The Price of the Liberal State

"My other piece of advice, Copperfield... you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!" -Mr. Macawber, from David Copperfield.

These words from Charles Dickens reflect on the reality of economics. To stay within ones means allows one to keep afloat, so to speak. But to overspend, to find oneself daily sinking into a morass of credit or expenditure beyond ones means is only to court disaster.

The Catholic eyeing the current rush in Washington, where politicians of both parties, and of course, the President, seek ways to lift the debt ceiling of the country in order to stave off a default on the part of the United States, push one to ask what the Catholic solution must be. While the Republicans in the House compromise ever farther on the question of how much this ceiling is to be lifted and what will not be affected in the government's ever growing list of social programs, the Democrats in the Senate cast down any proposals that touch the sacrosanct social spending that caused this very disaster. The United States Bishops, ever anxious that any semi-socialist program aimed for the poor, whether these poor are legal or not, does not suffer harm, remain totally silent when it comes to an insistence that the government desist from any funding of that which is immoral. It is as if Socialism, and indeed, the gospel of Liberalism, was the only gospel the hierarchy felt worth defending.

But the Catholic is faced with a problem that wringing hands or socialist minds cannot simply make disappear. The United States has vastly overspent its own government budget. Now trillions of dollars are spoken of casually, as if the left could ignore such inconvenient realities as the treasury, and simply continue to buy its votes by funding the recipients of the Nanny State. But reality has a way of making itself felt, no matter how sweet the dream of buying the ignorant or indolent.

We are forced to look at the morality of a citizenry that has gotten used to living beyond its means, that always thinks that benefits payed by a government are an inalienable right, whether that money exists or not. It is too often a citizenry that is paying out a kind of blackmail money to the self-interests of vocal minorities in order to soothe the consciences of European descendants that no longer believe in what their ancestors stood for. And then this is all compounded by a world that believes that the individual is the center of the universe, and that every sorrow must be monetarily compensated, since any suffering violates ones sacrosanct right to always be happy and enjoying oneself. At last, however, the free rides look to be cut back, if that is, the politicians have the courage to take the consequences of their parties' extravagances.

The Catholic is forced to look at the consequences of immaturity by politicians anxious to buy the electorate. He must see the fate of Mr. Macawber as related by Charles Dickens. Overspending for Macawber meant the Debtor's Prison. One cannot go on spending more than one has without courting disaster. Justice, in fact, demands that the one to whom money is owed, is paid. While money is a convention, what it represents is not. More goes out than is coming in. Will the government try to really face reality, or will yet another band-aid be put on the mortally wounded State? It is to feared that self-interest will win out over the prospect of Doomsday. Yet the Catholic should know, that love of self, of pleasure, of fun, at the price of the common good, is a recipe for disaster in this world and in the world to come.

Freemason or Crusader?

Yesterday saw a grave crime committed against the rights of God over the lives of His subjects. It seems that the death toll of the man who both bombed a government building in Oslo, and shot over eighty teenagers to death on an island, will bring the complete number of dead to over ninety and counting. There is outrage at the man who could laugh as he shot to death his victims, but it remains to be seen how this episode will be spun by the ever-liberal media so as to make it serve their interests in the deconstruction of the West.

The name of the man who caused such havoc is Anders Behring Breivik-if others are not found to be involved as well. His writings are even now being combed for clues as to why he was involved in such a series of acts, but it seems that two quite different portraits of the man are being painted as a result. Firstly, there is a good deal supposedly written by him against the current invasion of Islam in Europe. There is the call for a return to the roots of Europe in terms that are heavily borrowing from the Crusades. There is a call for the re-founding of the Knights Templar in order to defend Europe from the Moslem horde. There is the recognition of the evil that is threatening Europe by the massive settlements of the infidel. There is the claim that he is a Christian, and therefore that Christianity plays a part in the jihad against the innocent Mideasterners. It is quite a reversal from the normal story of the innocent being slain by Moslem savages. There are pages and pages in which there is call for a Liberation Day in Europe from the Moslems on the 11th or 12th of September, a recollection of the efforts of the Christians fighting the infidel before the gates of Vienna. There is so much material to be used by the media- to be used to crush whatever resistance there is in the West to the poor Moslems and to further put pressure on the Church.

However, there is another side to things. This same man who is supposedly the Christian Crusader is at the same time a Freemason, and in the photo above, he wears the apron of the Order- hardly a badge of the Crusade nor of the Church that waged war valiantly against the infidel. It is Freemasonry that has led the West into its present apostasy; it is Freemasonry that has been at the root of secularist wars against what was left of Catholic Christendom in Mexico, South America, or Europe. This is hardly a force to rise to the defense of the West or Christian tradition.

