11-09-2024, 08:10 AM
A portion of this 2006 article written for The Remnant Newspaper was reprinted on that site November 5, 2024.
The entire article is presented below in its entirety.
Editor’s Introduction: Perhaps the following article will not be easy to read for some. It’s an analysis of the philosophical and theological errors that were long ago insinuated into the root system of modern political thought. Born of the Protestant Revolution, these errors would ultimately bring the great tree of Christendom crashing to the ground. Included within this analysis is a penetrating look at how some of these fundamentally Protestant ideas made their way into the founding documents of our own country.
It is never easy to see faults in ourselves or in those we love, and it is no less difficult to recognize them in the land of our birth and childhood, hearth and home. Patriotism is a Christian virtue. Love of country is part of what builds integrity and honor in decent men. But love of country is not always synonymous with love of government, especially when governments deviate from Catholic principles as egregiously as has ours.
Just as we traditional Catholics must sometimes distinguish between the Church we revere above all else and the modern-day Vatican apparatus, so, too, Catholic Americans must recognize a distinction between the America we revere—the land of our birth, claimed as her own by Our Lady of Guadalupe, Empress of the Americas, discovered by the Catholic Columbus, colonized by the Catholic Spanish, Portuguese and French, generous beyond description in modern times, independent, resourceful, spirited—and the federal, centralized government which was founded by revolution-minded Protestants, who, while having some good and noble ideas, were nevertheless opposed to the Catholic Church and the social reign of Christ the King. (To admit this is not to insult or serve up calumny against our Founding Fathers; it is a mere statement of the historic reality, over which no serious historian would quibble. Our Founders were not Catholic and theirs was a “novus ordo seculorum” which was to replace the aging Catholic order of Christendom.)
And now, almost 230 years later, we American Catholics, living in the post-Christian era, must somehow sort out where we stand and how we are to reconcile the love and patriotism we all feel in our hearts for a land that has sustained us in bountiful plenty, with the dark side of our man-made government which has never shared our Faith and which is trying to impose secular democracy as a religion on the rest of the world.
Mrs. Hertz—a patriot, a Catholic American whose family goes back many generations in this country, a woman whose husband, a U.S. official, was among the first of the civilian hostages taken by the enemy in Vietnam and, in fact, died there in a Communist prison camp—has attempted in the present article to face the hard facts and contradictions that exist between scripture/Catholic teaching and the religion of global democracy, which, like it or not, spent its childhood in the wonderful, utopian, almost enchanted world we Americans call home.
America is not beyond hope. Her soil has run red with the blood of martyrs many times. But Christ the King is the only threat the King of Darkness recognizes, even here in America. Unless we get back to our Catholic roots, America—the great city on the hill—will first be placed in a position where she will do more to welcome the Antichrist and his New World Order than drive it back into the sea; and then she will be destroyed.
I encourage the reader to proceed with an open mind. The myths and fairy tales for adults that we’ve all been spoon fed for two hundred plus years are nearly impossible to overcome for many sincere and good Catholic Americans. But if we wish to know what’s really going on in the world today and what our children are really up against, then we must begin to look beyond the history written by Protestant victors to see what forces have long been at work even here in the land we love. If you’re ready to do that and perhaps even suffer some painful abrasions as the blindfold is removed, then read on . . . MJM
The true source of the godless democracy now overrunning the world and the Church is not hard to discover, for it is revealed in a vivid tableau which unfolds before the eyes of any reader of Chapter 9 of St. John’s Apocalypse: After the Fifth Angel sounds the trumpet ushering in the great age of heresy now coming to full climax at the dawn of our twenty-first century, the Apostle sees him given a key to hell’s “bottomless pit.” When the Angel opens it, ”the smoke of the pit ascended as the smoke of a great furnace: and the sun was darkened, and the air,” by the smothering fumes. We may take this to signify a worldwide darkness in which certainties can no longer be clearly discerned, the divine light having been obscured, and stifling error disseminated in the very air we breathe. In 1971 Pope Paul VI declared that this “smoke of Satan” had somehow or other penetrated the Temple of God.
The spectacle relates directly to the prophecy made by our Lord foretelling the tribulations of the days prior to His second coming, when He “shall send his Angels with a trumpet” and “the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light” (Matt. 24:29,31). The whole human environment being charged and penetrated by a miasma generated in hell, the Church, represented by the moon, is hobbled in her ministry and no longer able to reflect God’s truth clearly to the nations. At the close of her own little apocalypse confided to Mélanie Calvat at La Salette, our Lady declared that this was already happening way back in 1846: “It is time. The sun is darkening. . . The time is at hand. The abyss is opening,” and she predicted, “Only the faith will survive.”
But the blinding smoke of the pit isn’t the worst of the infestation, for the vision in the Apocalypse tells us that out of its billows there streamed hordes of “locusts upon the earth, and power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power” to torment “the men who have not the sign of God on their foreheads.” The shapes of these locusts, which the Church Fathers generally believed represented violent heretics, are described as “like to horses prepared for battle; and on their heads as it were crowns of gold: and their faces as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions: and they had breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like scorpions, and stings were in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.”
In other words these creatures, like earthly scorpions, possessed only natural means of doing harm. Wielding no supernatural power from heaven, they were not only prevented from doing injury to the elect who bore God’s sign, but even where their legitimate victims were concerned, their power was limited, for “it was given to them that they should not kill them; but that they should torment them five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man.” Whatever period of time these five months signify, it will be fearsome while it lasts, for the text goes on to say that “in those days men shall seek death and shall not find it: and they shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them.”
Again, our Lady echoed these words at La Salette when she said, “Men will beat their heads against the walls; they will call on death, yet death will constitute their torment; blood will flow on all sides. Who could overcome, if God doesn’t shorten the time of trial?” And our Lord himself had already predicted, “Unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect, those days shall be shortened” (Matt. 24:22). Although merely temporal and confined to the natural order, the pain and havoc caused by the locusts will be nearly unendurable.
As historical events unfold on the world stage, the symbolism of St. John’s vision becomes ever clearer. One detail leaps out starkly above all the rest, and that is the golden crowns on the heads of the locusts. They are not like the ones worn by the twenty-four ancients pictured elsewhere in the Apocalypse who cast them down before God’s throne acknowledging, “Thou art worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power: because thou hast created all things!” (4:10-11). Those worn by the locusts remain firmly fixed to their heads and are furthermore described only “as it were” of gold. In other words they are made of something that passes for gold but really isn’t. It would seem therefore that the locusts’ crowns are, for all their glitter, counterfeit. They are spurious symbols of the true authority which crowns are meant to represent and which can only be bestowed from above. As St. Paul says, “there is no power but from God” (Rom. 13:1).
A more graphic portrayal of the onslaught of the unbridled lust for self-government now ravaging the earth, can hardly be imagined than these troops of unisex crowned locusts “with the faces of men,” and “hair as the hair of women,” every one like another, yet each one a mini-king in its own right. Yet, despite their individual crowns and their appearance of autonomy, Scripture is careful to inform us that “they had over them a king.” And this king, we are told, is none other than “the Angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon; and in Greek Apollyon; in Latin Exterminans.” That the sacred text declares the name of this leader in the same three liturgical languages in which Jesus of Nazareth’s title as King of the Judeans was inscribed on the Cross cannot be happenstance. It would seem specifically to designate our Lord’s satanic counterpart the Antichrist, whose name in all languages is “Destroyer,” his essential mission being the destruction of Christ’s kingdom on earth.
