Old empires do not die, they simply wither away

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

- Cicero (55 BC)

The New Patriotism

Piety is the virtue of justice by which man renders to the sources of his life and existence, both natural and supernatural, the honor, respect and, within due limits, the obedience that is a mark of gratitude for their giving us life and for their provident care.

In the first place we owe piety to God, the Source of sources, without whom we would have nothing, natural or supernatural. We are grateful to God as God, and to each of the Divine Persons who have created, redeemed and sanctified us. Secondarily, we owe it those who are the instruments of His creating, redeeming and sanctifying plan.

In the order of nature, this is first of all our parents, who with God gave us life and who provide for us. Secondarily, it is our nation, which gives us many civil benefits, especially freedom. This species of piety is usually called patriotism.

In the supernatural order, we owe piety to the clergy who bring to us the Lord's many spiritual and sacramental gifts, as well as others, such as our parents, who had us baptized and raised us in the faith, as well as the many others who aided our spiritual formation and spiritual life.

Patriotism is, therefore, both a natural and Christian virtue, one that should be fostered within society. However, like all virtues it represents a mean, a moderate point between two vices, that of excess and that of deficiency. Patriotism which bears an extreme allegiance, without regard to the truth or the common good, is a vice. It goes under various names, such as jingoism or nationalism. The lack of patriotism is also vicious, an indifferentism to the good of society and the nation. Both have pride at the root, either pride in one's country as an extension of one's own ego (the vice of excess), or an egotism that admits no other allegiances, including country, except my own (the vice of defect).

There are always both with us in society, of course, but programs and plans that put the common good and the good of individuals, especially their moral good, beneath the good of the party or the support of a party prorgam, are vicious, as are all forms of political corruption.

To demand that we be "patriotic" and die when sick "for the good of the country" is particularly evil, since "life" is the greater natural right. This evil is aggravated by the fact that the money saved will be used to further political corruption and be diverted to cronies and special interests.

St. Camillus pray for us!

SPQR

Racism and Abortion - Twin Evils

Racism is endemic in America, and it's not in suburban white communities in the North or redneck towns in the South, but in African-American communities across America. There the population control industry plies its evil trade under the guise of serving the poor, but instead killing the next generation of Black Americans.

Read the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King on this subject: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/20/the-abortionists-eye-is-on-us/

SPQR

Servant of God Pierre Toussaint pray for us, pray for America!

Presidential GLBT Month

Presidential Proclamation of June as "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Month":

Forty years ago, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Out of this resistance, the LGBT rights movement in America was born. During LGBT Pride Month, we commemorate the events of June 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.

Pay attention America, if you are a protected class it is alright to operate illegal facilities (the Stonewall Inn was notoriously selling liquor without a license), it is alright to resist police when they arrive to enforce the law (as patrons and homosexuals in the neighborhood did), it is alright to rip up city property (parking meters), and to burn private property (the Stonewall Inn) and attempt murder (there were police barracaded inside). It is alright because you are a victim of injustice, somewhere, sometime, and some day a President will honor your victimhood and "civil disorbedience" with a presidential proclamation and special "victim class" status (still to come).

Holy Roman Martyrs Marcellinus and Peter pray for us, that we may be faithful as you were.

SPQR

3,446 Dead

According to Rev. Walter Hoye of Berkeley's Progressive Missionary Baptist Church, that's the number of African-Americans lynched by the Ku Klux Klan during the 31,390 days from 1882 to 1968, AND the number of blacks killed in abortion clinics in THREE days.

Given the xenophobia and the racism of Planned Parenthood's foundress, Margaret Sanger, is anyone surprised? Contraception and abortion may succeed in accomplishing what racists and segregationists failed to accomplish, the removal of blacks from American society. Pastor Hoye predicts that this could occur as early as 2100. He may be wrong on the timing of this demographic implosion, but he is certainly correct about the end result. Below-replacement levels of births in the African-American community necessarily will destroy it, just as the European nations are imploding and will be replaced by Islamic states -- though probably quicker.

Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point—have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.

Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy.

Pope Paul VI in his encyclical letter Humanae vitae accurately predicted where this new sexual frontier would go. In the First World sexual license is leading to depopulation. For the contracepting and aborting population planners in the US and at the UN, the need to impose population control on the Second and Third World grows ever more urgent. Aided and abetting by environmentalists who never met a salamander they didn't prefer to a human being, and global-warming alarmists, the push at the U.N. for universal contraception and abortion to reduce the human population of the world has begun. As Pope Paul predicted, and has already come to pass in China, government mandated and enforced population control won't be far behind.

Saruman's Speech

A reader of Fr. Zuhlsdorf blog (wdtprs.com) had this insight on beguiling rhetoric. Quoting from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, it is an explanation of the power of the wizard Saruman's speech. He applies it to President Obama and the way in which he was received at Notre Dame, though no direct analogy between Obama and Saruman is intended. However, it shows, as the Jesuits always taught, that all sin can be rationalized. Even the evil of abortion.

Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spake to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.

Some, however, learn the right lessons from history. Here is Newt Gingrich on his ever more conservative turn, as cited on The Curt Jester:

The whole effort to create a ruthless, amoral, situational ethics culture has probably driven me toward a more overt Christianity. I'll give you an example. As a college student at Emory when the Supreme Court ruled that school prayer was unconstitutional [in 1963] after 170 years of American history, I didn't notice it. As a graduate student at Tulane I probably would have said it's a good decision.I've now had an additional 40 years to think about it. And I think about the world of my grandchildren. I don't think American children are healthier, safer, and better off today than they were in 1963. So I have actually become more conservative in response to the failure of the liberal ethos to solve problems.

Our Lord and Savior, ascended to the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us!

SPQR

Mene, Mene, Tekel and Peres

Watching the news accounts of the Miss USA pageant, after which openly homosexual judge Perez Hilton trashed a contestant for her convictions about marriage, reminded me of the scriptural passage in which Daniel interprets the "writing on the wall" (Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Peres) for the King of Bablyon (Dn 5:25-28).

The reminder came about because peres is more or less the name of the rude and crude judge who berated Miss California on his blog, and because the incident is characteristic of the intolerance of the left, which brooks no opposition to its cultural and legal onslaught, like the Babylonian regime of Daniel's time.

The interpretation that Daniel makes of the writing on the wall is that Mene (numbered) refers to God having numbered the years of the kingdom of the Babylonians and finished it, Tekel (weighed) to His having weighed it and found it wanting, and Peres (divided) to its imminent division between the Medes and the Persians.

It is clear that we are in such a battle today, with the Babylonians of our times (a term Scripture uses for any kingdom that opposes God). Like King Belshazzar, the modern Babylonians delight in taking the sacred vessels which God's people holds dear -- Christ, Christ's Church, Christ's Vicar, the vocations which make us like Christ (priesthood, religious life, Christian marriage and single life), and even the body and life itself, and showing their contempt for God by polluting them with their abominations. Like the King they think themselves invincible; thus their arrogance and scorn of God's People. However, we know that whatever their ascendancy now, ultimately this worldwide kingdom of Babylon is numbered, weighed and divided.

A question suggests itself, however. Who will be the means of Babylon's chastisement, who will be Media and Persia to divide this modern Babylon, and set God's people free, as King Cyrus of Persia did? Without reading too much into it, Iran contains within it most of ancient Media and Persia. Whomever God uses as His instrument, the victor will be Christ Himself, personally insulted in so much that the modern Belshazzars do.

St. Faustina, pray for us!

SPQR