Saturday 2 August 2008

Apologists for bad Yankee aggression simply make my point for me

They respond with such preposterous fury, indignation and aggression that they simply defeat their own claims and make my point for me.

Most absurdly of all, they simply fail utterly to distinguish between proper criticism of the ills of Yankeedom and the virtue of the good Americans of whom there are a large number and always have been. They cannot see the difference which is precisely what is wrong with their whole analysis (or lack of it).

Take the self-styled "Colonel Alp" for a kick-off. I've no idea who he is but he is representative of a very typical strand of Yankee anti-Catholicism and he attempts to foist his Yankee-centred prejudice and lack of historical knowledge onto us. He will, I hope forgive me, if I use him as an example of what I mean.

He is clearly a conservative but in the American sense of that much-misused word.

He is right to criticise the Catholic bishops of America - whether for saying that it is compassionate to open the borders to all comers - or for any other reason. He will get no argument about the stupidity of many modern Catholic bishops from this blog. I wholeheartedly agree. And I could give him many more examples than he could even dream of.

A conference of the US Catholic bishops. The USCCB often wastes huge amounts of time and money endorsing fashionable viewpoints in as dull a manner as possible.


But the sum of Roman Catholicism is not the Catholic bishops of America - or even those currently living in the whole world.

The sum of Roman Catholicism is all the bishops, priests and laity that have ever lived since Christ first founded the Church. Hence the importance of "tradition" or handing on (it comes from the Latin word traditio meaning "handing on").

As St Vincent of Lerins put it in his famous maxim, since adopted by popes and Councils of the Church, we believe what has been taught always, everywhere and by everyone in the Church (quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus credentur), meaning not just what is currently fashionable but what has been taught and handed on by those who came before us.

That tradition began at the birth and death of Jesus Christ, at the Resurrection and at Pentecost. It began in the Roman Empire, is mediated through the Holy Roman Church and its chief shepherd, the Bishop of Rome, and has been protected historically by the Roman Emperor and monarchs of Christendom. That, by the way, is why this site is called "Roman Christendom" to reflect that reality.

This does NOT however mean that every Catholic bishop will be faithful to his charge and to that tradition. It does not even mean that a majority of such bishops living at any one time will be faithful to that tradition. It does not even mean that the Bishop of Rome, or Pope, will always be faithful to that tradition - although the popes have a remarkably good record for being faithful and the exceptions are rare, albeit colourful (e.g. Pope John XII who was assassinated by the husband of his mistress).

What it means is this - and please note well, Colonel:

The Church's teaching authority, personified by the Pope and any Council authorised by him, will not solemnly teach and define as true that which is false and inconsistent with ancient Catholic tradition.

THAT is what it means.

And so it has proved. No pope, however wicked, has ever solemnly and definitively taught that previous Catholic teaching is false or taught some contradictory novelty. The Holy Ghost has stopped evil popes from so attemptimg.

That is the true meaning of papal infallibility.

It does not mean that each individual pope cannot make mistakes when he teaches without the full solemnity of infallibility (for a definition of which see Pastor Aeturnus of the 1st Vatican Council and Lumen Gentium 25 of the Second Vatican Council).

So... it follows that the entire American episcopate could be teaching complete poppycock (and indeed they sometimes do just that). They would be traitors to the Faith (and often are) but that would not mean the end of the Faith nor would it be a proof of the falsity of the Faith. It would merely be a proof of the treachery of the American bishops, or at least some of them.

No Catholic is obliged to follow his bishop if that bishop teaches falsehood, error or any other kind of falsity. And one certainly does not need to take one's party political lead from the American bishops.

Now to your other false charges.

The USA does not "fee" other countries. On the contrary, thanks to the modern banking system and the nature of the US banking system, the US feeds off other countries. It began to do so by naked aggression in the way that I have already described but it has since learned to do so by more peaceful means, particularly through the banking system. This is not an exclusively Yankee phenomenon: the British and the Europeans are doing it, too. This is not exclusively due to the ingenuity and historical superiority of the Western nations. It is also often enough due to greed and power.

On the other hand, the greed of Western business is not the whole story, by any means. Western business has often enough been simply exploiting the strife and incompetence of foreign governments whose leaders, taught in Western universities, have attempted to impose Western secularist ideas on their people with often disastrous results.

