As Scripture says, "Love of money is the root of all evil." There is so much money in war. Is it any wonder that the default position of many in government is endless war? That isn't what the Founding Fathers envisioned. In fact, James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, considered war the greatest enemy. "No nation," he said, "could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Haven't war and terrorism been the twins used to reduce our freedoms? The Patriot Act after 9/11 is a 342 page document expanding activities of the FBI and CIA. It violates many of the rights articulated in the Bill of Rights. Are we really willing to trade our freedom for a false feeling of safety?
Here's what Madison wrote about war in 1795:
Excerpted from Political Observations, 20 April 1795
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Those truths are well established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to a more arbitrary government, or the transition from a popular government to an aristocracy or a monarchy. [Read more]
Madison would be appalled to see how presidents have usurped Congressional authority to essentially declare war unilaterally so often in the last 100 years. We have drifted very far indeed from the vision of the founders. As we celebrate the 250th year of the establishment of the United States, let us pray for a return to morality and limited government. As Thomas Jefferson said, the best government is the least government. Embracing the Catholic principle of subsidiarity would solve a lot of our problems, especially if we saw the rise of personal responsibility and integrity. Shall we pray for that?
"God revealed to us that misfortunes otherwise inexplicable are the work of the author of evil: 'An enemy has done this!' (Matt. 13:28)
ReplyDelete......only faith can discern the mortal battle between right and wrong that is going among nations as among individuals. It is simple truth to say that only a true Christian can know what really goes on in the world.....propaganda is a powerful weapon to deceive and control legions of naive learned in the history written by the rulers of this world, for he who writes the history books will rule the world.....with the devil in mind.
“No one is denying that, as a whole, our Founding Fathers believed in God. The problem with them and with their vision of what our national creed should represent and of what our social order ought to consist, is that they did not believe in the true God, that is to say, in the Catholic God. They were products of their age: lineal descendants of the Protestant ‘Reformation,’ children of the Enlightenment, the intellectual cousins of Voltaire and the French Encyclopedists with the impudent ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ and their pathological hatred of the Catholic Church.
ReplyDeleteBecause they stood completely outside the Catholic tradition, men like Madison and Jefferson did not recognize that the religious strife they abhorred had resulted not from the organic unity of Church and state in the Catholic social orders of pre-reformation Europe (and of the Latin countries, but rather from the disruption of that unity by the Protestant revolt, which shattered Christendom into dozens of warring sects each claiming to be the true religion……”
(ACLA Report (the American Catholic Lawyers Association)
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge!” (Hosea 4-6)
…excerpt from ‘’The star-spangled heresy: Americanism” by Solange Hertz
ReplyDeleteLet him who reads understand where and by whom the dream of a man-made world government is nourished.
Psalm 126: ‘If the Lord does not build the house, in vain ‘the masons’ (!) toil.”
The American Catholic Church can be said to have received its official charter from the New World’s first revolutionary government in 1798…..John Carroll, only Bishop in the U.S. at the time, he knew whereof he spoke when he said, ‘In the U.S. our religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one.’
As citizens in a wholly artificial nation suddenly put together from scratch by English Masonry, the non-English speaking faithful especially found their plight unbearable. There were three men, all Carrolls and all Catholics, on whom the architects of the American Revolution depended on to draw the Catholics colonials, into its ranks: John Carroll, was a Jesuit priest, his brother Daniel was a politician, and their cousin Charles was a financier. (Like most of the revolutionaries, the Carrolls were not so much American as English products.)
Catholics of the period found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Descendants of the Charles Carroll (the richest man in America, at that time) who had settled in the Catholic colony of Maryland in 1688 and who was Lord Baltimore’s friend and attorney general, they had been steeped in the spirit of the directives originally laid down by the first Proprietor in 1633:
“…..that they suffer no scandal nor offence to be given to any of the protestants, whereby any just complain may hereafter be made by them in Virginia or in England, and that for that end, they cause all acts of the Roman Catholique Religion to be done as privately as may be, and that they instruct all the Roman Catholiques to be silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of Religion.”
From this atmosphere of compromise the Carrolls carried the seeds of the Americanism later condemned by Leo XIII.
.....hardly any symbol of U.S. officialdom is more ominous than Ms. Statue of Liberty, she is the very goddess of the new religion of Man. The Masonic Madonna, at the very doors of the U.S. flanked by the World Trade Building, has brazenly supplanted Our Lady of Guadalupe as America's Queen official hostess, who continues to reassure her children.
'Let nothing discourage you, let nothing depress you....
are you not under my shadow and protection?
...are you not in the crossing of my arms?
Thanks for the history lesson. Very interesting. It reminds me of all the talk about American "exceptionalism." Too bad the Spanish missionaries influence didn't trump the Brits'.
DeleteThe hatred, and lies against Catholic Spain were unleashed from below. Such truth (among many) Americans have yet to learn.
ReplyDelete