America Is A Masonic Nation

THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: I always get a chuckle when I hear Evangelicals tell me that the United States of America was founded as a "Christian nation." No, I tell them, that's what it was BEFORE the American Revolution, when the colonies were ruled by a Protestant Christian king. After the Revolution, the colonies ceased to be Christian, and became the world's first Masonic nation! Granted, America's founding fathers were cooperative with Christians, mainly because they had to be, but don't think for one second that those same founding fathers had any intention of America keeping any trace of a Christian form of government. The founding fathers agreed that the moral foundations of religion were useful in building the country, but they kept it strictly to a moral understanding of the Christian religion, as all good Masons do. The idea of American government actually recognizing the real authority of any particular Church was repugnant to them. Of course, most repugnant to them was the Catholic Church, which the founding fathers were determined to keep in it's place. Need I remind my readers that following the American Revolution, Catholics suffered some of their greatest indignities at the hands of those who claimed the highest loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and the American Revolution.

Freemasons don't rule America in the literal sense, like a king might rule his subjects, but they do rule America in principle. In fact, the United States was founded on Freemasonry, and thus it is the world's first Masonic Nation. The idea being that Freemasons rule America through it's system of government, designed and ordered through Masonic principles. The idea of democratic republicanism (popularly and incorrectly referred to simply as "democracy") is Masonic in origin, a product of the Enlightenment era, which opposes Christian monarchy, the foundation of western civilization.

I want to make this very clear. Western civilization was founded on Christian monarchy. Kings and queens were subject to the ecclesiastical authority of the Catholic Church, which had both the power to coronate them and excommunicate them. By coronating them, the Church gave them power. By excommunicating them, the Church diminished their power, and sometimes dethroned them entirely. Thus western civilization was ruled by a Christian system of government during the middle ages. It was only after the Protestant Reformation that we start to see significant problems with these monarchies, which of course gave birth to the Enlightenment era and the rise of the Freemasons. The Freemasons in turn toppled the monarchies, or at the very least diminished their authority, thus giving us democratic republicanism.

The problem with democratic republicanism, besides it being an unChristian form of government derived from ancient Pagan principles, is that it always leads to socialism. We can see this in various degrees in democracies throughout the world, and even here in the United States, which continually slides deeper into socialist rule.

Many Catholic Americans don't understand the intrinsically anti-Catholic nature of Freemasonry. You have to understand that in America, Freemasonry has already accomplished most of it's goals. The government is totally Freemason. The democratic road to socialism is well underway, and nothing less than a total collapse of Washington DC can change this. Therefore, there is no need for Freemasons to work so hard in the United States. Most of their work is already finished. The primary function of most American Freemasons is now mainly fundraising, to help spread Masonic ideas around the world. In Europe Freemasonry takes on a much more openly anti-Catholic role, as it continually tries to undermine the influence of the Catholic Church there.

Married Priests In The Catholic Church

A Married Priest With His Wife And Children

(Rorate Caeli) - Very interesting answers in this lengthy interview granted by the leader of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Primate John Hepworth, to The Australian Inquirer...

Married Priests:

Inquirer: How do the Pope's proposals mesh the Latin celibate discipline for all clergy with Anglicanism's longstanding acceptance of married priests and bishops?

JH: Bishops in the new Anglican structure will be unmarried. This is out of respect for the tradition of Eastern and Western Christianity. But priests who come from Anglicanism will be able to serve as priests in the new structure, whether married or not, after satisfying certain requirements. The truly radical element is that married men will be able to be ordained priests in the Anglican structure indefinitely into the future...

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THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: The concept of married Catholic priests (under the Anglican Ordinariates) poses no threat to my Traditional Catholic sensibilities whatsoever, and here is the reason why. The Catholic Church has had married priests in the United States for literally DECADES! The first class come from former protestant ministers, usually Anglican, already married who seek to become Catholic priests. In most cases, the Church has granted this. The second class is this...

(PG News) - Saturday, October 02, 1999
By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The Vatican has cautiously opened the door to the ordination of married men as Byzantine Catholic priests in the United States.

The change comes as the Metropolitan Byzantine Archdiocese of Pittsburgh prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary tomorrow at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown. But the new law is not a full return to the church's practice of 75 years ago, when Rome's permission was not needed.

A set of newly approved canon laws for the archdiocese permits bishops to submit the names of married candidates to Rome for approval on a case-by-case basis....

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Here we see that Rome has allowed married men in the United States to become Byzantine Catholic priests for exactly ten years now. All of this comes with no shock or disruption to the Catholic Church in North America. The key here is rites. By that I mean liturgical rites. In the western world we are most familiar with the Roman Rite, however the Catholic Church actually consists of many rites. There are four primary rites in the Catholic Church, all of them recognizing the Bishop of Rome as the sovereign pontiff. Each primary rite has other rites that may have sprang forth from it, but primary rites form the main groups. These four primaries are the Roman Rite, Antiochian Rite, Alexandrian Rite and Byzantine Rite. All of them are 100% Catholic. All of them are in full apostolic communion with the pope (who is head of the Roman Rite). All of them make up the Catholic Church. Yet only one of them has mandated celibacy of all it's clerics, and that is the Roman Rite.