MacDonaldski!


Never more has this policy of Western secularism being imposed through corrupt leaders, and complaisant Western business on the make, appeared, than in the matter of forced contraceptive policies.

In some countries, even food aid is put second to the oppressive requirement of Yankee-dominated agencies that contraception be the first priority. No condom or contraceptive injection - no food aid. It is sometimes as crude, crass and appalling as that.

It is also racist. Some Westerners just do not want to see the population of asians, black africans and hispanics rising.

So they impose enforced contraception. It is disgusting and oppressive.

But let's not forget that many American states once had enforced sterilisation policies and that Yankee bigots and fascists like Margaret Sanger, who funded the Birth Control Review and the research that led to the contraceptive pill, hated the Catholic Church and supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi eugenic plans.

It wasn't an exlusively Yankee phenomenon, either. Britain had its Marie Stopes and her Nazi sympathies.

All of this was predicted - entirely accurately - by the Catholic Church. It was re-stated by Pope Paul VI - himself a liberal pope - in his now famous encyclical letter entitled Humanae Vitae of 1968. How prescient that letter was can now be seen. He predicted the enforcement in the Third World, the degradation of women and of family life, the cheapening of morals and, above all, the population implosion.

For that is what we are now seeing in the decadent West - including in America. You cannot complain about immigration - illegal or otherwise - if you are not prepared to have children yourself. It is an iron law of nature: the culture that is unwilling to have children and reproduce itself is a culture that will die as sure as night follows day. And no amount of immigration laws will stop that.

That is what is happening to Europe and America. In America, your immigrants are largely hispanic. In Europe, ours are largely Muslim. Europe will thus eventually become Muslim at this rate.

That is what widespread contraception has done for the West.

You are right: there is nothing intrinsically evil in a condom. It is a question of what you do with it. I believe that they make quite interesting balloons when filled with air. It is the policy of deliberate, widespread contraception that is the mistake.

However, one does have to ask what sort of a man thinks it right and proper to introduce a rubber contrivance intimately to his wife. He is certainly no gentleman but rather a species of uncivilised savage.

Now we come to your ignorant howlers. They are all too typical as examples of Yankee anti-Catholic ignorance, supersititon and bigotry.

Castrati: at no time did the Roman Catholic Church sanction the castration of boys to preserve their youthful treble voices for choral purposes. This is another myth. What the Church did was to take pity upon and employ existing castrati who had either been born with the affliction or had suffered it at the hands of some brutish person or by accident during their youth. To employ them as singers was an act of kindness and charity.

It is a piece of the most laughable hypocrisy on the part of anyone, Yank or not, to attack the Church over the Mortara case whilst seeking to defend the massive beam in the pharisaical eye which is the rape of Mexico by Yankee Protestants and secularists.

Rank hypocrisy.

But since you raise the case, I shall address it.

Edgar Mortara was born to Jewish parents but was water-baptised - quite wrongly - during an illness by his Christian nurse. She should not have baptised him since he was a Jew and that was an infringement of the parents' rights. Having been baptised, the laws of the Papal States required that he should receive a Christian education consonant with his baptism. This his parents refused and so the child was taken into care and raised as a personal ward of the Supreme Pontiff who treated him as a beloved son or nephew.

This sort of thing happens routinely in Britain and America where the state considers that parents are not suitable to bring up children and it is absurd for secularists to challenge the Church for doing, with far greater charity and circumspection, what secular states routinely and brutally do today. Remember the little boy in America who was seized at gunpoint by heavily armed police and returned to Cuba?

Mortara was not separated from his parents and saw them often but he was educated in the Christian faith and became an exemplary Christian, loving his parents and, at the same time, loving his Faith. He became a priest, an ardent admirer of Pope Pius IX whom he treated as a second father and later gave evidence in favour of his canonisation which can still be read on-line. It is testimony of the highest praise of Pope Pius IX. He continued to love his parents all his life and he died in 1942 in the odour of sanctity.

How supremely different from the brutal methods of separating parents and children so frequently used by the state and legal system in secularist Europe and America today!

