Monsignor Charles Pope has penned a concise summary of recent anti-Catholic and anti-natural law actions of the nanny state: If You Find A Good Fight, Get In It! A similar clarion call for political action can be found on the Mass Resistance site, which cites an address of a British Pro-Family barrister to the effect that America is in the same place the U.K. was fourteen years ago vis-a-vis the homosexual agenda, and we need to fight while we still have time. (With the aggressive queering of the military, one wonders if it’s not a bit late for that.)
Sadly, not one but two priests trying to fight the madness have been suspended or reassigned as a reward for their good service.
Across the Pond, Islam is set to be dominant religion in France.
But as the culture war is being lost on virtually every front, the talk coming out of many churchmen concerns “religious freedom,” “freedom of conscience,” “tolerance,” or “equality.” In other words, the very principles of the anti-Christ Revolution are being used to defend the Church and the rights of Christians, as if they are adequate to the task. And those principles are exactly the ones which will not be applied “fairly” toward us by homosexuals, Islamists, or the secularist nanny state.
Contrast these slogans of masonic modernism with what we received from our forefathers. In the prayers that Pope Leo XIII ordered to be celebrated at the end of every priest’s private (low) Mass, God was asked to hear our petitions “for the conversion of sinners, and for the liberty and exaltation of the Holy Mother the Church.” (You can read on our site about the frightful vision that compelled Pope Leo to prescribe these prayers.) Leo prayed not only for the freedom of the Church, but also her exaltation — a word that means “to raise in rank, honor, power, character, quality, etc.; elevate.”
Had we been working all the while from Leo’s time till our own to exalt the Church, to raise her rank and honor in men’s minds and hearts, we would perhaps not be suffering the pink persecution of a wicked nanny state that commands us to place orphans in the dysfunctional homes of sodomites or forgo our adoption services for normal people.
This notion of the freedom and exaltation of Holy Mother Church was not new int Leo’s time.
St. Anselm of Canterbury, cognizant of the hubris that Christian kings of his age sometimes displayed towards God’s Church, declared what Pope St. Pius X called “energetic words” in the encyclical Communium Rerum: “In this world God loves nothing more than the liberty of His Church.” Note that he did not speak of a vague “religious liberty” or tolerance or equality. Knowing God’s Church to be not the equal of heretical sects, and knowing her rights to transcend those of human institutions, St. Anselm sees that God’s love for his Spouse puts her in a totally unique category. Ponder these lucid words of the gentle Benedictine Abbot and Archbishop, cited in that same encyclical, and see how suffused they are with a supernatural character:
They who seek not so much to serve as to rule her [the Church], are clearly acting in opposition to God. God wills His Spouse to be free and not a slave. Those who treat her and honor her as sons surely show that they are her sons and the sons of God, while those who lord it over her, as over a subject, make themselves not children but strangers to her, and are therefore excluded from the heritage and the dower promised to her. [Emphasis mine. Yes, that’s a threat from a Doctor of the Church!]
And these words, addressed to a Christian prince, wherein the exaltation of the Church is spoken of explicitly:
I pray, conjure, admonish and counsel you, as the guardian of your soul, not to believe that your lofty dignity is diminished if you love and defend the liberty of the Spouse of God and your Mother, the Church, not to think that you abase yourself when you exalt her, not to believe that you weaken yourself when you strengthen her. Look round you and see; the examples are before you; consider the princes that attack and maltreat her, what do they gain by it, what do they attain? It is so clear that there is no need to say it. [Emphasis mine.]
Contrast this with the sentiments now dominating in the Church, where democracy has overshadowed divine order, tolerance has trumped the moral law, ecumenism has supplanted mission, and non-sectarian “religious liberty” has trumped the freedom and exaltation of Holy Mother Church.
It may seem triumphalist to say so, but the Church is the sole, exclusive teacher of mankind on the subject of God’s Law, both the supernaturally revealed “positive law” contained in Scripture and Apostolic Tradition, and the natural law written on men’s hearts, but rendered obscure by sin’s darkening of the intellect and weakening of the will. That prerogative alone, which is to humanity’s great advantage, is cause to exalt so good a Mother.
At Fatima, the Blessed Virgin promised us that the devotion to Her Immaculate Heart would deliver us from several things, including “persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father.” She promised this after she showed those three saintly children the vision of Hell. If you study the words of Our Lady on that occasion (go here and scroll down to “Words of the Virgin Mary”), you will see that the devotion to the Immaculate Heart is something that God Himself wants to establish in the world to save sinners from Hell and to save the Church and the Holy Father from persecution. We have not done what the Queen of Heaven requested. Mary’s Heart is not sufficiently honored, and what has been the result for the Church? She is actively persecuted, not only in officially Communist and Islamic states, but even in Christendom’s heartland — and even here, the “land of the free,” where a soft, liberal-democratic persecution of bureaucracy and political correctness seeks to choke the life out of the Church.
The devotion to the Immaculate Heart is the remedy we need to take. That Heart will be our refuge and the way that leads us to God. The triumph of that Heart will also effect the freedom and exaltation of Holy Mother Church.
