HHS Mandate, The Fourth of July - A Time of Opportunity

I cannot tell you how excited I am about the position that Catholics are being put in today... most clearly by the HHS Mandate, but also by a near endless myriad of other issues that grow more fanged and poisonous with each passing month.

The time has finally come when Catholics may begin to realize that their increasing difficulties in today's culture are not, nor have they been, in a set of issues.  Our difficulty is on the level of ideology, of philosophical foundation.  We have been blissfully unconscious of this inconvenient fact.  But now it is foisted upon us.  Increasingly, as our culture, systems and government become more and more centralized (something which is certainly not antithetical to Catholicism in and of itself), we are forced to recognize that Catholic culture is in essential discord with this current central American identity and character.  We find ourselves being placed in a constructed, ironclad system to which we can only be acid.

Burning of St. Augustine's Church in the 1844 Philadelphia Bible Riots

Certainly the Founding Fathers would not see this as a strange turn of events.  As Samuel Adams said in 1768 "I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of popery in America, than from the Stamp Act, or any other acts destructive of civil rights."  Certainly Adams was not unique in holding this attitude and this is no doubt why Catholics were banned from voting in many of the colonies.  These were honest days.

But truly, has anything changed beyond the veil?

As John Locke teaches, and as the System we find ourselves in will no doubt begin more and more to assert, Catholics can never be trusted politically by a centralized secular nation.  Why?  Because we have outside (centralized) loyalties.

1.)  We are loyal to the Pope

2.)  We are loyal to Reality (which we posit we can know- a claim in and of itself revolutionary in today's society).

The government, the founding fathers, radical liberals are not wrong to see us as potentially dangerous.  They are quite correct.  Catholicism cannot, by essence of its nature, subscribe to Social Contract theories because, ironically, these inevitably lead to the de-sacralization of the human person, not to mention human culture.

So on this Fourth of July, 2012, I only want to say thank-you.  I would like to thank Almighty Providence for allowing centuries of persecution to begin to show themselves for what they are.  I would like to thank the government for being bold enough to persecute Catholics more honestly.

On this Fourth of July, 2012, I can only kneel down and be thankful for Catholicism.  Vivat Papa!

Long Live the Pope - A Traditional Hymn
Long live the Pope his praises sound again and yet again
His rule is over space and time his throne the hearts of men
All hail the Shepherd King of Rome the theme of loving song
Let all the earth his glory sing and heav'n the strain prolong.
Let all the earth his glory sing and heav'n the strain prolong.

Beleaguered by the foes of earth beset by hosts of hell.
He guards the loyal flock of Christ a watchful sentinel
And yet amid the din and strife the clash of mace and sword
He bears alone the shepherd staff this champion of the Lord.
He bears alone the shepherd staff this champion of the Lord.