His advent will have been well prepared by militant Democracy, the systematic revolt against God which began when the Fifth Trumpet announced the first stirrings of Protestantism and modern man began claiming the right to worship as he pleased and interpret Scripture for himself by the light of his own intellect. The same independent spirit gradually pervaded all fields of learning, which one by one separated themselves from the beneficent light of revelation and began operating on their own, spawning major scientific and social errors of every kind in the process. Gradually the new liberated man undertook the creation of a whole new reality for himself, hatched in his own mind apart from and presumably better than the reality created for him by God. He displaced the Earth as the center of the universe, replacing it first by the sun, and soon by nothing at all. Matter began moving of itself according to its own attractions without outside spiritual propulsion, and was soon credited with the power of producing life. Absolutes became relative almost overnight, not only in the material sphere, but in the moral as well.
After the discovery of electricity a whole new man-made world based on these novel ideas and operated by a completely new power source came into being. Natural substances created by God for man’s use on earth being now everywhere replaced by “better” artificial substitutes contrived by human means, the mechanical began replacing the organic everywhere at an accelerated pace. In ordinary common life automobiles were substituted for horses and mechanical appliances for domestic servants. Astounded at the marvels of his own progress in providing for himself, man found less and less reason to have recourse to divine Providence. The whole realm of the supernatural, become redundant at best, is now regarded by many as non-existent, to such a point that the New York Times for October 12, 2003 can feature an article by a correspondent from the Holy City of Rome declaring to the world, “Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong.”
This being the state of affairs, it was only to be expected that human lust for freedom would find political expression. As Auguste Comte pointed out, revolutionary ideas are nothing more than the social application of the principle of religious liberty. The religious subjectivism of Protestantism automatically prevented the imposition of any transcendent order on politics, so that the people soon became their own sovereign source of authority. Preaching a gospel of freedom and human rights apart from God and the Church He instituted, a new artificial form of government devoid of any outside moral restraints was soon invented by men inspired by the locust hordes from hell.
Formally inaugurated as the United States of America, it proved to be a veritable abomi-Nation, a social incarnation of the primordial Non serviam by which Lucifer first declared independence from God in heaven. Infecting nation after nation with the new satanic democracy, it has by now succeeded in subtracting nearly all organized human society from the dominion of Christ the King and the Church He founded. One of its Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, who fathered the first international League of Nations patterned in its image, summed up its apostolate thus: “America has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind. Democracy is a religion. Americans are now missionaries to the world, its President a priest!”
[Editor’s Note: This is the same President who ignored Pope Benedict XV’s calls for peace and who rejected the brilliant peace plan of the great Catholic Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary just as World War I was underway. (Emperor Charles I was recently canonized a saint). At the time, the Emperor had thwarted the Kaiser’s will by insisting on trying to deal with the United States to establish peace in Europe. This last of the great Holy Roman Emperors was one who truly wanted peace; had he been listened to, he would have saved Europe. And why did President Wilson reject the Emperor’s peace plan? Because, as Wilson put it, Emperor Charles was not an “elected leader”…Austria was not a democracy. Charles was defeated, Europe fell into chaos, the Soviet Union was off to the races, the seeds of brutal, Godless Nazism were planted, and millions and millions lost their lives. The Holy Roman Empire gasped its last trying to prevent the Great War that assisted so diligently at the birthing table of the New World Order. MJM]
The spread of a universal godless republic whose sole Gospel is freedom was predicted four centuries ago by Our Lady of Good Success to a Conceptionist nun in Quito, Ecuador. She told her that during the 19th and 20th centuries it would gradually “extinguish the precious light of Faith in souls by the almost total corruption of customs.” Later at La Salette she would point out to Mélanie Calvat some of the results to be expected: “With God’s holy Faith forgotten, each individual will want to direct himself and rise above his peers. Civil and ecclesiastical authority will be abolished, all order and justice will be trampled underfoot. Only murders, hatred, jealousy, lying and discord will be seen, with no love of country or family. . . . Civil governments will all have the same objective, which will be to abolish and make every religious principle disappear, to make way for materialism, atheism, spiritism and vices of all kinds.”
Let us hasten to say at this juncture that modern satanic democracy is far from the kind of democracy which held sway in classical times as, for example in ancient Greece, where it rested upon a huge slave base and was restricted to a relatively small number of privileged citizens subscribing to a common state religion. It is even farther from the limited democracy which was always practiced in Christendom at all levels of society in smaller components of government within the greater hierarchical framework dictated by natural law. Monks in their monasteries, for instance, were often free to elect their superiors, but once they had designated them, they had no power to depose them, that being the sole prerogative of higher authority. For underlings to control their superiors once they have been elected, and especially to remove them from office – as Democracy empowers the people to do – would have spelled rebellion pure and simple and was not tolerated.
Until modern times, man labored under no illusions that authority might originate from below. All the governments of the world, even among pagans, were originally patterned on, and were indeed derived from the human family as created by God. Their structure was strictly hierarchical, with a father-figure at the top who exercised the final authority as king or supreme leader over his subjects in much the same way a father ruled his wife and children. This did not mean that authority could be exercised arbitrarily, according to personal whim, for from the king on down everyone was subject (at least theoretically) to the same moral laws and national customs.
The basic cell of government was never the individual, but the family, which operated on the lowest level of society as a political unit in its own right. Under his immediate political superiors, the father was legally responsible for the behavior of his household, in Roman times even possessing the right to put his children to death. The principle of subsidiarity played a major role throughout the body politic, which means that no higher authority was supposed to do what a lower authority could accomplish for itself. God created the human body on this principle, as He did the family, where each member is responsible for tasks in accordance with his ability to perform them, and good government is built along similar lines.
In the history of the US, the gradual usurpation of states’ rights by an increasingly centralized authority supplies a clear and flagrant example of how the disregard of subsidiarity inevitably leads from the qualitative to the quantitative into totalitarianism. The Constitution attempted to obviate this possibility by the last Article in the Bill of Rights, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” but over the years, especially after the bloody Civil War fought over this very question, more and more power has been concentrated in the federal authority at the expense of states’ autonomy, not to mention the rights of individuals.
Where government is firmly anchored in natural law, regard for individual and local differences is more easily maintained, for a nation is nothing less than a family of families, and an empire is a family of national families. All live, breathe and grow as living organisms under laws resting on the Fourth Commandment, which orders us to honor not only our parents, but any other representatives of the divine authority which governs the universe and to which all citizens are ultimately responsible. In the vast majority of cases the supreme human authority was hereditary, passing from father to son as it does in the family, permitting leaders to implement long-term policies without concern for periodic reelections or radical changes of administration.
Alliances between nations were cemented not so much by legal agreements as by marriages between ruling families, chief among whom would figure those of the Davidic dynasty designated by God to head Christian nations. Furthermore, most of the heirs to royal thrones were subjected from the cradle to a rigorous education designed to prepare them for rule. There was little if any government by amateurs such as we have today in the do-it-yourself society where “you can be anything you want to be,” and public entertainers can be elected to the highest offices.