Further, the entire teaching of the Church rebels at such an act as his. There is no just war if there are no leaders that can claim obedience from those fighting on their behalf- not to mention the fact that one does not just go randomly killing non-combatants. This appears to be a case of vigilantism, and that is far from the crusading spirit. Certainly, there is supposedly the desire to unite the "far right" groups in such a crusade. Yet how can that be taken seriously when this attack could produce nothing else except governments clamping down further on anything that they might consider "hate crimes"? Why will the nationalists groups benefit in his mind when his actions could never bring anything but grief to nationalists groups? He surely knew that his actions alone could not free the West. Did he really think there would be a new crusade after such actions? Or rather, did he have something else in mind?

If this was the first shot in a war against the Islamic invader, then why was there not a drop of Moslem blood shed? Why was not a mosque the target of his bombing? Why are the only victims the very westerners that he claims to rally rather than his self-confessed enemies? For someone who so desired the expulsion of the Mid-easterner, it is odd that none of them actually died. It is very strange.

Again we see the photo of this man dressed in the apron of the Lodge and wonder: is he merely insane, or is he the perfect instrument of the Craft so as to be able to crush what resistance still exists to the fall of the Christian West, all the while playing on the hysteria of nations that already have begun to turn against the Church in a serious way? Will this not be a very convenient case to be brought to the attention of those who feel uncomfortable at the annihilation of Europe at the hands of Islam? Will any resistance now be labeled "fanatical" or even worse, "terrorism"? No, this poor fellow is not another Saint Louis or Richard the Lion-Hearted. The Temple he represents is rather that of Osiris and the Craft. It is Masonry far more that the Catholic West that will benefit from the death of the Norwegians.

What does Harry Potter tell us?

Firstly, this is not another post claiming to reveal new secrets about the world of Harry Potter. Despite the fact that this weekend will probably see the latest movie in the Harry Potter series claim the honour of being the greatest money making film of any opening weekend ever, this still does not move the writer to enter into raptures about the benefits of the wizarding world for poor muggle families flocking to empty their pockets for a couple of hours of viewing ecstasy. Yes, Rowling's books have proved lucrative beyond measure; yes, the Prince of Wales has bemoaned the fact that the end of the series could hinder further interest in young persons taking up reading (is there indeed life after Potter?); yes, there was much entertaining about the rise of Valdemort and his war against Harry Potter; yet these factors only move one to ask a bigger question: what does Harry Potter tell us about our modern world?

To speak of Harry Potter and of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is to speak of the question of magic. The modern world seems more and more attracted by the magical, even as its culture plummets into virtual illiteracy. While Rowling is certainly capable of writing interesting stories, one cannot claim that her prose style is anything to write home about. Her ideas are dependent upon earlier movies or novelists; her religious notions are vague at best; her morality is certainly confused. She is no Evelyn Waugh or J.R.R. Tolkien. There is no beauty to her lines or elegance in her writing craft. The appeal of Harry Potter must lie elsewhere. It certainly is an interesting story of the friendship of three chums from a very English wizarding school, but even that does not explain the phenomenon of Harry Potter. Rather the combination of characters and magic is a stronger appeal. It is magic that attracts the readers of the series, and it is magic that has produced apps containing supposed spells for the fans.

The modern world is drawn to magic, as was said above. Magic is not only escapism or something exotic. It is the promise of power, of bending the world to ones own desires. It dominates both the evil wizards like "he who must not be named" as well as Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, and Ronald Weasley. It is the capacity to rise above the human so as to bend the created order to ones will. In this it is very like the realm of science, where the love of discovery has been often linked to the making of things that help man control the world around him. Curiously enough, the early men of science of the Renaissance were also keen on learning the secrets of Alchemy and so blend the natural with the preternatural, magical world. The two domains have much in common.

Magic allows man to utter words so as to obtain an effect above that of mortals. It is to enter into the preternatural world, a world above the muggle-born, so as to utilize that world to dominate the natural. It is not a world that relies on the power of God or His saints, but rather one in which the witch or wizard is at the center of power. This puts it into conflict with the Christian Order that submits to the Divine Will. The saint may raise the dead to life, but he or she is merely the instrument that God uses in order to accomplish His Will. The saint has no power in himself. All is God; he is nothing. The world of Harry Potter is the opposite. God is nowhere to be found. He is not invoked. Yet the wizard learns the spells in order to increase in his or her dominion over things, to make them subservient to their wills, not God's.