And what kind of laughable hypocrisy is it that turns a blind eye to the brutality but attacks mildness and charity?

The Colonel is, I suspect, a Freemason which may partly explain his anti-Catholicism and defence of Masonry. That Freemasonry was responsible for the conspiracy that brought about the French and American Revolutions is simply a matter of historical record.

Masonic symbolism reeks of black magic and other childish silliness but Anglo-American Masons are a largely conservative force, these days.


Today, consonant with the Colonel's own opinions, Freemasons are particularly active in promoting the pro-contraception conspiracy. Although, in many respects, a conservative force, they nonetheless retain many revolutionary ideas that are harmful to society. On the whole, however, English-speaking Masons are, on balance, a stable, conservative force and I have known a few who have given up high-ranking status in the movement to become Catholics.

Historically, however, the story is very different. In the Catholic world, Freemasonry became the preferred creed and society of those who attacked the opposition of the Church and the Monarchy to slavery and slave-trading. They sought to overthrow both Church and Monarchy so that they would then be free to enslave other men - literally.

In the Protestant world, too, Freemasons were well represented among the slavers and slave-traders, Jefferson being one well-known example. Hence Dr Johnson's famous remark "How is it that the YELPS for freedom come loudest from the drivers of negro slaves?".

The Colonel demonstrates his deepest, and most ignorant, prejudice, last.

He thinks that Brazil, Argentina and Mexico are Catholic countries.

Yes, really!

I kid ye not. He really thinks this. Or, at least, so he says.

Mexico has been ruled since 1922 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which, until as late as 2002, had consistently held it illegal for any Roman Catholic cleric to wear any kind of clerical dress in any public place.

The anti-Catholic butcher, leader of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party and brtual President of Mexico from 1922, Plutarco Elio Calles, whose reign of terror was largely funded by the US government.


The PRI, and its infamous founder Plutarco Elio Calles, began its infamous career with one of the most savage persecutions of Catholics that Latin America has ever seen.

This led to the creation of a whole wave of martyrs for the Church, including men like St Miguel Pro SJ.

St Miguel Pro SJ, Catholic martyr of Mexico, before a firing squad of Yankee- funded revolutionary stooges of the criminal regime of Plutarco Calles.


Catholics felt impelled to put up a resistance to this naked aggression and murder and they banded together to form the Cristeros who were ultimately defeated but only with the assistance of Yankee money, guns, ships, armour and aircraft, all orchestrated by the shameless US Ambassador, Dwight Morrow, the very personification of Yankee caddishness, claiming to love Mexico whilst conniving at the brutal murder of its sons.

Calles had Cristeros hanged from every second lamp-post and from every second telegraph pole so that trains passing could see what he had done to faithful Catholics as a brutal warning.

So much for Mexico being a "Catholic" country!

And since the time Mexico fell into the hands of these brutal anti-Catholic thugs, needless to say its economy, growth and political standing has fallen into the dust.

But - and note this well - this was accomplished largely with Yankee money and arms. So it is a fitting judgment upon Yankee crimes that Mexicans are now illegally emigrating into the USA.

Brazil is another example. When it was an empire under Dom Pedro II, it is a simple historical fact that Brazil was a richer and more successful country than the United States. But when Yankeedom had time to turn its attention to its Brazilian "competitor", after the War between the US States was over, once again successive Yankee governments funded and armed the brutal rebellions that eventually overthrew the economically successful Catholic government of Brzil.

The result was a foregone conclusion, as the Yankees expoliters well knew: Brazil would become yet another revolutionary basket-case in South America allowing Yankee business to move in and make a financial killing at the expense of the poor and the peasantry.

That, my dear Colonel, was always the prime motivating policy behind Yankee foreign policy. Raiding the Latins to fund the eccenstric lifestyle of all too many fat, bloated, utterly selfish, Yankee plutocrats.

Argentina provides a similar story, as does the rest of Latin America. You can read all about it in a book written not by a Latino but by an American, Bishop Kelley, in his contemporaneous book, written at the time of Calles brutal regime, entitled Blood-drenched Altars.

You could also read The Lawless Roads by famous British novelist, Graham Greene.