Historically hereditary monarchy has produced so high a degree of stability, continuity, cohesion and prosperity throughout human society as a whole that St. Thomas Aquinas was led to declare it “the best of governments.” Because it was human it was not perfect, but it worked very well. The French Davidic monarchy, on which all the other Christian monarchies depended, was founded in the Faith in the fifth century by King Clovis of the Franks and perdured in unbroken salic succession for nearly fourteen hundred years. Had it not been for the swarm of crowned locusts pouring out of hell, it would presumably have remained in power till now.
The immediate source of the change proved to be England, where modern, satanic democracy was hatched. It broke out violently in England with the regicide of Charles I. The crowned locusts apparently had found the readiest tools for their purpose among the English, the empire which to this day does not consider itself part of old Catholic Europe, and which as a nation has yet to repent of the criminal execution of Joan of Arc, the saint sent by God to save the pivotal French monarchy from English usurpation. Foreseeing little more than a limited success for democracy under the “constitutional” monarchy with a state religion which the English had agreed upon after the fall of Cromwell and the Restoration under Charles II, the astute locusts shifted their center of operations to the heretical English colonies wedged strategically (and illegally according to the international law then in force) between the French and Spanish territories in Catholic America.
There democratic ideology soon took root, transplanted from the mother country by a handful of radical English Freemasons who hoped to achieve, on new terrain far removed from the political centers of Christendom, what had so far proved impractical at home. Back in England under Henry VIII the locusts had already effected one nation’s independence from the Catholic Church, but in America, under cover of rebellion against the vestigial monarch George III – a God-fearing, upright Anglican who hated Freemasonry – they would sting their victims into concocting out of whole cloth a new man-made nation which would be independent of any religion at all, and whose written constitution would provide the blueprint countless others would follow.
Goaded by the scorpion-stings of their tormentors from the pit, representatives from the thirteen British colonies on July 4, 1776 “in general congress assembled” and acting solely “by authority of the good people of these Colonies,” began emancipating themselves from the God of revelation by promulgating a formal Declaration of Independence from the British Crown. Carefully eschewing any references to Jesus Christ or the Blessed Trinity, they were content to request a nameless deity designated as “the Supreme Judge of the World” to ratify “the rectitude of our intentions” in their momentous undertaking.
Although it opens with an appeal to “the Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God,” the document proceeds to enunciate false principles which are in fact diametrically contrary to natural law: that all men are equal and the source of authority over themselves. Scorning supporting proof of any kind, the signers of the Declaration deemed it sufficient to state that “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” and to enumerate them, beginning with three propositions: that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and “that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
We might note here that the first draft of the Declaration read “the pursuit of property.” According to John Locke, one of Democracy’s foremost architects, the state is not an organic institution geared to natural human necessities deriving its authority from God, but a civil contract set up between men by their common consent. In his Second Treatise on Government, he states furthermore that its “great and chief end. . . is the preservation of their property.” Elsewhere he says, “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving and advancing of their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things such as money, lands, houses, furniture and the like.”
In other words, men are rational animals, all equal by nature and possessing an “inalienable” innate right to govern themselves as they please without looking for any higher validation. They have furthermore a right and duty to rebel against any regime of which they do not approve or which they find unduly onerous. The Declaration canonizes revolution in the following terms: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” Against despotism it is in fact “their duty to throw off such government.”
This is quintessential democracy, a whole new political system built on a purely rational construction existing entirely in men’s minds without reference to the way things really are. In a universe created by God on hierarchy as principle, where “star differeth from star in glory” (1 Cor. 15:41) and there is an “up” and “down” to everything, where big fish eat little and no two creatures, from snowflakes to canonized saints, have ever been found to be alike, all men were suddenly and summarily declared equal. In the democratic scheme of things, any woman could have been the Mother of God, and her husband St. Joseph was like every other man.
The rest is history. With hierarchy leveled, verticals were horizontalized. Authority being no longer bestowed from above, it was, like its satanic inspiration, drawn from below. The colonies in question quickly morphed into autonomous States and proclaimed themselves the United States of America, a nation dedicated and built on the false principles proclaimed in the Declaration. By the very nature of its flawed Constitution, it carries within itself the seeds of its own disintegration and demise. Before a century had elapsed it began seriously coming apart, its unity being preserved only at the price of a bloody conflict which forced one half of the nation to submit to the other at gun point. That the political monster has lasted as long as it has – albeit not in its original form – can only be attributed to the remains of the Christian heritage perseverating in the body politic and still giving it some semblance of life.
The function of government being to promote the common good, Christian governments were designed to order man’s temporal life on earth in view of his eternal destiny in heaven. Democracy, on the other hand, would totally absolve itself of this responsibility by rigorously separating Church and state and devoting itself exclusively to his material well-being. Truth is not government’s concern. As Locke noted, “The business of the laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every particular man’s goods and person.”
According to the apocalyptic vision, the stings of the scorpion-like locusts were located “in their tails,” indicating that Democracy’s real power for evil would manifest itself not so much on first contact as in its long term, delayed results. And so it proved. As an ideology based solely on human reason, it has only natural means at its disposal wherewith to accomplish its objectives, but nothing more is necessary to create a whole new climate from which God and the things of God are ruthlessly excluded. Confined by law to the private sector, religion was not openly denied, but rendered politically irrelevant in the everyday public life of every individual.
Subjecting itself on principle to no outside moral arbiter, Democracy actually created its own Magisterium by empowering a supreme court composed of judges appointed by itself to determine the rectitude and proper application of its laws. Right and wrong being reduced merely to what it deemed “constitutional” or “unconstitutional,” gross vices such as usury, divorce, contraception, abortion and sodomy have one by one been cleared of moral censure by simple legal approval. The only “sin” possible in such a framework is infraction of the Constitution as interpreted by this judiciary body. As the Constitution’s own Article VI baldly states, “This Constitution . . . shall be the supreme law of the land.” Not even the Ten Commandments may supersede it. As a matter of fact to display them on any courthouse premises is viewed as an infringement of the Constitution.
As structuring principles of man’s social life, a nation’s civil laws are powerful factors in forming his thinking and behavior. They can in fact change the whole organization of his environment. Laws rooted in the Gospels have the power to raise the level of public morality and promote all the Christian virtues, whereas laws enacted without reference to revealed truth are bound to do the exact opposite. Morality’s downward plunge with the advent of Democracy is recorded fact, and as Democracy continues to gain ground over the world, the level of morality falls to ever lower levels. Clergy and other moral leaders can remonstrate and threaten all they please on the sidelines, but they have no legal power whatever to rectify matters in a society where Church and state enjoy no working relationship with each other.
It was not without reason that Bl. Pius IX solemnly condemned in his Syllabus of Errors the proposition that “The Church ought to be separated from the State and the State from the Church.” Their separation has removed all possibility of effectively correcting the deadly errors on which Democracy rests, one of the deadliest of them being the myth that given a level playing field, truth will automatically win out over error. Pius IX’s successor Leo XIII, viewing the freedom which the Church enjoyed to preach the Faith in the United States, was unfortunately led to believe this.
