Roman Catholics - Extremist Terrorists
At the moment, some representatives of the U.S. Army seem to have egg on their face for having easily swallowed SLPC guidelines concerning the extremist and even terrorist character of believing Roman Catholics. I say “seem to” for one important reason. I believe that the SLPC and its army victims are basically correct, that those who claim that they are wrong are tragically mistaken, and that Catholics must prepare to deal with the consequences. Let us examine each of these propositions briefly in turn.
First of all, allow me to begin discussion of point number one by assuring my readers that I certainly do not mean that the accusations of extremist-terrorist behavior is accurate in the popular sense of the term. Obviously, we believers are not walking around with car bombs or wrapped up in explosives, longing for the destruction and death of our fellow Americans. We are nothing other today than what we were in the bouts of persecution under the Roman Empire: law-abiding citizens. In fact, we can boast just as much as our ancestors did that the only reason why society still holds together at all is because there continue to be people like ourselves who counter its self-destructive lust.
On the other hand, anyone who has seriously studied the essence and the logical development of the vision of the Founding Fathers clearly must accept the justice of our identification as extremists and potential terrorists. We Catholics simply do not fit into the box inside which they limited their understanding of freedom and its expression. That box, developed by John Locke, who expressly noted our inability to rest content within its confines, only permits religious forces a liberty that transforms their faiths into living room sports with no impact on real life with all its political, social, economic, and moral implications. “Play all you want within your clubhouse”, the custodians of this box tell believers; “but once you go outside, your task is to avoid ‘divisiveness’, ‘move on’, and ‘get with the program’”.
But the Rules of the Game are determined by the will of the strongest materialists and by them alone. Unfortunately for Locke and the Founders, these materialists are not necessarily always of the sort that they would have preferred, namely men chiefly concerned with the protection of private property, and eager to avoid religious interference with economic liberty, but otherwise operating, morally, on the basis of a lot of unexamined traditional presumptions. Still, if you ride the train, you must be ready to pay the fare, and the architects of Lock Land, unfortunately built a railroad to materialist hell. It can go anywhere that the strongest passion wishes to take it, with believers expected to keep their fears about the consequences inside their clubhouse doors. Serious Catholics, practitioners of a religion that seeks to correct and transform all of nature, must use their freedom outside the box designed to enclose them. They must derail the train to hell. And this, from the standpoint of the heirs of Locke, has to confirm their master’s fears, revealing Catholics as dismantlers of the system; i.e., terrorists.
But now we reach my second point: the tragic failure of most of us to realize that the system that we have been called upon from birth unceasingly to praise as the height of human and even divine wisdom--the system that provides mankind’s last and best hope for freedom---is designed to deport us from the public square, shut us up in private boxes, and then kill us. Worse still, we do not realize that it is designed to kill us with a smile on its lips.
The smile is what deceives us, and it works so well that there is never any real need to replace it with a grimace and a menace unless our opponents smell a chance for the final axe to do its job (about which more below). Why should they bother to change tactics? Every time the reality behind the mask is clarified---as with the SLPC and the army officers dumbly heeding it---we Catholics justly protest, but then proceed to indicate our firm conviction that cultivation of the “true spirit” behind the American Way is the path to security. Real loyalty to the country’s founding principles simply cannot help but smite such evildoers. Sorry, but it doesn’t. It leads us first to our private, non-divisive, concentration camps and then to our public chopping blocks, singing---like those “moderate” Girondins who belted out the Marseillaise as the radical Jacobins used their common teachings to trot them straight to the guillotine---the praise of the tools used to eliminate the Catholic beast.
But no, most of us will once again insist! Bad people alone are responsible for what is simply a perversion of the system! It can once again be like it was in 1960 or in 1933 or 1861 or whatever year is taken as the moment when the aberrations began to set in. That it was different on those dates than it is today is beyond dispute. Nevertheless, the reason for that difference was not the Locke and Founder friendly system but the inertia of the more traditional and religious-minded past that that system was illogically seeking to freeze in its first stage of its property-obsessed Enlightenment decadence and logically committed totally to destroy. As Louis Veuillot once said, the problem with the proponents of error is that the more true to their principles they are, the worse the destruction. One longs to keep them in their contradictory or hypocritical state. With Catholics, the trouble is the opposite. They only wreak havoc when they do not live up to their beliefs. And we Catholics often do not do so.
That brings us to point three, which concerns a future that is imminent. Observers are correct when they note that the grimaces and menaces of such truly evil groups as the SLPC are growing in number, and the explanation for this is frightening. Such organizations feel that the time for the above mentioned axe to fall upon Catholics is swiftly approaching. The inertia behind the system has by now so been eaten away at by its logic that “the smiles that emasculate” may soon no longer be of any further utility. A Final Solution of any remaining religious impulse to leave its private box appears to be attainable.
Are we Catholics still going to call upon the constitutional magic of “mankind’s last and best hope” to protect our inoffensive concentration camp “freedom” when the “will of the Founders” is interpreted solely by those who think as the SLPC does? Will we sing the song of our executioner all the way up to the chopping block? We have been trained to sing that song unquestioningly for so long that we barely know any other hymn to joy.
Let us by all means appeal for the support of those non-Catholic opponents of current social and political evils whose opposition is based upon the power of past tradition. But let us simultaneously work with all of our might to separate that beneficent influence of social inertia from the Locke and Founder worship that logically works to destroy it. The religion of the Foundation is one that puts all men of thought and of soul in boxes whose confines we are all obliged to break down. Let us lead the way, and make the break with that false religion that allows our true “Catholic extremism” to emerge. This indeed will strike terror in the hearts of our opponents---not through bombs but through the corrective and transforming supernatural power of the Living God. Let us take off the porous armor of emasculating Americanist ideas and put on the famous “breastplate of St. Patrick” instead.
I bind unto myself today in
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.I bind this day to me for ever.
By power of faith, Christ's Incarnation;
His baptism in the Jordan river;
His death on the Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
His riding up the heavenly way;
His coming at the day of doom;
I bind unto myself today.I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of the cherubim;
The sweet 'well done' in judgment hour,
The service of the seraphim,
Confessors' faith, Apostles' word,
The Patriarchs' prayers, the Prophets' scrolls,
All good deeds done unto the Lord,
And the purity of virgin souls.I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun's life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.Against all Satan's spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart's idolatry,
Against the wizard's evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.
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