To those who point to fairy stories, or the works of Tolkien, an abyss opens before them. In the older fairy stories, witches are always evil. Those who learn of the forbidden arts are not heroes, but the enemy. In Middle Earth, there is the "magic" of Gandalf or the elves. But this is quite different from the world of Rowling. Gandalf is an angel that takes on himself mortal flesh in order to fulfill a mission given to him by higher angelic beings. He has a native power not learned by masters, but rather has a power over matter even as the angelic world. It comes from his own nature which is above the human. Galadriel, the elven Lady of Lothlorien, is puzzled as to why the elves are said to be magical, for they too are above the human and simply act according to their superior nature. They do not learn how to obtain a power they do not possess. Neither Gandalf or Galadriel teach mortal students how to rise above the human preternaturally. It is only in the world of Sauron's human servants that man is given the power of necromancy, of magic strictly speaking, in order to rise above the human by a power which is evil. The heroes of Tolkien, Frodo and Samwise, achieve victory through the arms of humility and loyalty, not wizardry.

The world of Potter is a world which is ultimately self-centered. It is the world of man rising above his own nature by learning spells of the preternatural order. It is a world that includes the house of Slytherin and Gryffindor both. Evil and good are both necessary. Yet the good world does not seek to conquer self by humility and submission to God, but to keep in check an evil power that is also necessary. It is dualism, and it is fatal to the Christian order. What does Harry Potter tell us? He tells us that a higher world can be made subject to man by magic, that wands and spells are the gateway to man's conquest, not of himself, but of the world he wishes to dominate, whether for what he chooses as good or for evil.

When is enough, enough?

At the end of June, Americans saw the sixth state of the union approve what is euphemistically called gay "marriage". The Democrats and Republicans were able to see beyond their differences enough to agree on the overthrow of the traditional definition of marriage and to embrace a new, elastic one. It was another blow to the conservative cause in the United States, and another example where those supposedly divided in politics were able to act as one, and draw from one principle: there is no moral law save for what man decides; all else is in the private sphere, and even here there is the danger of opposition being stamped out. This was made clear by the warning of the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan:

"If the experience of those few other states and countries where this is already law is any indication, the churches, and believers, will soon be harassed, threatened, and hauled into court for their conviction that marriage is between one man, one woman, forever, bringing children into the world,” wrote the archbishop.

This is a rather dire warning from one who did little to halt the process as it was being moved forward, yet despite the emptiness of his actions, his warning rings true. For a world in open revolt against the very idea of submission to God, persecution cannot be far behind, open or not. No doubt this new instance of revolt will not stir the conscience of those who are so devoted to the modern ideals of democracy that they not dare to question their loyalties. But for the Catholic who knows history and realizes that states rise and fall while only the Church is guaranteed not to fail, it is time to shake off the illusions of the modern world. For anyone who has eyes to see, the western world is throwing off all of its history so as to embrace the world promised by liberalism, a world where man answers only to himself. No Catholic can embrace such a world-view and yet remain a true Catholic, for he knows that all things were created to help man reach his supernatural goal, that there is truly a God Who governs the world and before Whom all must submit or be destroyed.

The modern illusion is wet with the blood of millions; it bred the First World War, the war to end all wars, the Second World War in which the godlessness of Nazism was fought by the Allies in full union with the scourge of atheistic Communism as incarnate in the Soviet Union, in the rise of Communist China and its purge of millions, in the death of millions of the unborn at the hands of the very mothers that conceived them, and this plague is in the decadent West. Even now, Euthanasia slowly finds legal refuge in lands where death threatens the very young as well as the sick and aged.

The apostasy lies heavy in these United States as modern education and hedonism combine to produce the malleable population foreseen by Pope Leo XIII in his masterful encyclical against Freemasonry. Yet Catholics remain paralyzed. Modernism and the desire for pleasure have converted them in droves, and the anemic Churchmen since the Second Vatican Council either lead the apostasy, or remain unable to gather opposition. For Catholics loyal to Tradition there is a fear of letting go of the last treads tying them to the liberal illusion, though the grosser of the errors have not been able to seduce them. How should we treat this State that more and more shows who its master really is?