Although he never faltered in traditional doctrine, he erred in practical judgment by directing the French bishops to face facts and rally to democracy as a political system, expecting that under its rule Catholic candidates could be elected who in due time would restore Catholic society by enacting laws based on Catholic principles. The results of this policy soon became abundantly clear. The Catholic parties gradually disintegrated under the force of their compromises they had to make with the enemy in order to gain office, and eventually disappeared from the political scene altogether.
As for the Faith in the U.S., almost from the beginning it fell into Americanism, led into a fatal collusion with the revolutionary objectives of Democracy by prelates following the lead of its first Bishop John Carroll, friend of Benjamin Franklin. A later Primate, Cardinal Gibbons, would eventually lay down in a Pastoral Letter to the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore that “there is no antagonism between the laws, institutions and spirit of our country,” and “that our country’s heroes were instruments of the God of Nations in establishing this home of freedom,” denying that “there is aught in the free spirit of our American institutions incompatible with perfect docility to the Church of Christ.” In other words, the Faith that thrived for a while so gloriously in the U.S. was not the integral Catholic Faith of the Apostles, but one diluted by the false principles of democracy.
The hard reality is that truth must be protected in order to survive in its integrity in this world. If it is not, it is trampled to death by the same forces which crucified Christ. A Catholic Church demands a Catholic state to safeguard it and apply its doctrines to temporal society. Their cooperation is what produced the glories of Christendom, which would still be ours today if Christ’s enemies had not succeeded in dismantling the Catholic state. Once that was accomplished, they had easy access to the Church’s spiritual treasures, indeed to the deposit of Faith itself which was the mainspring of Christendom. Cardinal Suenens spoke truly when he declared that the Second Vatican Council was “1789 in the Church.” He might just as easily have said “1776.”
One of the most deplorable results of declaring all men equal is the extinction of the family as God created it to be. Not only was it replaced by the individual as the basic political unit of society, denying the divinely ordained political role of fathers of families, but it destroyed the family’s internal unity by leveling its hierarchical structure, making of marriage a partnership where the sexes are also equal, and one no longer exercises authority over the other. Furthermore, under democratic law marriage is not recognized as a Sacrament between a man and a woman, but merely a civil contract between individuals who wish to cohabit. It can be legally dissolved like any other such commitment. So why be surprised that same-sex unions are now seeking recognition as legal marriages and claiming the same social benefits?
Didn’t our Lady declare at Quito that “Masonry... will enact iniquitous laws with the objective of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin, encouraging the procreation of illegitimate children born without being incorporated into the Church?” Needless to say, as she also pointed out at Quito, in order to achieve generalized corruption, the new political system “will focus particularly on the children. . . . Woe to the children of these times! It will be difficult to receive the Sacrament of Baptism and also that of Confirmation. Making use of persons in authority, the devil will assiduously try to destroy the Sacrament of Confession. . . The same will happen with Holy Communion. ”
As we know, by force of the egalitarian principles they professed, democratic governments were drawn to establish public school systems geared to providing equal educational opportunities to all children indiscriminately, and this in schools from which religious teaching is rigorously excluded, where any semblance of moral training must be limited to a hard fisted imposition of so-called “social” values. The noxious results need not be enumerated. They can be summed up in simply noting that today a police presence is necessary to keep order among the young in these alleged halls of learning.
Another long term effect of declaring all men equal which deserves mention, and which is generally overlooked, is the blanket enfranchisement of pagans and atheists, who until the rise of democracy and the abolition of Christian oaths of office, were quite properly denied an active role in the government of Christian nations. How indeed could people who denied Christ be expected to frame, let alone conscientiously enforce laws which were essentially rooted in the spirit of the Gospels? By according them equality with Christian citizens, Democracy not only let loose profoundly anti-Christian forces into the very veins of society, but actually empowered them to legislate for Christians, in many cases wielding legal authority over them. Is it any wonder that entire Catholic nations have suffered progressive de-Christianization, with the substitution of judaized, pagan ethics for the supernatural Catholic values on which these nations had been founded?
Usurping the place of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost by arrogating to itself on its own authority the executive, legislative and judicial powers proper to divinity, Democracy has made a mockery of the Fourth Commandment on which all real government rests, and Scripture teaches us that the specific punishment for infringing this Commandment is nothing less than slavery. For showing disrespect to his father Noah by laughing at his drunken nakedness, Cham and all his posterity incurred the paternal curse which declared him “A servant of servants . . . to his brethren” (Gen. 9:25). As slavery is the proper consequence of belittling the authority of God the Father even in His earthly representatives, it is a foregone conclusion that Democracy will lead the whole world into enforced servitude of a kind never seen before.
The United States, the much vaunted “Land of the free” which has appointed itself to preach freedom to the whole world and has risen to world leadership by the demonic power of democracy’s crowned locusts, is visibly becoming the “Home of the slave.” All the while extolling the blessings of self-government, its citizens are forging for themselves legal and economic shackles which eventually will trammel not only their every move but their very thoughts, where even now they are learning to live their lives under constant electronic surveillance. How many Americans manage to earn a living today without indenturing their bodies, if not their souls, to the “company store?”
Despite all the flashy successes of the democratic process, natural law nonetheless is bound to reassert itself, because natural law is true reality and there is no gainsaying it. Operating invisibly through all channels of the electorate, it is not elected legislatures, but dynasties of wealthy families who already head the powerful oligarchies which actually dictate national and international policies, guiding the course of governments behind the scenes. Historically democracies have inevitably ended in dictatorship, for like any other living body the body politic cannot be governed by its feet and remain functioning for long. It must have a head to direct its operations, and the great one world Democracy now taking shape can be no exception.
Craving by natural instinct a monarch in whom leadership can be concentrated and exercised over whatever lies below it, it should very soon acclaim by democratic vote the rule of the supreme Slavemaster, the “son of perdition” prophesied in Scripture who is Antichrist the King. At La Salette our Lady characterized him as “the devil incarnate” and even then declared his arrival imminent, telling the young shepherdess Mélanie: “Here is the king of the kings of darkness. Here is the beast with its subjects, calling itself the savior of the world!” The next age, looming just ahead and soon to be announced by the blast of the Sixth Trumpet, can therefore be expected to witness a formal declaration of independence from the Creator on the part of all mankind under the rule of the Antichrist, the triple-titled king of the hellish locusts, the “Angel of the bottomless pit.”
He will sum up democracy in his person much as one of his prototypes, Napoleon Bonaparte, summed up the French Revolution by declaring “La Revolution, c’est moi!” Being “lifted up above all that is called God or that is worshipped. . . showing himself as if he were God ”(2 Thess. 2:4), he will personify that same arrogant spirit of Democracy which during our Lord’s Passion voted to reprieve the robber Barabbas rather the innocent Christ the Redeemer.
The evangelists tell us that when Pontius Pilate, sitting on the judgment seat in the governor’s hall, asked the constituency assembled before him, “What shall I do then with Jesus that is called Christ?” they all replied unanimously, “Let him be crucified!” When Pilate, finding “no cause of death in him,” tried to remonstrate with them, “they were instant with loud voices, requiring that he might be crucified: and their voices prevailed . . . Away with him, away with him. Crucify him!” (Matt. 27:22; Luke 23:23; John 19:15). Now, that was democracy in action, openly pursuing the objective for which it was forged to begin with: to get rid of God!
The entire article is presented below in its entirety.