Celibacy has always been practiced in Christianity by those who were able to practice it. Jesus Christ himself was celibate, as was the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Paul, the apostle who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. St. Paul encouraged celibacy among all those clergy who were able to practice it. However, the first pope, St. Peter, was married, as were a number of bishops in the early Catholic Church. Christianity has always placed high value on both marriage and celibacy as two different ways of practicing chastity. Though celibacy was preferred among the clergy as a way of fostering total devotion to care of the Christian flock. As St. Paul put it, the married man strives to please God and his wife, while the celibate man strives only to please God. It wasn't until the early second millennium (1100's) that celibacy was mandated of all clerics exclusively in the Roman Rite. This mandate did not apply to other rites within the Catholic Church. Any charge that the Catholic Church banned marriage from all clergy is spurious to say the least, as married Catholic men have always been allowed to become priests in the other Catholic rites. However, it had been the custom within all rites for some time to restrict the office of bishop to celibate men alone. This is not to say that a married man couldn't be a bishop. It's just that it hasn't been the custom of any Catholic rite to allow this for some time, and that is not likely to change.

The crisis that erupted in the Protestant Anglican Communion during the late 1970s led some Anglican clergy to seek refuge in the Catholic Church, and among them were married Anglican priests. So in the early 1980s, Pope John Paul II created a "Pastoral Provision" in the Roman Rite that would allow married Anglican priests to be ordained as Roman Catholic priests and continue to practice their Anglican customs. This was essentially an experiment to see if married clergy (operating under an "Anglican Use" pastoral provision) would coexist well among a predominately celibate priesthood within the Roman Rite. The experiment proved to be a success, in that these married priests proved to be just as faithful and devoted as celibate priests within their limited capacity as married men. Ironically, they often proved to be more conservative, more orthodox, and more traditional than the average number of celibate priests throughout the United States. This is not to say that marriage makes one more conservative, orthodox or traditional, but rather demonstrates that marriage does not in any way detract from these things. In other words, married men make just as good priests as celibate men, thought admittedly, married men do not have as much time for their priestly duties. So if you're looking for quantity of ministry, celibacy is definitely the way to go, but if you're looking for quality of ministry, there really is no measurable difference between married and celibate.

As the Anglican Ordinariates are organized and grow, we can expect a larger number of married Catholic priests operating under this pastoral provision of the Roman Rite. What does that mean? Well in essence, it means the Catholic priesthood will be much more accessible to married men in the years ahead. Granted, it's always been available through the eastern rites, but this is the first time in a thousand years when it will be widely available to Catholic men in the Roman Rite (under Anglican Ordinariates). In practical application however, I wouldn't expect a flood of married men applying to the priesthood. There are still many strictures that make the priesthood difficult for married men even under an Anglican Ordinariate. For starters, probably the biggest obstacle is money. Married men tend to need a lot more of it then celebrate men, and the Church is not likely to provide a higher salary to married priests at risk of discrimination against celibate priests. So married priests will have to work on the side to bring home the bacon, now splitting his obligation three ways between ministry, family and job. Either that, or his wife is going to have to go out and work. However, a married priest would be just as obligated to obey the Church's teachings on contraception, so he is likely to have at least a few children and possibly more. That being the case, we're talking about more money and less time for ministry. All and all, the Church is getting less bang for it's buck with married priests, and I'm sure that played a role in the Church's initial decision to mandate celibacy in the Roman Rite nearly a thousand years ago.

I should point out that this is just one pastoral provision within the Roman Rite. It is not the entire Roman Rite itself. In many ways, the whole Anglophone world has just become a laboratory. It's a repeat of the experiment done with Anglican Use priests in the United States thirty years ago, but this time on a much grander scale. It doesn't apply to the Spanish-speaking world on the same level, nor the French-speaking world, etc. It mainly applies to the English-speaking (Anglophone) world and who knows where it will lead? One thing is certain. English speaking Catholics have been clamoring for married priests for decades. Now they're going to get it, though perhaps not the way they expected, and certainly with no hint of sacrificing traditional Catholic orthodoxy.  If anything, they should expect incoming married priests to be more traditional and conservative than many of their celibate counterparts.  At least that's what the trend has been so far.

The Weakness of Democracy

THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: "It is the natural progression of all representative government to inch toward socialism and tyranny." Yes, you can quote me on that. Indeed there are short periods of time when things move too fast, and the people temporarily return to their traditional sensibilities, but this is only a setback. It doesn't last. In time the steady march toward socialism and tyranny will continue. This is the lesson of the last 100 years.

(Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 1959) - Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state….

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose…. [T]hey should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal…. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you….

No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority…. “They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic…. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals….

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects…. As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?…

Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time…. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem”…. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma…by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career….

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.

Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I’m as good as you. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked not long ago, “A democracy does not want great men.”

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that “democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.

For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible….

It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy. You would almost wonder that even humans don’t see it themselves. Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government….

The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us a means (besides, of course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction of individuals. For only individuals can be saved or damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us. The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I’m as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.

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