Some claim that we are in a position like the early days of the Church, when pagan emperors threatened the lives of Christians, and their empire held many of the present day illusions. Were the rulers not unbelievers? Christians were loyal to them nonetheless, despite their errors. In fact, the Theban Legions shows Catholic soldiery willing to die rather than either to offend God by false worship, or to take up arms against the pagan emperor. It seems a strong argument. However, this modern world is not the world languishing in ignorance concerning the Saviour. It is the world turned away from the true God, rejecting Him and His Rule in favour of the rule of almighty man. This is a different and more evil world, a new paganism worse than the first. It is not to the Caesars that we must turn for inspiration, but to that mighty Pontiff, Pope St. Pius V, as he deprived the bastard Elizabeth of the throne of England, though she was acknowledged by the great majority of her subjects, and his forbidding of Catholics to acknowledge the apostate as legitimate queen. This is the action of a saint faced with a ruler not pagan, but unfaithful. It not the voice of human prudence, but of Divine sight.

The modern governments are not pagan, per se. They are apostate. They have turned away from the truth in order to make their own "truth". They are ripening for the punishment of apostasy. They are the fig tree where Christ can find no fruit. They have been weighed and found wanting. Catholics need not refuse to acknowledge these states, for the Church has not deposed their rulers as she did the bastard Elizabeth. They still have some claim, perhaps, to our allegiance. But the age of illusions must pass. It is time for Catholics to refuse to go along with the tide of liberalism infecting both parties of government. It is time to pull out of a losing battle. There is only one answer, the Catholic one. There is only the true Faith that can save us. It is only Christ Who stands behind every human authority. When that authority allows its own citizens to be put to death by the millions, when it perverts the natural order by contraception, abortion, and gay marriage, the Catholic must finally make a choice as to where his allegiance finally lies.

We live in an age where Americans more and more show that they have lost all contact with even natural truth. They are the makers of reality. God is no more than the religious projection of their own self-deification. With such men, we must realize that compromise is impossible. It might mean that we can no longer patronize restaurants or other businesses that pour money into the organized revolt against God; it might mean refusing to vote unless the candidate is Catholic in his stand; it might mean inconvenience to us as to where we work, or where we keep our money. But it is God's rights that are at stake. We must come to the point when we realize that enough is enough. It is time to be Catholic, and to let the chips fall.

To Restore All Things in Christ

This first posting is timed to occur on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and that is certainly not a chance occurrence. The Sacred Heart of Our Lord is not simply a devotion to the bodily heart of Christ, though that is worthy of veneration due to the hypostatic union, but it is a devotion to the heart as the sign of the Divine love for us, a love that seeks to elevate man to the supernatural order and bring about a union with God and man. Such a symbol as the Sacred Heart is potent, for we know that the humanity of Christ, being united so intimately to the Second Person of the Trinity, become a window onto God. The Sacred Humanity is the expression in human terms of the Divine Person that is the Logos. Every action becomes a revelation of God. The Heart of Christ, being a symbol of His Charity, and indeed of what is most intimate to Him, becomes then the means of knowing Who God is. "He who sees me," says Our Lord to St. Philip, "sees the Father."

We must ask then about the end of this charity of the Sacred Heart, for it is not necessarily what we think. Moderns think of love as a very subjective thing, and unfortunately as either an excuse to do virtually anything, or at least as being opposed to any kind of sternness. Now this it simply false. Love desires the good of the one loved, and that good is an objective thing. "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee," writes Saint Augustine in the Confessions. Man is made for God; and so true love for ones neighbour necessitates that one desire ones neighbour to attain his end, and to fight against those things that turn man away from it. This is true of the charity of the Sacred Heart. God is man's end. Thus the Sacred Heart loves man in such a way as to draw him to God, and sometimes intervenes in such a way as to remind man of that end, though that might imply some sternness on His part. Sin separates man from God; and so it is sin that must be overcome by the charity of the Sacred Heart. He was without sin so as to suffer for man the sinner, to overcome sin by His Divine Sacrifice. It is sin that the Sacred Heart cannot condone in man, for it is to consign man to eternal separation.

Why is this important for this commencement of a new blog? It is because the Sacred Heart is the means to our end, the measure of all reality as man makes his pilgrim's way to the eternal city. What is important? What is to be cast aside? Christ is the measure, even as He is the king by right of nature and conquest over all the actions of man. He is Creator for "all things were made by Him," and He is Redeemer, for He has purchased all by the shedding of His Precious Blood. We must remember that it was by Divine Love that creation was brought to be, that is by the Divine and Human Love of the Incarnate God that the Redemption came to pass. and it is through the charity of the Heart of Jesus that grace is given to man now, in this hour, to reach is everlasting end, the union with God in the beatific vision. All things then must be judged in the light of this Heart, and all things tend towards it. There is no other measure.

To the Kingly Heart of the Divine Redeemer this blog is now dedicated. May He, through the intercession of His Immaculate Mother, bring about the submission of all human activity to the reign of the Triune God. Kyrie Eleison.