APOCALYPSE NOW! Global Democracy & the Rise of the Antichrist
by Solange Hertz
![[Image: antichrist.jpg]](https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/images/antichrist.jpg)
by Solange Hertz
Editor’s Introduction: Perhaps the following article will not be easy to read for some. It’s an analysis of the philosophical and theological errors that were long ago insinuated into the root system of modern political thought. Born of the Protestant Revolution, these errors would ultimately bring the great tree of Christendom crashing to the ground. Included within this analysis is a penetrating look at how some of these fundamentally Protestant ideas made their way into the founding documents of our own country.
It is never easy to see faults in ourselves or in those we love, and it is no less difficult to recognize them in the land of our birth and childhood, hearth and home. Patriotism is a Christian virtue. Love of country is part of what builds integrity and honor in decent men. But love of country is not always synonymous with love of government, especially when governments deviate from Catholic principles as egregiously as has ours.
Just as we traditional Catholics must sometimes distinguish between the Church we revere above all else and the modern-day Vatican apparatus, so, too, Catholic Americans must recognize a distinction between the America we revere—the land of our birth, claimed as her own by Our Lady of Guadalupe, Empress of the Americas, discovered by the Catholic Columbus, colonized by the Catholic Spanish, Portuguese and French, generous beyond description in modern times, independent, resourceful, spirited—and the federal, centralized government which was founded by revolution-minded Protestants, who, while having some good and noble ideas, were nevertheless opposed to the Catholic Church and the social reign of Christ the King. (To admit this is not to insult or serve up calumny against our Founding Fathers; it is a mere statement of the historic reality, over which no serious historian would quibble. Our Founders were not Catholic and theirs was a “novus ordo seculorum” which was to replace the aging Catholic order of Christendom.)
And now, almost 230 years later, we American Catholics, living in the post-Christian era, must somehow sort out where we stand and how we are to reconcile the love and patriotism we all feel in our hearts for a land that has sustained us in bountiful plenty, with the dark side of our man-made government which has never shared our Faith and which is trying to impose secular democracy as a religion on the rest of the world.
Mrs. Hertz—a patriot, a Catholic American whose family goes back many generations in this country, a woman whose husband, a U.S. official, was among the first of the civilian hostages taken by the enemy in Vietnam and, in fact, died there in a Communist prison camp—has attempted in the present article to face the hard facts and contradictions that exist between scripture/Catholic teaching and the religion of global democracy, which, like it or not, spent its childhood in the wonderful, utopian, almost enchanted world we Americans call home.
America is not beyond hope. Her soil has run red with the blood of martyrs many times. But Christ the King is the only threat the King of Darkness recognizes, even here in America. Unless we get back to our Catholic roots, America—the great city on the hill—will first be placed in a position where she will do more to welcome the Antichrist and his New World Order than drive it back into the sea; and then she will be destroyed.
I encourage the reader to proceed with an open mind. The myths and fairy tales for adults that we’ve all been spoon fed for two hundred plus years are nearly impossible to overcome for many sincere and good Catholic Americans. But if we wish to know what’s really going on in the world today and what our children are really up against, then we must begin to look beyond the history written by Protestant victors to see what forces have long been at work even here in the land we love. If you’re ready to do that and perhaps even suffer some painful abrasions as the blindfold is removed, then read on . . . MJM
The true source of the godless democracy now overrunning the world and the Church is not hard to discover, for it is revealed in a vivid tableau which unfolds before the eyes of any reader of Chapter 9 of St. John’s Apocalypse: After the Fifth Angel sounds the trumpet ushering in the great age of heresy now coming to full climax at the dawn of our twenty-first century, the Apostle sees him given a key to hell’s “bottomless pit.” When the Angel opens it, ”the smoke of the pit ascended as the smoke of a great furnace: and the sun was darkened, and the air,” by the smothering fumes. We may take this to signify a worldwide darkness in which certainties can no longer be clearly discerned, the divine light having been obscured, and stifling error disseminated in the very air we breathe. In 1971 Pope Paul VI declared that this “smoke of Satan” had somehow or other penetrated the Temple of God.
The spectacle relates directly to the prophecy made by our Lord foretelling the tribulations of the days prior to His second coming, when He “shall send his Angels with a trumpet” and “the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light” (Matt. 24:29,31). The whole human environment being charged and penetrated by a miasma generated in hell, the Church, represented by the moon, is hobbled in her ministry and no longer able to reflect God’s truth clearly to the nations. At the close of her own little apocalypse confided to Mélanie Calvat at La Salette, our Lady declared that this was already happening way back in 1846: “It is time. The sun is darkening. . . The time is at hand. The abyss is opening,” and she predicted, “Only the faith will survive.”
But the blinding smoke of the pit isn’t the worst of the infestation, for the vision in the Apocalypse tells us that out of its billows there streamed hordes of “locusts upon the earth, and power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power” to torment “the men who have not the sign of God on their foreheads.” The shapes of these locusts, which the Church Fathers generally believed represented violent heretics, are described as “like to horses prepared for battle; and on their heads as it were crowns of gold: and their faces as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions: and they had breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like scorpions, and stings were in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.”
In other words these creatures, like earthly scorpions, possessed only natural means of doing harm. Wielding no supernatural power from heaven, they were not only prevented from doing injury to the elect who bore God’s sign, but even where their legitimate victims were concerned, their power was limited, for “it was given to them that they should not kill them; but that they should torment them five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man.” Whatever period of time these five months signify, it will be fearsome while it lasts, for the text goes on to say that “in those days men shall seek death and shall not find it: and they shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them.”
Again, our Lady echoed these words at La Salette when she said, “Men will beat their heads against the walls; they will call on death, yet death will constitute their torment; blood will flow on all sides. Who could overcome, if God doesn’t shorten the time of trial?” And our Lord himself had already predicted, “Unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect, those days shall be shortened” (Matt. 24:22). Although merely temporal and confined to the natural order, the pain and havoc caused by the locusts will be nearly unendurable.
As historical events unfold on the world stage, the symbolism of St. John’s vision becomes ever clearer. One detail leaps out starkly above all the rest, and that is the golden crowns on the heads of the locusts. They are not like the ones worn by the twenty-four ancients pictured elsewhere in the Apocalypse who cast them down before God’s throne acknowledging, “Thou art worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power: because thou hast created all things!” (4:10-11). Those worn by the locusts remain firmly fixed to their heads and are furthermore described only “as it were” of gold. In other words they are made of something that passes for gold but really isn’t. It would seem therefore that the locusts’ crowns are, for all their glitter, counterfeit. They are spurious symbols of the true authority which crowns are meant to represent and which can only be bestowed from above. As St. Paul says, “there is no power but from God” (Rom. 13:1).
A more graphic portrayal of the onslaught of the unbridled lust for self-government now ravaging the earth, can hardly be imagined than these troops of unisex crowned locusts “with the faces of men,” and “hair as the hair of women,” every one like another, yet each one a mini-king in its own right. Yet, despite their individual crowns and their appearance of autonomy, Scripture is careful to inform us that “they had over them a king.” And this king, we are told, is none other than “the Angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon; and in Greek Apollyon; in Latin Exterminans.” That the sacred text declares the name of this leader in the same three liturgical languages in which Jesus of Nazareth’s title as King of the Judeans was inscribed on the Cross cannot be happenstance. It would seem specifically to designate our Lord’s satanic counterpart the Antichrist, whose name in all languages is “Destroyer,” his essential mission being the destruction of Christ’s kingdom on earth.