So you see, my dear Colonel, if Latin America is poor, unstable and corrupt - and it certainly often is - that is as much as anything, due to the mountain of successive crimes committed by the government of the United States, done to fatten the Yankee rich at the expense of the Latin American poor.

This is nothing to be proud of, my dear Colonel.

Still less is it something to blame the down-trodden and poor for. You might as well blame the Jews for the Shoah! Would you do that? No? Well, then? Don't do it to the Latinos either.

You are quite right that somebody was doing something wrong. But that somebody was, more often than not, the government of he United States.

It's an historical fact. Get used to it, buddy!

Good, old-fashioned, interfering, exploitative Yankee government hucksterism and crime at its very worst.

Naples and Palermo tell exactly the same story, the only difference being that their anti-Catholic revolutions were funded by both the British and the American anti-clericals and for exactly the same anti-Catholic reasons.

So, in case you think I am holding up the British model in preference to the American, think again! They are both as bad as each other, predicated, as they were, upon anti-Catholicism. Indeed, historically, it is the one thing that the British and American governments always had completely in common: a mutual hatred of Catholicism. Where do you think the Yankee Protestants first got it from? British anti-Catholics, of course! Men like John Locke, for example.

John Locke, anti-Catholic British philosopher and ideological inspirer of the American Revolution.


Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini and the other anti-Catholic revolutionaries of Italy were all lionised and feted in Britain and America precisely because they were anti-clerical and conspired against the Pope and the Catholic kings of Christendom. If you had paid more attention to this blog you would long ago have read chapter and verse on the whole subject.

Go back and read what I wrote about the film Gattopardo, or The Leopard, a film about how the old Catholic Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was overthrown by the revolutionaries of the Risorgimento, backed, as they were, by British and American money aimed at leading to the overthrow of the Papal States which, in due course, is exactly what happened. The bigots won the day and cashed in big time!

Once again, the blame lies squarely with the Anglo-American Protestants and secularists and their damnable and infernal greed, selfishness and bigotry which you seem so keen to defend.

It should be obvious why the Irish went to North America and not Latin America. They spoke English and not Spanish or Portguese.

In fact, many Irishmen did go on to Latin America, once they had learned the language, and there is, today, a large Irish community in Argentina, for example (also a large Scottish and English community).

Sadly, many of the Irish who stayed behind in Yankeeland soon enough got affected by the anti-clerical and revolutionary spirit of the Protestant and secularist exploiters and, whilst they kept their religion against much hostility, too many of them soon enough blended into the spirit of Jefferson and the other slave-owning, Deist-Unitarian hypocrites.

This should suffice to answer Viator Catholicus who has a good website and is generally a good chap but does not realise that I am just as opposed to British anti-Catholicism and exploitation as I am to the Yankee variety.

And I am not a Limey, by the way, as I was not born in England, nor born of English stock. So think again, Viator, my friend! Why do you think my blog is called Roman Christendom and not English Christendom? Bit of a giveaway, isn't it?

Reveille time, o ye defenders of Yankee crimes! Wake up and smell the incense - if McDonald's hamburgers haven't got you first!


The acme of civilisation?
Or might we be allowed to prefer Mi
chelangelo?
Or eve
n just the cuisine of old Catholic Europe?

...

5 comments:

colonelalp said...

Having to listen to yet another litany of the glorious, sorrowful and joyful mysteries of a poor, put-upon Catholic world is massively tedious; consider where these people would be if the Latin Catholics had colonized the whole of the western hemisphere.
Consider the pitiful and repulsive defensiveness that even now defends and apologizes for the fascist and authoritarian regimes in catholic Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.
It's no news to you, I'm sure, but the dimwits who're trying to change Catholicism to Unitarianism in drag are no treasures, either.
I don't know why we have to be involved in YOUR problems; I don't know when we've imposed ours on you.

Anonymous said...

You might be interested in this quotation I saved:

As in many other countries, public education in the United States began at the instigation of churches. For a long time, schooling was openly religious. In the 1820s, in New York and in other states, legislators became concerned that many students were receiving the wrong type of education. It was not that children were going uneducated - in 1821, about 93 percent of New York's school age youths were already attending private schools. As expressed in legislative debates, the fear was that students educated in private Catholic schools would learn the wrong values and end up becoming criminals. If Protestant schools could be made less expensive through government subsidies, the legislators reasoned, some Catholics would transfer their children there, thus saving them from a life of crime.

