed in sense pleasures, including all manner of perversity, while they eagerly surrendered more and more to the caesars and their minions.
Alas, as Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ prohesied, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha than for those nations that have refused to heed the words of Catholic truth such as contained in the following oft-quoted exhortations of the late Silvio Cardinal Antoniano in the Sixteenth Century and Pope Saint Pius X a mere one hundred three years ago:
The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; 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.)
The Protestant Revolution made possible the rise of ʝʊdɛօ-Masonry and of the false "philosophers" who set the stage for the French Revolution, a social revolution founded in the hatred of God (anti-Theism) that was to influence in its own wake all subsequent social revolutions, including the Bolshevik Revolution. Every single political "ideology" of the false opposites of the naturalist "left" and the naturalist "right" is an attempt to replace the social order that Catholicism once provided to the Western world. As alluded to by Pope Leo XIII and Pius XII in the passages provided above, all secular "'isms" (belief systems) have the proximate causes in the Protestant Revolution, including the spirit of nationalism, which is but a counterfeit of ape of true love of one's nation (patria that wills the good of one's nation without exalting a nation over God and His Church, that was responsible for the needless war of national pride, ambition and aggression that was World War I, the harbinger of World II.
Catholicism was once the foundation of all social order in Europe. It is now relativized to the margins as the people of once Catholic Europe have abandoned the Faith and as God has withdrawn His Sanctifying Graces from those lands as a result of the conciliar revolution, which continues to produce devastating consequences in its own sordid wake.
Cradle to the grave socialism, replete with entitlement programs that have corrupted all sense of personal responsibility, has brought Europe to its knees financially and produced social chaos and vast disorder.
The counterfeit church of conciliarism has played its own role in helping to worsen the situation caused by the false premises of Modernity. It has made its "reconciliation" with the principles of 1787 as millions upon millions of young Catholics detained in conciliar schools have had their souls spiritually aborted (see Cardinal Newman Society Survey and my own Apostasy Has Consequences.)
Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. Only from this perspective can we understand, on the one hand, the ghetto-mentality, of which we have spoken above; only from this perspective can we understand, on the other hand, the meaning of the remarkable meeting of the Church and the world. Basically, the word "world" means the spirit of the modern era, in contrast to which the Church's group-consciousness saw itself as a separate subject that now, after a war that had been in turn both hot and cold, was intent on dialogue and cooperation. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382.)
Pope Leo XIII warned solemnly in Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892, that there can be no "reconciliation" with the principles of the Revolution:
Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God (Pope Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892.)
Future voters, my friends, including those produced by Catholic schools in conciliar captivity, will indeed be singing the songs of angry "modern men," and the "will of the people" tomorrow may well be something quite different than the "will of the people" now.
Alas, it is not the "will of the people" that matters. It is the law of God as He has revealed It to us through His Catholic Church, which is why all of our efforts, including those to try to conform the civil law to His eternal Law, must be must on right principles without any compromises and without any concessions to error whatsoever.
We must have confidence in Our Lady's Fatima Message, consecrating ourselves to her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life. The only election that really matters is the one that took place in the Baptismal font when we were elected to be citizens of Heaven. There is only one judicial verdict that matters: that of Christ the King upon our immortal souls at the moment of our Particular Judgment.
This is our destiny, please God and by the graces that flow forth from the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother we persevere to the points of our dying breaths in states of Sanctifying Grace.
No matter the results of a particular election or the results of a particular plebiscite, we can be assured that our efforts to restore the Social Reign of Christ the King by means of our total consecration to Him through Mary our Immaculate Queen will help to plant a few seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith as we, recidivist sinners that we are, attempt to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, remembering to say each day:
O Jesus, it is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary."
These are the words spoken by the Mother of God in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, ninety-one years ago. They should be on our lips at all times so that there will come a day when the words uttered by the Cristeros in Mexico and the brave Catholics during the Spanish Revolution will be on the lips of all men and heralded on the flags of all nations:
Viva Cristo Rey!