His advent will have been well prepared by militant Democracy, the systematic revolt against God which began when the Fifth Trumpet announced the first stirrings of Protestantism and modern man began claiming the right to worship as he pleased and interpret Scripture for himself by the light of his own intellect. The same independent spirit gradually pervaded all fields of learning, which one by one separated themselves from the beneficent light of revelation and began operating on their own, spawning major scientific and social errors of every kind in the process. Gradually the new liberated man undertook the creation of a whole new reality for himself, hatched in his own mind apart from and presumably better than the reality created for him by God. He displaced the Earth as the center of the universe, replacing it first by the sun, and soon by nothing at all. Matter began moving of itself according to its own attractions without outside spiritual propulsion, and was soon credited with the power of producing life. Absolutes became relative almost overnight, not only in the material sphere, but in the moral as well.
After the discovery of electricity a whole new man-made world based on these novel ideas and operated by a completely new power source came into being. Natural substances created by God for man’s use on earth being now everywhere replaced by “better” artificial substitutes contrived by human means, the mechanical began replacing the organic everywhere at an accelerated pace. In ordinary common life automobiles were substituted for horses and mechanical appliances for domestic servants. Astounded at the marvels of his own progress in providing for himself, man found less and less reason to have recourse to divine Providence. The whole realm of the supernatural, become redundant at best, is now regarded by many as non-existent, to such a point that the New York Times for October 12, 2003 can feature an article by a correspondent from the Holy City of Rome declaring to the world, “Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong.”
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This being the state of affairs, it was only to be expected that human lust for freedom would find political expression. As Auguste Comte pointed out, revolutionary ideas are nothing more than the social application of the principle of religious liberty. The religious subjectivism of Protestantism automatically prevented the imposition of any transcendent order on politics, so that the people soon became their own sovereign source of authority. Preaching a gospel of freedom and human rights apart from God and the Church He instituted, a new artificial form of government devoid of any outside moral restraints was soon invented by men inspired by the locust hordes from hell.
Formally inaugurated as the United States of America, it proved to be a veritable abomi-Nation, a social incarnation of the primordial Non serviam by which Lucifer first declared independence from God in heaven. Infecting nation after nation with the new satanic democracy, it has by now succeeded in subtracting nearly all organized human society from the dominion of Christ the King and the Church He founded. One of its Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, who fathered the first international League of Nations patterned in its image, summed up its apostolate thus: “America has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind. Democracy is a religion. Americans are now missionaries to the world, its President a priest!”
[Editor’s Note: This is the same President who ignored Pope Benedict XV’s calls for peace and who rejected the brilliant peace plan of the great Catholic Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary just as World War I was underway. (Emperor Charles I was recently canonized a saint). At the time, the Emperor had thwarted the Kaiser’s will by insisting on trying to deal with the United States to establish peace in Europe. This last of the great Holy Roman Emperors was one who truly wanted peace; had he been listened to, he would have saved Europe. And why did President Wilson reject the Emperor’s peace plan? Because, as Wilson put it, Emperor Charles was not an “elected leader”…Austria was not a democracy. Charles was defeated, Europe fell into chaos, the Soviet Union was off to the races, the seeds of brutal, Godless Nazism were planted, and millions and millions lost their lives. The Holy Roman Empire gasped its last trying to prevent the Great War that assisted so diligently at the birthing table of the New World Order. MJM]
The spread of a universal godless republic whose sole Gospel is freedom was predicted four centuries ago by Our Lady of Good Success to a Conceptionist nun in Quito, Ecuador. She told her that during the 19th and 20th centuries it would gradually “extinguish the precious light of Faith in souls by the almost total corruption of customs.” Later at La Salette she would point out to Mélanie Calvat some of the results to be expected: “With God’s holy Faith forgotten, each individual will want to direct himself and rise above his peers. Civil and ecclesiastical authority will be abolished, all order and justice will be trampled underfoot. Only murders, hatred, jealousy, lying and discord will be seen, with no love of country or family. . . . Civil governments will all have the same objective, which will be to abolish and make every religious principle disappear, to make way for materialism, atheism, spiritism and vices of all kinds.”
Let us hasten to say at this juncture that modern satanic democracy is far from the kind of democracy which held sway in classical times as, for example in ancient Greece, where it rested upon a huge slave base and was restricted to a relatively small number of privileged citizens subscribing to a common state religion. It is even farther from the limited democracy which was always practiced in Christendom at all levels of society in smaller components of government within the greater hierarchical framework dictated by natural law. Monks in their monasteries, for instance, were often free to elect their superiors, but once they had designated them, they had no power to depose them, that being the sole prerogative of higher authority. For underlings to control their superiors once they have been elected, and especially to remove them from office – as Democracy empowers the people to do – would have spelled rebellion pure and simple and was not tolerated.
Until modern times, man labored under no illusions that authority might originate from below. All the governments of the world, even among pagans, were originally patterned on, and were indeed derived from the human family as created by God. Their structure was strictly hierarchical, with a father-figure at the top who exercised the final authority as king or supreme leader over his subjects in much the same way a father ruled his wife and children. This did not mean that authority could be exercised arbitrarily, according to personal whim, for from the king on down everyone was subject (at least theoretically) to the same moral laws and national customs.
The basic cell of government was never the individual, but the family, which operated on the lowest level of society as a political unit in its own right. Under his immediate political superiors, the father was legally responsible for the behavior of his household, in Roman times even possessing the right to put his children to death. The principle of subsidiarity played a major role throughout the body politic, which means that no higher authority was supposed to do what a lower authority could accomplish for itself. God created the human body on this principle, as He did the family, where each member is responsible for tasks in accordance with his ability to perform them, and good government is built along similar lines.
In the history of the US, the gradual usurpation of states’ rights by an increasingly centralized authority supplies a clear and flagrant example of how the disregard of subsidiarity inevitably leads from the qualitative to the quantitative into totalitarianism. The Constitution attempted to obviate this possibility by the last Article in the Bill of Rights, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” but over the years, especially after the bloody Civil War fought over this very question, more and more power has been concentrated in the federal authority at the expense of states’ autonomy, not to mention the rights of individuals.
Where government is firmly anchored in natural law, regard for individual and local differences is more easily maintained, for a nation is nothing less than a family of families, and an empire is a family of national families. All live, breathe and grow as living organisms under laws resting on the Fourth Commandment, which orders us to honor not only our parents, but any other representatives of the divine authority which governs the universe and to which all citizens are ultimately responsible. In the vast majority of cases the supreme human authority was hereditary, passing from father to son as it does in the family, permitting leaders to implement long-term policies without concern for periodic reelections or radical changes of administration.
Alliances between nations were cemented not so much by legal agreements as by marriages between ruling families, chief among whom would figure those of the Davidic dynasty designated by God to head Christian nations. Furthermore, most of the heirs to royal thrones were subjected from the cradle to a rigorous education designed to prepare them for rule. There was little if any government by amateurs such as we have today in the do-it-yourself society where “you can be anything you want to be,” and public entertainers can be elected to the highest offices.