The subsidies began as a kind of voucher system in which approved Protestant schools received a per pupil payment. However, this had an unintended consequence: the subsidized Protestant schools started competing against each other to attract Catholic students. To compete, they began teaching more of what Catholic parents and students wanted - reading, writing, and math - and less of what they didn't want - Protestant religious training. Advocates of the subsidies found that the subsidized schools were no longer providing the religious training that justified the funding program in the first place.

In response, subsidies were limited to the approved Protestant school nearest to a student's home. This reduced the incentive for the schools to compete against each other, and thus to limit their Protestant religious instruction. As government programs tend to do, over time the subsidy scheme grew until it began eliciting complaints that the subsidized schools were getting most of their money from the government while being protected from competition. With the Free Schools Act of 1867, the state simply took over the subsidized schools, which then became public institutions. This is the surprising, true origin of America's public school system.


-John R. Lott Jr., Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't, p. 190-191

Stephen D. said...

Thank you for these additional illustrations that rebut the notion that everything good in civilization today derives from the cultural influences of Protestantism and the "Enlightenment." I'd like to hear your response to the speculative alternate history posited here, written by a self-described Highlander concerning what would have happened had Bonnie Prince Charlie won back the British throne. It was written in response to a film about the prince supposedly in the works.

On a side note, would you say that the word "conflicted" accurately describes the Stuart prince's attitude toward his Catholicism?

Tribunus said...

I'm afraid the Colonel's response requires no answer. If he thinks invading another peoples' country is not "imposing" then I'm afraid I can't help him.

But thanks to other contributors for some very interesting information.

Tribunus

Tribunus said...

Stephen,

The "Highlander" to whom you refer is typical of a particular type of modern Scotsman.

He may be a Loyalist Protestant with all the usual bigotry against Catholics.

Another typical type is the sort who hates his own history and is virtually a nihilist. There are sadly too many of them.

They tend to be lapsed Presbyterians who have become the very worst sort of whining, whingeing, half-baked Lefty.

They usually can't even summon up the spittle to be real Marxists, so miserable and negative are they.

They hate the English, they hate the Jacobites, they hate the Catholic Church but have rejected Presbyterianism, they embrace a kind of half-baked atheism but are forced to recognise the evil of Stalin, Hitler and other atheists, and they are often Scottish Nationalists but do not really know what that means.

In short, they add up to one big zero.

No wonder Scotland is in the state it is in. It has a new Parliament but everyone hates it for the corrupt parcel of self-serving politicians that it is.

The Scots who were teetotalling Presbyterian bigots have now become a nation of whiners who hate everybody but themselves and they are not too sure about their neighbours, either!

This guy is not dissimilar.

In the same breath that he tells you - quite wrongly - that Jacobite government would have prevented the founding of any empire, he might well tell you that he does not agree with having an Empire or that it is "out-dated".

Like a lot of ignorant and ill-informed people in Scotland he thinks Jacobitism was a Scottish nationalist movement of some sort. It was nothing of the kind. It was a Crown Unionist movement which intended to keep the union of the Crowns but with separate parliaments - something the British Labour Party said they would deliver and have singularly failed to do.

The Bonnie Prince always wore the Garter star first and foremost. He was proud of being Scots but he was British, first, and had no intention whatever of breaking up the union of the Crowns and would most certainly not have been averse to continuing to build a great Empire just as his grandfather, James II, had been.

The difference is that the Empire would have had much more Catholic influence - including in America - instead of reverting into a bastion of anti-Catholic prejudice.

Tell him so and then sit back and watch the fireworks!

This is what happens to a country that first becomes Presbyterian, kicks out the Catholics and Anglicans and the more interesting people, and then turns secularist.

It is not a pretty sight.

I don't think Prince Charles Edward was "conflicted" over his Catholicism. He did, however, weaken at one point and give in to the Anglicans in the hope of re-gaining his crown - but it did not last long as they were merely playing with him. He reverted to his Catholic faith in exile and died fortified by the rites of the Church.

Tribunus