Historically hereditary monarchy has produced so high a degree of stability, continuity, cohesion and prosperity throughout human society as a whole that St. Thomas Aquinas was led to declare it “the best of governments.” Because it was human it was not perfect, but it worked very well. The French Davidic monarchy, on which all the other Christian monarchies depended, was founded in the Faith in the fifth century by King Clovis of the Franks and perdured in unbroken salic succession for nearly fourteen hundred years. Had it not been for the swarm of crowned locusts pouring out of hell, it would presumably have remained in power till now.
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The immediate source of the change proved to be England, where modern, satanic democracy was hatched. It broke out violently in England with the regicide of Charles I. The crowned locusts apparently had found the readiest tools for their purpose among the English, the empire which to this day does not consider itself part of old Catholic Europe, and which as a nation has yet to repent of the criminal execution of Joan of Arc, the saint sent by God to save the pivotal French monarchy from English usurpation. Foreseeing little more than a limited success for democracy under the “constitutional” monarchy with a state religion which the English had agreed upon after the fall of Cromwell and the Restoration under Charles II, the astute locusts shifted their center of operations to the heretical English colonies wedged strategically (and illegally according to the international law then in force) between the French and Spanish territories in Catholic America.
There democratic ideology soon took root, transplanted from the mother country by a handful of radical English Freemasons who hoped to achieve, on new terrain far removed from the political centers of Christendom, what had so far proved impractical at home. Back in England under Henry VIII the locusts had already effected one nation’s independence from the Catholic Church, but in America, under cover of rebellion against the vestigial monarch George III – a God-fearing, upright Anglican who hated Freemasonry – they would sting their victims into concocting out of whole cloth a new man-made nation which would be independent of any religion at all, and whose written constitution would provide the blueprint countless others would follow.
Goaded by the scorpion-stings of their tormentors from the pit, representatives from the thirteen British colonies on July 4, 1776 “in general congress assembled” and acting solely “by authority of the good people of these Colonies,” began emancipating themselves from the God of revelation by promulgating a formal Declaration of Independence from the British Crown. Carefully eschewing any references to Jesus Christ or the Blessed Trinity, they were content to request a nameless deity designated as “the Supreme Judge of the World” to ratify “the rectitude of our intentions” in their momentous undertaking.
Although it opens with an appeal to “the Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God,” the document proceeds to enunciate false principles which are in fact diametrically contrary to natural law: that all men are equal and the source of authority over themselves. Scorning supporting proof of any kind, the signers of the Declaration deemed it sufficient to state that “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” and to enumerate them, beginning with three propositions: that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and “that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
We might note here that the first draft of the Declaration read “the pursuit of property.” According to John Locke, one of Democracy’s foremost architects, the state is not an organic institution geared to natural human necessities deriving its authority from God, but a civil contract set up between men by their common consent. In his Second Treatise on Government, he states furthermore that its “great and chief end. . . is the preservation of their property.” Elsewhere he says, “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving and advancing of their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things such as money, lands, houses, furniture and the like.”
In other words, men are rational animals, all equal by nature and possessing an “inalienable” innate right to govern themselves as they please without looking for any higher validation. They have furthermore a right and duty to rebel against any regime of which they do not approve or which they find unduly onerous. The Declaration canonizes revolution in the following terms: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” Against despotism it is in fact “their duty to throw off such government.”
This is quintessential democracy, a whole new political system built on a purely rational construction existing entirely in men’s minds without reference to the way things really are. In a universe created by God on hierarchy as principle, where “star differeth from star in glory” (1 Cor. 15:41) and there is an “up” and “down” to everything, where big fish eat little and no two creatures, from snowflakes to canonized saints, have ever been found to be alike, all men were suddenly and summarily declared equal. In the democratic scheme of things, any woman could have been the Mother of God, and her husband St. Joseph was like every other man.
The rest is history. With hierarchy leveled, verticals were horizontalized. Authority being no longer bestowed from above, it was, like its satanic inspiration, drawn from below. The colonies in question quickly morphed into autonomous States and proclaimed themselves the United States of America, a nation dedicated and built on the false principles proclaimed in the Declaration. By the very nature of its flawed Constitution, it carries within itself the seeds of its own disintegration and demise. Before a century had elapsed it began seriously coming apart, its unity being preserved only at the price of a bloody conflict which forced one half of the nation to submit to the other at gun point. That the political monster has lasted as long as it has – albeit not in its original form – can only be attributed to the remains of the Christian heritage perseverating in the body politic and still giving it some semblance of life.
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The function of government being to promote the common good, Christian governments were designed to order man’s temporal life on earth in view of his eternal destiny in heaven. Democracy, on the other hand, would totally absolve itself of this responsibility by rigorously separating Church and state and devoting itself exclusively to his material well-being. Truth is not government’s concern. As Locke noted, “The business of the laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every particular man’s goods and person.”
According to the apocalyptic vision, the stings of the scorpion-like locusts were located “in their tails,” indicating that Democracy’s real power for evil would manifest itself not so much on first contact as in its long term, delayed results. And so it proved. As an ideology based solely on human reason, it has only natural means at its disposal wherewith to accomplish its objectives, but nothing more is necessary to create a whole new climate from which God and the things of God are ruthlessly excluded. Confined by law to the private sector, religion was not openly denied, but rendered politically irrelevant in the everyday public life of every individual.
Subjecting itself on principle to no outside moral arbiter, Democracy actually created its own Magisterium by empowering a supreme court composed of judges appointed by itself to determine the rectitude and proper application of its laws. Right and wrong being reduced merely to what it deemed “constitutional” or “unconstitutional,” gross vices such as usury, divorce, contraception, abortion and sodomy have one by one been cleared of moral censure by simple legal approval. The only “sin” possible in such a framework is infraction of the Constitution as interpreted by this judiciary body. As the Constitution’s own Article VI baldly states, “This Constitution . . . shall be the supreme law of the land.” Not even the Ten Commandments may supersede it. As a matter of fact to display them on any courthouse premises is viewed as an infringement of the Constitution.
As structuring principles of man’s social life, a nation’s civil laws are powerful factors in forming his thinking and behavior. They can in fact change the whole organization of his environment. Laws rooted in the Gospels have the power to raise the level of public morality and promote all the Christian virtues, whereas laws enacted without reference to revealed truth are bound to do the exact opposite. Morality’s downward plunge with the advent of Democracy is recorded fact, and as Democracy continues to gain ground over the world, the level of morality falls to ever lower levels. Clergy and other moral leaders can remonstrate and threaten all they please on the sidelines, but they have no legal power whatever to rectify matters in a society where Church and state enjoy no working relationship with each other.
It was not without reason that Bl. Pius IX solemnly condemned in his Syllabus of Errors the proposition that “The Church ought to be separated from the State and the State from the Church.” Their separation has removed all possibility of effectively correcting the deadly errors on which Democracy rests, one of the deadliest of them being the myth that given a level playing field, truth will automatically win out over error. Pius IX’s successor Leo XIII, viewing the freedom which the Church enjoyed to preach the Faith in the United States, was unfortunately led to believe this.
Although he never faltered in traditional doctrine, he erred in practical judgment by directing the French bishops to face facts and rally to democracy as a political system, expecting that under its rule Catholic candidates could be elected who in due time would restore Catholic society by enacting laws based on Catholic principles. The results of this policy soon became abundantly clear. The Catholic parties gradually disintegrated under the force of their compromises they had to make with the enemy in order to gain office, and eventually disappeared from the political scene altogether.
As for the Faith in the U.S., almost from the beginning it fell into Americanism, led into a fatal collusion with the revolutionary objectives of Democracy by prelates following the lead of its first Bishop John Carroll, friend of Benjamin Franklin. A later Primate, Cardinal Gibbons, would eventually lay down in a Pastoral Letter to the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore that “there is no antagonism between the laws, institutions and spirit of our country,” and “that our country’s heroes were instruments of the God of Nations in establishing this home of freedom,” denying that “there is aught in the free spirit of our American institutions incompatible with perfect docility to the Church of Christ.” In other words, the Faith that thrived for a while so gloriously in the U.S. was not the integral Catholic Faith of the Apostles, but one diluted by the false principles of democracy.
The hard reality is that truth must be protected in order to survive in its integrity in this world. If it is not, it is trampled to death by the same forces which crucified Christ. A Catholic Church demands a Catholic state to safeguard it and apply its doctrines to temporal society. Their cooperation is what produced the glories of Christendom, which would still be ours today if Christ’s enemies had not succeeded in dismantling the Catholic state. Once that was accomplished, they had easy access to the Church’s spiritual treasures, indeed to the deposit of Faith itself which was the mainspring of Christendom. Cardinal Suenens spoke truly when he declared that the Second Vatican Council was “1789 in the Church.” He might just as easily have said “1776.”
One of the most deplorable results of declaring all men equal is the extinction of the family as God created it to be. Not only was it replaced by the individual as the basic political unit of society, denying the divinely ordained political role of fathers of families, but it destroyed the family’s internal unity by leveling its hierarchical structure, making of marriage a partnership where the sexes are also equal, and one no longer exercises authority over the other. Furthermore, under democratic law marriage is not recognized as a Sacrament between a man and a woman, but merely a civil contract between individuals who wish to cohabit. It can be legally dissolved like any other such commitment. So why be surprised that same-sex unions are now seeking recognition as legal marriages and claiming the same social benefits?
Didn’t our Lady declare at Quito that “Masonry... will enact iniquitous laws with the objective of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin, encouraging the procreation of illegitimate children born without being incorporated into the Church?” Needless to say, as she also pointed out at Quito, in order to achieve generalized corruption, the new political system “will focus particularly on the children. . . . Woe to the children of these times! It will be difficult to receive the Sacrament of Baptism and also that of Confirmation. Making use of persons in authority, the devil will assiduously try to destroy the Sacrament of Confession. . . The same will happen with Holy Communion. ”
As we know, by force of the egalitarian principles they professed, democratic governments were drawn to establish public school systems geared to providing equal educational opportunities to all children indiscriminately, and this in schools from which religious teaching is rigorously excluded, where any semblance of moral training must be limited to a hard fisted imposition of so-called “social” values. The noxious results need not be enumerated. They can be summed up in simply noting that today a police presence is necessary to keep order among the young in these alleged halls of learning.
Another long term effect of declaring all men equal which deserves mention, and which is generally overlooked, is the blanket enfranchisement of pagans and atheists, who until the rise of democracy and the abolition of Christian oaths of office, were quite properly denied an active role in the government of Christian nations. How indeed could people who denied Christ be expected to frame, let alone conscientiously enforce laws which were essentially rooted in the spirit of the Gospels? By according them equality with Christian citizens, Democracy not only let loose profoundly anti-Christian forces into the very veins of society, but actually empowered them to legislate for Christians, in many cases wielding legal authority over them. Is it any wonder that entire Catholic nations have suffered progressive de-Christianization, with the substitution of judaized, pagan ethics for the supernatural Catholic values on which these nations had been founded?
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Usurping the place of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost by arrogating to itself on its own authority the executive, legislative and judicial powers proper to divinity, Democracy has made a mockery of the Fourth Commandment on which all real government rests, and Scripture teaches us that the specific punishment for infringing this Commandment is nothing less than slavery. For showing disrespect to his father Noah by laughing at his drunken nakedness, Cham and all his posterity incurred the paternal curse which declared him “A servant of servants . . . to his brethren” (Gen. 9:25). As slavery is the proper consequence of belittling the authority of God the Father even in His earthly representatives, it is a foregone conclusion that Democracy will lead the whole world into enforced servitude of a kind never seen before.
The United States, the much vaunted “Land of the free” which has appointed itself to preach freedom to the whole world and has risen to world leadership by the demonic power of democracy’s crowned locusts, is visibly becoming the “Home of the slave.” All the while extolling the blessings of self-government, its citizens are forging for themselves legal and economic shackles which eventually will trammel not only their every move but their very thoughts, where even now they are learning to live their lives under constant electronic surveillance. How many Americans manage to earn a living today without indenturing their bodies, if not their souls, to the “company store?”
Despite all the flashy successes of the democratic process, natural law nonetheless is bound to reassert itself, because natural law is true reality and there is no gainsaying it. Operating invisibly through all channels of the electorate, it is not elected legislatures, but dynasties of wealthy families who already head the powerful oligarchies which actually dictate national and international policies, guiding the course of governments behind the scenes. Historically democracies have inevitably ended in dictatorship, for like any other living body the body politic cannot be governed by its feet and remain functioning for long. It must have a head to direct its operations, and the great one world Democracy now taking shape can be no exception.
Craving by natural instinct a monarch in whom leadership can be concentrated and exercised over whatever lies below it, it should very soon acclaim by democratic vote the rule of the supreme Slavemaster, the “son of perdition” prophesied in Scripture who is Antichrist the King. At La Salette our Lady characterized him as “the devil incarnate” and even then declared his arrival imminent, telling the young shepherdess Mélanie: “Here is the king of the kings of darkness. Here is the beast with its subjects, calling itself the savior of the world!” The next age, looming just ahead and soon to be announced by the blast of the Sixth Trumpet, can therefore be expected to witness a formal declaration of independence from the Creator on the part of all mankind under the rule of the Antichrist, the triple-titled king of the hellish locusts, the “Angel of the bottomless pit.”
He will sum up democracy in his person much as one of his prototypes, Napoleon Bonaparte, summed up the French Revolution by declaring “La Revolution, c’est moi!” Being “lifted up above all that is called God or that is worshipped. . . showing himself as if he were God ”(2 Thess. 2:4), he will personify that same arrogant spirit of Democracy which during our Lord’s Passion voted to reprieve the robber Barabbas rather the innocent Christ the Redeemer.
The evangelists tell us that when Pontius Pilate, sitting on the judgment seat in the governor’s hall, asked the constituency assembled before him, “What shall I do then with Jesus that is called Christ?” they all replied unanimously, “Let him be crucified!” When Pilate, finding “no cause of death in him,” tried to remonstrate with them, “they were instant with loud voices, requiring that he might be crucified: and their voices prevailed . . . Away with him, away with him. Crucify him!” (Matt. 27:22; Luke 23:23; John 19:15). Now, that was democracy in action, openly pursuing the objective for which it was forged to begin with: to get rid of God!
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre